Draw Steel is focused on monster-fighting. But those fights should, like any in an RPG, carry some narrative heft. Not every encounter needs to be against named enemies, but, considering the "Cinematic" keyword that Draw Steel was built around (along with Tactical, Heroic, and Fantasy,) I think you should treat every encounter like it's an action set-piece in a movie.
This is actually good advice for any system - always give your players an exciting "hook" that will make that encounter memorable.
First things first, let's consider what we want this encounter to be. Do we just want the party to fight a group of monsters to the death? Eh, that can be part of it, but that's a little generic. Let's start with the narrative and work out the mechanics from there.
Among the Draw Steel adventures I've had mulling in my head, one is a dark and dire one: set in my D&D homebrew world of Sarkon, but 2000 years before the modern day, we're at the tail end of the Reign of Madness: a millennium of chaos and bloodshed that has all but wiped out any memory of the futuristic, utopian civilization that came before. The acute terrors of that era have settled down into an era of mud and filth and misery. Petty fiefdoms are the only real powers in this world, and until the dragons return to the world to build their grand empires and restart global civilization, there are little more than remote pockets of civilization, most of which are ruled over by tyrants who wield some modicum of magic.
The party begins the adventure fleeing the destruction of their previous shelter, hearing rumors of a village with a large wooden wall, and where people live in relative freedom without some wicked magical tyrant. However, upon arriving, they find the place under attack by the undead: a perennial threat in these parts.
The heroes come to the village's defense, destroying the invading monsters, but it becomes clear that even though the immediate threat still looms.
The adventure will then require the party to venture out into the dangerous marshlands and go after the would-be tyrant who wishes to conquer this village.
Now, let's say that this is just the level 1 plot: even these forays out into the wilderness are to deal with this one villain. That simplifies things a bit, because the "1st echelon" undead monsters we have available to us are actually all level 1. I think we could use higher-level monsters against a 1st level party, and can also use lower-level monsters against a higher-level party, so we'll look at our encounter budget once we get our encounter put together and figure out what we can afford and how having higher-level characters would affect that.
Now, we could build the boss encounter against our villain: there's a level 1 undead leader stat block in the form of a Ghost - perhaps this is the spirit of a would-be conquerer who was defeated but cannot accept this, and now is seeking to drain the life force of the villagers to fuel a necromantic rebirth.
However, I think instead what I want to build is something in the middle - the third encounter after the initial village defense and then an ambush by undead stalkers en route to the villain's lair. We learn that the villain is drawing power from the land to fuel some cataclysmic cloud of death to wash over the village. There are numerous constructions of bones and tree-branches that stab into the earth, and the party needs to destroy them to delay this cataclysmic plan. Undead monsters guard these "Deathgnarls."
The objective here is to destroy the Deathgnarls, meaning that they can achieve victory just by destroying the objects, and don't necessarily have to kill all the monsters. This actually gives us some adjustments to our encounter balancing: this is a Destroy the Thing! style encounter, detailed on Monsters page 18.
Per the guidance given by this section, the things that need to be destroyed should have 35 stamina times the player's level. They're level 1, so that's 35. If we have multiple things, we can divide that stamina between them. Maybe we have 7 of them, and they each have 5 Stamina. Or 5 with 7 each. I think that might let them go down a little too quickly, so I think we could fudge it and have just three of them with 11 Stamina each.
The objects have full poison and psychic immunity, but perhaps we'll say that they have corruption immunity 5 (given that they're necromantic constructs) but also Fire weakness 5 (if they're made of dried wood along with the bones).
Now, if the object(s) to be destroyed are out in the open, that means that the difficulty of the encounter is reduced by a level (standard to easy, hard to standard, etc.) because the fight can end faster if they focus down the objects.
I want this to be a standard difficulty encounter, so we'll actually balance its encounter budget as a hard encounter.
While we won't be making it totally crazy to get to the objects (if they're hard to reach, that can push the difficulty even higher than its baseline) we might put some environmental effects in there that the party will need to contend with.
But let's figure out our budget: Given the relative ease of the Destroy the Thing style of encounter, we can budget this as a Hard encounter. This is also the third encounter we're expecting them to fight, so they should have two victories. Every two victories lets us add another PC's worth of EV (encounter value) to our budget.
For a hard encounter (again, because of our scenario, it'll still count as a standard encounter) we can add up to three heroes' worth of encounter budget. However, I don't really want to push this to be too hard, so we might add, say, one to one-and-a-half of the budget per hero.
We'll assume we have a four-player party of level 1 characters with no retainers. Thus, each hero brings 6 to our EV, with another 6 from having 2 victories and then 6-9 in order to bump up the difficulty. This all comes out to a total budget of 36 to 39.
Each monster has an EV value, as do dynamic terrain objects. I actually want to start with that.
The Deathgnarls themselves I don't think are going to be dangerous objects - they're just targets to be destroyed. But we want there to be some hazard on the battlefield because that makes for fun encounters (especially in a game with so much forced movement).
We'll say that each of the three Deathgnarls are in a patch of Brambles - sharp, thorny vines that impede access to them. This is actually very cheap: only 1 EV per 10x10 thicket (that's 10 squares, squared). We might only need one or two of these, placing the Deathgnarls within the large overall thicket of brambles. If we have a really big map, we could put each of them in the center (I imagine that the Deathgnarls have a size of 2, meaning a 2x2 square on the map). Brambles have only 3 stamina per square, but I think that that means you can destroy them separately. They create difficult terrain and deal 1 damage per square a creature passes through. We could upgrade them to make them cause bleeding when they deal damage (save ends). This doubles their EV cost. I think it's worth it: we'll have two patches of brambles, perhaps next to one another so that we can easily fit our three Deathgnarls within them, and thus we're spending a whopping 4 EV on the total brambles.
That leaves 32-35 EV to spend on monsters.
We're going to stick to 1st level monsters, which actually makes the math very simple: Monsters come at a clean ratio to players depending on their status as Minions, Horde, Platoon, or Elites.
To avoid making this too complicated for ourselves, I think we should limit the encounter to no more than three kinds of monster. We'll want some minions, but all the remaining 1st level Undead monsters are either Horde or Leaders (the Ghost in that latter case).
What we really need to consider is enemy type. These monsters are here to defend the Deathgnarls, so we'll want things that can get in the way of our heroes. Brutes, Defenders, and Artillery to stand at the back and try to take down foes from afar all work well in this kind of encounter.
So, do we want two kinds of minions or two kinds of horde monsters? I don't imagine these are the most organized undead. I think the image here is not of some fusillade of arrows coming from disciplined undead soldiers, but of a giant swarm of zombies. There are some skeletal bowmen, but they're going to be more like elite officers left in charge of the rabble. The rest will be Zombies and then Rotting Zombie minions.
Ratio-wise, a minion comes 8 to a player, while Horde monsters come 2 to a player, at least at the same level. So, I think we should have a similar ratio of 2:2:8, skeletons, zombies, and rotting zombies. Each horde-level monster costs 3 EV to add to our encounter, and then each group of 4 minions costs 3 as well (again, these values go up with higher-level monsters).
So, if we want equal equivalent strengths of monsters, we can divide our budget by roughly 3, giving us about 11 EV to spend on each type of monster. Naturally, that doesn't divide perfectly, but we can skew toward certain monster types if necessary.
Four "proper" zombies takes up 12 EV from our budget. Four skeletons takes 12 as well, for a total of 24. The easiest thing we can then do is have three groups of four rotting zombies, taking up a total of 9 EV. We're thus a little on the low side for our budget, but still within our target (ok, technically we were already lowballing it, so screw it, let's add a fourth group of rotting zombies).
Thus, our total monster roster is:
4 Skeletons
4 Zombies
16 Rotting Zombies.
And yeah, that feels like a real sizeable monster force.
Now, we want to divide the monsters up into squadrons for their turn placement.
Here's something I'll confess I haven't quite figured out in the rules: Minions can have captains that give them a bonus (in the case of Rotting Zombies, it's a +1 bonus to their strike damage). I don't know if they have to be in the same squadron as their non-minion captain (I don't think they do). I think their more powerful zombie brethren are likely to serve as their captains here.
So, we position the skeletons behind the briars (or even in them - maybe the skeletons are fine just not moving) to pelt our heroes with arrows, while the zombies form a wall in front of them to try to prevent the heroes from getting to the Deathgnarls.
In order to ensure the fight ends if the objects are destroyed, we'll even say that the power they're pumping out of the land is what is sustaining their animation.
With 24 monsters to fight and three targeted objects, this should be a rather target-rich environment, and I think forced movement through the brambles could also be a lot of fun - a way to shred through monsters. The Deathgnarls probably have high stability - they're anchored into the ground - but they could be damaged by hurling zombies and skeletons into them.
And there we have it: a little action set-piece for our story.
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