Weekly Homebrew: Balasar

This edition of Weekly Homebrew will focus on Balasar a warehouse manager for the banking clan I introduced a couple of weeks ago. I am still working on a name for the clan so if anyone has some good ideas please feel free to let me know. Balasar manages the warehouse that Seamus would report to so if the players are tracking down the stolen item it could lead them back to there. If however the party overcame Seamus and kept the item they could try to track down whoever sent Seamus and the trail could lead them here as well.

Balasar, created on the Monster Builder from the Wizards of the Coast website, is an Elite Soldier. Balasar would be a good for challenge a party of 8^th level Characters. Coupled with some other Dragonborn, or perhaps some humans he would make a good end of adventure “boss.” I do have an idea for making Balasar into an end of tier boss which I will get into near the end of the post.

Balasar has some features that make him a really good a soldier. First he has a Defender Aura. I have already talked about the benefits of a Defender Aura in my post about Defenders. His best feature is the ability to knock prone any enemy who provokes an opportunity attack or who ignores his aura. This makes him extremely hard to get away from. His signature attack is a finishing move which can recharge. It does a lot of damage against a bloodied enemy and also gives his allies a hefty bonus until the end of his next turn.

As he is written Balasar makes a pretty good end of adventure boss monster. You could make an arc where the players find an item, have an encounter with Seamus then either lose the item or become curious about why he attacked them. After that you could design a skill challenge to track down the clan which would lead the players to Balasar’s Warehouse. The Warehouse would make an excellent site based adventure, or you could round the skill challenge out with a few combats to make it play more like an event based adventure. Either way an encounter with Balasar should be a good climactic end to the adventure for 7^th or 8^th level players.

However if you wanted to make Balasar more of a tier ending threat, you could foreshadow him a bit by having him appear at the warehouse and leave the characters being attacked by the other dragon born. After some time away and a good deal of investigating the party could track him down again. Then after another long fight, once he is bloodied or even dying, have him transform into a dragon. I would recommend an adult Orium Dragon, but others could be appropriate as well. Depending on how the fight has gone you could allow the players to recharge an Encounter power or perhaps spend some healing surges, but I would not allow the use of a short rest. If the party is in truly dire straits you might even allow them to regain all encounter powers or one daily.

I hope you find Balasar as interesting as I have. If you end up using him or Seamus I would love to hear about it. Taken together Balasar and Seamus make a good introduction to the clan at the heroic tier. Going forward be sure to keep in mind that the clan is a world spanning operation and has many resources to use against the characters. If you wanted to use the clan as more of a patron of the characters you could use Balasar as a test to the characters worthiness in much the same way. Until next time remember don’t let your DM tell you no. It’s always “Yes, and…?”