In Princes of the Apocalypse, is this monster “supposed to” kill a player character?

Question

In Princes of the Apocalypse Ch. 6,

Oreioth, the necromancer and self-styled Lord of Lance Rock

has plenty of time and warning to prepare for his encounter with the party, along with the spells to do so:

Mage Armor and False Life at 3rd-level.

He is also in possession of a powerful magic item,

a Wand of Magic Missiles,

Which the adventure says he grabs before combat breaks out. He’s also alone, cornered, and clearly has no qualms about such evils as murder.

Furthermore, his stat block gives him the special ability to

Cast Animate Dead as a single action as long as he’s just killed someone.

Because he's alone with the PCs, this special ability can only practically be used on a PC.

Finally, the adventure explicitly states that the dungeon in which he appears should be handled while the characters are 1st-level, and the book states the whole campaign is designed for four PCs.

All of these things together seem to imply the designer’s intent is to have him use all (or all but one) charges of the magic item to instantly kill a PC and then use that special ability on his next turn.

However, my understanding of encounter design according to the Dungeon Master’s Guide is that this encounter would be Deadly without the magic item. After adding in the magic item’s ability to cause instant death and the fact that his special ability tips the action economy in his favor, the risk of a TPK rises greatly.

I’m second-guessing whether I’ve understood the intent of the designers here. Is this campaign really designed to make the instant death of a PC in the first dungeon a likelihood of the party ignored his repeated warnings to flee?

Answer 1

No, he is not "supposed to", but it is possible

This is pretty explicitly stated, on p. 153 of the Adventure

The “Lord of Lance Rock” is Oreioth (see chapter 7), wild-eyed Tethyrian human with a bristly beard and a shaved head. If the characters moved through area L4 alerting him, they find Oreioth arranging and cleaning his tools on the tool bench. Otherwise, he watches warily from behind the four skeletons. In any case, if confronted, he shrinks from conflict and orders his skeletons to attack while he retreats into area L6.
The necromancer refers to himself in the third person and by his self-appointed title. He’s afraid of physical confrontation, but he pretends bravery when his pets shield him, saying, “Bow before the Lord of Lance Rock! Me! Behold my dark terrors!” He’s willing to magnanimously consider a surrender or offers of truce, as long as intruders leave the cave.

This says what he will do: shrink from conflict and retreat. Not: empty his wand of magic missile, and re-animate the killed character. This is not an encounter designed to kill and re-animate the characters, even if he could. Moreover, this pretty clearly points to the possibility of him not being aware of the characters, and being surprised.

So unless the players risk it by their behaviour, and press on, this is not designed to kill them. If they do, and you as the DM opt to have him use his resources in that way, he of course might. As a CR 2 threat with level 3 spells, and backup by a group of skeletons, this certainly could result in a TPK if all the characters are level 1.

While the original quest is meant for first level characters, it does not ask the group to fight the necromancer

Kaylessa believes an evil influence emanating from Lance Rock is the source of Red Larch’s troubles. She asks the characters, who should still be 1st level, to find out what’s going on. The characters discover that a necromancer who styles himself a “lord” is lurking in a cave near the landmark.

Nothing there says they need to combat him. They only need to learn what is going on. That is exactly how the encounter is set up: he tells them he is the Lord of Lance Rock, and that the undead are his making, and then he allows them to surrender and leave.

However, they may opt to come back later, when they are more powerful, and set things right. In particular if the group confronts him when they are all level 2 or 3, then the special ability may give him a little more staying power.

Answer 2

I doubt the author of the encounter considered the possibility of him upcasting Magic Missile to do maximum damage and cause a single insta-kill with little or no chance of defense on round 1 (I agree it's a problem if he does; with an average of 31.5 damage from blowing all the charges on a single shot, it's >50% likely to instakill even a Con 16 Barbarian; ironically, the party's weakling Wizard or Sorcerer with Shield is far safer here). It's absolutely a thing he could do, but upcasting is often overlooked. I suspect the author just wanted to be sure he didn't run out of offensive spells, there's no suggestion he uses it like an instakill cannon as a matter of course.

Beyond that out-of-universe explanation, it doesn't seem to fit with his characterization. The character in question is characterized as a mixture of distractible and cruel:

He was cruel almost from the time he could talk, catching small creatures and killing them in hideously inventive ways to savor the power of life and death.

That doesn't strike me as someone who kills quickly and efficiently, he wants his victims to suffer, and using the Wand of Magic Missiles to kill them instantly directly contradicts that aim.

Beyond that, he's clearly characterized as cowardly, shrinking from physical confrontation, and only fighting if attacked, or his driftglobe is approached, even accepting a truce offering if they agree to leave the cave. The fight is wholly optional, and while tough, almost certainly not intended to be run by a DM who optimizes their strategy to kill the party most efficiently.

As for why he has the ability? If he does manage to kill a character "the normal way", it's a horrifying thing for him to be able to do. If he survives (e.g. because the characters avoid the almost designed-to-be-avoided encounter), and becomes a recurring villain, it's a nasty surprise for later. It doesn't even have to be a combat when it happens; the characters who let him go can witness him idly murder and animate a peasant in a fit of pique weeks later, and be exposed to the consequences of their failure to stop him. I can't speak to what the exact reasoning for giving him an ability that you shouldn't plan on using against the PCs is, but I'm not going to assume that the adventure expects the DM to kill a PC like a redshirt, just to prove the situation is serious.

Answer 3

At the very least, we can observe that such adventure design would be inconsistent with the game’s fundamental philosophy as described in the introduction of the Dungeon Master’s Guide:

your goal isn’t to slaughter the adventurers but to create a campaign world that revolves around their actions and decisions, and to keep your players coming back for more!

An adventure encounter designed to kill a player character would be in direct opposition to the game’s fundamental design, so that casts significant doubt on the proposition that this encounter was designed that way. In the absence of more specific guidance stating otherwise, we can assume that the game's general design isn't being contravened here (see also specific-beats-general)¹.

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^{1 General rules hold unless contradicted by a more specific rule: "This compendium contains rules that govern how the game plays. That said, many racial traits, class features, spells, magic items, monster abilities, and other game elements break the general rules in some way, creating an exception to how the rest of the game works. Remember this: If a specific rule contradicts a general rule, the specific rule wins."}

Answer 4

Monsters don't know D&D's combat mechanics.

This includes necromancers. A cowardly necromancer isn't going to be a combat tactician. They will have orders of magnitude less simulated combat experience than most TTRPG players. They don't know that lethal spells become non-lethal when used against heroic PCs.

Each missile in a wand of magic missiles is possibly lethal. Throwing a maximum strength burst of such missiles at one human target is insane overkill! Imagine having a submachine gun with magical seeking bullets and one clip, facing 4 foes, and choosing to empty the clip into one and only one of them.

What more, you know of a spell (shield) that nullifies such an attack if fired as one burst, but only lasts for a few seconds. If you empty a wand at such a target, they can counter the attack and your wand is now useless.

Now, it also happens to be tactically optimal in 5e D&D against a level appropriate foe and a great use of action economy to use such a spell to drop a single low level fighter type.

But you don't have to have monsters using D&D combat mechanics to make fights interesting.

Have monsters roleplay combat

This is a cowardly non combatant with necromatic magical abilities. He'll use undead to cover his escape, blast at the nearest foe (unless said foe is locked down by his undead, in which case he might go after a different threat).

Any attack that does damage is an attack that attempts to kill the target. While D&D has an attrition based HP model, Monsters shouldn't be aware of it. Failure to kill means you didn't get a solid hit in - a matter of luck, not attrition - except against foes with insanely more HP than your damage output.

The wand would probably first be used to spray foes with 1-2 missiles each, along with a threat to surrender. Against non-PCs that would plausibly kill more than one of them! But PCs are tougher than that, unexpectedly. The low HP of the PCs might then encourage them to stop hostilities however (which ... is a win as far as the necromancer is concerned).

Once a target proves difficult to drop and threatening, doing the equivalent of "emptying a magazine" (the wand) is plausible.

As the DM, you control how hard a fight is

The stats, number of foes, and what creatures there are is completely under your control.

Running creatures optimally under 5e mechanics is definitely not required to make challenging fights. You are fully free to treat combat as a roleplaying opportunity instead of a tactical puzzle. Do so, and tell a story in combat!

Your players are free to do optimal tactics or not.

You can even go a step further, and intentionally trigger PC abilities. Trigger opportunity attacks, move through auras, group a modest number of monsters up into "fireball formation", have monsters advance adjacent to each other, etc.

If you want the fight to be harder, after all, you can just throw 3 more monsters into the mix.