At our last session, my D&D 4e party ended up in a town after jumping through a whirling blue portal to escape certain death.  They had some time to poke around, buy some gear, that kind of stuff. During their shopping spree, the group noticed that some people began looking.. sick.  Ashen skin, all that stuff.

Soon after, the party heard a scream coming from outside. When they rushed to investigate, they found that one of the townsfolk had began to mutate..growing in size. He chucked a water trough at the group and combat began. I sprinkled around the map 8 other townsfolk. I told the party that they looked sick as well and may begin to mutate at any moment. My idea was to have the large creature attack the party while the townsfolk would become zombie`ish minions. The group is level 4 and I gave the minions an AC of 13. Nothing hard to fight. But just an annoyance.

Then the cleric of the group asked me a question..

Is there a way we can stop them from turning?

How interesting..  I suppose I hadn’t thought of that. My plan was to have 1 creature turn each round.  Time to utilize The Rule of Fun!

Sure can! Here’s how it`ll work. Each round, one of the townsfolk will turn and begin to attack you. If you reach them and make a successful Heal check, you`ll be able to prevent them from turning.”

Then the cleric asked

Is there a way I can tell which order they`ll turn in?

Oo! This was getting good.  I responded by stating she could roll Perception to scan the battlefield and visually check the status of the nearby townsfolk. I set a rather high DC for it as the map was somewhat large and there were a few outlying townsfolk that may be hard to see.

She all but rolled a natural 20.

So the battle became 4 party members against the Cursechanged Beggar and the cleric running from one end of the map to the other..several times over. If I kept proper track, only one was lost when she was unable to reach it in time.. and another died when a fellow party member mercy killed a townsfolk who hadn’t changed yet..but was about to.

To finish the encounter, the cleric ran back from saving her last citizen and promptly Crit`ed the main baddie, dropping him to the dirt.

When the session was over for the evening, everyone commented on how they enjoyed the extra element that was added to the encounter instead of  it just being an exchange of weapon blows. In fact, I’ve reworked the next few encounters now to add some extra challenges/obstacles to the fight!