Dungeons & Drogans -- or should I say Drogan -- Session XXXVI has been posted. Listen in as our heroes final face Kalarel in the ultimate showdown of ultimate destiny.

DM commentary on the session after the break; spoilers abound.
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Kalarel is a poorly-written villain. He's as cliché as they come, and he seems to be reading straight from the "How to be a Villain" handbook. His evil schemes have no real motive -- he's just performing evil for evil's sake.

The module offers this gem of advice for DMs on running Kalarel:

"This encounter allows Kalarel to shine. Arrogant, utterly evil, and convinced of his success, he alternates between taunting the PCs and bragging of how they will serve him once he reanimates their dead bodies. Make Kalarel as hate-worthy as possible."

In other words, make him spout hackneyed villain dialogue from 1960s Bond movies.

Since Kalarel aspires to become a great villain so badly, I figured who better to be his idol than one of the most well-known villains of all time: Darth Vader.

The writers want Kalarel to be a cringe-inducing cliché? Oh, I'll give them cliché. How better to get my players to hate Kalarel than to make him a bad Darth Vader imitation?

That was the plan, at least. And if Dave and Stephen had been present that night, it would have worked.

The shtick started with Kalarel holding the underpriest by the throat and saying, "You have failed me for the last time, Reginald." Star Wars is so ingrained in my childhood that it didn't occur to me that anyone would not get the reference to Vader's iconic quote. If Dave or Stephen had been there, I'm positive they would have clued in immediately, but the reference was lost on Doug, Nick, and John.

Round after round, Kalarel spat more Vader quotes. I had only planned for the first, but decided to roll with it and improvised the rest. John later told me he realized the reference after a few rounds, but it took me directly quoting "the power of the dark side" before Doug and Nick figured it out.

If I had emulated Vader's voice, would they have clued in sooner? I had decided Kalarel was not worthy of my Vader impersonation and gave him a higher-pitched tone.

That aside, the battle was a disaster from my side of the table. I had to run the monsters on sub-optimal combat tactics to prevent them from killing the party, and even then, I had to go against the module and have Kalarel get sucked into the portal when it closed -- Kalarel was only supposed to get sucked into portal if he died near it. However, when the players closed the portal, Kalarel still had 175 HP left. He would have systematically killed every single PC.

Is that the fault of my players? Not really. They didn't perform optimally during the battle, granted; but I stand by my assessment that this module is just too difficult for an introductory 4E adventure. When Kalarel teleported onto the magic circle, his defenses rocketed up to 24, 24, 21, 24.

When Doug mordantly remarked that he wished he could have killed Kalarel, I had to bite my tongue to avoid saying that there was absolutely no chance of that happening.

Again, a disaster from my side of the screen. But did the players see it that way? Hopefully not. Hopefully they left feeling like they'd survived an epic battle by the skin of their teeth. And at the end of the day, that's what matters.