Designing The Red Wizards faction
From the book, there are four Red Wizards
Dyrax, Thazma, Yamoch and Zagmira. For my own purposes I have added a fifth: Sardinac Von Nordisk: a transmuter
To the others, I am assigning them the respective schools:
Dyrax: Abjurer/Evoker (not decided which yet for defence or damage)
Thazma: Diviner. Mostly to mess with my party's Diviner by holding onto to a Portent to screw with them
Yamoch: Conjurer: I fancy having some summons on my side.
Zagmira: Necromancer and kitting her out with some sweet gear.
The Mage statblock in 2024 MM (CR 6)MM feels a bit feeble for Red Wizards, but the Archmage (CR12) feels rather too powerful to throw against a party of level 8 or 9.
Comparing them to The Evoker, Necromancer and The Diviner from Volo's, where the CRs are all over the place but they do have some very evocative and thematic spells, which I can also suplement from more recent books.
So I'm attempting to build my own Red Wizard stat block for each named NPC probably around CR8 or CR9
So that they actually feel collectively like a threat but against a party of 7 high tier 2 PCs could probably take down when they split up to search for the cubes
I was just wondering if anyone else tried to adapt the Red Wizards into more of a faction and how did you balance them to be a challenge but also give space for them to perhaps negotiate.
I'm exploring my own ideas in my notes but thought I might open this topic up to the Omnibrain and seek some opinions here and elsewhere.