The Heroes of Fallcrest and other stories

AP: The Lakeside Shuffle

2010-03-27T12:15:00.010-07:00

And on we continue with our quest. Participating this session:

Iolo (Half Elf Bard/Rogue) - A freelancer hired by house Vadalis to investigate the failed assassination attempts. The eccentricity of the group will drive him to alcoholism. At that point, he'll fit right in.
Paulic (Elf Ranger) - Continues to exemplify the perfect Ranger. And the perfect Valenar. A new measurement was created this session, Paulics per Million, or PPM. Paulic is all PPM. A regular ranger might be 30 PPM. He is like, the chosen one of Rangers.
Phedre (Elf Cleric) - Her wandering accent hides a vulnerable side. I think her left side? This must also be the side that encourages her to flounce. Elves, right?
K'rrul (Kobold Assassin) - Discovered the sexy side of assassination, earning the name "Cruel. . .Sexual Assassin".
Arashi (Genasi Swordmage) - Again, the battle basically swirls around him. Of all the characters in the game, he is the one most likely to be a kick-ass action game hero. Also, is intimidating to *crazy* people as well as non-crazies. Look out!
Jasper (Gnome Wizard/Warlock) - Hopefully adventuring with a band of felons and misfits only enhances his reputation as an explorer, not tarnishing his reputation as an academic. Since really, he's the scariest of us all.

The travel weary and teleport-lagged Eye of the Storm trotted into Lakeside after a journey of a thousand miles. We were after Serin. He was our latest clue in a continent spanning treasure hunt, with the prize being a spoiled Vadalis heir that was targeted by a cult of deathless assassins known as 'The Stillborn'.

Luckily for us, the Vadalis compound was easily found. In this small town of roughly 1,000 people, the Dragonmarked family was the largest institution. We made our way directly to the stables to drop off our charges. We were paid (surprisingly), and directed to where we could find Serin.

Yes, Serin was actually Nolan. He had been hiding out here since our departure, and had not been idle. He introduced us to Iolo. Iolo had been doing some digging about these assassination attempts, and had discovered:
- They were being undertaken by an organization known as "The Black Flock"
- A certain assassin known as Crow had been asking around Irongate, looking for sellswords. Presumably this was to replace the ones we have killed.

Over the next few hours discussion we learned that Nolan was a Dragonmarked scion of his house. His dragonmark allowed him control over animals and other beasts. Whether the flock wanted him for that, or for other nefarious purposes, we didn't yet know.

Iolo's investigations had also discovered that some unknown group was descending on Lakeside. We were pretty convinced that Nolan's cover was blown (and just in time, naturally). Luckily, while we discussed this, Nolan started getting more and more drunk on fine brandy. He agreed to go with us to the town's only Inn, and set a trap for this group.

When we arrived we found out that a woman had been asking around for Nolan. While the party arranged to purchase the second floor of the inn, Arashi told a stable boy to go to this woman and tell her where we were. The Innkeeper was kicked out. The party spread out on the first floor, and Paulic took a spot in the second floor window overlooking the entrance.

Three figures approached the inn. Paulic quarried one, but did not shoot. They entered, and after a short (and fruitless) conversation, a bar fight broke out:

An insane Kalashtar Monk, a Black Flock Necromancer, and an archer, just inside the door. Nolan was in the rear. Iolo was right up by the enemies (and Phedre's MC Shaman Spirit Companion). The middle row on the left was Phedre (on the bar), Arashi, and K'rrul (hiding on the stairs). Jasper was in the back, and Paulic was upstairs.

- Iolo darted in and with a flick of his rapier, spectacularly missed. The miss was most likely a feint, though, as he slashed across the face of the lead caster (minor action attack crit following his standard action miss).
- Paulic moved to the top of the stairs and executed a crit himself. Things looked smashing for the heroes!
- Phedre turned undead. . .and nothing happened. Seems her keen elven eyes and highly trained Clerical knowledge took a back seat to her hatred of Stillborn and she failed to check whether this necromancer was undead before she tried turning her.
- *Immediately* after she turned undead, the necromancer summoned a good handful of skeletons. Don't think the party didn't point out this poor timing to Phedre at the time. It's a good thing her flouncing on the bar top didn't provoke an Opportunity Attack when she moved in to Turn Undead.
- The tide began to turn. A skeleton ran at Nolan, cowering in the back of the tavern, and cut him down.
- The crowded inn was filled with explosions of thunder and lightning as Arashi and Jasper cut down skeletons in an effort to turn the tide.
- Paulic must have spent the months traveling in honing his craft. Instead of turn after turn of twin strike, he used all the tricks available to him, shifting around the battlefield and in general, filling even more things with arrows than before.
- Iolo's skill set was a perfect fit for our eclectic group. With no real solid front line, or a battle strategy worth anything, our plan is usually to scatter like roaches and chew at the closest or weakest thing we could find. Iolo was a natural at this.
- K'rrul, towards the end of the battle, leaped into the shadow of the necromancer. Due to the unintentionally suggestive things that got said about his status, he was dubbed the Sexual Assassin.
- When the outcome of the battle started looking inevitable, Phedre shrieked "I won't be denied!", as she wanted to be the one to deal the deathblow to the assassin.
- Paulic had a great time shouting that same thing before each shot for the rest of the encounter.
- The archer was cut down, and then the Necromancer, but the monk was still kicking. Like, really still kicking.
- Once bloodied, he was intimidated into surrendering by Arashi.

As it was well past our normal ending time, we stopped right there. . .

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Iolo is our friend Dan's character. A hybrid bard/rogue. He fits really well, and it looks like the powers of those two classes are pretty complimentary. He has quite a few ways to gain combat advantage by himself, as well as some leadery things (like CA for *everyone* and his 1/encounter heal). He is already more liked in the party than K'rrul. Can you blame them though? He's a half elf. . .

And Andrew (Paulic's player) was so bugged that we gave him a hard time about only twin striking, that he spent the intervening weeks poring over his cards. He was really, really effective with all his powers available. I highly approve!

This was our first fight since our shopping trip. Sadly, I don't think much got used. Arashi kept forgetting to activate his bracers to resist necrotic damage (until too late). Jasper changed the damage type of his curse once or twice, to no real effect. Of course, that is just how I like it. I like the power residing in the PC's, not their trinkets.

K'rrul hid in the Necromancer's shadow for one round, but the comments lasted the rest of the encounter. I can't wait until he can do that Daily, for an entire encounter. The lulz will never end. . .

Jay

PS - blogger is being a tard about me uploading the one picture I have for this session. I'll work on it.

AP: Do you have this +2 Goblinkiller Armor in baby blue? It sets off my eyes.

2010-03-23T09:24:00.004-07:00

Alternate title: "Does this Cloak of Fireslaughter make my ass look big?"

Fear not gentle folk, I have not forgotten the blog. We have not gamed every week, so I am working on getting 2 sessions down. The session for this post was a shopping trip and globe trotting adventure. Not a lick of combat.

Our intrepid adventurers Paulic, Phedre, Arashi, K'rrul, and Jasper again sallied forth from a campsite surrounded by the rotting corpses of their fallen enemies. Paulic's excellent pathfinding and knowledge of natural processes sped our feet and we made our grand entrance into the Fortress of Fading as night fell.

Our first order of business was to raid the vault of our slain would-be ambushers. Irus took his share of the loot and bought his contract from Paulic, returning to his family in the city for now.

We traveled together to Senzimay's estate. She welcomed us warmly, and offered us a place to rest for a day, and her services as a ritual caster. We graciously accepted, and got to shopping.

Eladrin only trance for four hours a day, so the city was teeming with life at all hours. We had a bit of time to ourselves to unload the vast amounts of wealth we had acquired. Enough, in fact, for each member of our party to purchase one 8th level magic item.

A good deal of real time later, and one in game day later, we had satisfied our urges and spent about half of our current capital on becoming more efficient killers.

Then we began our travel. A couple of days hiking out of the mountain to the sea to catch our boat. No incident in the city (surprisingly), and no problem finding our ride outta town. The boat took a few weeks to sail West along the coast to the mouth of a large river, where we were dropped off. We hiked to the small seaside fishing village Seaside Reef. There Arashi leapt on his summoned horse and galloped ahead to the next large town, Quarry. In Quarry he hired a boat to go upriver, and when the party arrived we boarded this boat and traveled to Aridusk by boat. Another few weeks.

From Aridusk we were able to board the lightning rail and traveled in style to Verithrond. We hurried to the Vadalis compound to find Nolan. . .and he is not there. Nobody knows where he is. We are told that if we want to find him, we had best find the man known as Serin. He is posted in the Vadalis stronghold in Karrnath.

This is where our Eberron geography lesson occured. Since even with the map, divining how our voyage transpired was difficult, we related the voyage to landmarks in the US. We just left New Hampshire, took a boat to Minnesota, and then all the way up a river to like, Colorado. Or something. Now, we found out that the place we needed to be is like, Ohio, or Kentucky. Or something. Also, we found out that Nolan's brother was the King of Wisconsin. Nice.

Faced with the prospect of another long voyage, and one that would be simpler if we could only travel through the Mournland (remember, the Louisiana Purchase is an impossible mess to travel through), we started poking around for a way to teleport there.

Our eventual solution was to hire a house Orien mage to teleport us as near our destination as possible. To defray the tremendous cost (well, we could easily afford it, but we didn't *want* to pay) we offered to transport some magebred draft horses for house Vadalis. That was roughly half of our trip paid for. Not bad.

The deal went off without a hitch, and we ended the session arriving in Karrnath with a dozen expensive horses. A few hours ride was all that kept us from the next leg of our journey. . .

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Quite a bit of time was spent dividing up our money and purchasing goods. It had been awhile since I played in a shopping session, and I kind of enjoyed it. Like planning an assault, it can be fun occasionally, but can also be a drag if done too often. We had been hoarding our goods for awhile, so we had around 23,000 or so GP to spend. Most upgrading was actually pretty utilitarian. We couldn't afford to buy up too many plusses, so we bought items that helped us in other ways. Jasper got some gloves that let him change the damage type of his Curse, and spend some charges to add damage to an enemy. Arashi got some gauntlets that helped him resist damage. I think once our Mage and Cleric learn to enchant and transfer magic items we will do a little more of the upgrading. I know K'rrul still has a +1 neck piece, and I'm sure he's not the only one behind on the big three.

A lot of off topic chat, as we weren't really all focused on buying stuff together. One random conversation began as a musing as to what Deathless (an Undead Elf variant in the Eberron setting) ate, exactly. We determined that they can only eat twinkies that were forged when they were still alive. Twinkies are forged in the fires of Mount Doom. "Come and get 'em while they're hot!" Sauron says, as he adjusts his apron.

I guess you had to be there.

Jay

AP: Clever Title Placeholder

2010-02-17T12:27:00.004-07:00

Full party again this session. Good thing too, as we stumbled into a nest of trouble. Stumbled/Galloped, really:

Paulic/Irus - One boy split into two bodies, this session they perfected the Twin Twin Strike. That's right, four arrows. As they are controlled by one mind, Paulic often acted as the laser designator for Irus' arrows.
Phedre - If her devotion to the party was ever doubted, she only need point to fights like this one. Arashi was propped up by her healing, and she brought back Paulic from the brink of death with it.
Arashi - Certainly got the enemy's attention, since even without being marked they focused on him, mostly. Was swarmed early, healed up, swarmed again, and healed again. . .ended the fight so deep in negatives that another attack would have killed him for good.
K'rrul - As an Assassin should, he stayed hidden, invisible, or concealed for the first half of the fight. Less impressive than Paulic, but the enemies were Brutes, so he hit with nearly every attack this fight.
Jasper - Obliging enemies clumped up for him, and his spells were extra effective this fight. Also managed to save Paulic's life. Three cheers for Jasper!

The party piled into the cave en masse, since our stealth was clearly broken at this point. Arashi carried the weaker party members over the river, and we climbed up into the ogre's home. It was a dead end.

There was a large ogre-sized bed, and several broken pieces of furniture that had been feeding a fire at one point. Despite searching around for another way in or out, we found nothing. We left the cave empty handed. Paulic looked at the surroundings and guessed that in other valleys like this, with a river, ponds or lakes often formed at the low point. He thought that if ogres had moved in, they likely gravitated to the lake as it was a source of water and possibly food. Arashi climbed a tree to scope out the area, and saw a thin wisp of smoke in the distance, coming from the lower part of the valley. With afternoon approaching, we shouldered our packs and walked the few miles to the lake.

We arrived on the opposite side of the ogre camp. From our position in the grass at the edge of the lake, we saw four or five buildings. One of them was a log cabin-type structure, and it had smoke rising from the chimney. At that distance we were unable to determine much more, so K'rrul ghosted off to scout out the camp.

He returned and confirmed what they saw. Four tents, one smallish cabin, and ogres and wolves visible. A quick and dirty plan was hatched:
- Paulic, Irus, K'rrul, Phedre, and Jasper go back to where K'rrul had observed the ogres and hide.
- Arashi was to circle around the opposite side of the lake.
- When he was good and ready, he would mount his Obsidian Charger and . . .charge through the camp.

Paulic and Irus each climbed trees to 15 feet or so high. Jasper, Phedre, and Phedre's Mister Bubbles each hid behind a tree in the forest. K'rrul hid in the high grasses and brush at the edge of the woods, but outside the camp. And waited.

Arashi charged through the camp like an elemental fury. Shouting and yelling, he whipped his sword over his head as lightning coursed over his body. It certainly got the ogre's attention. They unleashed their wolves and followed him into the woods.

A nublie young human, dressed in scant clothing stepped calmly from the cabin and took to the air, hovering 10 feet above the ground and moving towards the woods herself. In addition to all of that noise (3 ogres, 3 wolves, 1 mysterious caster), three totems in the village all released spirit animals. One each of a wolverine, bear, and mountain lion ghost totems leapt from their prisons and charged after Arashi.

Even though he was mounted, an ogre managed to catch up to him just as he entered the trees. It was perfect timing, really:
- The ogre had unknowingly lodged itself in our trap. It ran right by K'rrul in the grass, and ended up just a few feet from Jasper and Phedre.
- Almost the entire ogre army got to go before the rest of us went. The Vicious Dire Wolves, The Ogre Savages, and the jailbait something or other all went before any of us. They advanced, but as yet only one of the ogres was in our trap
- We sprung. K'rrul stabbed, Paulic and Irus shot, and Jasper cast. Now that our trap had sprung. . .were we just normal combatants, about to get smashed to jelly by ogres?
- Arashi was foiled early. He marked and moved, but the wolves had an ability to pull their target prone, and the other wolves all did bonus damage to prone targets. In addition to taking gobs of damage, he was wasting a move action every turn just standing back up. Luckily, the one he marked first attacked someone else, and he used his mark to teleport out of the gank and near his allies.
- Jasper changed the face of the fight in the first round or two. He bravely charged in, getting clubbed nearly to bloodied for his trouble, just so he can try to Otherwind Stride the ogres and immobilize them. He did hit one this way, and then dropped an Enlarged Acid Mire where he was, hitting most of the enemy and creating a huge, 5x5 area of difficult terrain.
- Phedre then spent her first few turns healing Jasper and Arashi up, then spent the rest of the fight healing herself, Arashi, K'rrul, Arashi, Paulic, Arashi, etc.
- Mr Improbable, Paulic/Irus, seemed invulnerable and cocky shooting at ogres without fear of reprisal. Their flying, improbably hot leader closed in on him, however, and instructed her ogres to do the same. Suddenly realizing that 15 feet is not that high to an ogre, Paulic was forced to use his magic cape to teleport away. Irus had an ability that let him get away from his ogre, too, but they were on the run and without their superior vantage point.
- The seemingly endless bag of hitpoints represented by the ogre mini finally dropped to our focus fire, leaving only two more ogres, two wolves (one of which was bloodied) and the spirit totems.
- Right. . .the totems. They were minions, which was a nice gimme in this bloodbath. Their catch, though, was that they imbued their allies with various, unnamed and improbable boons when they died. At one point we were fighting an ogre wearing a wolf mask with supernatural bestial elements reflecting the lion and bear totems. Quite the amalgam of a creature.
- With the ogres intent on killing our archers, and the boss lady not much of a threat (yet), we were able to start finishing off the wolves. This was working, being hastened by the Acid Mire, and Phedre summoning her Consecrated Ground. There was one poor wolf immobilized in two different auto-damage zones.
- Consecrated Ground was keeping Arashi from dying, and things were looking. . .okay. Or at least *less* deadly. Possibly sensing the same change in tone, the ogre leader morphed from a nubile young temptress into a Large, horrid, steaming mess of ugly. With a club. The ball is in our court, it looks like.
- Jasper had just teleported Arashi out of the way of the ogre leader and into the Consecrated Ground. Now she was in melee with two of the squishy members of the party, and she bore down on Paulic.
- With his freshly renewed vigor, and seven whole HP's, Arashi engaged her again. It was nearly his final act. He was dropped back into negatives again, and far away from the safety of Consecrated Ground.
- Desperation or teamwork had us focusing fire on her, and we quickly brought her down through bloodied, and eventually dead. Not before she dropped Paulic and chased Jasper away. Clever use of Eyebite kept him off of her radar, and kept him alive.
- Arashi didn't die, though he was so far negative that 10 or so more HP's would have killed him for good. We stopped there.

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Paulic's double crit Twin Strike. Those dice must have 20's on more than one side to crit so much. ..

This session was mostly combat. It was kind of the culmination of this little investigation, two sessions of figuring out what was so scary in this valley, and if it had anything to do with the wagon crash. It appears it did. The ogres were led by an Ogre Mage, Jesse let slip. Someone super smart had guessed this very early on, so it was kind of a confirmation more than anything.

This was a pretty fun time, despite it being a long fight. We are sixth level, and had enough tricks up our sleeves to stay creative through most of the fight. Except Arashi. Those wolves really messed with his game. He lost enough actions that he was still sitting on Dailies, even though Jasper, Phedre, and K'rrul had been using theirs. . .kind of an admission that this fight was maybe a touch out of our league. Despite that, all the attention paid to Arashi (and deservedly so, with his pre-fight role as bait) kept them off of us long enough for us to whittle them down. Had they honed in on our two archers early and taken them out, or shut down Jasper's controlling, it would have been a very different fight.

Next week . . .exposition, roleplay, and possibly a surprise or two!

Jay

AP: My name is Koulton Brightwind, and I approved this message.

2010-02-12T10:42:00.004-07:00

So this will be a two for one post (again), life has jumped up and stolen a bunch of my free time, so I got a little behind. Both sessions were full houses, with all players present:

Jasper - Begins work on phase two of his life plan, gain notoriety for himself to enhance the dust jacket of his book(s). He does so by schilling for a Pirate Captain.
K'rrul - Continues his efforts at fitting in to the party. Unfortunately, he remains unsuccessful to date.
Arashi - Begins the quest that Jasper finishes, though his inner Swordmage would much rather just cut to the chase and kill the opposition.
Phedre - Ultimately it is her goal to return to Verithrond in time to save a pretty dragonmarked man from assassination. So really, this is *all her fault*.
Paulic - Continues his tradition of just shooting the hell out of anything that gets in his way. Along the way he attracts a follower who has similar goals in life.

After the dust settled from our epic(ish) battle with the Eladrin assassination squad, we decided to split up and gather some information. Que the montage.

Phedre cast Speak with Dead, and Arashi brainstormed on some questions to ask the Eladrin leader. We convinced the lone surviving assassin to join us. His name is Irus, and he is our new Paulic. So we had two Paulics now. Both taciturn, arrow shooting, elfin murderers.

The rest of us went to the rooms of the Spiked Star. We considered taking their group name (The Spiked Star!), but I think consensus was that it was too retarded. Instead we took a bunch of their stuff. In addition to some magic stuff we found on their bodies, we also recovered some maps and a journal. Oh, and a trunk full of *spellbooks*. This has the potential to be the most valuable thing we collected, but we won't know until Jasper or Phedre has time to catalogue them.

Speak with Dead was productive. We learned that the person that hired the assassins is none other than Anton. Big shocker there. Unfortunately, we were not able to find out why he did so. This was kind of a small time adventuring party, but apparently they were well known enough that when a different party of Eladrin (The Cunning Claws. Why couldn't we have killed *them* and taken their name?) noticed Irus traveling with us, they suspected something.

This kind of marks our descent into madness. At that point, our careful plans about pretending to be dead, or seeking revenge, or any other interesting thing fell apart. We decided to stay in our adversaries' rooms. An official from the hotel approached us as we climbed the stairs, and though we were able to bribe him, we were still required to sign in. Since we guessed that the sign in was compared to the official log kept by the Guard at the gate, we couldn't just BS it (Dr and Mrs Smith, of Bree, with retainers) and we sent our least cunning member to the front desk to sign us in.

That's right. Paulic (of clan Paulic, of the Paulic reaches in Paulic county, Paulic) and Irus went to the lobby to see what was going on. While he was down there, Paulic signed us in, with our real names. He also gave Irus a little direction on what to say to Elaceiria, the leader of The Cunning Claws. It was awkward to listen to. Like Paulic, he was used to using his bow to solve his problems, and it was clear that she wasn't quite comfortable with things.

That night, as we prepared to lie down and be killed in our sleep, a city guard knocked on Arashi's door and gave him a letter. As he was in a room alone, and did not elect to share with us what it said, we didn't know anything was up until early the next morning. As he left to go to a meeting (indicated by the secret note), Paulic caught up with him, and they went to negotiate our future with a Pirate captain.

When they returned, the told us of the *new* plan. This pirate captain liked us. She wanted to take us home. She was willing to do so, for free, if we did a favor for her. A pirate election was coming up, and her candidate, Koulton Brightwind, was running against Anton Fatass. She wanted us to talk to some of the other Pirate captains about their votes, and hopefully sway them to vote for Koulton.

Despite being the party that negotiated this deal, Arashi was against it. He proposed an easy solution, if Anton was dead, he could not be elected. The party agreed, with one exception. Jasper wanted to try a more elegant solution. He wanted to destroy Anton's life, by destroying the source of his power. His ultimate goal was to take away his wealth.

So, Anton and K'rrul started talking. We chatted up sailors in seedy dockside taverns, dock workers in seedier dockside whorehouses, and eventually got ourselves audiences with a few of the influential Pirate Captains. Jasper spoke plainly and honestly about our experiences with Anton, and about his evaluation of the Quartermaster's performance. He used information gleaned from some Captains to sway the votes of the more difficult to persuade ones. Finally, he resorted to outright lies to sway the final contact of the day, convincing her that Anton was poised to eliminate the Piracy aspect of the organization in accordance to a contract he made with Dwarves.

In the end, Jasper was able to tell our contact that should the people vote as they indicated, Koulton would carry the day. In return, she offered us passage to the mainland at the end of the week. Six days hence.

With almost a week to kill before our ride outta town, the party had a pow wow to decide what to do. Our most attractive option, and our eventual choice, was to travel back to the Eladrin city and loot the holdings of the Spiked Star. Irus, their sole surviving member, didn't seem to take any offense at this, so we left immediately. Since we had a couple of extra days, we also wanted to spend some time in the dark and scary valley, and investigate the wagon crash that we discovered.

After making camp that night, we started off early the next morning and soon reached the crash. After extensive searching returned very little new information, Jasper performed a ritual to hopefully shed some light on what had happened. His ritual allowed him to see what was loaded on the wagon (various fine Eladrin goods from the Fortress of Fading), how it crashed (an ambush by several large canine headed humanoids and their wolves), and what they did with the wagon after it crashed (unloaded the contents onto sleds and pulled it into the woods in the valley).

Paulic was able to pick out a path once Jasper gave him a heading, and we started off into the forest. Paulic was out in front scouting with K'rrul a few feet behind him when he stopped suddenly. One hundred or so feet away one of the wolf-headed ogres stood with two wolves, apparently unaware of our approach. We snuck into position, and Arashi got his attention by using an arc of lightning to create a thunderclap in a clearing. The ogre charged:
- 5 on 3 meant that unless this ogre was a solo or vastly higher in level, we had this fight in the bag before it started.
- He wasn't a solo or higher in level by enough to matter.
- Three strikers (K'rrul, Paulic, and Irus) focused fire on him and he was bloodied in the first round.
- Round two saw him down for the count, and his wolf companions soon followed.

Disturbingly, when we examined him we noticed that the wolf head was actually a mask or a kind of headdress. When removed, we saw no way for him to see out, and it was obvious to us that this ogre was blind. Creepy.

Paulic continues pathfinding, and we followed the trail to a cave near a river. The stench of ogre permeated the cave, so we were pretty certain our quarry was there. Paulic and K'rrul snuck inside. After a bend, the light from the entrance disappeared, and we were left groping blindly along. The noise from an underground river masked our approach somewhat, but it also blocked our passage. We couldn't tell how large or fast moving it was in the dark, and were unwilling to compromise our stealth. K'rrul waded in. About ten feet into his swim, just as he was unable to easily walk, he was attacked:
- Dire Stirges lived in this cave. K'rrul and Paulic were a good 100 feet into it, alone and in the dark, with the party lounging at the opening waiting for us to return.
- K'rrul popped a sunrod and illuminated the cave. A handful (6 or 7?) or stirges were clustered over the river. Paulic yelled for the party and began Twin Striking and backpedalling.
- Through a series of obfuscating techniques, K'rrul managed to escape and prevent his blood from being totally drained.
- The party rushed in the following round and a natural kink in the cave provided a good point to hold them off. The battle surged around that point for a bit, with Paulic getting a good bit of attention from the Sturges, but our ability to teleport kept them from draining us dry.

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And with that, I'm almost caught up. I have yesterday's game to detail, and that should be a bit of fun (big, climactic combat!). These two sessions were filled with talking, discussion, and exploration of Jesse's carefully built Pirate town. Early on, Jasper was labeled as a shill (Sarah Palin, to be specific) for Koulton, and a lot of jokes were had at his expense. His goal was revenge (in 5-10 years, if interest rates hold), and his motives were. . .annoying. In the end, it appears that we got what we wanted, but this is D&D. You never know if things will turn out as planned or bartered, and you should never count on it. We also managed to get some cathartic wholesale slaughter out of our systems, and should get rewarded my large amounts of lewt. We will see. . .

Jay

AP: We spring the trap!

2010-01-29T09:29:00.005-07:00

A full house this session:

Jasper (Gnome Wizard Warlock 6) - Despite being only half controller, he controlled very well. Had the biggest letdown of the night when he was dominated and unable to sustain his Acid Mire immediately after casting it
K'rrul (Kobold Assassin/Rogue 6) - In his virgin combat he emerged solidly mediocre. Managed to crit on some guy who only had 10 HP remaining. Yay?
Arashi (Genasi Swordmage 6) - Took a ton of damage, and gave as good as he took. The confined space virtually guaranteed he'd be close enough to take advantage of his mark when it went off.
Paulic (Valenar Elf Ranger 6) - Continued the time honored tradition of bow rangers everywhere, quarry+twin strike=awesome. Now holds both the gold and silver in single round damage totals for the party.
Phedre - (Aerenal Elf Cleric/Shaman 6) - Must have done something to piss these guys off, since she took enough damage to be killed at least three times over. Consecrated Ground saved her life.

After some pregame chatter, we jumped right in with an initiative roll. Despite high dex characters, and good rolls, we ended up going all bunched up *after* our ambushers.

At the top of the battle mat were the large doors we entered through. The three minis outside the warehouse were ours, as were two of the minis just inside (crappy camera phone and poor lighting, sorry!). This was taken immediately after they charged in on us. No surprise round, since we were pretty sure that our boat wasn't going to leave from a landlocked lumber warehouse. Most of the boxes with lines through them represent piles of lumber. The southernmost one was actually a staircase. The three long skinny boxes that are divided in two (1x3, 1x4, 1x5) were masts suspended from the ceiling of the building, 30 feet up. The Large mini (not an Aboleth!) was a Fey Constrictor, the toughest snake ever. This was a *long* battle-
- The snake slithered through the pile of lumber and grabbed Arashi before he could go.
- Two of the other attackers aimed for Phedre from range.
- Two more charged in to engage at melee range.
- The net result was our healer having to use her first Healing Word on her first action to bring herself out of bloodied. She used another minor to summon her Spirit Companion (an elven mummy affectionately called Mr Bubbles).
- Arashi teleported out of the snake's coils (the first of many times this would happen) and tried working his Swordmage magic.

Swordmage magic is different from other defender magic. Where a Fighter or a Warden needs to be in melee range for his mark to be effective, and a Paladin needs to 'engage' his enemy, Swordmages invert that. An Assault Swordmage like Arashi needs to make his mark think hard about who they attack. If the mark is violated, Arashi can teleport up to 10 squares and hit the offender. If Arashi can get himself to the other side of the battlefield, his mark has to endure a gauntlet of OA's, get whacked by him, or do nothing. This fight was a good showcase for that. We mostly stayed bunched up at the door at first, meaning that Arashi was well served by marking an enemy far from the door and teleporting back near his allies.

- After our first round, the fight was feeling tense, with the obvious focus on our Cleric very apparent.
- With all the teleporting available (three of the five party members have quite a bit of the Nightcrawler in us) the neat clump of allies frayed a bit. The snake surprises us when *it* teleports.
- Something else that blindsided us was the Half Elf using a power to make us belive he was our ally. Predictably, Paulic the bloodthirsty Valenar was immune, but everyone else had to give the guy a wide birth.
- In fact, even as she lay dying, Phedre was failing saves against this power. Her twilight thoughts as she drifted in and out of must have been concern for her new found friend.
- And die Phedre did. She started bringing out her Daily heals to stave off the inevitable. It was for naught, as just a couple rounds in, she lay bleeding on the ground. It was then that we realized that *nobody had any healing potions* (not strictly true. . .Jasper had one he had forgotten about).
- Jasper spotted an opportunity and jumped at it. He threw down his new 5th level Daily, Acid Mire. A sustainable 3x3 area of bubbling acid that damaged anyone who started in it, or fell prone. It also acted as difficult terrain. With his amped up Thunderwave, he could keep an enemy or two tied up.
- He was promptly dominated. His daily expired after doing a few points of damage to the two enemies caught in the area.
- The nearest ally to Phedre, Paulic, rushes to her side to administer 'Valenar First Aid'. By repeatedly kicking her in the ribs, he was able to allow her to spend her Second Wind.
- The big guns, Bacon of Hope and Consecrated Ground get thrown down. Consecrated Ground will keep Phedre alive the rest of the combat.
- Split the Tree struck again. Paulic critted with one of his shots. Does this sound familiar? This time his grand total was 72 points of damage to two enemies, killing them both. He now holds the all time record and the runner up.
- That was the second and third enemy death, leaving a skirmsher(?), a 'sniper', and a snake to deal with. The sniper was annoying, spending his time leaping from mast to mast, 6 squares above the party. The snake was eating a tremendous amount of damage and not getting bloodied. The other guy was a pushover.

Difficult terrain was obviously available for us to use in this fight. Jesse had drawn it out lovingly in advance. He described in detail the features of the warehouse, and the masts hanging from the ceiling. Unfortunately, we were not availing ourselves of the options open to us. Partly it was the sinking feeling you get when your healer keeps dying. Maybe a little of it was our attempt to reform into some semblance of a strategic formation. Some of it was our power tunnel-vision, I'm sure.

- K'rrul had been shrouding the sniper as he crouched on a mast, plinking away. When he had stacked up four, he used a power to teleport up and attack the sniper, whiffing.
- On the sniper's turn, he leaped off and shot the rope holding the mast. K'rrul tumbled down and was crushed by the mast, dying a horrible death.
- Just kidding. Through several methods (Acrobatics training, Temp HP, and Insubstantial) he reduced the damage taken to 3.
- With the sniper in melee, and the only thing with legs left alive, we decided to take him alive. With those magic words, K'rrul critted on him, and the renewed shrouds as well as the rest of the damage was maximized. 43 damage on a guy with 10 HP that we wanted alive *anyways*. Lame.

- The snake took some work. We found out later that he was an Elite. He had several cool hypnotic powers that ultimately failed. In fact, enough of his otherworldly flavored powers failed that he behaved much as a normal 40 foot snake would behave, aside from the teleportation.

Following the combat, we had a quick interrogation session. Our Eladrin prisoner didn't seem to speak common, but with Phedre as an interpreter, Arashi made it very clear that his ability to continue breathing was due to our benevolence, and if he did not make it worth our while, we might cease being so giving. In return, we got pretty much nothing. We had killed the mercenary Captain, and this guy claimed to know nothing about their reasons for attacking us. Searching them yielded some magic items, and one solitary clue. A magical stone that we guessed was used as a key for an Eladrin safety deposit box. Our prisoner told us the box was located in the Hand of the Ivory Stone, back at the Fortress of Fading.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

About two hours of combat. It was admittedly a tough fight, with one enemy per PC, each one at 7th level. On top of that, the snake was a 9th level Elite. We did well, probably because they wasted a *lot* of actions trying to kill Phedre, and she kept popping up. Midway through the fight she said she had taken over 150 pts of damage, and she kept getting knocked down after that. After we killed the mercenary Captain, she dropped a healing potion. Before we could dash in and grab it, the freaking *snake* came from across the room and ate it, glass and all. Poor Phedre had been eyeing that potion.

After that the session went off track pretty quickly. . .and got pretty blue. Next week? We figure out what the hell we are doing next!

Jay

AP: An evening with no encounters is just. . .improvational theater?

2010-01-21T10:33:00.005-07:00

That's right, last session was four hours of roleplay. There were a handful of die rolls (Insight checks. . .Perception checks. A Nature check, maybe) and a lot of in character talking. A pretty health ratio of in character/out of character, really. The participants were:

Arashi Stormcrow - Genasi Swordmage
Jasper Phinneas Merryweather III - Gnome WizardWarlock
Phedre no Delaunay no Montreve - Elf Cleric
K'rrul - Kobold Assassin

Senzimay (and her difficult to spell name) had left the party, as had Hogorth. Paulic (of the clan Paulic) was a zombie this session.

The session opens on May 16th. Arashi, Jasper, Phedre, and Paulic were preparing to leave the Eladrin city that they teleported to in haste two sessions ago. I missed the intervening session of roleplay, but since I am bringing a new PC. . .I never found out what was learned there. I gather there was some Speak with Dead ritual(s) and some roleplaying, but not much else beyond that.

The party was given two methods of leaving the city. Both led to the settlement of Blackrock, on the coast. One was the long and more safe passage along the edge of a valley. The other was the shorter, but dangerous trek through the unknown wilds. Arashi was all for braving the danger. Apparently he was the only one, because the party ended up taking the longer, safe passage. It is a few day's travel, most of it glossed over.

The one interesting event was the discovery of a coach or wagon that had gone off the road. Arashi climbed down to investigate, but was not able to immediately determine how long it had been since the accident. He found no evidence of survivors, and no valuables. Even though he figured a wagon of this type required two horses to pull it, he only found a portion of one of the horses.

Jasper and Paulic climbed up the hill on the other side of the road. They didn't find much, but a set of what appeared to be wolf tracks. The pack of wolves went up the hill, and their trail was lost as they entered a stony area and there were no more tracks.

While this discovery was *interesting*, the party had no context or motivation to pursue it further, so they continued on their journey to Blackrock. The town was aptly named, being built on a large deposit of black rock. It appeared to be obsidian. The city was bounded on one side by the sea, and on the other by a ten foot wall. The wall extended into the water, and metal gates kept boats out. The tallest building in the city had a structure that the party recognized as an airship dock. It was currently vacant.

As the party approached the gate, they were stopped by a solitary guard. He asked them to give their names, and as they weren't on 'the list', they were required to bind their weapons with silver ribbon. He seemed to indicate that only people with interesting or effective weapons were asked to do this. He recommended they stay at The Knight's Reprise, and sent them on their way.

Once inside the city, the party split up. They had to return to Verithrond, and were in a hurry. Jasper looked for some information on House Orien, to see about getting the teleportation sequence in Verithrond. The party had an Artifact that would allow them to Teleport there, if they knew the right Arcane sequence (think Stargate). Arashi went to the docks to see about hiring transport. If Jasper failed, they would need to get to the mainland somehow, and a boat was the only real way to do that. Phedre asked around about some information they had gleaned during the time spent with the Eladrin. All she found was an old crone tending a shrine to the Blood of Vol. She was pretty much antagonistic and told Phedre to get out of town, and that she didn't belong in the North.

Jasper had little luck, too. He learned that House Orien had little or no presence here, since they had a fierce rivalry with House Lyrandar. Arashi learned that most of the ocean transport here was cargo, but if they wanted to book personal transport they needed to talk to the half-elves in charge. The nature of the town began to become clear. This town was run by the shipping and pirate industries. Fishing was core, too. And it all seemed to flow from the large tower in the center of town.

Jasper, Phedre and Paulic all entered an Inn to look for rooms, and were accosted by a Kobold. He claimed that a seer had told him of the party's arrival. He wanted to join, as the seer had suggested his destiny was with them. Needless to say, there were various levels of scepticism. Despite several signs given by the seer about the nature of the party, for prudence sake they all went to verify things with her.

It was fully nighttime when K'rrul led the rest of the party to the door of Eltar the Sighted. She lived in a cave under the black rock, with her door made of chicken (when knocking, Jasper said 'bok bok bok'. made of chicken). A young half-elf boy answered and said that Eltar, his grandmother, was sleeping. With a bribe, we *encouraged* him to wake her, and after a few minutes he led us inside.

She had taken her seat in a tiny room with a small table and an obsidian 'crystal ball'. Jasper verified that the ball was indeed magical, and the seer represented with some out of the blue fortune telling about Phedre. It turns out that some of the information she had gathered about her nemesis, the Stillborn, was incorrect. Unfortunately, like most things of this nature, Eltar could not be more specific. The party grudgingly accepted K'rrul's presence (for now) and returned to the inn for sleep.

The next day we headed for the black tower at the center of town. Our only option was to take a sloop, a journey of four or more weeks, or to find another option with the folks running the show. A tip the night before had given us a name of a higher up we could ask for. A quick bribe and we were shown into the building. Shortly thereafter, a half-elf with a Mark of Storm over his eye entered the room. Over the course of a few minutes negotiation, we learned of several options. Our list became:
- Hire a sloop and travel to Verithrond. This was estimated to take at least a month, and cost 500 GP
- Hire the airship and travel to Verithrond. This could take only a week, but would cost 5,000 GP.
- Agree to owe this guy a favor, and get the airship for only 1,000 GP
- Attack and kill the captain of the airship and turn it over to him. We would still owe the 1,000 GP
- Double cross him and tell the captain (Koulton D'Lyrandar, this guy's boss) of his plans. No clue what the reward would be, or if we would gain passage this way.
- Blackmail him and hope he'd drop the price
- Attack and kill the captain and take the ship for ourselves

The two seriously debated choices became whether to double cross this guy, or do his bidding. Either choice was bound to anger people. Some information gathering at a dive down at the docks revealed that both men were well liked by their crews. The fight could go either way.

In the end, after long deliberation, we chose to sleep on it. The next morning during breakfast, Jasper was handed a note. It was from our Dragonmarked friend. A sloop was departing that day at noon, and we could be on it, headed for the mainland. It appeared that our choice was made for us, which was kind of a relief.

We finished up and headed to the indicated address. It was an abandoned warehouse. Adventurer senses tingling, we approached with weapons de-ribboned and ready to fight. The session ended there. . .

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Our DM, Jesse, actually ended it by telling us that we were ambushed from the shadows. Nothing like a combat-less week ending on a cliffhanger to motivate players to show up next time, eh?

The half-elf contact we spoke to had a name, I just can't remember which one it is. Anton, or Alton, or Amber or some A name. A hoity toity name.

Funny things this session besides the door made of chicken:

- Star Rubles (a mixup in gem pronunciation) got an impromptu description, with cosmonauts waiting in line to spend their Star Rubles on the moon. . .as usual, my description hardly does it justice.

- Relieve us of our bodily usage.

- Paulic Paulic of Clan Paulic in the house of Paulic, from the Paulic region of . . . .you can see where this is headed.

Next session, combat? And perhaps some sort of decision from the party about where to go and how to get there!

Jay

AP: In which we turn tail and run. . .

2010-01-01T12:43:00.002-07:00

So. . .I did not blog about the one session I attended earlier in December. I anticipated the party finishing that story arc while I was unable to game, and figured I would start back in when I joined back up with them. Well, due to typical holiday Shenanigans, they did not play in the main campaign at all. A couple of one shots. So our game this week was a direct continuation of the last session I attended. And did not blog about.

Our investigations had led us to the basement of Alomar's house. His lab held a portal similar to the one in the basement of the Inn we worked in. His was a different color, and appeared to be a key to our way out. We entered.

We exit in a dark and moody jungle. It is nighttime, with washed out colors and the ambient light of the Mournlands. We discovered that Alomar's Crystal Ball was pulling us along, and since we had no other clue as to where to go, we followed it.

The ambush should not have surprised us, since we were in hostile territory, but the Kenku still got the drop on us. Two of them seemed to blend into the blackness so completely that they often disappeared from view after their lightning quick strikes. A caster walked on a path made of inky black feathers 40 feet in the air. The five of them worked together to coordinate their hit and run attacks and split the party in two:
- Paulic, for the second week in a row, rolls to hit on an unarmed OA, and crits. This kills the Kenku. Those of us holding swords look at each other in horror. . .we are being outdone by the Elf's boot?
- Jasper uses the ancient Gnomish art of Hadoken, and blasts Kenku away. He is very effective, as usual.
As the Kenku die, they dissolve into blackness and are either drawn into the Crystal Ball, or away to the North.

As we travel North, we eventually stumble on our goal. It is a large black hemisphere. Thirty or so feet in diameter of, and swirling, menacing blackness. After some study and contemplation, it is determined that this is a veil of souls trapped within some kind of arcane net. In an attempt to destroy it, Phaedra Turns Undead. Then all hell breaks loose.

Another Skill Challenge, only this one had a strong combat component to it. Again, the concept with this Challenge was rock solid, and its execution was perfect. The layout was as a regular encounter. In addition to this, we had the option of making an Arcana, Diplomacy, Religion, or Endurance check. A failure not only counted towards one of the three total failures to loose the Challenge, but each skill had an individual effect as well.

The center of the challenge was the shade of Prince Amir. He was surrounded by spirits, and a few of those became corporeal enough to attack us. Successes and Failures of certain skills would increase this number, and more would appear on their own at certain points in the challenge. This mechanic worked well. Notably, Paulic and Hogorth did not have much skill in the Primary skills required for this challenge. It became a battle to keep the minions away, since their aura applied a negative penalty to the skill rolls.

We totally rocked it, too. We completed the skill portion in the first couple of rounds, getting our five successes, and only incurring one failure. This didn't end the combat, it just made the Shade of Prince Amir more manageable. We then went on to defeat him.

With his destruction, we had a short race to get out of the forest and through the portal before Something Bad Happened. We made it. We appeared in a changed Thrace, with our goal in hand and the bubble destroyed.

The final portion of that session was spent exploring the new Thrace, now exposed to the Mournland. It was devoid of the illusions that had lived here, but the houses and their contents all still stood. We discovered the graves of six people, and deduced that the party we were sent to rescue had died of old age in the time bubble and been buried. We also found Alomar's home, and learned a bit more about the final days of Thrace. Alomar had been close to the Prince, and so it fit that while his research about this mysterious Artifact uncovered more about it's planar properties, he would bend it to aid the prince somehow.

In the final days of Thrace's day to day life, Alomar had activated the cube, stranding Thrace in a bubble apart from the world, and stranding the souls of the Day of Mourning's catastrophe in the bubble as well. I am really not sure I am getting all of that right, and I'm sure there is more there. To be frank, as my *character* is not very interested in such things, I did not devote much brain space to piecing it together. Maybe someone will pipe up in the comments and clear things up.

Last session began with an Extended Rest. It had been awhile since we had been safe enough to do this. Unfortunately, since we were now in the Mournlands again, we were not able to get the full benefits of the rest. In particular, we recovered only 1d4+con mod in surges. During our meager rest in the former lab of Alomar, we began to hear disturbances up in the town. Some exploration revealed a winged female (harpy!) was directing some stone formed allies in the sacking of Thrace. As they were keeping well away from us, we finished our rest and prepared for the day. Paulic soon realized that their loud searching was getting closer, so we hustled up the ladder and into the house. Our quick plan was to hide, while Arashi tried parlay with the Harpy.

His efforts appeared to be going somewhere initially. She was looking for more statues to complement her collection. She had with her a minotaur, a one armed soldier with a spear, and an arbalest. When Arashi did not have any knowledge of statues in Thrace, she said she could also work with bones. Arashi laughingly told her that he did not have any bones.

Combat started when she used some of her innate control over bone to jerk Arashi around. Paulic, crouching across the street and looking through the crack, let loose a shot, and with that everyone jumped into action.
- Everyone on our side gets a Surprise Round except Arashi (obviously in plain sight) and Jasper (cruddy Stealth roll). Paulic uses his to fire the Twin Strike above.
- Hogorth tries to run out from the second floor and across the ruined wall to engage the minotaur, but slips and falls.
- Phaedra is unsure of what to do. She can't hit anything right now, and if she moves she will be exposed. She hides.
- When combat begins in earnest, it immediately gets dangerous. The Minotaur charges the building and rocks it to the foundation. Hogorth and Jasper both try forced movement to keep him away, and he ends up even further inside.
- The harpy, in a pattern repeated many, many times, will fly upward and attempt to use her sorcery in battle. Arashi and Paulic focus fire on the harpy, and she is soon bloodied.
- The animated ballista has a twist that is revealed when it finally fires. It's bolts are blunted and not really deadly. The electric shock that accompanies them, however, is quite deadly. Arashi resists lightning, so it only wastes one shot on him before switching to other, more vulnerable targets.
- The combat on the first floor of the house is brutal and deadly. When the second melee statue joins in, things begin to look grim. Hogorth's last surge is expended, and the only surgeless healing the party has available. Eventually the minotaur goes down, only to be followed by Hogorth.
- We are all saddened when the minotaur rises again.
- We are all angered when the harpy falls to her death, and rises again.
- Hogorth is stabilized, but effectively out of the fight. Phaedra can now focus her healing on the newly bloodied Arashi.
- The harpy is killed again. Breathing a sigh of relief, the party focuses on her cronies.
- We are incredulous when the harpy rises from the dead yet again. Around now, Senzimay (played as a DMPC) grabs the Planar Artifact from Jasper (also played as a DMPC) and starts fiddling with it.
- In a moment of awesome, Arashi triggers his aegis to teleport *above* the harpy in an attempt to grapple her to the ground. He fails, and falls 40 feet to his death. Not dead-dead, just negative HP's. Still, no fun.
- Hogorth and Arashi are both resigned to their deaths, and our poor healer is probably left feeling a bit unwanted. Regardless, she keeps Arashi from death, and despite ourselves the harpy goes down yet again.
- We poop in our pants a little when she rises for the thousandth time, cackling.
- As we put away our swords and prepare our last wills, making sure to cross of Senzimae as she has spent the last two round fiddling with the cube (and, as was suggested, summoning Hellraiser) instead of fighting.
- She opens a portal over Hogorth's body. Everyone runs for it.
- In a last bitch effort, the harpy starts immobilizing folk. Working together, everyone is rolled/tugged/shoved through the portal and to safety in a strange Eladrin city.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Jesse did give us two very good handouts that explained both the Cube and the research behind it. I did not study these, and don't have copies to reference. In a nutshell, the cube we found is attuned to portals and planar travel. It allows the use of rituals related to such travel even if the user does not know the ritual. It works as a focus if they do. It has other, more combat oriented functions. It also has functions that were not enumerated, but must be discovered.

Our flight from Thrace was something I thought about on our downtime. We ended the session and Hogorth had 11 HP's and no surges. I did not imagine him surviving a trip of a few days, unless they were encounter free. He recovered two surges at the beginning of the session, and used one to bring himself up to near full HP's. He dropped in the first third of the fight. I don't know what possessed Jesse to have Senzimae use the cube to port us out. According to him, the harpy was using a finite resource to resurrect. Each opponent could do it a number of times, or she could *steal* one of theirs to do it, too. We did not know that of course, so we felt absolutely screwed.

Okay, this we stuff should be clarified. *I* felt a TPK coming, and I imagine the others felt pretty grim about it too. When Jerome and I were both talking about our back-up characters. . .you get the feeling you are gonna be using them soon.

So the session ended with the portal closed, and we have a week or two of in-game downtime to level to 6th, and do some training or magic item creation. Should be interesting to see what the next session holds.

Jay

World Building: Other Races

2009-12-17T15:50:00.003-07:00

Shifters - Shifter blood runs thinly throughout rural communities in some parts of the world. Occasionally a child is born who displays some of these shifter traits. Usually, unless someone intervenes (often the Church) he or she can live a normal life. These shifters are drawn to solitary lives as shepherds or fishermen.

Gnome - As Tieflings influence finances, Gnomes influence Academics. Gnomes are sought after by the wealthy as tutors of utmost quality. The University has several tenured Gnomes, and Gnomes are scattered the world over in schools and research houses. Gnomes have a singular interest in knowledge, and the power that comes with it. Extensive study of archaeology and history has allowed the Gnomes to corner the market on ancient magics, and to introduce some technological marvels as original creations. Gnomes are almost always independently wealthy, and live in large (for them) estates with many generations sharing a compound.

Deva - Although quite rare, Deva do exist in connection with Divine events. Often a Deva will claim to be the Avatar of their God and create a highly devote cult of personality that follows them without question. Whether these actions are sanctioned or not is unknown, but Deva have garnered a reputation as Cult leaders and mystics.

Goliath - These stubborn individualists are perhaps most well known for their rebellion. Goliaths make their home in the high mountain passes, and every generation or so their extreme distance from civilization emboldens them to declare independence. After a hastily gathered army of city guards and wardens is gathered and dispatched, the Goliaths usually back down and see reason. Once in awhile a rebellious young Goliath will leave his home to make his name in the city. These Goliath are highly prized in combat arenas and mercenary troupes, and rarely return home.

Half-Orc - Called Orcs, these brutes are ubiquitous in the more dense urban areas. Their strength makes them ideal for some of the jobs Halflings can't do, and their prolific nature means they breed like rabbits. Bouncers, bodyguards, builders, and other non-skilled professionals in the inner city are often Orcs. Occasionally one will learn a trade and rise to become a genuine artisan, but stigma against buying from a non-Human will always keep them second best in this regard.

Gnoll - Some segments of the world do not regard Gnolls as thinking beings and deserving of the rights that such beings have. As a result, Gnolls are secretive and self serving. Most Gnolls adopt nocturnal behavior to further limit their contact with the public, and crime is common among them. When Dwarves are accused of theft, it is usually a Gnoll that is truly guilty.

Warforged - Occasionally recovered in old ruins, Warforged are without exception very, very old. They are considered property of the state, and kept apart from society in general. From time to time, when a show of force is needed, a squad of willing Warforged will be deployed, and they generally do their job without needing to lift a finger. For most, however, their needs are met, and they are free to spend their days in whatever leisure activity they desire. As a result, there are quite a few very powerful magicians, historians, and physicians among their ranks.

Changeling - Official word is that they do not exist. The truth is that a small population of Changelings does exist. For all of recorded history a clan of Changelings has followed the powerful, shadowing and influencing them subtly. Their goals are unknown, as is their true number.

Drow - The only colony of Drow is under the mountains. Most of their efforts are bent towards excavating and attempting to find their Underdark. While the rest of the world view it as a religious or racial obsession, the Drow are convinced that somewhere under the world lies a second world, and their home is there. While they are nominally citizens, most officials don't bother with them, as they can be extremely deadly on their home turf.

Kobold - Kobolds are commonly considered to be to Dragonborn what Halflings are to Humans. Lesser in number than Halflings, they have also avoided the traps of slavery and poverty.

Goblin - These cunning beasties are found in civilization's garbage piles. Subsisting on scraps and hand me downs, Goblins, like rats, have carved out their niche in the sewers of mankind. Commonly viewed as pests, most civilized people have no desire to associate with Goblins.

Minotaur, Shadar-kai, Revenant, Kalashtar, Genasi - Unknown in the world, if you want to play this race you are from another world, and need DM permission. That goes for MM races, too.

Jay

World Building: PHB Races

2009-12-17T13:41:00.003-07:00

Races may or may not have a different flavor in this world. I will include relevant PC races and some MM races.

Human - The dominant race in numbers and influence. Essentially flavorless, a blank slate for you to imprint your character on.

Half-Elf - This true breeding race is labeled Half-Elf almost as a slur. They appear mostly human with some elfin qualities that give them their name. Half-Elves are not numerous, and exist mostly in the shadows, functioning as conmen and grifters. Honorable Half-Elves exist, often rising above their brethren to work in law enforcement, or occasionally as entertainers.

Tiefling - Possessing a reputation as superb bankers and money managers, Tiefling have risen above many of the other non-human races to several positions of power. A loose network of family and professional ties have made them one of the more powerful factions in the world. While certain criminal elements do exist, a majority of Tieflings operate entirely within the law. This relatively recent surge in power has allowed them to dig into their past. Discoveries made there indicate that not only are the Tiefling not native to this world, but they are changing over time to a more 'human' appearance. Who knows what more digging will uncover...

Dwarf - Rather than attempt to integrate themselves into Human society, most Dwarves spend their entire lives in one of several Dwarven enclaves. Living on the outskirts of society, they have earned a reputation as tinkerers and occasional thieves. While it is true that a Dwarf is almost always an opportunist, propaganda and racial tensions are mostly to blame. Dwarves also have a rich cultural heritage, with songs and poems without equal in the world. Their oral history is particularly rich considering they are among the longest living races in the world.

Halfling - The most human-like of races, Halflings are also most numerous (besides Humans, of course). They thrive in urban areas where space is at a premium, and are often exploited for cheap labor. River barges and other small vessels are also filled with Halflings, generally, as their quick feet serve them well on the water. They are, as a whole, a poor and dirty race, with little cultural history of their own. Common belief is that they are descended from humans, and are slaves as their birthright.

Eladrin - The most beautiful race in the world, or so they would have everyone believe. The most visible Eladrin function as attractive escorts for politicians and businessmen. Their dirty little secret is that they are able to use their innate fey powers and their affinity for weapons to function as very effective bodyguards. Eladrin society places high value in martial prowess, and Eladrin boys and girls learn quickly or are weeded out. Children unable to participate in this training are taught in segregated schools, instructing them in Arcane and other mystical training. Like Dwarves, they keep to themselves, but they give the appearance of aloofness, rather than being cast off.

Elf - Feral cousins of Eladrin, Elves are so rarely seen that they are viewed as myth by some members of the population. Almost all Elves live in wooded areas, surviving by hunting and gathering what they need. The few elves that choose to live in society are often mistaken for Eladrin. Elves are fanatical about ancestry, and have genealogies that go back a millenia. These records end abruptly at a time the Elves are reluctant to talk about. Whether this reluctance is due to fear or lack of knowledge is unknown.

Dragonborn - Called Dragons by the populace, Dragonborn are feared for there size and ferocity. Their relative rarity is compensated for by their presence. Dragonborn dominate wherever they tread, and are seen as military commanders (under Human supervision, of course), performers, artisans, and criminals. Their numbers remain small most likely due to their wanderlust. Dragonborn are natural travelers, and rarely settle down. When an opportunity to mate presents itself, they often do, but Dragonborn have a poor reputation as caregivers, and most eggs don't hatch.

Jay

World Building Again

2009-12-17T12:02:00.004-07:00

I still have an actual play to write. Motivation is low since I missed that session, and I'll miss two more because of the holidays. I'm not alone in this, I think holidays muck up *everyone's* gaming.

I've been spending my down hours, like driving, showering, and falling asleep, thinking about trying my hand at a real, honest-to-goodness homebrew world. My, that was a lot of commas. I don't have a chance to DM in my future, but honestly. . .that is the best time to work on this kind of thing, right? No pressure? No outside influence regarding PC choice or players or anything? I will be sticking with 4e though, so not an edition neutral build (though that is mostly to accommodate player choice regarding race and class).

This was all spurred by this enworld post on campaigns. I tried to do this with the couple of small attempts on world building in my recent past, and realized they were very, very derivative. Not that derivative is something new for me, it is a major reason I don't write much any more. I get this bug in my brain to write something, and it turns out to be a reflection of some earlier book/story. We'll see if this turns out like that.

For my starting point, I'm taking a theme or trope that I really like and building on it. One of my favorites is the post-apocalyptic world. This is not Mad Max (though Mad Max does exist in this space, as does Fallout), this is more generally a fallen world. One where the glory days have passed. Some good fantasy literature does this, like the Shannara books or the Wheel of Time books. What really got me thinking about it was Lord of the Rings. The book doesn't emphasize this, and the movies don't show it, but at the tail end of the third age, most of the glory days are behind Middle Earth. Relics like Narsul and Glamdring are beyond the ability of man to create, and ruins like Weathertop are all that remain of a great civilization.

I'd like to emulate that, but focus it more. I initially went to far and started in on a Logan's Run style place, where the entire history of the outside world was unknown, and everyone was gathered to one small place. While that might make for an interesting story or one-shot, it has an implicit level of player cooperation. I'd like for this world to be as house rule free as possible, and the smaller I made it the more that became difficult.

So, I have four areas I am working on, with a fifth I try to keep in mind as I go:

Geography

This is one of the simpler questions to work out. In keeping with my original Logan's Run (and The Island, and Aeon Flux) inspired idea, I want the landmass to be small. A single continent. The historical clues point to emigration from elsewhere, but details are lost to the sands of time.

I don't want to get too fancy or crazy with the geography. Ideally the world will have no wilds left, with only the fringes having any sort of mystery. While most or all of the possible races have a home, fantastic beasts like Dragons and Medusas are legend.

One country accomplishes this. No Eberron-like fracturing of the continent. My current plans in this regard are to take an existing map, whether real or fantasy, and work it over to my satisfaction in Gimp. Not far out of the planning stages here.

Races

The most developed section of my world. I'll save a full individual writeup for another post. I worked on races first with the understanding that knowing how so many races fit in a small amount of space helped me to visualize the shape and current state of my world. For example, in this campaign, Tieflings are viewed with a cultural bias as being excellent managers and bankers. Since most non-humans are faced with some amount of discrimination, intelligent Tieflings often exploit this bias as route to power. This results in an old boys network of Tieflings that aid each other in this line of work, and an underground that assists in siphoning off assets from their masters.

Little insights like that help me to guide the rest of my thoughts, and hopefully the end product is better for it.

Class

The makeup of the world has meant that classes are viewed differently. In a traditional medieval fantasy world, there is plenty of room for fighters and their derivative classes. In a world without a meaningful standing army, and with no wilderness to speak of, ruffians who like to stab things are almost always criminals. The integration of Primal classes also impacts this, but I am making headway there. I think this section will get put on hold until I finish my work on. . .

Divinity

I struggled with this, since it is likely the largest amount of work, and will have the smallest payoff. I am tempted to go with Core here, and save myself trouble, and make it easier for Divine PC's, but that feels like a lazy move to me. I still have some thinking to do here.

Plot

I do not want to make an adventure path. I will likely not get to run this world for a long, long time, if at all. Putting work into something like that is folly. However, I do want to consider where the plot can go. This means placing interesting hooks and things throughout the fluff. It means building with an eye towards interesting changes, not making a static world and standing back. It is also the thing I am itching to dive into, but won't waste my time with.

Jay

Where have I been? What is going on?

2009-11-30T22:23:00.002-07:00

Not sure what the audience is like for this thing, but an update is warranted for my own sanity.

Two weeks ago we did not game due to low expected turnout. Last week the game was held, but family obligations prevented me from attending. Our excellent DM has posted his writeup on our campaign message board. The specific thread is here.

We will be gaming tomorrow (that's the plan, anyhow) so I will endeavor to remain caught up. Still looking for my 'voice'. We'll see what comes out.

Jay

AP: Double Teamed to Death (nearly)

2009-11-16T15:43:00.006-07:00

Arashi - Genasi Swordmage
Paulic - Elven Ranger
Senzamei - Eladrin Wizard
Phaedra - Elven Cleric
Jasper - Gnome Warlock/Wizard
Hogorth - Eladrin Fighter/Warlord

We soldiered onward this session, towards the castle and our goal of ultimate understanding. . .

Unfortunately, because we are just *that* lucky, we triggered two encounters, so the session was one, long, painful fight. I am getting a tad ahead of myself, though.

We got within sight of the castle and saw 11 or so guards gathered outside. Presumably, they knew we were coming and this was their response. We also saw Captain Regal there, and Senzamei remembered that he is familiar to her. He is a character in a children's book, or series of books. Not only does he engage in a series of daring exploits, but he has a pet dragon.

Suddenly a little less cocksure, we discussed some other options. Waiting until dark, or trying to find another way in were the two best options, until Jasper thought it would be a good idea to try and bluff our way in. Senzamei recalled that the nemesis of Captain Regal was the Dread Pirate Roberts (yes, that one?!) and we tried bluffing the Captain, telling him the Dread Pirate was after the Prince.

Captain Regal apparently believed us, and led us into the castle. Once in the courtyard, the trap closed and we were ambushed from all sides. Smart, eh? We bluffed our way into the trap, and past one encounter to take both on at the same time! Hurrah!
So the dragon in the corner is Flamey, Captain Regal's wingless dragon. . .until it sprouts wings of flame. Nice. The large enemy in the other corner is the wolf that we saw the prince riding. Yes, there are archers on the walls.
This is midway through the first round. We had some amount of leeway, since without the first encounter outside to alert them, the dragon and the wolf are still sleeping when we enter the courtyard. At Captain Regal's signal we are attacked, and our retaliation is swift and. . .unfocused. Hogorth and Arashi are both in the lead and take on Captain Regal, since he has a huge target on his back by virtue of being the captain. Jasper blasts a chunk of enemies out of the way and makes a patch of difficult terrain. Now the heavies are up front with the Captain (good) and the soft centered party members are in the back surrounded by solders and about to be attacked by wolves (bad):
- Senzamei is in good form, actually hitting fairly often. These hits are punctuated by a crit even, which is awesome!
- Lead the Attack on Captain Regal felt right, and may have actually been the right call, but he went down pretty quickly to the focused fire. Things did not get noticeably easier when he died.
- The rear of the party was attacked by a Wolfmaster and his two wolves. They did repeated high damage to our softies.
- A round or two in, Flamey and The Wolf both entered the fray. This was BAD. We had two big enemies and two defenders, which is fine, but we were fighting on basically three fronts, without someone sturdy to hold off the eight or so soldiers and their two wolves.
- Things get a bit worse when the Dragon uses a mobility power to shift back and create some zones of damage. With all the melee fighters involved, it is tough for us to keep or stay out of these. Senzamei Fey Steps out, which is good in the short term but leaves her exposed. The Wolf predictably goes for her.
- A slight misread of Senzamei's Guardian Blades power puts a serious dent in the wolf when he makes a series of attacks against her and Arashi, and is dealt Int*4 damage (16) in response. We cheer.
- Phaedra is flanked by wolves and gets beaten down to less than 0. She falls.
- Inspiring Word brings her to positives, but she is hit again before her turn and must make her first death save. She fails.
- A cunning plan involving Hogorth Fey Stepping adjacent to her and Paulic tossing a Healing Potion goes off without a problem, and she is able to roll out of the way while Hogorth holds off her attackers. A shift granted to the entire party puts most of us within range of her healing powers, and she unloads her big guns. Healing is dispensed and appreciated. The two tanks were in single digit hit points for most of the fight to this point.
- Tired of the constant (yet surprisingly ineffective) sniping, Jasper uses Otherwind Stride to pop up on top of the wall. He proceeds with the business of tossing the archers off with Thunderwave. We cheer.
- Things still seem grim, since at this point we have killed only the Captain, but bloodied almost everyone else. A lesson to be learned about focusing fire? To make matters worse, all of these solders grant their allies Temp HP when they are bloodied. Stacking Temp HP.
- Arashi takes on The Wolf, and Paulic disengages from melee. The recently healed Hogorth incurs several OA's (to Phaedra's disapproval) and uses the daily magic item power of his sword to immobilize the dragon. With it marked and unable to move, the most powerful attack available to it seems to be a basic claw attack.
- The Wolf dies.
- In a freak event, one of the wolves draws an Opportunity Attack from Paulic, and he crits. He crit with his boot. Max damage. 5 damage. It kills the wolf. His ego is forever inflated. He states "I am a God."
Better. This is about an encounter's work. They are all bloodied though, so we power through this.
- Jasper crits on the final archer, flinging him off the edge to his death.
- Phaedra pulls out all her healing mojo, granting Temp HP and healing to Hogorth. He takes enough damage to kill him, but does not die due to this. Even though she is upset that nobody told her how *dead* they were, she continues to heal. What a champ.
- Following this, a few members of the party use second winds. With no more real healing triggers to spend, and almost everyone bloodied, it was needed.
- Jesse is frustrated to find several of his attacks over the next round miss by less than two, indicating that the Second Wind's defense bonus saved them from harm.
- Like dominoes, the enemies begin to fall, and we are victorious.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Horrible note taking. Mostly consisted of writing down the bizarre things spoken by the party:
- One plan for destroying the castle was to concoct the AIDS virus and spread it to the troops. This was predictably suggested by the bloodthirsty Valenar Elf.
- The Wolfmaster sounded like a bad 80's movie. While I initially thought 'bad beastmaster clone', Paulic thought 'bad Die Hard or other action movie clone'. We ended up fleshing out a Road House-like movie, where the protagonist was the Wolfmaster. With Patrick Swayze dead, we would just have to settle for photoshopping wolves into the fight scenes.
- XXY, the genetic condition, was mentioned as causing one to be covered in floppy penises.
- Since everything we kill disappears, and it is looking more and more like the Prince is at the heart of this, a parallel was made to the movie "The Neverending Story". We are the Nothing. The prince is Bastian. How sad.
- Jesse mentioned that this was a "Custom Dragon". We were derailed for a moment describing his hydraulic tricks. There was a cholo standing a few feet away with the control pad for him.
- And finally, splintery wooden cocks of death...

I don't remember where that came from. Jesse was telling us that originally we would have only needed to fight the Captain and his men, and that the fight with the Dragon and the Wolf were the second encounter. It also included some wooden toy soldier minions that could only be killed with fire, so I imagine that is where that last one came from...

This session, denouement. Well, following some final battle against an eight year old or his pet wizard. Or both. Or neither.

Jay

AP: What was I doing here? It's not important...

2009-11-04T09:20:00.005-07:00

Following a mid-week email that fast forwarded us to our destination, Thrace, the usual group assembled:

Paulic (Valenar Elf Archer Ranger 4) - Learned a new skillset this session, that of teppanyaki master. If this adventuring thing falls through, he can always fall back on twin striking cuts of meat on a hot grill.

Arashi (Stormsoul Genasi Assault Swordmage 4) - Slid right into the role of Tavern owner like he'd done it before. Amazing for a guy who spent most of his life in a cage, but he held the mantle of authority well. Usually by holding it over our heads in a menacing manner.

Phaedra (Arenal Elf Devoted Cleric 4) - Since death worshipping powers don't port well into the hospitality industry, she fell in line as the Tavern's main chef. With meals consisting of all-vegetarian fare, and (apparently) delicious cakes, she was kind of the main draw. And she made sure that as a tavern wench, she had her cleavage appropriately maximized.

Hogorth (Eladrin Hybrid Fighter/Warlord 4) - Despite a keen mind and quick blade, he was dropped in the most obvious spot befitting a man of his strength. As being a bouncer for the mildly overbearing Arashi, he spent the beginning of this session drunk. Playing second fiddle to a mildly intelligent lizard will do that to you.

Jasper (Gnome Hybrid Wizard/Warlock (Fey) 4) - With magical tricks up his sleeve and the charisma to make it work, Jasper should be obvious as the main performer in the tavern. Unfortunately, the wrongness of it all and his inability to handle stress led to a near mental breakdown. He compensated for this by sobbing uncontrollably out of view of the rest of us.

Senzamei (Eladrin War Wizard 4) - With her player absent, alternated between mindless zombie, DM controlled personality, and comatose baggage. She was the waitress, though it was hinted that there might be another profession she engaged in on the side.

Boxed text that kicked off this session set the stage. Jasper is playing his crystal keyed xylophone on stage, while Phaedra and Paulic prepare meals for guests. Arashi surveys his bar, keeping an eye on Zap and Hogorth as they watch the door.

Any questions about our reasons for being here were met with "You start thinking about it, and then realize that it's not important." We are all working in a tavern in Thrace called The Eye of the Storm. Arashi came into town awhile back, and set up the tavern for our arrival. About two weeks later the rest of us came following him into town, and for the past couple of months we have been spending our day-to-day lives running the tavern.

As for our other options, such as leaving town or exploring the nearby castle, "You think that is a very bad idea. It makes you uncomfortable to think about it." Residents of the town are currently packing our bar and enjoying themselves very much. With no real reason not to, we all stop fighting the compulsion and do our job.

The action this night is a possible bar fight. An unruly patron is getting violent and a brawl would be bad for business. Hogorth confronts and forcibly removes the offender from the bar. Crisis averted. . .not quite, as a couple of kids dash through the door and steal some drinks from a table. Hogorth sees them giving their drinks to a shadowy figure in an alley across the way, so he goes to investigate. It is the drunk troublemaker from just a moment ago. Two of his companions use the distraction to dash into the bar and start making with the brawling. By time the bouncer returns, things have devolved into a messy barfight, and the evening is quite ruined.

Getting things cleaned up once the guard has carted away the offenders (Guard insignia is best not thought about, since it is not important) is a priority. The Prince of Thrace is having his 8th birthday party here tomorrow, and we have much work to do. While Phaedra slaves away in the kitchen preparing, everyone gets the mess cleaned up, and Hogorth and Arashi have a FIGHT. Not like, with fists, but about Hogorth's supposed lapse in judgement and the resulting mess. Hogorth, for his part, remains drunk throughout the evening, and prefers to blame Arashi for holding him back. After Hogorth stumbles off to pass out for the evening, Arashi draws up a post advertising an open position as a bouncer, and tacks it up by the door.

The next day, everyone is up preparing for the Prince's arrival. Some drama is inevitable, though, when Hogorth sees the ad for his position. He brings it to Arashi, upset about this (and apparently, a lot of other unresolved baggage). It remains unresolved when the Prince and his retinue arrive.

The Prince and a herd of children his own age are accompanied by a dozen guards, and the old cloaked and bearded vizier. Among the guards is the Captain of the guard, an ex-pirate named Captain Regal. He lives up to every stereotype a pirate ever had, with a peg leg and a pirate hat (non regulation, I imagine). In an effort to keep Hogorth's bad attitude from ruining the party (and his reputation), Arashi sends him up to the main marketplace to purchase some blue dragon meat for the prince. Paulic then puts on a show with said meat, chopping and grilling it with flair. He unfortunately rolls a 1 on one of his opening moves, and is only saved when the harried Jasper manages to catch the haunch before it hits the ground. Playing it off as intentional, Jasper holds it over Paulic while Paulic slices bits off with his deft knifework. This is while Jasper is simultaneously playing the xylophone, and using ghost sound and prestidigitation to duet with himself. I believe the song was "Farmer in the Dell" or it might have been "The Hokey Pokey".

The party is going quite well. The meal is a success, and the guards dig in to the dragon meat leftovers while Senzamei brings out the Prince's cake. She places the eight candles, and then lights them with a cantrip. This seemingly mundane act gets Paulic all disoriented. He has seen Senzamei do this before, even in his current life as a grillmaster. Something about the setting though, with the prince, and the magical flame, causes him to loose it. He remains quiet throughout the rest of the party, and then attempts to approach Jasper about something. From the outside, it appears like. . .well "We've been friends for awhile now," and "I've been having these strange feelings." and "Why can't you just make this easy?" lead us to believe that Paulic has just now professed his love for Jasper. Jasper is not pleased by this (and any effort to steer the conversation to *why* is, predictably, not important) so he retires to his room.

Part of our mental compulsion is the sealed chest at the foot of our beds. Whenever we think that things don't feel right, we are comforted by going to our rooms and meditating on this chest. Several things in our current circumstances trigger these feelings, like the magic room under our cellar, Old Thrace, and any suggestion about a life before our current one. Paulic, in his manic insanity, breaks several knives trying to pry open his chest, and eventually uses an axe to chop into it. Inside he finds his old belongings. This is quite the development for him, but given his recent failure to talk sense into Jasper, he decides to sleep on the problem for now.

Arashi, on the other hand, can't let a possible workplace romance get out of hand. He awakens early and goes to talk to Paulic about his overtures to Jasper. He makes it clear that Paulic's acts in the bedroom are his own business, but he doesn't want anything to interfere with his work. Paulic, for his part, manages to break Arashi's compulsion. The Prince of Thrace, and Captain Regal seem to be a key, as they are figures from their shared adventures.

With Arashi now fully aware of his real self, along with Paulic, they split up to convert the rest of the party. Arashi confronts Phaedra, and tries using his hatred of her religion to jog a memory. She steadfastly clings to the delusion, until he mentions stillborn. She swoons, and remembers. Paulic is unsuccessful in convincing Senzamei. Arashi tries to talk with Hogorth, and things predictably go downhill. His methods include a mop, and hand to had combat. They crescendo with attempted electrocution, and his familiar as an improvised thrown weapon. They climax with a verbal drubbing where Hogorth's ambitions are questioned, and for him that is the final key to unravelling the domination.

Senzamei, now quite afraid of her insane-seeming companions, is trying to get into Jasper's room, but he is having none of it. After her chest is broken open, she falls unconscious, and Hogorth breaks down Jasper's door to talk with him. Jasper is able to shake off the effect when his meeting the party is mentioned, and he remembers that he thought we would make a very poor archaeological team.

With Senzamei's unconscious body forgotten in the hallway, we all gather downstairs to talk about what happened. We have memories of 2 months working in this tavern. For Arashi, he has memories of an additional 2 weeks waiting for the rest of us to arrive. Since he only entered the town of Thrace a few seconds before the rest of us, we come to the tentative conclusion that while in Thrace, time runs at a different pace. Very different, since as Phaedra looks at her journal from the past couple of months, she reads that the Prince has had his birthday here about every 2 weeks. Her entries are regular, and reveal that we have been basically repeating the same actions over and over. It then dawns on us that if the party we were looking for has been missing for about a month, odds are that if they made it this far they died of old age long ago.

We decided to investigate our tavern before we go anywhere. On our way to the magic room below the basement, we stop to check out the cellar. Inside it we make a horrific, or mundane discovery. We uncover a stack of signs that we posit once hung in front of the Eye of the Storm. They are the names of the past taverns (Lydia's Rest, Heart of Fire, Ale's well that ends well, and the Laughing Minotaur). Lydia is the name of the leader of the last expedition. It is reasonable to assume that she was stuck running a tavern and throwing a birthday party for the rest of her life. Hogorth found that horrifying, and possibly one of the worst punishments imaginable. Phaedra felt that it wasn't so bad, since the laughter of children can bring a smile to your face.

We also found a few chests identical to the ones we just destroyed to get our gear. Upon opening them up, we find some increasingly ancient magic items. All of the mundane material has decayed away, but we collected quite a few useful pieces. After that sobering revelation, we climbed down the ladder into the next basement. The room was covered in arcane glyphs written in glowing blue. The arcane specialists in the group were not able to make any sense of the gibberish. The other feature of the room was a glowing blue sphere hovering in the center of the room. Arashi touched it and disappeared. Not wanting to arrive two weeks later wherever they were sent, and end up a bouncer again, Hogorth touched it, and the whole party followed suit.

We appeared in a jungle. Despite various clues, such as the vegetation and the wildlife, we are unable to determine where we are. It doesn't seem to be a different plane entirely, but we are not able to figure anything out beyond that. In our immediate area are some blue crystals, and just beyond those are some red. Experimentation reveals that:
- We are not seeing precisely the same thing
- Some force will not allow us to move deeper into the jungle
- The resonant hum of the crystals can be enhanced with Jasper's tuning fork, and that creates a hovering blue ball like the one that teleported us here.
- Nothing else seems to do that

Fruitless in our efforts to determine more, we leap through the next glowing light, and reappear in our sub-basement. It is quite possible that we are more confused now that we were before that little jaunt. We gather up Senzamei and decide that our best option is to check out the castle. A few things we conclude:
- The vizier who looked like an old wizard could be Alomar, the last man known to have the artifact we need
- The Prince's birthday seemed odd to us. Every two weeks, really?
- It was the only other landmark we really knew about
- It was on the other side of this odd bubble in time, so we would pass through the center and be able to see what was what on our way

Right away Jasper sees something odd. As both a Gnome and a wizard he was able to see that all of the buildings beyond New Thrace appeared. . .odd. Illusory, probably. Not that the buildings here in town were normal, they were described ass oddly constructed as well. We soldiered on towards the center of town, and the open air marketplace that dominated it. As we neared a guard checkpoint in town, Paulic saw one of them jump on a horse and ride hard to the North. With no way to catch him, we just knew that meant that our decision to go to the castle was probably warranted, and that things could get violent.

Entering the marketplace was yet another revelation. Jasper noticed something odd about the vendors there, and a piece clicked in his head. Looking around he saw the same face repeated a dozen times over. His sharp eyes noticed some imperfections in the proportions of the people milling about. It looked like the population there was entirely illusory. When the squad of five soldiers galloped up he was shocked yet again to notice that the plate armor didn't have seams. There was no way to get into or out of it.

The soldiers announced that we were not allowed to have weapons in the town. Hogorth rebutted that *they* had weapons. Things didn't really devolve from there, so much as they exploded:
- Paulic had taken the time to climb a scaffold as he saw them approach.
- Hogorth and Arashi stepped out in front to protect their allies. They both consistently hit this fight, which kept the attention focused on them.
- Arashi kicked things off by marking a swordsman, dashing to slice at an archer, and then riding the lightning to engage the Arcanist.
- Hogorth was dazed the entire fight. His very nice allies kept the enemies within reach of his spear, so it was a non-issue.
- Jasper showed his depth by killing things in a much less flashy manner than before. The opposite, in fact, as his curse+eyebite managed to finish off a couple of the enemies
- Despite his position very far behind the party, Paulic drew fire from the archers after they saw his effectiveness
- Straining the probability of this encounter, Phaedra crits twice, and keeps the party up. While doing that we discover that the healing dampening effect of the Mournlands is not present here.
- The last archer had climbed to the roof, and was immobilized, cursed, and quarried before he was killed. He dissolved into weird nothingness like the rest, and Jasper rode the curse to teleport back down to the ground. Showoff...

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

No pictures this week. My cameraphone is just not up to the low light and unsteady hand. I'll have to start stealing the actual camera.

The bulk of our evening was spent roleplaying as confused tavern workers. It was quite fun. Enough so that we were going on and on about how it would be awesome to play in a campaign where we owned a riverboat tavern, and traveled from town to town, adventuring and serving drinks.

Poor Paulic was the first 'awakened' and every time he tried to talk to Jasper about it we really gave him a rough time. It just sounded like he was hitting on him. A lot. Senzamei was the prostitute in all but name, as the stereotypical tavern wench. Of course, before when she was not there she was taken advantage of by Phaedra, so she seems to attract those sorts of things...

Hogorth and Arashi had a few spats about Hogorth's attitude problems, drinking problems, people skills. From the outside looking in, Hogorth was an accident waiting to happen, but the real scary one was Jasper. He was not taking the stress well, and as someone pointed out "Its always the quiet ones...".

Some other good lines:

- "Please help me. I am retarded. I need the following things:" - joked about hanging that sign around Hogorth's neck when he went to market. We had just established that he can, in fact, read.

- "Yours consist of murder and horse farts" - Arashi, about Paulics recently recovered memories.

- "Your are just the inside of a cage." - Paulic, about Arashi's memories.

- "Like a family friendly Hannibal Lechter!" - Trying to deal with the comatose Senzamei eventually involved loading her on a sled painted with smiley faces, tying her up and putting a mask on her (to prevent spitting).

- "Keep your government out of my bag of holding" - The next idea was to load her in Paulic's bag of holding with her head sticking out.

Jay

Flee the Mad Beholder!

2009-10-29T10:37:00.002-07:00

Jesse kindly sent me his handout, and some of the stats on the beholder eye rays he used, along with the traps. I am posting it here because I think it was done really well. Take a look:

Flee the Mad beholder!

You must escape from the magic warped creature who's path you've crossed. To make matters worse the land itself seems to be against you, with many hostile arcane barriers in your way and few places to take cover or hide.

Each person must complete a skill challenge: 4 successes before 4 failures. That means you have to make four skill rolls on the Primary Skills list below, before you fail four rolls. The DC starts at DC 12 and increases by +2 every time you use the same skill more than once. A failure on one of these checks causes you to be attacked by the beholder's eye rays. When you succeed you've managed to slip away from the monster, you can still aid your companions (but you can not take the continue on to Thrace action).

If you fail you fall behind and the beholder catches up to you. This is bad.

You can assist others by using the Secondary skills: success gives the person +2, failure gives them -2 on their next Primary roll. Every time you try to use the same skill to help the same person, the DC rises by two.

Skill checks are a standard actions. If for some reason you do not use your move action to flee during your turn you get a -2 penalty to your next primary skill check and MUST use the next attempt to flee or you automatically gain one failure.

Primary skills (start at DC 12): acrobatics, athletics, dungeoneering, endurance, nature, stealth. DC goes up by 2 every time the same skill is used.

Secondary skills (start at DC 12): arcana, insight, nature, history, perception.

Special Actions

Teleport 5 or more squares: 1 automatic success for the teleported party member.

Ranged Attack: Reduce the attack roll of the next eye-ray by 2 on success or grant a single ally member a +2 bonus to their next action on success. On failure you become distracted and wander into an area of magical hazards (can not attack while in a hazardous area).

Continue on to Thrace: While you’re performing the skill challenge, you can try and guide the party towards your final destination of Thrace (if you're not in an area of magical hazards). Make a nature check, DC 17. On success you help redirect the wayward party towards their final destination. If you fail you are attacked by the eye rays or you wander into an area of magical hazards (50/50 chance) as you hesitate to try and pick out your way through the waste. No successes here results in the group being hopelessly lost. One means you know roughly where you are, but loose a day of travel. Two keeps you on course. Three and you find the best path to escape and advance, granting all allies a +2 bonus to any remaining primary checks.

Special: If the beholder acts last everyone starts with one success. If the beholder gets a surprise round everyone unaware starts with one failure, if any players get a surprise round they start with one success.

Eye Rays: +19 vs. NAD, 1d8+5 damage + some other effect (depending on the ray).

1) Numbing Cold (cold, fort) - You are slowed (save, endurance or heal[DC 15], others can heal you as well, ends). Your successes do not count until you are no longer slowed.

2) Telekentic Blast (force, reflex, attacks anyone who aided you last turn as well) - you are hurled randomly (1d8)
8: away, you gain 1 success
1-2: backward, you gain 1 failure

3) Fear (psychic/fear, will) - you are shaken (save ends): -2 to defenses and any non-primary skill checks, +1 to primary skill checks.

4) Petrification (fort) - 1 automatic failure, no damage.

5) Venom (poison, fort) - You loose a healing surge.

6) Domination (psychic, will) - You are dominated for 1 round, during which you attempt to hinder an ally with a secondary check and do not flee (success is a -2 to their next check, failure means nothing).

7) Stone to Mud (auto hit, no damage) - You drop neck deep into a pool of sticky mud. You can take no action but try to escape (Athletics DC 12, others can pull you free as well). After you escape you are coated in thick mud, giving you a -2 to all Str/Dex/Con checks and attacks (save ends).

8) Barrage - The beholder makes two ray attacks, against you and one other ally (reroll any 8s)

Anti-Magic Ray (recharge 6): An an interrupt the beholder makes an opposed roll (+10) with the person using the power. On success the power is negated. Utility powers use the most relevant attack bonus, racial powers use your highest stat bonus +1/2 level +2.

Magical Hazards: Random trap, level 1+1d4 (DMG 88), reflavored as a magical hazard. Arcana is an added skill that can be used for most interactions.

AP: In this session, amourphous blobs

2009-10-28T13:33:00.006-07:00

A full house this time, all six players and our patient DM...

Senzimay (Eladrin Wizard 4) - Has been at times a zombie follower and make out buddy for Phaedra, or sitting in a library staring into space. She snapped out of it and summoned a spectral steed to catch up with us, citing a 'premonition'.

Jasper (Gnome Wizard\Warlock 4) - Continued his dimensional experimentation, but with much less success this time. I think we have the Mournland to thank for that, and if things get hairy it might become a legitimate option for those of us frightened by his power.

Hogorth (Eladrin Fighter\Warlord 4) - Continued his ineffective, draw-no-DM-attention playing by mainly pissing off the party and scooting things around.

Phaedra (Elf Cleric 4) - In the Mournlands is just a 'crappy wizard' with magical healing nerfed (or so we thought!). In addition to that, Resist 5 Radiant popped up, meaning she had to work a little harder to be awesome this time. We appreciated the effort.

Paulic (Elf Ranger 4) - Our dedicated tracker this session. Also wins the Gold Star Award for best massive damage of the day. We salute you, Paulic. Take this coupon for a small fry at your nearest Burger King with our congratulations.

Arashi (Genasi Swordmage 4) - Keen Arcane knowledge (in a party with 2 wizards even) combined with lightning tinged ancestry made him our early warning system for the storms of magical energy. Also, he swung his sword at a lot of things, and even hit some of them.

Last session we ended with the supremely dubious decision to walk into the Mournlands or our own free will. Our DM let slip at one point this session that we were possibly a little out of our league in here, and gave us a boost by giving us a Milestone after every encounter. I believe he called it 'giving it everything you've got'. It meant that nobody was shy about spending their action points.

We also got a moment of infodump/exposition. Since last session Jesse had prepared for us going on any number of quests, he had not fully fleshed out the details of what we were doing in the Mournlands. In a bit of a retcon, we learned the following:
- The Artifact was last known to be in the town of Thrace, in the possession of the wizard Alomar
- Alomar was a retired wizard doing research for the state. Part of his research involved this artifact
- At the time of the Day of Mourning, Alomar had the artifact.
- A team of adventurers failed to retrieve this artifact for Mord about a month ago
- The team was led by a Paladin of the Silver Flame (Mord's religion) named Lydia.
- Our mission is to discover the fate of the team, and to complete their mission.

We got down to the business of tracking and finding the team. Right away we stumbled across their trail (or we assume it is their trail, the Mournlands don't always play fair). It headed in the direction we thought it should, towards a road that led toward the town that was our goal (nice, right?), so we followed it.

Around this time, Arashi began pointing out strange storms in the sky ahead of us. Small stormlets that we could easily avoid. He also pointed out the large, malevolent one closing in behind us. Hasted by this development, we hustled along until we encountered one of the oddities of the Mournland.

A field of grain (we assume wheat) blocked the path. Arashi examined it, and confirmed it was. . .strange. It leaked a fluid, and it appeared to be made of stone. With effort, he broke off one of the heads, and kept it in a pouch.

Of course, Scooby Doo time was allowing our nemesis, the rapidly congealing storm, to catch up, and we had to suck up our fear and just plow through the field. We survived.

We picked up the trail, and followed it as it veered towards a half-standing barn and half-demolished farmhouse. In the land around the derelict structures were several corpses. Paulic determined that whomever we were tracking stopped here and examined the corpses, then remounted their horses and continued on their way. In an effort to stay ahead of the storm, we did too.

A few hundred yards later, at our best forced marching speed, we realize it will not be enough. We have already seen this storm change course to follow us, and we watched it condense down from a large amorphous blob (see the title!) into a smaller, tentacley amorphous blob. Enough running from our problems, it was time to take a stand. We did so:
- The thing descended and through some quick arcane studying it was identified as a Living Spell. Specifically a Living Color Spray.
- In the early rounds, Senzimay summons her Fire Warrior (a bird), Arashi marks it and whiffs a few times, Paulic Quarrys and Twin Strikes, Jasper Curses, and we feel the thing out.
- Once a round when we hit it, the Spell buds off a smaller version of itself. These minions do random damage when they hit, and have another random effect when they die. The Spell demonstrates its. . .annoying nature when it shifts something like 6 squares and makes an attack to daze everything it shifted through.
- This is kind of the low point for Phaedra. We were under the assumption that magical healing was impossible in the Mournlands. She is our healer. On top of that, this spell had resist 5 radiant. A quick glance through her power cards did not seem to help her there. Jesse reminded us that he had never said that we could not heal. Jessica, trying not to metagame, used a healing word on the bloodied Arashi. . .and it worked. Somewhat. Bloodied characters only healed half. This, coupled with the fact that her Lance of Faith us superpowered, doing Striker level damage for like 1d8+10, made the resistance a non-issue.
- Senzimay also gets a boost, when we remember that her conjuration can flank, and she is reminded that even though she has a Fire Warrior summoned, she can use other spells. The Flame Striking of minions commences.
- Many rounds of combat pass, and we eventually bloody the spell. We know this because it splits in two at that point. Each one also buds off a minion when hit. This solo fight has turned into a full on mass battle.

- Paulic (who let us know he has been studying his power cards) opts to use his Daily. . .Split the Tree. It is at this point that we find out that the split creature has a shared HP pool. Paulic crits on one of his rolls. Split the Tree (for those in the dark) has you choose two targets, and make two rolls. You apply the higher of the two rolls to both targets. Since one was a crit, both are crits. He then spends an action point and shoots again. All told, he deals 75 points of damage in one round. Let that sink in. That is enough damage to kill any of us. From full HP to dead in one round. Freaking amazing.
- Hogorth starts kiting one of the spells away from the group. Aiming to keep them apart and allow the party to focus fire. This works for like, two rounds before the spell just flies away. Hybrid Fighters are not, by default, sticky at all. Plus, the party did not seem to approve of my 'helping'.
- Phaedra pulls out her Opportunity Action Guy (multiclass Shaman) and casts 'Bacon of Hope', which is predictably delicious and manages to hit both big spells.
- Jasper is given plenty of opportunity to show of his awesomely powerful Thunderwave, and between he and Senzimay the minions are kept from totally overwhelming us.
- Someone, and this record does not indicate who, kills the spell. In a final, loving gesture, it explodes and takes its minions with it, damaging us one last time.

That was the first blob of the night. We continued on, since it was still like, mid morning and we had a three day hike in front of us. The trail we followed eventually merged with the road, and due to the messed up nature of the Mournlands, we lost the track because the road appeared well traveled. Of course, the road *could* be well traveled, but we didn't assume that to be the case just yet.

After some tense moments skirting around a dozen Warforged we guessed to be followers of The Lord of Blades (the racist messiah of Warforged everywhere), we came upon our second true challenge of the evening.

Paulic spotted a figure in the distance. After carefully sneaking up on it, he guessed that the figure was humanoid. . .and petrified. Or a well made statue. But this is D&D, what do you think the players thought?

Sure enough, a Beholder hovered around the edge of the odd terrain and Paulic knew he was spotted...
- Thus began our second encounter of the night, the skill challenge. Jesse judged this enemy to be far above our current abilities (15th level solo with 740 HP. . .Paulic's crit for 75 seems a little less majestic against those numbers).
- The skill challenge was to escape with our lives. We all got a handout that indicated the allowed primary and secondary skills, the DC's, and the penalties for failure.
- In addition to the regular skill challenge, we had another goal, Escape to Thrace. In an added wrinkle, besides the 4 individual successes before 4 failures, we had to make a series of more difficult Nature checks to avoid being lost. Each successive test improved our chances of getting away and making it to Thrace.
- It went wonderfully. Tough to narrate. We went in initiative order. On a success, nothing happened. . .we just got our cookie. On a failure, we either got tripped up by the alien terrain, or got blasted by one of the eye rays.

We ended with everyone getting away safely. The remainder of the journey to Thrace will probably be dealt with narratively (emails or forum postings this week) so next week. . .answers! action! adventure!

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Very nice session. The solo fight was anything but solo, with the splitting at times there were probably 6-10 enemies on the map. It kind of made it a more dynamic fight than if it were just 1 thing.

The skill challenge was very well put together. I am going to ask Jesse if he has the file he typed it up in, I'd post it here if he did. The best or one of the best skill challenges I've done.

The Mournlands are weird. That is all.

Jay

AP: Just try to enjoy camping in D&D, I dare you

2009-10-26T07:57:00.005-07:00

Of course, the camping was on the edge of the Mournlands, so we kind of get what's coming to us...

Arashi (Swordmage 4) - Came to the session with a new friend. It seems that in a recent violent storm he acquired a little lightning lizard. He named him Zap (is this a traditional Genasi name?). Zap earns his keep in the first session, as you'll see.

Phaedra (Cleric 4) - Came to the session with a new friend. Somehow she has gained the loyalty of a ghostly minion (Arenal elves and their ancestor worship). Unlike Zap, this undead friend has no name that we know of, and did not really earn his keep this first session.

Paulic (Ranger 4) - Already has a pet horse that communicates via fart, and a pet falcon. We are not allowed to know the names of his pets. I suggested his horse pull a cart (to literally pull his weight in this party) but my idea was not taken under advisement.

Jasper (WizardWarlock 4) - Our newest addition, he does not have a pet, though as a wizard it would be fitting the theme. In fact, at that point we would have more pets than not. Jasper, though on the exterior a jolly little gnomish wizard, is in fact a powerful, murderous fiend. His spells suck folks into other dimentions. Don't piss him off.

Hogorth (FighterWarlord 4) - Plane jane with no pets or dimensional portals, he is still not sure about this group of adventurers.

Dame Orena summoned us to the cathedral again. It seems that after a few days of arguing, she is eager to push us in *some* direction, but including yet another new member. His name is Jasper, and he was told by Mord (our benefactor) that we were his new Archaelogical team. We straightened that issue out, and then got to the business of deciding where to go. Since Jasper was all about visiting the Mournlands, that broke the deadlock and we wasted little time in getting started.

No, really, we didn't. I can see how that last bit could be taken ironically, like by having this paragraph describe our extensive preparations, and shopping guides, and divination or skill checks, but we really did pretty much just start walking immediately after that decision.

Our job was to locate the previous group of adventurers that had tried to do this mission, and to retrieve the artifact they were sent to get. This was a favor for the Prince of Cyre, and in atypical adventurer fashion we had not established any kind of reward for completing this deed successfully. Oops.

Our newest member performed a bizarre ritual involving a tuning fork and our vibrating brains, and we walked through the day tirelessly (MC Bard ritual). Our woodsy Ranger, Paulic, did some scouting and found us a great place to spend the night. It was on a lightly wooded hill, with brush thick at the base. It gave us a good view of the surrounding lands and provided us cover against anyone seeking to attack us.

Arashi took first watch. During his watch, his lizard (who has low light vision) spotted a figure sneaking around. He pointed it out to Arashi (who does not have low light vision), and Arashi started after him. During the following "encounter"
- The hunting habits of shocker lizards was discussed. Do they hunt in packs, taking down much larger prey, like elephants? Charging up like Blanka from street fighter, and hurling towards them?
- Paulic was pretty much it here. With an insane longbow range, and the far shot feat, he was the only one to effectively hit the fleeing spy.
- Hogorth managed to, using 2 magic items, immobilize the spy as it transformed into a cloud of bats and took flight. It immediately made it's save and kept flying.
- In a last ditch effort to stop him, Arashi flung Jasper into the air - *20 feet*. Jasper still fell short of hitting the druid by about 40 feet. The phrase fastball special was indeed uttered. Jasper also managed to avoid falling damage by activating his magic sandals. Was he intending on being thrown? It sure sounds like it.
- Paulic plugs away, but only manages to bloody the thing before it finally flies too high to hit.

We are sure that this guy was just the tip of the spear, but continue our rest anyhow. Paulic had pretty much pegged this spot as the best place to rest up within a few hours walk, so it made the most sense to finish our night here, and take off the next day. Paulic's watch was next, and since he has the perception skill of a demigod, they did not attack. Hogorth took the last watch, and since he has the perception skill of a clam, they sprung their trap then.

Just kidding. That was how a mean DM would have done it. They attacked while Paulic was on watch. He spotted them (for there were a few, now) skulking around and quietly roused everyone but Jasper. Phaedra was sleeping in a tree (Elves!?) so she stayed put. Hogorth and Arashi stayed low. At the last possible moment Hogorth woke Jasper up, in time for him to make his hide check and avoid the first round of pain. The enemies prepare to charge in, but we jump the gun and hit them first...
- During our surprise round, Paulic scurries up the tree, making this the tree to be in if you were an elf right now. Hogorth plants his banner and yells a battle cry. Jasper peeks through his tent flap and casts a spell at the bunched up attackers. An icy blast from The Frozen Hell explodes, and the ground is covered in treacherous ice. One unfortunate soul is caught in the portal and gets pulled across the planar boundary. Our respect for the tiny caster goes up a notch.
- A Stillborn assassin (incorrectly referred to as an Abortion (which Jasper pointed out would make a great band name)) teleported into our midst. The three original party members recognize her as the same elf that tried to murder Nolan DiVidalis while they were in town. They thwarted her attempt then, and for some reason she was out here near the Mournlands trying to kill us. With friends.
- Aside from the Assassin and the Druid, we fought 9 or so minions. They had an axe throwing problem, and Jasper quickly cured them of it. Unfortunately, as each one died they threw one last axe, usually at Paulic or Jasper. For minions, they were nasty, which takes the fun out of killing them. Jasper finished them off anyways, with another horrible spell to watch, one that physically removed several combatants from this plane of existence. They still found the energy to throw axes through the shrinking portal. Jerks.

- With the minions out of the picture, Arashi set into the Druid, and Hogorth tried to hold off the Assassin. Focus fire on the Druid eventually brought him down, though he managed to apply some nasty effects to a few party members before he croaked.
- The Assassin must have known she was coming after us, because she now had some kind of warding protecting her from Arashi's lightning damage. Unfortunately for her, she had neglected to ward against radiant damage, arrow damage, and spear damage.
- Jasper's spell that sucked all the minions away continued to restrain her, and we saw the end in sight. She was bloodied, stuck, and flanked by our two meleers. Of course, since she is a recurring villain, she had to Dimension Door away and escape from us. Someone, I don't know who, called her a whore. I don't know what the basis for that is, but I like it.

With that, we are able to finally finish resting, and prepare to enter the Mournlands. Paulic instructs his horse to wait for us (using a series of complex whistles). The horse agrees (using a series of farts). Next session, almost certain death...

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Trying to avoid the rut I stuck myself in, so this post is an experiment in a more lighthearted style. I hope it sticks. I planned to take more comprehensive notes during combat, and to write down things I found entertaining. I ended up with notes like "Shocker lizards hunting an Elephant, Blanka style" or "The Frozen Hell". I may need to work on my note taking.

Jay

On Halfling Gangsters and Copper Pots

2009-10-09T16:12:00.005-07:00

So real life intruded and I didn't write for awhile. Also, work intruded and now I am gaming a different night with a different group. 3rd level, so I have yet to get any Paragon play outside of one-shots.

In an effort to at least write something, I'll be blogging as much as I can about this game, even though our excellent DM is doing writeups. Having done them as a player and a DM I find DM writeups easier. You know the details and progression of events more intimately, having *designed* them to begin with.

Paulic - Elven Ranger
Phedra - Elven Cleric
Arashi - Genasi Swordmage
Hogorth - Eladrin FighterWarlord

So last session was my introduction to the group. They have been playing this campaign for a couple of months already, and were currently biding their time in Verithrond, in Western Breland. The mysterious benefactor that had contacted me to meet him here in Breland had also asked them to wait here for a week or so. Having been adventuring constantly for awhile this led to some spring fever, and some impromptu adventuring and roleplaying was had.

Paulic was traveling through the Copper Festival and noticed he was being tailed. Being a Ranger, and an Elf, he had little difficulty in throwing the tail. Being a Valenar Elf, he immediately started following/watching his shadow. The halfling that had been following eventually gave up and left the fair. Paulic followed him to another district, and then caught up to him in an alley. In an effort to find out what was going on, poison arrows were shot and a halfling was thrown into a wall.

After the watch arrived and arrested him, Paulic got to spend a few days in jail to think about what happened. Luckliy a shrewed Gnomish Barrister (class coming in the PHB4!) was able to get him off with a fine, but he no longer has a clean record. And he is still a Valenar Elf.

Arashi and Phaedra also spent some time at the festival, but their stories are a little less interesting. Arashi was trying to track down the source of some Cyran copper pots that he had innocently bought last session, and that involved interrogation, and Alchemy. To complete the Batman image, he tried a rooftop surveillance of a grubbier part of town, but ended up on his back in an alley.

He fell. Nothing beyond that, and get your mind out of the gutter. His investigations discovered that the pots were Arcane Marked 6 years ago, so they were not likely forgeries, but smuggled.

After Paulic is sprung from jail, he and the others (and the zombified (because her player was absent) Senzimay) go check out a Halfling warehouse. Various investigations and introspection and other puzzling has arrived at the halfling mafia being behind the smuggled copper pots/vessels/vases. I am still not sure why this is significant to the group beyond something to occupy their time while they wait for the appointment with the benefactor, but give me a few sessions...

Arashi knocks on the door. He would like to buy some more copper pots. It is currently around 3 AM. The Halfling that answers tells them to come back in the morning. Arashi repeats his request. After the door is slammed in his face, he starts knocking with his sword.
This picture taken after the door is finally busted in. A volley of sling bullets pelt Arashi (12) but his warding deflects all but 3 of them. Immediately following that two halflings mounted on dinosaurs charged around the corner and into the group. They were outclassed, but didn't know it. The three fully conscious members of the party took the dinosaurs apart without much effort, almost casually. The DM-run wizard missed (and I am told that was pretty standard for her) and the fight was over when the halfling slingers inside the warehouse bolted.

The evidence recovered was useful for the party in that they were able to uncover some small plots the halflings had a part in. They implicated them in the attempted killing of a Dragonmarked heir of house Vadalis. The party had been instrumental in preventing his assassination earlier in the week, so this new information just got them more deeply involved in the plot. Arashi and Paulic were not too thrilled about that, but as the Dragonmarked heir was quite handsome, Phedra was interested in this news.

The day finally arrived for the meeting with our benefactor, and I met the party formally for the first time in the basement of the Church of the Silver Flame. Mord brought us there to give us some options for what to do next. He was going to be incommunicado and wanted us to have something lucrative and important to do while he was gone. He referred us to his squire, Dame Orena to give us any further instructions and left on the train.

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No fault of Jesse's, but I was largely a spectator this session. Bringing someone new in, whether it is through PC death or changes or a new warm body at the table, is always an adventure. You have the reality suspending options that bring instant gratification (your long lost cousin!!), and the more realistic options that take some time to work in. I'm cool that Jesse got me in without too much struggling. This party already has a good bunch of inside jokes and cool experiences. It might take a few sessions for these writeups to make much sense. . .

Jay

Curse of the Crimson Throne 9: Saved by the beets

2009-08-25T16:24:00.003-07:00

As always, there will be spoilers.

Saul - Bard

Torg - Fighter

Saturnine - Sorcerer

Veegor - Barbarian

Lars - Paladin

Raiche - Avenger

We began where we left off, with Lars opening a door in the basement of the clinic.

Okay, I forgot to take pictures until the end of the session, and was not really able to sit down to write this thing *last* week, when it was still new. So, some things are gonna be a little sparse. Sorry.

In the basement we run into Lars and Saul. They had beat us down here. . .somehow. The next room is full of more patients. These don't appear to have the plague, instead they look like they were unconscious, but perfectly healthy. At the end of the room two doctors hover over two patients with daggers raised. Their implication is clear. If we enter, they will try and kill their hostages.

Of course we enter, because we are heroes, and the doctors go down fast. A couple of Gray Maidens try and stop us, but we defeat them as well.

We burst into the office at the end of the room and confront its occupant, Doctor Davaulos. He and a few more of his Doctor cronies put up a weak fight, but we defeated them. Of course, since it is our Modus Operandi, we kept him alive.

We discovered that he was holding a lever that operated a lift on this floor, linking it to a second basement. This basement was decorated in a horrible, torture, disease, undead motif. We encountered some priests who had evidently heard us coming and prepared. Again, we didn't have too difficult of a time defeating them, and kept one alive to interrogate.

We did some more exploring. There was a room with glass walls and a glass floor with zombies or skeletons trapped behind it. We deduced that it was an attempt at art.

The final fight was a bit more challenging. We opened the outer door to a room, but discovered that the inner door was ice cold. The last time we had encountered this we fought chillborn zombies. We would have had a tougher time then, but we had a good controller. This time, we had no controller.

The fight began with Raiche using a power that allowed him to teleport into an unseen room with a nova of energy. He was almost immediately overwhelmed and dropped. The rest of us burst in. . .kinda. Besides the three chillborn zombies, there were three vampires.

The vampires clustered in the corner and did their vampire thing, while the zombies ran interference and made it tough to get to their masters. Saturnine, with resist cold 5, is immune to their aura, but too squishy to just run by the zombies to get the vampires. It was a tough fight. In a twist on the usual, the final vampire stopped fighting and we chatted with him.

He was amoral, but not needlessly cruel, and revealed that he was working with the queen's physicians to develop a cure. Their goal was to find a cure, and then use it to make the disease more virulent. He was nearly finished anyhow, and was just missing a key ingredient. It seems that in its current form, the victim would likely not survive the treatment. Add beets, however (beets featured in a session I missed. Apparently an old perfume maker was using beets in a hoax cure, and that was also the missing ingredient in the real cure).

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That was most of it. We discovered that the cultists, the queen's physicians, and a group of vampires were behind the plague. Who would have guessed *that*? The cultists were using a plague demon, imprisoned in glass, and distributing its filth to infect people. The vampires were working on this cure to help make the disease worse, and the doctors were the face of the operation, tracking down immune people and doing their hideous experiments on them.

We let the vampire go in exchange for his help. If you can't tell, most of the group is unaligned. One of the prisoners (the cultist) had his eyes stabbed out, and died due to massive soul loss. In character, we don't know why. Out of character, Saturnine did it. We brought Field Marshall Kroft in to clean up, and relayed all that we had learned, omitting the deal with the vampire. She brought us back to the Citadel, and showed us a gift from the spirit of Beor. . .magic items.

From beyond the grave Beor had felt our need of moar crit damage, and we each chose a magic item, our first and only magic item in this campaign. We got our standard between-book email, that told how even though we had significant evidence against the queen, we could not move against her. She dissolved one of the guard organizations in the city to make room for her own, the Gray Maidens, headed by her companion. The guard is pretty whimpy now. During the ceremony transferring power to the new commander of the Gray Maidens, the old Sable Company commander shot the queen in the head with a crossbow. Nonplussed, she yanked it out and drove it through his head.

This city is messed the hell up, and the module will keep us here until we have been sufficiently tentacle raped. I'm glad I play a warforged.

Curse of the Crimson Throne 8: It gets deadly.

2009-08-10T16:14:00.008-07:00

Spoilers past this point.

We were short a bit this session:
Lars, Kalashtar Paladin(Jesse)
Renn, Gnome Illusionist (Jay)
Kilhan, Eladrin Cleric (Rob)
Raiche, Elven Avenger (Mike)
Saturnine, Tiefling Sorcerer (Scott)
Dan DMing, we were all 7th level for this session.

Last session (which I missed) they had done some investigation and ended up in a playhouse of some kind. My character joined them, and we began poking around, looking for some hints or clues about this plague (or zombies? I'm not sure...)

On the ground floor we found some strange things. In one room several zombies stomped around in a rough approximation of ballroom dancing. They did not seem to be bothered by our peeping, and we left them to it. Another room had one zombie on a stage. He mumbled some zombie speak (mumbmlbmblbbrainsbrainsmubmblb) and several others watched him. At intervals they clapped for no apparent reason.

Leaving this creepiness aside we climbed the stairs to the second floor. Here there were some more zombies dancing. We could feel the blast of their cold aura from the stairs. It was an ominous sign. As soon as we stepped foot in the room combat started.

It was brutal. Chillborn Zombies have an aura 2 cold effect that stacks with itself. If you are in 1 aura, 5 cold damage. In 5 auras? 25 damage, just for starting your turn. It triggers if you move into it or start your turn, so even passing through got deadly. Early combat looked like this:

That diagonal line of mobs was our death warrant. The dwarf mini and the gnoll are both zombies as well. Six of them versus us, and those overlapping cold auras.

I should point out that 4 of the 5 of us were currently suffering from the effects of plague. Some had reduced surges, but the worst were down to no surges and a -2 to all d20 rolls. A couple folks had been putting off taking a rest since rests were when the DM called for endurance rolls. So we were down in power, and in healing, and short a striker and a leader. All would have meant a tough fight, if not a TPK.

The turning point was Visions of Avarice, and after a round or two the battlefield looked like this:
All of the zombies pulled and immobilized to the far side of the room. Now the auras were more of a deterrent from approaching them. They had no ranged attack. The sole ranged attacker was an invisible Gnome Bard that unveiled herself midway through the fight.

What made this mess even more of a turnaround was our Sorcerer. Saturnine is a Dragon Sorcerer, and his energy resistance is Cold. Since each of those auras is 5 damage, he was immune to their effects. Between his fire damage, and the cleric's radiant damage, the fight began to turn.

Kilhan took 4 of them out at once by moving close and calling down a divine prayer that hit the group. The death burst from one of them triggered the burst from another, and so on, until 4 lie dead. Unfortunately, Saturnine was in the area and his resist 5 cold was not quite enough to keep him up. Honestly without that he would have been killed outright by the explosion. Kilhan was able to heal him up right away, after some persuasion by the party.

We won, but barely. Saturnine wanted the Gnome kept alive, so Raiche turned his blade at the last moment and knocked her out. Renn sat down in the corner to take a short rest and died.

It was an interesting moment, because not everyone was paying attention (end of battle, folks were talking among themselves about what to do, rolling perceptions, things like that) but I think it was kind of a shock to most. Nobody expects an ally to just fade out during a rest. Once everyone was done with their post fight rituals, Lars carried Renn's body out, and the Gnome prisoner was taken to the temple for interrogation. Saturnine asked to talk with her alone for a moment, and ended up getting quite a lot of information that we could use to take our next step in figuing this disease riddle out.

The party was interrupted by a loud knocking on the door. When they opened it, a metal man greeted them, and claimed to have the memories of their fallen comrade, Renn. Cue new PC intro. After some confusing back and forth, the party decided that he was above board and he accompanied them on their next mission.

Torg, Warforged Fighter (Jay)

The information that Saturnine got from the Bard led us to a clinic. The Doctors brought to Korvosa by the Queen were looking for someone that seemed immune to the plague. According to our source, they had such a person in a clinic across town. Of course, we went there.

During the session that I missed we had somehow found a doctor's mask and regalia. Our cleric, Kilhan, had been wearing it, and we used it as a convincing ruse to gain entry into the clinic. Unfortunately, the receptionist would only let him through.

While the rest of us twiddled our thumbs, Kilhan explored the clinic. A large open warehouse held rows of cots, all occupied by plague carriers. Doctors administered to them, and when one drew some blood and headed to a rear door, Kilhan followed. When he lost sight of the Doctor, he opened a door at random.

He chose poorly. The room he entered was a guard room, and inside one solitary Gray Maiden was gearing up. He surprised her as she had on her greaves, and nothing above her waist. She seemed irritated. Kilhan, maybe forgetting that he was scoping the place out, maybe not recalling that the person we were looking for did not match her description, maybe blinded by bare boobies, told her to come with him

Yeah. While he was exploring, Lars tried to pry clues out of the receptionist. What the conditions of the sick were like, who brought them in, things like that. He was failing at that when Kilhan brought his prize back out to the front. She had paused to throw on a tunic, at least, but was still irritated. Many failed attempts at lies and confusion about what was going on led to her turning on her heel and leaving, back inside the clinic. Kilhan followed her. Torg followed Kilhan.

The Gray Maidens guarding the door were fast. The oddities were piling up, but a big, armed and armored thing pushing past the receptionist and into the clinic was enough for them. Combat was on.

I'm sure Scott would like it known that he was against it. Against all of it. Retroactively, we should have let someone else, someone with better people skills, impersonate the Doctor. Perhaps the Paladin Private Investigator?! But with Torg quickly surrounded, and his allies all leaping to the battle, after a round or two of hesitation Saturnine joined in.

Raiche had gotten bored waiting and went looking around the building for other ways in. He was in the back when he heard the fight start up, and used a sweet Avenger power to phase through the wall and right into battle. The fight could have been hairy, because of all the patients around and the fact that we were not at 100% effectiveness due to disease, but we did well. The Maidens had a funky ability that lessened the effect of healing, but we managed to not run into it at all, and took them all out.

During the fight, the Doctors all withdrew and ran to the back door. When it was obvious that we were going to win, Lars took off after them. He followed them down some stairs, and stopped at the door. . .end of session, with a cliffhanger even!

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Beor died too. While Dan ran the game he had his PC back with the guard, and kept making rolls for him.

I am kind of torn about things like this. I did not mind Renn dying, as much as I enjoyed playing him. PC's are mortal, and they will eventually die if you keep taking risks. It is just a less than heroic thing to be killed by disease, and out of combat. Anyhow, I also like my new PC, so that lessens the sting somewhat.

I hate pointing out when I personally have a good moment, since I feel it shows that i am biased. I can't avoid it though, Visions of Avarice saved that fight. The zombies were swarming us, our options were: 1) Die 2) Back down the stairs to try a bottleneck (and aggro more zombies) 3) Something that changes the battle. We got a 3, luckily. I do kind of like that Renn's absolute final act was to keep that spell going so the party could survive.

I glossed over some of the middle roleplaying between fights. We healed Field Marshall Kroft of the plague, spent time at the temple, other stuff.

And the final fight was a disaster. Kilhan did about the weirdest thing possible. He went in to find signs of this immune girl (we had a description). He looked around, found a topless chick, and grabbed her. As a party, we didn't really do well when he brought her back. His goal was to take her away from there and interrogate her, but the bluff checks to try that were horrible. I'm sure there is a way we could have gotten what we needed without killing, but when the diplomacy dice fail you, you take what's left.

Next session, resolving Lars' action.

Also, our campaign blog is here, if anyone is interested. Right now it is mostly character bios.

Jay

Curse of the Crimson Throne 6

2009-07-30T16:29:00.003-07:00

This post contains spoilers.

As mentioned before, I missed the 5th session. In it, the party located the body of some tribal people. It had been taken by a necromancer (or necromancer's apprentice?) and they had to delve into some catacombs to retrieve it. In a post game email, Josh narrated the near hanging of Trinia. At the last moment she was saved by a vigilante known as Blackjack.

For this session we were 6th level:

Raiche - Elven Avenger (Mike)
Saturnine - Tiefling Sorcerer (Scott)
Veegor - Longtooth Shifter Barbarian (Josh)
Renn - Gnomish Wizard (Jay)
Saul - Half Elven Bard (Colin)
Kilhan - Eladrin Cleric (Rob)
Lars - Kalashtar Paladin (Jesse)
DM - Dan

Dan's first session as DM for this new book began two weeks after the last one ended. We each had time to do as we pleased, and had agreed to meet at the Inn where Renn worked and Beor drank. As we sit to discuss recent goings on, Saul is possessed by the Harrow deck. It does a reading, through Saul, and it seems to center on yet more drama surrounding the party. One particular note is that Saul's card is the Survivor, and the first card drawn mentions a sickness in the city.

Veegor, in typical PC fashion, insinuates himself into our conversation. He is there when an old acquaintance of Beor's approaches us. His name is Grau, and he is looking for some help with a sick niece. Since we are heroes, we agree to help and we follow him to her home.

Her name is Brianna. The church has agreed to help her, for the low low price of 150 gp. We know that there is no way on earth that her family can come up with that, and besides, Kilhan, Saul, and Renn all have the Cure Disease ritual. While Kilhan goes upstairs to perform his ritual, and Veegor goes outside to perform *his* ritual (carving native runes around the perimeter of the house), some of the party chat with the priest who was at the house.

His name is Ishanni, and he is the temple's best expert on diseases. He was stumped by this one, and amazed at the divine power that Kilhan used to cure it. In gratitude for our help, Brianna's mother invites us to stay for dinner, and we all have a nice visit.

Afterwards, we each go to our respective hideouts for the evening. Saturnine stops by the guardhouse at the north shore on his way home. We had heard a rumor that the night before Brianna got sick (last night), a singe ship was sunk as it tried to enter the harbor. Saturnine asks around, and finds that the ship was lit with only 1 lantern, and refused to answer hails. The guard sank the ship despite the known convention of lighting a ship with only 1 lantern when there is plague aboard.

Saturnine tells the guard captain that he suspects a plague is loose in the city, and then goes home. The next day, plague is loose in the city. Coughing and other symptoms that we saw in Brianna are everywhere, and we go to Field Marshall Kroft to see what we can do to help.

There we meet Dr Davaulos, head of the Queen's physicians. He is Chellaxian, like all or most of the Queen's cronies, and was somehow summoned the day before from Chelliax, many hundreds of miles away, and arrived just that morning. The morning the plague broke out. He and his assistants all have faintly magical masks they wear that identify them as physicians, and they spread out to combat the spread of the disease.

Marshall Kroft, as always, has news for us. She gives us a letter from Vincarlo Oracini, the man who had hired us to find the Queen's 'assassin'. He would like to meet us later. In the interim, we have some errands to run. We stop by Brianna's house to see how her recovery is going, and to ask some questions. She is coming along nicely, and Kilhan is able to make a breakthrough in our investigation.

In an effort to determine where she contracted the disease, he asks her about her day before she got sick. She hesitantly tells him about finding a chest washed up on the shore, filled with silver. Kilhan buys the chest and it's contents from her, and we take it with us. Disturbingly, the chest is radiating some faint magic, as if it once held an enchantment.

Our next stop is the temple, to speak with Ishanni. As a disease expert, he might be able to shed some light on the transmission of this plague. As he ushers us back, we notice in the light of the temple that several members of the party are showing signs of the disease. Now our search is more than altruistic or mercenary, it is for survival.

Ishanni carefully takes one of the coins from the chest, and promises to do his best. We are now able to make our appointment with Vincarlo Oracini. We travel to the appointed location, and he surreptitiously lets us into his training studio. He wants us to get rid of someone for him.

Not what you think. Apparently Blackjack thought that Mr Oracini would be willing to house the woman convicted of regicide in his studio. He has been doing so, but is unsure of his ability to hold off the guard forever. They would very much like to search his place, having reason to believe that he is harboring a fugitive, and he would like us to fix things before the whole mess gets ugly. He has arranged a place for Trinia in the country, and needs us to escort her past the guard and out of town. We agree.

Our plan is for Renn to cast invisibility on her and sustain it as we leave. While being invisible does not make one hidden, the heavy fog this night should make our mission simple. One snag, of course, is that Trinia does not wish to go to this safe house. She does not entirely trust Vincarlo Oracini's motives, and has arranged her own way out. We bend to her wishes, and escort her to the docks. Once the spell is allowed to end, she walks into the mist, and disappears again. Raiche is able to follow enough to catch a glimpse of her in a small boat as it pulls from the dock.

We have been going all day, but we stop in to see Field Marshall Kroft anyhow. She has a couple of things for us to investigate. She is curious about reports of immune people, but her most pressing concern is Rackers Alley.

The disease is fast acting, and the city has already begun the process of carting away the dead. One route has been mishandled, however, and the bodies are being dumped in Rackers Alley instead of taken to Gray with the rest. We are to investigate this.

Sure enough, when we find the alley there is a pile of bodies up against one wall. We are surprised when figures leap down from the rooftops, but Renn quickly pegs them as vampires and we do what we do best.

Saturnine had been sneaking around to the opposite end of the alley, and was caught away from the group by the lead vampire. Veegor charged over to help him, leaving the rest of us with the handful of regular vampire spawn. They try dominating us, which is less effective. The leader gets a lot of mileage out of draining Veegor's blood when she knocks him down past bloodied, but they were over matched to begin with. As they start to fall, instead of dying they transmute into a silvery mist that blends with the ambient fog and drifts away. We are left with no answers.

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That was most of it. After I left they did some detective work in the adjoining building, but I have not gotten the scoop on what, if anything, they found.

It felt like a first session. A lot of talking and running around, and a throw away fight at the end to sate our blood lust.

I have yet to be present at a fight that really tested us. The session I missed had a couple moments, I was told, where the big bad trapped our two defenders in a web. Low magic means thrown weapons run out pretty quick, and they were removing their gear to throw as improvised weapons.

This was our first session with what Josh is calling 'unlockables'. Powers that we get to level the playing field, or make up for the lack of magic. Interestingly, if I remember right I was the only one who tried his, and mine failed, so the impact of these powers is still up in the air.

This disease plot point warranted a warning email before the session. Dan wanted us to all know that things may combine to kill our character in ways we could not prevent, and wanted us to be prepared with a backup. This scares me. I really enjoy my character, but he is weak. Any checks along a disease track will almost certainly end in my death.

Another missed session next week. My luck will ensure that it is the session when I die of a horrible wasting disease.

Jay

I don't want to be an adventurer

2009-07-24T16:45:00.002-07:00

I have been reading online about Dave Arneson's Blackmoor. A little reading about older D&D, since I didn't start playing until mid 3.5, has given me a lot to think about.

It seems like in their game, and in other older games I have read about, there was no Adventurer class in their fantasy worlds. If you were a PC, you were a vassal of a king, a footman, a magic user, but adventurer was a . . .subtitle.

Naturally, this got me thinking about my own gaming experiences, and how they relate. They *don't*. Not at all. I think that every one of my characters, fully fleshed out back stories to one shot shadow puppets, is an adventurer first, and everything else second.

So I decided to change that. From now on, I will endeavor to give my PC's goals. Goals wholly separate from adventuring. For instance:
- My current PC is a Gnomish Illusionist. Until 10 minutes ago, his only real motivations were story driven. Who killed me? Why? Where is my next reward coming from? This is not really satisfying. A good goal for him to have would be to establish an Academy of Illusion in Khorvaire, to compete with the Academy of Summoning. Since he had a bad experience there, living in poverty just to attend, I can see this as a legitimate goal for him.
- My previous PC (who is at this moment playing chess in a bar in Hammerfast with his good friend Arlarond), had met his only goal, to catch up to his friend. What now? He is a warlock, so his goals could be fulfilling the desires of the powers that hold him to his pact. Perhaps the fey demigod or primal spirit wishes him to build a shrine in a key location in the real world, strengthening their power in the Feywild? Maybe he would like to investigate the accident that caused him to be mired away from the real world. Since I am not playing him, this is all just a mental exercise...
- My backup PC for our Curse of the Crimson Throne campaign is a Warforged. Owned by Dwarves for the first 50 years of his life, and now free to do what he wills, why would he adventure? To prove his worth as a living being? To establish a legal place in this world?

I think the adventurer label is bad. It oversimplifies things. Why does your character need to sink all of his gold into gear upgrades, why not tithe, or build, or loan, or. . .something new? I believe these kinds of things can add flavor to your character.

Jay

Curse of the Crimson Throne 3 & 4

2009-07-21T16:10:00.004-07:00

This will contain spoilers.

Again, our party consists of:
Raiche - Elven Avenger (Mike)
Saturnine - Tiefling Sorcerer (Scott)
Beor Stoneblood - Dwarven Fighter (Dan)
Renn - Gnomish Wizard (Jay)
Saul - Half Elven Bard (Colin)
Kilhan - Eladrin Cleric (Rob)
Lars - Kalashtar Paladin (Jesse)
DM - Josh

All level 5. Not everyone was present for both sessions. Our next mission from Field Marshal Cressida Kroft was to track down several missing people. Our investigations uncover the fact that they were all jurors in a trial 10 years ago. In fact, all 8 surviving jurors are missing. We travel to the site of the old courthouse.

Turns out that not long after the trial the courthouse was condemned. An adjoining building had fallen into it, and it had not been used since. We split up, and Beor, Saturnine, Raiche, Renn, and Kilhan went inside.

What followed was an impossible to relate mystery/horror story. We found the jurors, and over the course of the night, they all died (save 1). We uncovered a story of corruption and murder, vindicated a wrongly convicted man, and killed a lot of undead. Or re-killed. And fought this horrific intestine/tentacle beast.

While some of us ran around trying to save doomed extras, Saul met up with our new ally, Lars, and they began running down leads outside the courthouse. They followed the judge to his bank, where he withdrew a large amount of money. He met the prosecutor and they entered the courthouse, where we had just had our climactic battle with the intestines of a juror and the intestine controlled bodies of the rest of the jurors. In the confrontation that followed, we solved the mystery, the prosecutor died for his sins, and we captured the judge so he could hang for his crimes.

After a quick prestidigitation to wipe the bile from our lips and feces from our boots, we return to miss Kroft and tell her our story.

Remarkably, she elects to send us on another errand. This time, she has a third party interested in our abilities. Vincarlo Oracini wishes us to expose the sins of the Ambassador from Chelliax. It is well known in the underworld that Darvain, the Ambassador, is a deviant, but our job was to bring evidence of it to light, harming his reputation.

Our initial information directs us to a part of town known as the Eel's End. A series of boats all owned by one man, the King of Spiders. These boats all serve as dens of sin, from prostitution to gambling, and more if you have the coin. We wandered in, and started our attempts at gaining an audience. Lars went to the card table, and after showcasing a great talent at gaming, proceeded to loose his new found wealth to the house, gracefully.

Renn challenged the gaming hall to a game of knivesies. A wrestling game with a couple twists, the diminutive old gnome was a dark horse, but the party all bet on him, and made quite a profit when he tricked the big man he was fighting into stepping off the table and losing.

Still not interest from the King of Spiders, so we shed the cloak and dagger and went straight to his personal boat. A bribe got us in, and some superb roleplaying and die rolling from our faces (bard and paladin, abc this fall...) meant that we didn't even get knifed on our way out. 1000gp of someone else's money bought a sheaf of incriminating papers.

We were sent on another errand by Marshall Kroft. The Queen had announced the name of the King's Assassin. His portrait painter, Trinia, was being accused of poisoning the King over the long period while she was painting his picture. The Marshall was worried that if the Queen's goons got to her before the guard did, that we may never know the truth of what happened. She sent us to pick her up and bring her in first.

This was a skill challenge. We found her apartment, and she was already out the window and fleeing across the rooftops. The game went like this:

The cards laid out are from the Harrow deck. It is a deck of cards made specifically for this adventure path. It can be used like a Tarot deck, or in other ways. Each card is associated with one of the 6 main abilities. To move forward, after the fleeing Trinia, you can make skill checks. The number of checks depends on the number of cards you want to advance. Each card is roughly 1 move action.

The other row represents the ground. If you fall, you move to the other track, and can make checks to get back on the roof, or follow on the ground at a slower pace.
It worked well. Josh chose skills for each ability that came up, so in one case someone had to remember a shortcut (streetwise) and then know that a certain church had a feature they could use to cut even more distance off (religion).

We caught her, and returned her to the guardhouse. We were met by a group of the Queen's men, who took her (over our objections). Field Marshall Kroft was also upset, but there was little we could do.

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Good sessions, both. The courthouse mystery would have lost so much in the telling that it was not worth the effort of typing it out. We spent all of one session and the first 1/3 of the second on that one quest.

It is a good example of my love/hate opinion of published adventures. Things like the courthouse mystery are shining jewels of creativity, but there are the dark pits of garbage sometimes. So far, this one has been good. Having a very capable and creative DM helps.

Not everyone enjoyed the skill challenge. There were spots where not many had the skill trained (endurance) and falling down was tough, as it required an athletics or acrobatics roll to get back up. I applaud the method though, and hope we see it again.

Sadly, I missed the final quest in this book. It involved recovering a boy's body from an evil necromancer, and ended with the supposed assassin being rescued by a mysterious man. Next week, we resume with a DM change, Dan will run, and Josh will bring his evil demon of melee doom.

Jay

Curse of the Crimson Throne Sessions 1 & 2

2009-07-15T16:24:00.004-07:00

These posts will have spoilers.

We all started with a connection to Gaedren Lamm (as suggested by the adventure path). Due to that connection, we all began the session in the Grey (the graveyard district. . .) having risen from the dead to seek revenge on our killer. So, like zombies, but with more cognition, we follow conspicuously placed notes from our pockets to meet at the home of a fortune teller.

We are:
Mike - Raiche the Elven Avenger
Scott - Saturnine the mysterious Sorcerer (Tiefling)
Dan - Beor Stoneblood the Dwarven Fighter
Jay - Renn the Gnome Wizard
Colin - Saul the Half Elven Bard
Josh - DMing, also running an Invoker/Shaman NPC

We are joined in the next several adventures by:

Rob - Kilhan the Eladrin Cleric
Jesse - Lars the Kalashtar Paladin

This party meeting is awkward. Everyone is roleplaying their characters well, and as such there is less in the way of "Hey, you are a PC, we get along!", and more "Hey, I don't have time for small talk, my world has recently come to an end!". After we all arrived, the fortune teller came to the front room and told us our fortunes.

It was one of those moments where you can tell that the game designer (and the DM) had good intentions, but where the venue just didn't suit the great new idea. We all took turns getting our fortunes told by Josh. Fun times, when you were up, but downtime while you were waiting.

We all get to know that Gaedren Lamm is behind our individual miseries. Raiche, who was wronged grievously (and is murderous. Never piss of a murderous person) leaves the shop to confront this guy. We all follow, and end up outside a fishery in a bad part of town.

Through Raiche's mysterious knowledge of the interior of the place, we know what to expect. Renn's familiar scouts out the front room, and we enter. Things slide back to killing pretty quickly, and we hack our way to the floor of the processing plant. There, Gaedren's two lackeys fight us, surrounded by kidnapped children. We prevail, but our quarrel was not with his lackeys, so we press on. We find the entrance to the lower level of the fishery through a decrepit old boat filled with spiders. It is then that the Spiderman trap gets sprung on us:

Crappy labelling courtesy of MS paint, since I am at work. We enter from the bottom left door, and Gaedren has a child suspended over a pit. Inside the pit is a crocodile. If we leave, kid will be fine (just a slave is all). If we enter, kid becomes croc chow.

Predictably, we enter and kick his ass. Raiche has a key part in this fight, as he is able to teleport the crocodile out of it's pit and onto the walkway, where Beor keeps it busy. Saul pretty much solos Gaedren at first, but we mop the floor with him and his silly crocodile. The boy is fished from the water, but before we can interrogate the slime, he leaps into the water. The shark infested water.

Session two began with the end of the world. All hell was breaking loose, and Saul, as a loyal servant of the crown, felt that he was needed at the castle. As we ran there, we learned that the king had died, and that magic was returning to the world. Our quest to aid the king was interrupted by an otyugh and some rats that had burst free of the sewer. Again, we had little trouble defeating them, but a couple of us contracted some foul disease in the process. We decided to call it a day, and spend the evening recovering in an Inn. Our ears to the ground find us a place where we can get some possible cures for the diseases, and after we take care of that we head to the castle for a meeting with the queen.

During the night one member of our party let slip that he recognized some of our treasure as belonging to the queen. Thinking to use this as a way to gain an audience with her, we easily get into the castle, and are soon standing before her. She is happy to have her property back, and in addition to paying us, sets us up with a guard captain in the city. This captain has a lot to handle with the recent chaos, and even with the Queen calling in the Hellknights it is too much for her to keep the peace in her part of the city.

And so we meet Field Marshal Cressida Kroft. She does indeed need our help, and our first assignment is to root out a former guard causing dissent in another part of the city. He had taken over an old butcher shop (All the World's Meat) and was handing out free food to citizens and swaying them to his way of thinking. He hated the Queen. On top of that, he financed this operation by hiring his men out as mercenaries. Both destabilizing influences had to go.

After some halfhearted information gathering, we entered the front pretending to be customers. Little did we know that the men had seen us approaching, and loitering, and had a funny feeling that the heavily armed and armored men he saw did not need mercenaries.

The fights could have been short and straightforward. Some guards, some boars, and some caged otyughs. Instead, we managed to alert the guards, Saturnine ran through the boar pen, and Saul and Renn opened the door keeping the otyughs locked up.

Luckily Saturnine is tougher than he should be, and Renn burned a daily to knock the monsters down so the door could be shut. That just left the big boss and his two henchmen at the top of a narrow staircase. It took all or our collective battlefield control to get past the impromptu barricade and into melee with them. We prevailed, and returned to the Field Marshall to report our victory and collect our reward.

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A lot more happened. Raiche headbutted a bum and got filth fever. Of course, he swore his oath on the bum first, so he could roll twice. We learned a ton about the backstory and nature of the city that I will be omitting. We had a spat about how much time we were spending investigating rumors. Saul became a Bard, after starting as a Rogue.

The big thing was the head of the fortune teller we found under the former fishmonger/gangster's hideout. Discovering that she had been decapitated for several days, we deduced that the deck of cards she had used to tell our fortunes, the Harrow Deck, was very powerfully enchanted. The only enchanted item we have encountered in the world, so far. It kind of helped to mitigate that feeling I sometimes have. You know it, after a key event you wonder what is motivating your character to stay with this group of miscreants if their goal is accomplished. The Harrow deck has touched us, raised us from the dead, and we are bound to it.

Of course, that means that new arrivals and character death just got a little stickier. Josh has threatened us with death quite a bit so far, and has not followed through with it yet. I imagine it will only be a couple more sessions before he starts pushing the boundaries of what we are capable of handling. It works out well this way, since without magic items we are a little underpowered.

Parts 2 & 3 to follow. . .

Curse of the Crimson Throne

2009-07-14T16:13:00.002-07:00

If it is not obvious by the two month hiatus from blogging, we did indeed fall victim to the 6th level curse. At least this time, I can kind of see what sent wrong. No chance of me preventing it in the future, as it just seems to be an artifact of me being too nice combining with the nature of pen and paper gaming.

So, our friend Josh started up a new group. He is back in a place where he can and will DM again, so he took the reins back and began converting the Paizo adventure path The Curse of the Crimson Throne to 4e. This is despite his well know bias against it.

Which brings me to my primary reason for the lack of blogging. We are running a published adventure path. It is one thing to share the adventures of players in a homebrew world, and quite another to narrate our progress down an adventure path. I do not think I will be writing up detailed reports on what happened any longer. I will try to stick to observations about the game, it's mechanics, and the quirks of the group. Emphasis on try. In addition to that cop out, my motivation to blog about this is pretty low, since I am not DMing at all. As stated previously, I viewed this blog as a tool to help me be a better DM.

A couple of changes for this group:
- Set leveling schedule.
- Low magic
- Shared background

We are advancing in level every 2 sessions. If we game nearly every week, that puts us getting through epic in about a year. I like this for our group. We have dinked around in low levels for far too long. As long as we can avoid the curse (no certainty of that happening) we will be getting to paragon levels around October. It will be nice for a change.

Of course, to balance that out, Josh has pretty much eliminated magic items. Our group has played 4 sessions now and not found a single magic item. This puts us behind the curve as far as ac and to-hit goes, but we haven't noticed a problem yet. I was kind of irritated at first, since I am playing a Wizard (Gnome Illusionist ftw?). I had planned to make him a strong ritualist, but I will wait and see what the future of magic in this world is like, maybe I will go a different direction with him.

The Adventure path suggests a common link for the PC's, and we have gone with that suggestion. All of us have had dealings with a common enemy, and our initial quest was tied wholly to him. Things have developed beyond that, but I'll touch on that when I start with the writeups.

Jay

3/16 Actual Play: Werewolves, Ooozes, and . . .chessboards?

2009-05-19T10:47:00.006-07:00

One less this session, and Phedre had a change of heart about her name. Her new name has some kind of D&D reference.

Berend - Jesse's Fighter/Cleric, our only melee character.
Blackleaf - Formerly Phedre, Jessica's Elven Ranger who likes killing.
Bennethost - Jay's Fey Warlock, the glass cannon of the group.
Nim - Dan's Bard, proving that 4e Bards are like 3.5 Bards in name only.

We began right were we left off last week, with Team B rescuing Team A from the dungeon. We put them on our mounts and took them to Hammerfast. We were ambushed by followers of The Hunter during our trip, and managed to get a couple of our A team killed (PC's that would not be returning, giving Colin a convenient way to remove them from the campaign).

In Hammerfast the Dwarf went to talk to his leader about the werewolves. Nim, Bennethost, and Blackleaf went to the local Inn to unwind. At this point Benn remembered the enchanted chessboard from the dungeon and challenged Nim to a chess game.

He set it up, and immediately a skeleton appeared across the table and challenged him to a game. Benn went first. The skeleton made a move and then disappeared. Shrugging, Benn asked Nim to take his place. What followed was one of the more entertaining roleplaying experiences I have had. Dan and I took turns playing "chess", and I set a precedent by using cantrips (hedge wizard's gloves ftw!) to double my number of queens. Dan fought back, and soon we were using every devious illusory and underhanded trick to get the edge. Bluff checks, Insight checks, Intimidation checks, and straight Intelligence checks were thrown around, and all told an hour or so of real time was taken up. I always feel a little bad when my character is in the spotlight that long, but everyone seemed to enjoy themselves, and it didn't seem to matter that this bit of action did little to further the story.

In the end Benn managed to squeak out a victory, and we put up the board. Berend had learned that the answers we sought about The Hunter were possibly hidden in the catacombs under the city. We set out exploring. A couple days of hand waved searching later, we finally stumbled upon something.

We climbed down a ladder and into a large room. Berend sets out and runs smack into a gelatinous cube. Combat was long and tough, we were matched against some Azure Oozes, and the Elite cube. Benn proved his utility by teleporting Nim out of the corner, and then proved his ineptitude by dazing Blackleaf. Berend spent the first half of the encounter in and out of the cube, finally escaping long enough to get away. Nim put the final nail in the coffin with a curse that dazed the cube if it moved closer to him, and the combat ended. Session over after that.

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I'm kind of burned out on the longer, more detailed write ups. I did take some pictures, I might put some up later if I can. This campaign is looking dead in the water. No progress in awhile, we will not be playing this week and I am out the following week, putting me at a month with no D&D. Sad. We played some Shadowrun a week or so ago, but we are stopped in the middle of a job.

Bennethost has been, in his short experience, my favorite 4e character to play. Not really much of a striker (the least damage potential in the group, behind the Bard and Fighter), he falls somewhere in the controller/leader range.

I'm not sure where this blog is going. . . .with the game sort of falling down, I'm not sure what to do with it. I started it solely as a way to put up these play sessions. First because I find them useful when trying to remember what happened to tie in old events. I don't DM much, but hopefully the other DM's in our group use it. Second, because I enjoy reading the playthroughs of others, and I thought I could contribute my own.

I read a post on a different roleplaying blog a few weeks ago that has kind of kept me from posting. It was basically a rant against just the type of blog that I have. If I do not have anything groundbreaking to contribute, I should not be blogging. I guess breaking out of that required me to remember that I do this primarily for *me*. I like writing. I don't devote enough time to it. If the best I can do right now is to elaborate on a gaming session, so be it.

That guy can bite me.

Jay

The 6th level curse

2009-05-15T13:27:00.004-07:00

I feel like I have been cursed. I have been at or around 6th level a handful of times, and each time the campaign has dissolved, and been replaced by a new 1st level campaign. Some examples:

K'rrul - My 1st character ever, a Kobold Rogue/Invisible Blade managed to just get into 7th level before our campaign ended. Even that was kind of a gimme, as the campaign had fallen apart once at around 5-6th level, and had picked up again, only to be destroyed again.

Haggar - Halfling Paladin. Made it to around 5th before that campaign ended.

Some wizard - I don't even remember his name. Red Hand of Doom, we got to 5th-6th levels and the campaign ended.

Klaus - Human Cleric of the Sovereign Host. Possibly my most enjoyable character. Just made it to 7th when we lost at D&D and the campaign ended.

Therryk - Dragonborn Paladin of Erathis. This current campaign has this cloud of doom hanging over it. Spotty attendance and disinterest seems to be bringing it to a close. Therryk is currently 6th level. We will see how many sessions we can get through before the curse ends us.

The thing is, each of these endings were big. Not just a change of DM, most of them involved 2 or 3 people leaving the group. I am guessing this next explosion will be the same. Some people will leave, and we will start over again. Maybe 1st level, maybe 4th level, but we will not get much past 6th level before the curse strikes. I'd like to point the finger and say that none of these were my fault. After all, *I* didn't leave, I'm right here. But perhaps this pattern shows that I do have a problem. Me and the surviving core of the main group, currently three people strong, are good, solid gamers in my opinion. And nice guys on top of that. What is the reason for this curse?

The only way I see to beat it is to start at a higher level. My next campaign will be 11th level. How's that curse!? Eat it!

3/9 Actual Play: Team B gets a shot at some werewolf tail.

2009-05-10T11:06:00.007-07:00

Due to much drama and some bad timing, we have not played our main campaign in awhile. With the long break, and with attendance at the last session not great, we decided to break out our B team.

So, same setting, same basic history, only these new (sort of) PC's don't know anything of it.

Berend - Jesse's Dwarven Fighter/Cleric, worshiper of Moradin.
Delg - Chris' Dwarven Invoker, also affiliated with the temple of Moradin
Phedre - Jessica's Elven Ranger, says she is French, sounds Romanian. Likes Dwarves and killing things.
Nim - Dan's Gnomish Bard, the only holdover from team A (but his second PC; Arlarond remained in Fallcrest)
Bennethost - Jay's Eladrin Warlock, Nim's friend from the Feywild.

Nim strolled into the Dwarven city of Hammerfast at dusk. He made his way to the nearest inn, and had a seat at the bar. He scanned the patrons, looking for some that looked like they could take care of themselves, and saw Berend sitting near him. He was wearing his Scale armor and had his axe and shield propped up by him. If that doesn't scream adventurer (or paranoid?) I don't know what does, so Nim approached him and made an offer.

He had been part of a group sent to investigate the disappearance of a caravan in the Harkenwood. His party had discovered that werewolves were behind it, but had not been able to defeat them. He had escaped and his companions were captured, and now he was looking for some able bodies to assist him in rescuing them.

Berend agreed to help when Nim pointed out that the threat to Hammerfast was real, since the werewolves were preying on caravans that brought goods North to Hammerfast. They walked together to his home, the Temple of Moradin, while they discussed this. Present in the temple were Delg, who was acting as a priest at the time, and Phedre, who had come to worship. After explaining the situation to Delg he agreed to help, and Phedre who was eavesdropping put her hat into the ring.

Bennethost stopped by the temple on his way to his nightly pursuits and saw Nim. He had been looking for Nim for about a year, ever since they had become separated on their journey out of the Feywild. He ran over and gave Nim a hug, and they caught up. He was going to join them, of course, though his motivation was more for selfish reasons.

Phedre has a horse, and she offers to ride with Nim, so the rest of the party obtain horses from the Temple and they travel South to the last known location of Nim's companions. The entrance is marked by a large unnatural tree.

The tree is enormous, redwood sized, and has a malevolent, oppressive aura. While it is healthy, trees in the vicinity are dead and dying, as if they had suffered through a long drought. Phedre is fascinated by the tree, and spends awhile examining and exploring it. She breaks of a small branch, and instead of sap, the tree squirts out blood. She climbs up it, to the first major branching. As she climbs, she feels a peculiar pulsing through the bark, almost like a heartbeat. When she gets to her goal, the hair on her neck stands up. She knows she is at a place of peculiar magical power, but as we are unable to discover more, we persuade her to come down.

Not before she can get herself a souvenir. She decides she is going to cut off a branch. She chooses one about as thick as her thumb, and cuts. Blood sprays everywhere. Despite her best efforts she gets it all over her hands and her chest.

She washed up in an almost dried up creek, and we enter the ruined temple.
We cautiously start exploring the entryway, and are quickly ambushed by a fey panther. It bolted out the open door, and must have retrieved it's master, because soon we were fighting 4 big men, and a creepy caster came out of the closed door and began casting spells at us.
Berend is our only melee fighter, so he had his hands full with a fight that had two fronts. The quarters were tough on Phedre, who excels at ranged combat. Delg was in his element. Most of his attacks are area attacks, and the small room made it easy for him to catch multiple enemies in it.

The fey panthers and the soldiers got right in the middle of things, and the wizard stood in the door and cast his spells. His big mistake was the huge darkness spell he threw down. While it netted his panthers a couple of free attacks, we all cleared the area and moved to the walls. Bennethost and Nim used the opportunity to get into melee with the wizard. In a round or two, tables had turned mightily, and the surviving members of his posse were clustered in the middle of the room. Easy pickings for us, and the end of the fight went quickly.

Searching the remains was mostly fruitless. The caster had a fancy staff, which we took, and a holy symbol made of silver and shaped like a wolf's head. Berend seemed to remember that this holy symbol had a connection to a cult that worshiped some arch fey, but did not know much more than that. Bennethost saw the symbol and fell into a trance. He had a vision of several baying hounds on a hunt, with bestial werewolves riding on nightmarish chargers right behind, and a shadowy giant figure with enormous antlers at the rear. He shared this with his companions. We knew that we were dealing with the right people at least.

The next room had a strange fountain. As Nim and Bennethost examined it, they determined that it was a fountain of arcane energy. Nim figured out how to activate it and was flooded with power. Bennethost followed soon after. Tingling with power they continued to explore the ruined temple.
The right pass was barred with rubble piled to block something in. We took the easy road and turned left. That room had a couple tables, some chairs, and a trapped and locked treasure chest. After Nim defeated both, we found a very fine chess set inside, and Bennethost was able to determine that it had magical qualities. We put it in the bag for later.

The next room had a very large block of stone. A dark stain covered the top. It was quite obviously a sacrificial altar. The bookcase in this room was a treasure trove, and after Nim used the arcane power he had absorbed from the fountain to cast comprehend languages, he read the only book we could not otherwise read, the one in Primordial.

It was the story of a hunter, told by him, of his role as leader of this cult. He had come to know about a powerful arch fey called The Hunter. He gathered to him local rangers and woodsmen, and formed a cult dedicated to this hunter. The book told of a quest to find and slay a white stag deep in the Harkenwood, one that enabled them to plant a special tree. This tree, when fully grown and tended with the proper rites and sacrifices, would act as portal to the Feywild. Since the temple had been build at a location where the barrier between the worlds was already thin, this portal would allow The Hunter to pass through and enter our world. He would hunt and kill all living in the region, and grant much power to his acolytes who had served him.

Sobered, we moved on. Berend picked a door apparently at random, as he had been doing so far, and kicked it down. A short hallway led to another door, this one heavy, iron, and locked.

Nim made the lock less effective, and the door swung open. Gnolls, a slayer, and a creature made of vines were ready for us inside a large natural looking cavern. At the far wall were some people bound and unconscious. Nim's companions. Initiative!

Our position crammed in a hallway was hardly ideal. Were we facing mostly enemies who attacked in melee we would be in a very good place. The Vine Horror opened up with a bang, though, and blinded three of us with his ranged attack.

Early on we realized the pits were not useful to us. The first enemy we knocked down there was lifted out by the vines and roots that seemed to cover the walls. We knew that they would do us no such favor, and so we kept well away from them.

Berend moved into the room to create a new front, allowing us to get at the Vine Horror and hopefully shut him down. Delg managed to make it out of the hall, but was knocked into bloodied and was only kept up by Nim's healing powers. Berrend was pushed next to a clump of mushrooms, and their spores attacked him, keeping him confused. As a result he attacked Delg instead of the Gnolls. Phedre had put her Hunter's quarry on an enemy who had quickly moved aside. Now he had cover and she could not choose another quarry, since he was the closest to her.

Bennethost changed the battle somewhat when he used fey magic to swap places with Delg, who was surrounded by Gnolls and not having an easy time getting away, and then he attacked and teleported away, towards the captives on the other side of the room.
Berend shook off the effects of the spores and plugged the hole again. The Vine Horror was dropped, and the battle clearly turned in our favor. With Phedre filling the hallway with her arrows, and Nim and Delg incapacitating the Gnolls, the battle control was all in our favor. It lasted only a few rounds longer. We ended as soon as it was over.

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There was some good role playing this session. The beginning, where we all were introduced had a lot of in character chatter, which I love, and certain parts of the dungeon had some good interactions.

You may notice in the shots above the map we are using. Colin drew it out on cardboard, added a grid, and cut it out. He cut the dungeon into pieces, and then added them as we explored. He has these cool little props, things like doors, chairs, and bookshelves, that he places where appropriate. We went at exploration in a more organized manner, with us moving our mini and saying what we were doing, and then letting the next person go. I think that in some groups, where there is a clear prima donna, attention hog, or rogue (usually the rogue is a prima donna...) this could help keep everyone in the game. It worked pretty well, and since this was only our first time trying it out, I think it can only get better.

Since this is *my* blog I wanna talk about my character for a sec. I like fey pact warlocks. But they are not strikers. I am really trying to chose powers and feats that add to his controller side, but in combat his contributions were kind of sub-par.

I don't care though. He is not min-maxed. He was a class chosen to play a person that I would like role playing as. I wanted a high Charisma, high Intelligence character that could participate in all parts of the adventure. My previous character was not much use outside of combat, and most role playing felt kind of flat. My Shadowrun character is pretty tightly focused, and again not much use outside of combat. Benn is a success. Fun to role play, and entertaining in combat, even if he is in no way the star.

Jay

5/5 Shadowrun game: Battle Jitney we love you...

2009-05-06T09:54:00.004-07:00

This was our second Shadowrun session. Dan ran both, and playing we had:

Josh-Drake the Dwarven face. Not only good at talking his way into or out of trouble, handy in a fight to boot. The Dermal plating makes him 'pop'.
Joel-J Dogg the Ork ganger. Skills appropriate to a ganger, he shoots, drives, and throttles like a ganger should.
Jay-Teddy Two Eagle the Human mystic adept. Mostly detection spells, with a sniper rifle and a pack full of marijuana.

The first session was an escort mission. We all traveled to the appointed meetup location where we met Fractal, our contact for this job. She told us that we were to get her to an arcology where she would drop off her 'package'. As none of us had brought transportation, she called us a car. We immediately rendered it inoperable. Paranoia combined with lack of expertise led someone (not to be named to protect his reputation) to rip out the rigging in the front seat. Car stop, car no go.

So we ended up walking. As we passed through a seedy part of town, Teddy got the sense that someone was planning hostilities against us. A couple of gangsters hiding in an alley thought they would start something. Likely this was because we were traveling with a very attractive lady. J Dogg used his bravado and gang knowledge to talk them down. These gangers were part of a gang called the Blood Monkeys. Being part of a rival gang may have had something to do with it, but a few moments after we had moved on they attacked.

The firefight was very quick and very brutal. Teddy dropped to the ground and just laid there the whole time, failing at casting spells. Drake ran at them with his shotgun, blasting the two punks, though their cover behind the dumpster made it tough. J Dogg kept himself between the danger and Fractal, getting her to cover between two dumpsters, and then opening fire on the gangsters. A previously hidden elf cast a spell that rocked the dumpsters, slamming them together and squishing Fractal. J Dogg responded with two explosive shells to the head of the mage, and he cast no more spells. Drake jumped up on the dumpster and with his shotgun in the face of the last ganger, tried to end it. The ganger just laughed, and Drake pulled the trigger.

Fractal was surprisingly okay, leading us to believe she was tougher than she looked. We continued on our travel to the Arcology. Our target was a warehouse on the bottom level. Fractal needed to get into the office and plant something. Several plans were discussed. Our eventual plan was to lie our way in.

Drake went to the front door and posed as a representative of a software company looking to unload his wares. The warehouse manager bought his ruse, and Drake called his truck to drop off the software. The truck was real, having been 'acquired' by Fractal for this purpose. The boxes were empty. Fractal went into the office to finish paperwork with the warehouse boss, and J Dogg and I waited by the back of the truck, ready to fake unload some fake bosses. Fractal used her powers or authority to cause a glitch in the loading dock door, and the boss ran out to see what was the matter. Fractal was able to plant her delivery while Drake ranted about the unsuitability of this place for his merchandise, and when she emerged from the office we all piled into the truck and drove away. Mission accomplished. That was last weeks game.

In the intervening weeks while we waited for a job, Drake was able to help J Dogg acquire a new car, so we wouldn't need to walk everywhere. This proved to be handy.

We all found fliers on our doors. The advertised an event at a Club Raven, and included a VIP pass. Since we are shadowrunners, not friends, we never contacted each other about this, but each accepted the invitations for our own reasons. Drake's sharp eyes spotted a watermark that identified this as Fractal's handy work. Teddy knew that invitations like this did not just get stuck in the door of any house, and there was probably something more to this than just a party at a club. J Dogg was certain that his notoriety had finally garnered him some respect and prepared accordingly. He spent incredible amounts of money on appropriate dress, and showed up fashionably late to draw as much attention as possible. This is in contrast to Teddy, who showed up an hour early to watch and see what the deal was, and Drake, who showed up on time. We sat at separate tables (again, not really *friends*) for 4 hours before J Dogg showed up, and then we all moved to sit together. A little deflated that we had been invited too, meaning that the invitation was not issued because of his reputation, he thought that finding a lady companion would soothe his ego.

He spotted an attractive lady across the room who had been looking at him. He approached and laid down his best lines. Teddy was eavesdropping magically and relaying the entertainment to Drake. It was just what you would imagine an uncouth Ork ganger picking up on an attractive human woman in a club would be. After a few moments, J Dogg realized this woman looked familiar. He seemed to think she was a pop star, or famous, while Drake sitting across the room and watching her had picked up on the fact that this was Fractal with a new appearance. After watching him stammer for a while more, we stood up and joined her at the table. J Dogg recovered admirably, telling her that it would do no good to mix business and pleasure.

She had another job for us. This job involved hitting an armored bank vehicle and making it look like a robbery. We were to make it sloppy and again, or real goal was to allow Fractal to plant something. This truck we were hitting did not carry cash, but bank records, and she needed the distraction.

Further details would be forthcoming, so we split up. J Dogg made the most of his night after finding out similar VIP privileges for life are well out of his price range, and Drake and Teddy returned home. J Dogg did not remember much of his partying, but he awoke 2 grand poorer and not feeling up to much the next day. That was our day to prepare, so he lucked out.

All of the prep was done by Drake. With the silver tongue to get things done, he only needed Fractal to supply the contacts. His first step was to obtain a solid vehicle. He was directed to a junkyard and a fellow who seemed more than happy to help his rich new client. He showed Drake this:
Sort of. Ours ran on tank-like treads. It was in rough shape, but for a pretty sum Drake was able to get it running and towed to our ambush spot.

We also needed ammunition capable of piercing the heavy armor that these trucks had. Fractal was able to find us a supplier. We were almost ready.

Drake needed to buy the most obscene lead throwing, fear inducing, highly illegal gun he could find. Somehow Fractal tracked down a supplier, and we now had the Terminator (the bottom half anyways) on our side.

The next day we all piled in to J Dogg's ride and drove to the spot. J Dogg parked around the corner, and got in our tank. Teddy set up down the road, on the first floor of an old building. Drake got out of sight on a side road, and we waited for the armored truck.

J Dogg started up the tank, and notified the whole neighborhood of our presence. Not only was it extraordinarily loud, the clouds of black smoke it threw up were prodigious. Behind the wheel. . .I mean steering levers, was an ork. He had a ski mask on with a skull on it. He was wearing big thick goggles. It was a mental picture to frighten children. When Drake spotted the truck he gave the signal, and J Dogg started forward. The tank maxed out at 35 mph, but it was enough. J Dogg's timing was perfect, and just as the armored truck went through the intersection it was T boned by our Battle Jitney. The collision hit in the less armored cab of the truck, shredding it and it's occupants, and drove the whole mess into a building. Literally. The front end was lying inside a building, with surprised occupants now staring into the face of this smoke shrouded beast, piloted by the terrifying ork.

As soon as things came to rest Drake opened up with his machine gun, throwing a burst of 6 shots right on target into the rear of the armored car. Teddy had his sights on the doors from his perch, and the instant he saw something he pulled the trigger. J Dogg heard the two guards inside panicking, and just as one began an obvious call over the radio for help, a loud plink, and a thud. Teddy's second shot was a wild guess as to where the other guard might be, but it turned out not to have mattered. Drake heard the second shot follow the first, and several plinking ricochets, with the other guard falling dead to the floor soon after.

Drake left his position and hustled to the armored truck. Fractal came out of the shadows, looking different yet again, and joined him. His powerful gun made short work of the doors, and a couple bursts allowed him to yank them open.

Now is when he and J Dogg tested their action chops. Drake made a show of dumping out drawers and loudly cursing about the lack of money. J Dogg menaced the occupants of the building he had smashed, telling him not to forget the Blood Monkeys were here. He was dressed in their colors, which helped.

Teddy, not having anything to do, and just sitting in the car, decided to be helpful and drive around to pick everyone up. He did not get the welcome he expected, as a crucial part of the plan had been a clean getaway in the car, that was now tied to this crime scene. Things went further south when they spotted a Lone Star checkpoint ahead, already established to keep the perpetrators from fleeing.

Fractal used her abilities to try and find an alternate route for us, but our luck ran out. We Turned down a side road, only to have a Lone Star patrol car pull in behind us and flip on it's lights. We pulled over like good, law abiding citizens.

More acting was required. Before the officer could do anything, Drake shouted "Don't you know who this is?". He was playing on an earlier event. After our meeting with Fractal in the club, Drake had make a big production on the way out, hinting that he was a big time record producer and J Dogg an up and coming rapper who had just turned down a very lucrative deal. This had made J Dogg's night, and now it was an attempt to keep us alive and not arrested.

The officer bought it, and even when he pegged J Dogg's SIN as fake, he did not connect us with the crime. He fined us and let us on our way, even going as far as to radio the checkpoint and tell them we were cool to get through.

The cherry on top? When Drake returned home the flag on his mailbox was up. Not a common occurrence. Inside was an address. When Drake went to that address, he found an old abandoned gas station, and sitting in the lot was our Battle Jitney, somehow recovered from the crash.

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We started this weekday game since a couple of us have never played shadowrun and have always wanted to. After two sessions it is certainly living up to it's expectations, but as I have expressed to the guys, I think we could play almost anything with that group and have it work. They are a good group of guys.

I am still so new with the Shadowrun rules that I don't think my customary picking apart of what happened is really warranted, but I can't *not* do it, so. . .my uninformed opinion will have to do:

I love the setting. I have always dug post-apocalyptic themes, steampunk themes, and shadowrun has a feeling of both.
I am still feeling out the rules. I like the openness of magic, but a mystic adept is not really the right character to fully experience the system. So far I have been hit and miss with the do or die things, but very satisfying with the detection things.
Combat is not as scary as the rules make it seem. Last night we did not use a battlemat at all (I think had we not so efficiently won, effectively killing all opposition in 1 round, it might have come into play, but probably not).

I have a hard time separating the rules of the game from our roleplaying. A lot of what we did was totoally rules neutral. 75% probably could have been done in any system. One thing I like is the episodic nature of the setting, but even that could be adopted to any rules system.

Thoughts/impressions? Feel free to comment.

Jay

4/18 Actual Play, and rumination on group size

2009-04-24T13:04:00.003-07:00

Rumination is where cows rechew their food right? So that word seems appropriate since I feel like this subject has been talked to death in our group lately, in person, through email, and posted publicly on our group. I'll get to that later.

We had a few cancellations last week, some last minute, and so it wasn't until about 30 or 40 minutes after the appointed start time that dan, colin, chelsea and I decided to scrap the planned continuation of our main campaign and run a one shot. Colin volunteered to run a module and the three of us sat down to put together some last minute characters together.

Another ringing endorsement for DDI follows. Colin found a module, and we started making characters using the character builder. Jesse showed up a bit later, and with colin printing out the module and the four of us making and printing our characters, we were ready to play in about an hour. We played 9th level for an 8th level module since we were one short. I can't imagine making 4 3.5 characters even with heroforge in that amount of time. I can't imagine making 4e characters without the character builder in that amount of time. It was very nice.

We ended up with a Goliath Barbarian, Half-Orc Ranger (2 weapon), Dwarven Warlord, and Dwarven Warden. We began in the Warwood. I immediately thought of a party of warforged, a warlock, warden, and warlord, all adventuring in the warwood (incedentally, that party is not only viable, but sounds kind of awesome.)

Since it was a one shot I don't really feel the obligation to set down the plot and structure of the battles for posterity. I will still give some thoughts on the session however. Firstly, our party was very spiffy. Secondly the adventure was a learning experience for me (and somewhat for others, it seems). Thirdly, a party of four adventurers is about twice as fun as a party of eight, proving the inverse relationship between the two (to a point. I do not think that a party of 1 is 8 times more fun than a party of 8, so the statement is only valid for groups >3 or so).

Chelsea played the Goliath Barbarian. The barbarian was kind of the star of the show. She wielded a pick (irony for a goliath there), and chose the rageblood path. Our session was only long enough for 2 combat encounters, which is kind of sad for a 9th level barbarian, and I am pretty sure she never used the rage strike. She was a great striker, and her in-your-face presence kind of created a defendery aura, too. The disappointing thing was that I never really got to see what a goliath was like out of combat. . .how would she be roleplayed, what were her skills like, what was her racial power, things like that.

Jesse ran a Half Orc Ranger. He dual wielded bastard swords, which is awesome, and had the highest damage output. Chelsea had some awesome moments, but Jesse had chosen his powers wisely and was able to wring quite a bit out of what he had. He was less *flashy* though. While the barbarian was charging across the battlefield, as far as 10 squares in one instance, Jesse was quietly doing 30 points of damage consistently.

Dan played our leader, the Dwarven Warlord. Dan had played a female dwarf warlord before, as a DMPC, but this one seemed much better at her leadery role. Not only did his healing keep Jesse alive, but he gave a few free attacks to Chelsea, and during the second fight his White Raven Onslaught is probably what saved us from cold zombie death. From the beginning I always like warlords a hair better than clerics, and this is just more confirmation for me. Clerics may be better at a lot of things, but warlords are certainly the anti-controller of the battlefield. Anti-controller as in, move allies and subtract status effects as opposed to move enemies and add status effects.

I played the Dwarven Warden. I have kind of been itching to play one since I first flipped through PHB2. Yes, it is another defender. I appear to be stuck in a rut. I built him with the reach weapon cheese that a Warden encourages. The Verdant Lord Paragon Path outlines how I feel. Become a tree. Control the battlefield. With a greatspear and turned into a tree, the Warden can have reach 3, which is a 7x7 piece of the battlefield, or 48 squares. A regular player controls 8 squares.

This isn't what I liked most, though. I didn't really take advantage of my reach much. I liked his defender/controller feel. Wardens mark all adjacent allies as a free action once per round. I chose the power that is reach 2 and pulls one. With that power, you can pull an enemy one, mark him (and any others next to you) and shift back. Eventually, during the first fight I found I had managed to pull a group of enemies away from the pack after a few rounds of this. I feel like an Elf Warden would be very superior at this, able to shift no matter what. While the Warden's mark is surely not as cool as the Fighters, since it uses your immediate action and can therefore only be done once a round, it is a basic attack rather than an opportunity attack, so you can make it at reach.

Enough about the warden. The session cast us as a group of mercenaries traveling through the Warwood. We see a procession in the distance, traveling the opposite direction, and we discern that it is a funeral procession. As we step to the side to allow it to pass, bandits attack and we leap to the defensive. The first fight was us vs 8 4th level human bandity types and 2 6th level casters. We were 9th level. Surprisingly the fight was not a steamroll. Sure, after a few rounds Jesse and I figured we could only miss on a 2 or less, but the fight was dynamic, and rather than having a couple of equal level brutes to lock us down, or a nest of minions, they split the difference. It worked. There were enough that we could not easily get away without provoking (and they still hit hard, when they hit), but they weren't minions and dead at the drop of a hat.

We prevailed and fast forwarded through the roleplay (the gist: we agree to help the creepy procession retrieve their coffin, which was stolen during the fight) and set up for the second encounter. This encounter started with us on one side of a frozen river, and our enemies on the other. Again, we faced lower level opponents, 5 4th level and 4+ 6th level. I will explain the plus in a moment. Chelsea bounded across the ice but failed her acrobatics check to not fall over, and ended up prone in the middle of the river. So did Dan. So did I. Jesse did not run, so he did not fall. We started engaging the enemy as they moved to the river to fight us, and that is when the terrain feature became something more than just difficult terrain. Every time someone was wounded (per the module) an icy zombie burst through the ice next to them and began attacking the nearest target at random. These zombies were tougher than the mooks we were fighting, and Colin quickly had to rein in the rampant zombie creation and we ended up with 5 or 6 total. Dan made it to the other side and hit with his White Raven Onslaught, enabling us to slide our allies across the ice. This one was closer, with Jesse out of surges by the end and Dan out of healing, but loads of fun. With enemies 3-5 levels lower than the party. Who knew.

I guess that is the learning experience part. I tried to make tough encounters with higher level enemies, and now I feel like while those have their place, throwing in tough encounters with lower level enemies, or easier encounters, can still be a lot of fun. I need to revise my thinking.

My last comments will be on group size. A lot of talk has been generated on this subject over the past 2 or 3 weeks. We currently have 10 semi-regular players, which is quite a lot. It is more work and less fun for everyone, but we are playing a game with friends, how do you decide who stays and who goes in an equitable manner?

The first knee jerk proposal was a split into 2 groups. This appears reasonable on the surface, 5 players each is ideal. That was our number last week. What about those kinds of situations? If we had been split up, neither group would have been able to play. With some members of the group not confirming their attendance until the day of the game (if at all) it would be nearly impossible to plan to meet together if the same happened. And it does not solve the problem of who decides. Do we split by age? Experience? Region? Draw lots?

While this option was never dropped *officially*, it has not seen much discussion lately. Discussion that I have had lately has focused on a couple things:
1 - Helping the DM. We have had someone helping unofficially with initiatives, but expanding this into a more helpful position will make things easier on him. I suggested tracking conditions as well, and looking up rules disputes. This has not been agreed upon.
2 - Paying attention. This is a horrible feedback loop that must be stopped. The longer combats get, the less inclined folks are to pay attention, and the longer the combat gets. It is self causing, and it's solution is . . .to pay attention? If the DM (or his assistant, see #1) has to explain to every player individually, when it is their turn, that the ogre mini is in fact a centaur, and that the red marks are his flaming arrows, it takes up a huge chunk of time. How do you encourage paying attention? One good suggestion has been to give a time limit. If you aren't ready to go when your initiative count comes up, you delay until you are ready. Enforce this in an impartial manner, such as with a tiny hourglass, and I think feelings are more likely to be spared.
3 - Respect. This was my contribution. I feel there are a lot of reasons that having less respect slows the game down.
-Realize that the DM likely spent upwards of an hour or two preparing for this session, and will not get to play his character. Show some respect for the thought he has put into it.
-Respect that we all have lives, families, other hobbies, and we chose to get together to play D&D. For most of us this *is* our social interaction for the week.
-Respect each other and our time by not wasting it by interrupting or ignoring, but try to pay a little attention to what is going on.
-Understand that most of us can take time, as little as 30 seconds during the week, to let the DM know whether to plan on us attending. We are all in this together, and the better prepared the DM is, the more fun we will have.

These are not . . . public suggestions, these are things I have thought about and told a couple folks, but things that I think any gaming group with our problem can use. It is easy to take the excuse I took above, that we are friends getting together to play a game, what is the big deal, but I think that shows a general lack of consideration for the people who have spent time to make this game fun, and if what you desire is a group of friends getting together to play a game with no pressure or strings attached, maybe this game is not for you. That is what makes gaming fun, is that there is pressure, there is group effort, and the more we work together and respect each other, the more fun we can have.

This highlights something that I will begin explaining kind of backwards. My mother in law does not understand D&D. She thinks it is kind of silly that we all get together and play, every week, and nobody ever wins. To her, game=win. She is a non-gamer. Some people are gamers, some are non-gamers. If you do not grasp some of these things about being a considerate member of a gaming group, and you feel like perhaps this is all a little serious for just a game, perhaps you are a non-gamer. This is not a bad thing. I am a non-athlete and I have led a full life. You can still game, but you might have to take into consideration some things you think are ridiculous, like RSVPing every week for a casual get together. Par for the course.

That got a little ranty. Please don't be offended.

Jay

Actual Play 3/28: The Guild of Thieves, Again.

2009-04-01T14:51:00.010-07:00

Colin ran this session, and had a large party to deal with. All of the prospectives and maybes showed up for one grand session, and plan on returning. We could have a 10 people gaming group, 9 PC's and 1 DM. It should be interesting.

Our first session at 6th level. Those in attendance:
Colin, DM.
Jay, Therryk the Dragonborn Paladin/Barbarian of Erathis.
Josh, Wry Wit the Drow Sorcerer and former jester of the Dwarven court in Hammerfast.
Jesse, Halma the Human Rogue, now back from mysterious business.
Jessica, Sanbrielle the Halfling Warlord
Joel, Nightshine the Shadar Kai Avenger of the Raven Queen, who insists he looks just like a regular human.
Chris, Zamir the Genasi Stormsoul Swordmage. Now the best defender we have.
Chelsea, Ana the Half Elven Cleric of Bahamut and daughter of Lord Markelhay
Lucan will fade away for awhile, and Arlarond's player, Dan, was absent this week.

We had brief introductions first, since this is the first session (since the inaugural one) with such a large number of PC's. Colin jumped right in...

Following the defeat of the Red Champion by the Heroes of Fallcrest, they were rebranded the Heroes of the Nentir Vale. This is due in a large part to the sheer impact of their victory. Aside from their earlier accomplishments, the Heroes had just averted war between the Humans (and their allies) and the Eladrin (and their allies?). They had turned the tide of the war with the Legion of the Chimera, and sent them packing. Their efforts on the behalf of the Eladrin in Southember changed them from the defenders of just one city, to the defenders of the entire region. Of course, the Heroes have yet to voyage too far from home, and have not visited any of the other settlements in the Vale. They may dispute this title...

Their triumphant return to Fallcrest was followed by a euphoric fortnight of winding down and enjoying the fruits of their labors. Not all of the party basked in the adoration of their charges, with Arlarond sequestering himself in his Master's tower, and Lucan rejoining his work with the guard. They were currently engaged in building up the defenses of Fallcrest.

In the midst of this, Halma returned and began seeking out his friends. He was fairly certain that he could find Ana in her home at the Moonstone Keep, and started there. Ana was happy to see him, and he was filled in on the events of the past few weeks. She introduced him to Zamir, who had remained with the party and was spending some time at the Keep, and the three of them started making rounds to gather the rest of the party together. Therryk was performing some rites in the Temple to Erathis, and Sanbrielle and her parents were there worshipping (and a little tipsy). The priest of Bahamut was happy to see Ana at the shrine, as she had not been exactly devout, lately. He extracted a promise from her to return the next day and perform some of her priestly duties that she had been neglecting. Therryk volunteered to find Lucan and Nightshine, as they had been spending some time together since their arrival in Fallcrest.

We all met in the Lucky Gnome Taphouse, Halma's favorite dive. The whole group of us began catching up and discussing our next moves, when we were interrupted by a figure in a cloak. When he pulled his hood back, we were surprised to see a drow, walking unmolested through Fallcrest. He asked us if we knew Halma. Uncomfortable silence followed, and Halma finally spoke up and identified himself. The drow reached over his shoulder, throwing back his cloak, and revealed a knife in his back. He pulled it dramatically forth, and tossed it at Halma. "A gift from Sogol". Of course, we as a party were immediately on alert, even after Halma quickly discovered it was a trick dagger, with a collapsing blade. After that icebreaker, the drow introduced himself as Wry Wit, Drow raised by Dwarves and prized feather in Sogol's cap. He was sent to deliver this 'message', and to offer his services. We were immediately suspect of this offer. Several tense minutes later, the mood was darkened even further when Halma collapsed into the table.

He fought off the poison in his system and tossed the dart that had pierced his neck onto the table. Zamir caught sight of a shadowy figure darting from the Tavern, and we launched into action. Zamir pointed and shouted, and we started towards the door. The small crowd that had gathered to watch the fight between us and Wry Wit were now in our way and slowing our way to the real fight. While some pushed through the crowd, being slowed by the close quarters, Therryk shoved his way through, heedless of the people in his way. Ana shouted for their assistance and asked them to stand aside, and Sanbrielle skirted through their legs.
We rushed from the door to try and stop him (or her) from getting away, but our rush was in vain. All of us got out in our own ways, only to have the shadowy figure disappear before our eyes. Our disappointment in our inability to catch him was quickly forgotten when he reappeared and began stabbing us with his poisoned short sword. Usually, our large numbers and two defenders in such small spaces would have made this fight a cakewalk, but this opponent did not follow our rules. He teleported past the real melee threats and attacked our tender flank. Nightshine kept his Avenger's mark up and was able to follow him no matter where he went, but not before he managed to poison a handful of the party.
Even with him surrounded he popped out of the flank and over to stab some other people. Still, we had him bloodied, and victory was relatively assured, since none of us were to terribly hurt. Then he disappeared. . .and did not reappear to stab us.

One good development was a little trust developed with Wry. During the fight he did not hesitate to come to our aid, and had plenty of opportunity to stab (or blast) us in the back. We warily accepted him into our ranks.

The attack had us shaken though, and we began to bend our efforts to uncovering this possible plot against us. Halma was able to arrange a meeting with the Thieves Guild for the following morning, and retired for the evening.

We met with Ervan Lances, much to our chagrin. Ervan has a history with Halma, and more recently had some dealings with us. Although the arrangement ended satisfactorily for all parties concerned, we still had reservations about meeting with him. Reservations founded in reality, we found out.

Ervan Lances was polite and cordial. He did not know anything about our attacker, but had heard of our fracas the night before. When we accused him of being behind it, he let slip that one of his own had been injured, but not in Fallcrest. He proposed a deal. He would bend his considerable resources to finding information about our mystery man, and we would do a favor for him. The injured man was one of his couriers, a man named Devon. He had disappeared on his regular route between the Harkenwood and the Fiveleague House. All he needed us to do was travel his route and see if we could discover what happened to him.

Again, we were loathe to get in bed with organized crime, but could see little other option to get what we needed. So, the Heroes of Fallcrest again went to work for the Thieves Guild. Our plan was to travel East to the town of Harkenwood, and ask after his wife, Sandra. She might have more detailed information about his last known whereabouts and would direct us on the next leg of our journey, most likely to the Fiveleague house.

We left immediately. Therryk insisted on taking their wagon (secretly fearing that no horse could long bear his weight), and the party mounted up and started East.

One uneventful day of travel later, we set up camp with a few miles to go before we reached Harkenwood. We stayed within sight of the road, and divided into watches for the night. Sometime during second watch we were attacked.

Therryk and Wry were on watch. Wry was busy creating a shadowplay on the wall of Halma's tent, and Therryk must have been at least a little distracted by it, since with no warning at all 3 large wolves and a handful of their beastial looking allies padded silently out of the woods and charged before we could raise an alarm:
Wry is not built for hand to hand confrontations, but the wolves and shifters may have been distracted by the shadow play as well, since he did not die in the initial attack. They also singled out Halma, in his tent, and Nightshine who was sleeping under the stars.

We could have died, with the surprise attack going the way it did. The wolves were able to knock us down if they connected with a hit, and the shifters were able to follow us if we tried to shift away. Fortunately, the Gods (or Spirits or what have you) were generous and we were able to avoid a lot of the attacks on us. Our first fight with some of our new allies with a large force allowed us to see what they were capable of. Wry pinballed a bolt of psychic energy that hit every enemy, and careened towards the party before fizzling out.
However, be it due to our greater numbers, or due to our recent training, the fight was over quickly. Had we been awake when it started and able to better focus fire, it would not have presented much of a challenge at all. We finished there.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Colin was in for the opposite surprise this week, than Jesse had last week. Jesse anticipated as many as 9 players, while Colin prepared for less than 7 players. So he was stuck trying to ramp up his encounter on the fly, and we still kind of steamrolled it.

I did mean encounter, not encounters. The first encounter was an on the fly invention by Colin. He saw the need for an encounter there, and found an appropriate challenge using the Compendium, and ran it with his laptop. It worked really well. In fact, with some world building notes and a quick wit, I imagine creating on the fly encounters like this are perfectly doable. If you wanted the sandbox to end all sandboxes, you could kinda do it this way.

I think I will stick with thoroughly planned setpiece encounters mixed in with semi-random encounters that I have thought out ahead of time.

The second encounter was too easy, I think we just overwhelmed them. Partly due to some of us using dailies right off the bat, and partly due to Colin rolling really, really badly. He is pretty streaky, rolling 20's and 1's, and the video of that old dude that sells precision dice came up. I like that old guy, but I would have to do some convincing to get the wife to be cool with paying that much for dice....

After the session we had a conversation about our group size. Seven PC's is a lot, but not a crazy number of people. It was still enough of an increase that combat was noticeably slower. I'm not sure if anything was decided, but we talked about giving the DM at least a day's notice, so he had some concrete numbers to plan for. We talked about paying better attention to what is happening so you don't require a recap on your turn. Once in awhile this is not an issue, but if everyone has to be told what is going on at the beginning of every turn, it seriously subtracts from the fun of everyone else at the table.

Sadly, I won't be able to comment on the short term effect of these discussions, as I will be out for the next two weeks. I do not know if anyone will be up to posting a short synopsis for me to copy and paste here, and I am not sure how the game will progress, but I will endeavour to keep this site updated with any information I have.

In an effort to at least keep up with 1 post/week, I will have to sit down and do some thinking about what to post. I am not sure that I have the most stunning insights into gaming, so the subject of these posts could be about. . .anything, I guess. Gaming related.

Jay

Why I am addicted to DDI after only 2 days

2009-03-25T19:50:00.002-07:00

I am so against the DDI. Just the idea of it makes me upset. For a one year subscription they charge $60. I could by two gaming books for that price. I don't like the idea of renting information. Like the encyclopedia salesman coming to your door and offering you a beautiful set of leather bound encyclopedias, they are $20 a month. Buy? No, you can't buy these encyclopedias. They are for lease only.

The whole sales model is rotten to me. But, I came into some money that I didn't think I deserved, but that I couldn't turn down, so I bought 3 month's worth. $20. Thinking that even if I didn't like it, I could save all the pdf's and keep the character builder. Those are worth $20. Maybe.

So, yesterday, I did not even go beyond the character builder. I built Therryk. I built a Warden, just in case. I built a 30th level, just for fun. It was. . .nice. I wasn't sold, though. Not until today.

I came home from school intending to mess around with Gimp some, I have a couple encounters for my eventual turn that might require me to design a map in advance, and I'd like to try Gimp for that, rather than graph paper and a pencil, when I should be paying attention in Physics. I wanted to finish the creatures in the encounter, first, and thought I would try the encounter builder.

Not impressed, not at all. Well, I was getting impressed slowly as I went along. Ooh, chose the creature and it adds the XP, nice. Wow, I can sort by role, or keyword, handy. But, when I got to the end, and it did not give me the option to print the statblocks, I was. . .disappointed. A totally missed opportunity. How handy to have the whole thing in one package.

I found the statblocks I wanted in the Rules Compendium, however, and was impressed even more by the functionality of that tool. Allowing you to sort even more than the encounter creator, and allowing you to page through the whole statblocks when your results popped up meant that I had a whole host of options available again.

Of course, those two tools alone are not really worth the price. It is the fact that they include every published adventure, supplement, splatbook, and pdf that makes it work. Monsters from RPGA adventures and the Scales of War and any other regularly released adventure are included, and those include leveled versions of some Monster Manual creeps. I never even got to Gimp. I ended up finishing up and printing out 6 encounters this afternoon, where before they were nebulous ideas, now I have creatures to go with them, calculated to the appropriate challenge rating from the Encounter Builder (I also typed up short little tactics blocs, since I sometimes get nervous and fudge these. Or copypasta from a Dragon magazine article).

So, yeah, for DMing these tools are *huge* time savers, and tremendous for adding new and different foes for your party. I hate that Wizards has hooked me like this, but at the same time, they delivered on a pretty good product. If they could only get the interface smoothed out (my suggestion would be merging the encounter builder into the Compendium, it is easier to navigate, and you could print out the stat blocks all at once) , but that is a nitpick. I am duped. I am sold. I am ashamed...

Jay

Jesse's Homemade Minibosses

2009-03-25T19:16:00.002-07:00

Jesse actually mailed these to me 3 days ago, I am just now getting to posting them. First the Red Champion:

The Chunn-Aragot, Blessed Soldier of Gruumsh
Level 8 Solo

Initiative: 9 Exp: 1750
HP: 368; Bloodied: 184
AC: 24 Fortitude: 23 Reflex: 22 Will: 20
Attack bonus vs. AC: +15
Attack bonus vs. other defenses: +13
Damage Low Medium High
At-will 1d8+5 2d6+5 2d8+5
Limited 3d8+5 3d10+5 4d8+5

Action points: 2
Str: 20 (+9) Dex: 17 (+7) Wis: 17 (+7)
Con: 20 (+9) Int: 17 (+7) Cha: 17 (+7)

Gruumsh's blessing (aura 5)
When opponents in the aura score a critical hit they suffer 1d8+5 raidant damage.

Blessed Axe of Gruumsh (Standard, at will)
+15 vs. AC, 1d10+11 damage (crit 21+2d12)

Divine Vengeance (Standard, at will)
+13 vs. Will. 1d8+5 radiant damage and the target is stunned until the end of your next turn on a hit. Whenever you score a critical with any other power your next use of this power on the same target is a minor action.

Battlefury (standard, recharge 5 6)
Make two basic attacks.

Roar of the Conqueror (Standard, Encounter)
+13 vs. Will. Close Burst 3. 4d8+5 damage on a hit and the target is weakened (save ends). Allies within the area gain 25 temp HP.

Divine Storm (Standard, Encounter)
Make a basic attack against every opponent within a close burst 2, these attacks deal radiant damage. Targets hit are dazed (save ends).

Gruumsh's Favor (minor, recharge 5 6)
Close Burst 3, you or an ally within the burst can take an extra standard action. When bloodied recharge becomes 4 5 6.

Blood-Frenzy (aura 5, when bloodied)
All creatures within the aura score a critical hit on a roll of a 19 or 20.

Warrior's Surge (Standard, Usable only when Bloodied)
Basic attack, regain 92 hit points

Vicious Battleaxe +2 (Two Handed)
Blood Red Scale Mail

Next, the two allies:

Grobb, Major Domino of the Goblins
Level 7 Elite Lurker

Initiative: 11 Exp: 600
HP: 128; Bloodied: 64
AC: 23 Fortitude: 21 Reflex: 22 Will: 19
Attack bonus vs. AC: +12
Attack bonus vs. other defenses: +10
Damage Low Medium High
At-will 1d8+5 2d6+5 2d8+5
Limited 3d8+5 3d10+5 4d8+5

Action points: 1
Str: 16 (+6) Dex: 19 (+7) Wis: 16 (+6)
Con: 16 (+6) Int: 19 (+7) Cha: 16 (+6)

Acrobatics +12
Stealth +12

Blade Twisting:
Targets attacked with combat advantage are dazed until the start of your next turn.

Sneak Attack:
+3d6 damage

Melee Basic (Standard)
+12 vs. AC 1d6+7

Feint (Standard, at will)
+10 vs. Will, 1d6 damage and you gain combat advantage against the target until the end of your next turn.

Vanish (Encounter, Minor)
You become invisible until the end of your next turn or you attack.

Blade of the Assassin (Minor, Encounter)
Your next attack deals an added 4d6 poison damage and the target is stunned (save ends).

Riposte (encounter, immediate reaction to an opponent missing with a melee attack, recharge 6)
Make an attack against the opponent with combat advantage.

Call in the Favor (immediate reaction to an opponent hitting with a melee attack, encounter)
Switch positions with an ally within 2 squares, that ally takes the hit instead.

Goblin Tactics: IR to being missed, shift 1

Karkak, Timat's Focus. Leader of the children of 5.
Level 7 Elite Artillery

Initiative: 6 Exp: 600
HP: 128; Bloodied: 64
AC: 22 Fortitude: 19 Reflex: 21 Will: 22
Attack bonus vs. AC: +14
Attack bonus vs. other defenses: +12
Damage Low Medium High
At-will 1d8+5 2d6+5 2d8+5
Limited 3d8+5 3d10+5 4d8+5

Action points: 1
Str: 16 (+6) Dex: 16 (+6) Wis: 19 (+7)
Con: 16 (+6) Int: 16 (+6) Cha: 19 (+7)

Draconic Shift (free, at the start of each turn)
Your are immune to a random type of energy and your other draconic powers reflect this draconic blessing.
1 - Blue: Lightning Stun/Daze
2 - White: Cold Immobilize/Slow
3 - Black: Acid -4 to all Def/-2 to Reflex
4 - Green: Poison Weakened/-2 to Attacks
5 - Red: Fire Blinded and Ongoing 5/Ongoing 5
6 - Choose

Claw (Standard, At will, Melee Basic)
+14 vs. AC. 1d8+5 damage, target suffers minor draconic effect until end of turn on a critical.

Dragongout (Standard, At will, Ranged Basic)
Ranged 10, +12 vs. Reflex, 2d6+7 and minor draconic effect until end of next turn.

Dragonblast (Standard, At will, Recharge 6)
Close Blast 3, +12 vs. Reflex, 3d8+7 and major draconic effect until end of next turn.

Wings of the Goddess (Standard, Recharge 5 6)
+12 vs. Reflex. 2d6+7 in close burst 1 and shift 5 squares (can fly until end of next turn), then make a dragongout attack. Opponents hit by either suffer minor effect until end of next turn, hit by both suffer major.

Breath of the Goddess (Standard Encounter)
Close Blast 5, +12 vs reflex 4d8+7. Opponents hit suffer major effect (save ends) with aftereffect of minor (save ends). Missed suffer minor and half damage.

Dragonskin (Minor encounter)
Gain resist 5 against all attacks until the start of your next turn, any opponent who strikes you with a melee attack also takes 3d10+5 damage and suffers your minor draconic effect (save ends).

Dragon Queen's Favor (free, when spending an action point)
Choose one

And lastly, the spider minions:

Lothleb's Brood

Initiative: 4 Exp: 50
HP: 1; a missed attack never damages a minion.
AC: 19 Fortitude: 18 Reflex: 17 Will: 17
Attack bonus vs. AC: +10
Attack bonus vs. other defenses: +8
Damage: 5
Action points: 0
Str: 18 (+6) Dex: 15 (+4) Wis: 15 (+4)
Con: 18 (+6) Int: 15 (+4) Cha: 15 (+4)

Poison Bite: +8 vs. Fort
Hit: Ongoing 5 poison damage (save ends all)
targets taking ongoing 5 poison are immobilized.
Targets immobilized + ongoing are dazed.
Targets immobilized +dazed +ongoing are stunned.

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Unfortunately we never tangled with the spiders. And as mentioned in the writeup, Jesse ended up nerfing the two elites, since he thought we might have more players.

My thoughts on the bosses? They were tough. They were *supposed* to be tough. The kobold has the potential to really screw with you, if he were dropped into an encounter where he had soldiers blocking for him or some other mechanism for him to keep bombarding the party. We had Joel to thank for saving us from that. The goblin really was tough, and the only thing that saved us there was the fact that he died. If he had Elite HP we would have been toast.

And the Red Champion was hard, but were she *solo* instead of solo with two allies, I don't think we would have had quite the problem. Honestly, her greatest threat was serving as a huge block of HP to soak up our hits while her weaker teammates put the hurt on us. Grummush's favor had the potential to eat us up once she bloodied, since an extra action would mean 4 attacks from her. Her to hit bonus is high enough that with flanking she is almost guaranteed to hit any less armored member of our party. So, given all that, we did pretty well.

Jay

Actual Play 3/7 & 3/21: Heroes of Fallcrest no longer, Heroes of the Vale we have become!

2009-03-22T17:16:00.010-07:00

Last session we played had no combat encounters. I did not take many notes.

We went to the place where the lizardfolk told us we could meet our contact with the Orcish Shamans. We were able to meet with a haughty Orcish Shaman who felt that the Prophesies were being misread and misused, and thought that the Red Champion was a fraud. He was trying to get the Prophesies so that he could disprove many of the signs that she had used to rally this Legion to begin with.

We attempted to give him a translated copy, but he wanted the real thing. We were, after a lot of talking, able to get an agreement hammered out. He would demand that the Champion prove herself by seeking a sign in a certain place at a certain time. We would be there, and kill her without having to hack through her entire army. We would then give the book to the traitor shaman and he would lead his people out of here. He did warn us that once he had the book he would not hesitate to tell his people that it was us that slew their champion.

The spot we chose was on the edge of the Harken forest. Lucan had spent some time patrolling the wood with his elven brethren, and took part in a battle against a large and vicious spider. He remembered the location of her lair, and suggested that we could ambush her there.

That was the condensed version of our roleplaying only session. The next week we played a Call of Cthulhu game, and yesterday we picked up our main campaign where we left off.

The party consisted of:
Lucan, Elven Fighter and sometime conscience of the party; played by Colin.
Ana, Half Elven Cleric of Bahamut and MVP of the coming battle; played by Colin in Chelsea's absence.
Nightshine, Shadar Kai Avenger of the Raven Queen, quiet, occasionally invisible, and deadly; played by Joel
Arlarond, Human Wizard, calm center of knowledge and fire; played by Dan
Therryk, Dragonborn Paladin of Erathis, clueless brute with a rage problem; played by Jay
Sanbrielle, Halfling Warlord, plucky and loud. Halfling Paragon? played by Jes

Immediately after the Orcish Shaman left the grove where we met, Nightshine creeped in. He had been a slave owned by the Legion until a recent escape, and had overheard our entire conversation with the orc. He offered his services, as he was naturally eager to punish his former masters. After a sparring match with Therryk, he was accepted into the group, and we began the quick trip three days to the edge of the Fens.
This is the spider's cave. The cave opening is the black bar on the right. The black region to the left of that is a dark pit that we can't see the bottom of. The blue parts are webs that are attached to the floor and sloping upwards and attaching to the wall about 30 feet up. The red portions are sticky webs on the floor of the cave. The difficult to see light blue-type color are solid husks of web. The giant spider was slain 6 or 7 years ago, so the egg sacks we see inside the solid parts are old and not a danger. Most have been slit open already. The top right and bottom left of the map are small. . .cavelets only reachable by the ramp of web. The cave was once a generic limestone cavern, but had been carved and eaten into it's current shape. Tiny fissures cover the walls.

Many plans were discussed. Should we hide? Where would we hide? Should we try and fool her with a sign of our own? How? And if we succeeded, then what? Arlarond had a ritual he had picked off of the body of one of the casters from the Legion that we had killed. The ritual allows greater ease of movement across mundane and magical webs. He has his familiar fly outside the entrance to the cave and keep an eye out for 3 figures approaching, an orc, a kobold, and a goblin. We had learned as much from the shaman. The Legion of the Chimera, led by 3 leaders of the 3 major races that comprise it. . .pretty clever.
This was our eventual plan. Our two minons hid in the thick webs. Arlarond and Ana concealed themselves on the ramp. Therryk, Lucan, and Sanbrielle crawled under the end of the 'ramp' and covered themselves in web to be concealed. Nightshine did the same thing, but in a different spot. A last minute decsion regarding the light situation led to us incorporating some element of deception. Arlarond's familiar returned. It had spotted an orc and a kobold approaching. Arlarond performed the webby ritual on us and we all got in our places. Arlarond then conjured a floating holy symbol of Gruumsh, and a light spell inside it to make it glow. . .and light the center of the cave.

The orc and kobold entered. They walked towards the symbol, paused, and then approached it. She swiped her axe through it a couple of times. Nightshine may have seen something, but knew that warning us would ruin any surprise we had.

After a long pause, Arlarond acted. He tried to sneak forwards to get within spell bombing range of the holy symbol. Almost immediately he was spotted by the kobold. The orc charged. Initiative was rolled. The battle was on.
This initiative board is after a couple rounds. Yes I am aware that it should probably be Grobb, Majordomo of Goblins. We liked the typo. Knock one down, they all go down...

The fight immediately went against us. The Red Champion brougt Arlarond into bloodied territory on her first attack. Sanbrielle gets him healed, Lucan and Therryk begin the process of freeing themselves from the webs they were hiding in. Grobb makes his presence known by appearing in a flanking position with the orc. Karka lobs some fire at the party, but is quickly locked down when Nightshine gets in his face.

The Red Champion hits Lucan twice. Both are criticals. Lucan is immediately felled, and lies bleeding on the ground. Sanbrielle uses her second and final Inspiring Word to get him back in the fight. Ana summons what is most likely the largest contributor to us winning the fight, Consecrated Ground. A 3x3 area of holy ground that she can move each turn, it has the effect of damaging each enemy that begins it's turn in it, and healing any bloodied PC's that start their turn in it. Since most of us were bloodied most of the time, we reaped a huge healing benefit from it. 12 HP each time was more than a healing surge (for all of us, I'm pretty sure).
Arlarond also uses his shroud of flame, which is super effective against Jesse since he always forgets to save. Ongoing 5 fire plys 1d6 or so for Consecrated Ground. . .and then Lucan activates his stance. Any enemy that begins it's turn next to him takes 1[w] damage. This added up to a huge amount of damage over the many rounds this fight lasted.

At the same time this was happening, Nightshine was taking on Karka by himself. Karka hit him with a poison attack, which allowed him to fly (shift) away and onto the web platform over the chasm. Nightshine had several tricks up his sleeve, however, and was able to chase him up there and teleport him over the edge and into the abyss. His fall was broken by some webs a few feet down, and we were introduced to the last element of this fight. Spiders.

Lotheb's Brood were medium spider minions who singlemindedly went after anything that disturbed the web. Karka was swarmed immediately, and Nightshade left the lip of the chasm to help us with the other two.

The fight was not really going well. Sanbrielle ran out of healing, and the status effects started to pile up. Grobb (the Domino) was a rogue and maintained his flank, tearing us apart. A difference was made when Therryk managed to get a flank with Lucan on Grobb, and used an action point to hit twice. The second hit he avoided by using an ability to swap places with the Red Champion, but this meant he would start his turn in the land of ongoing damage, and it brought him down.

We were feeling good. One enemy left. She was tough, but we were tougher. After all of that mess she was just into bloodied territory. We pressed our advantage. We were surprised to see Karka return. He had been spending each round rerolling for his abilities to recharge, and the one that allowed him to fly finally did. He soared from the darkness and immediately began to bombard us with elemental attacks, all of which carried some kind of status effect. The result was a rebound for the bad guys. The Red Champion was pushed into the webs, but used the opportunity to regroup with Karka.
This was bad news overall, but good news for Arlarond. He had the chance to hit them both with an area attack and summoned a huge cloud of icy pain over the two of them. He positioned it so that for the short time it was there, we could attack them through it's border.
This was the final stretch. Despite turning his scales white to afford him some protection against the cold damage, Karka was doomed and went down. The Red Champion coulcn't escape the Consecrated Ground, and each time she cut one of us down we popped up again on our next turn. It took some more time, but we whittled her mountain of hit points down eventually to zero.
We gathered the three bodies together to search them, and the only thing of value was the +2 Vicious Battleaxe that had hit Lucan with criticals at least three times. Probably more. And the book. Ana cast Gentle Repose on the Red Champion's body, and we loaded her on a floating disc for the journey back to Southember.

The Eladrin were understandable excited about this news, and they hoisted her body up on a pike to carry at the head of their army. Within hours the Eladrin had left to begin routing the orcs and clearing the fens of their foul presence. We had the Eladrin scholars perform their copying ritual on the book, and arranged (via animal messenger) for another meeting with the Shaman in the same grove we had met in previously.

He was still pompous, and we still did not relish dealing with him. On top of that, when he had his book he marched straight to his waiting troops and told them what he said he would. That we were the jerks who had killed their Red Champion.

A lengthy chase through the Fens was finally ended when we were able to lose the Warg riders in a difficult section of the terrain. We met up with Kerlos leading the Eladrin army shortly after, and told him where he could find 200 or so disorganized orcs begging to be slaughtered.

The next day was a feast day in Southember. Kerlos was pleased with us, and saw to it that our role in the events was made known to the people during the feast. We began this endeavour with the goal of preventing all out war between Fallcrest and Southember, and it looked as if, for now at least, we had achieved it.
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There was some more chatting after that, in and out of character, determining what we would be bringing to the next leg of our campaign.

We have this grain of an idea, to turn out Party into a much larger organization. With the release of the PHB2, several of us are/were itching to try out some of the new classes. Add to that our sometimes peculiar party makeup (3 defenders and no striker, really?) and you have a great opportunity to start something different. We are going to try a different definition of party. Folks can have more than one PC, we just play one at a time. We would be able to try new things without doing one shots, or breaking continuity.

So far it looks like Dan might put Arlarond on the shelf for a bit and bring in a Gnomish Bard. Jesse and Jes were . . .arguing over who could play a Druid. I made a Warden (and my first love, a Kobold Rogue), but I think I'll stick with Therryk for now. He sometimes really underperforms, but I feel like in this last fight he did his share. Plus, with Colin running Lucan may be written out for the time being, and we will need a defender. Not that I feel Therryk is as good a Defender as Lucan (seriously, when Colin first brought him I though 'oh great. . .Elf fighter? Not very optimized...' but I have seen the error of my ways. I would dare anyone to make a more effective Defender than Lucan. He fills his role perfectly) but Therryk does have a defender in him somewhere. . .but it is crowded with all that Leader and Striker that he is carrying around. We will see.

So, this fight was really something. Jesse built 4 creatures using the DMG rules, 1 solo (the Red Champion) and 2 elites (his flunkies). Plus the spider minions. The Red Champion was built at 8th level, and Jesse had tried to plan for who would attend, but with our schitzo group I do not fault him at all for overestimating it's size. He thought we could have as many as 9 PC's, and planned accordingly. Thus, the 2 bodyguards were reduced on the fly from Elites to Regulars. the dice really favored him in the beginning, so I am curious if without that change we would have survivied. I think we might have, but with a PC death. It would have been that bastard Goblin stabbing Colin or I (or Sanbrielle or Nightshine) in the back.

Jesse mentioned emailing me the stuff he put together for me to post. I'll do that as soon as I get the email.

In other news, PHB2 is awesome. . . .

Jay

Actual Play 2/28: Our Own Private Siege

2009-03-03T12:29:00.015-07:00

Sambrielle - Halfling Warlord
Therryk - Dragonborn Paladin
Zamir - Genasi Swordmage
Arlarond - Human Wizard
Ana - Half Elf Cleric
Lucan - Elf Fighter

Jesse continued the adventures of the Heroes of Fallcrest as they battled the Legion of the Chimera.

We finished our exploration of the compound we had claimed, and divided up the treasures we plundered from the fallen orcs. Our wagon was damaged in the attack, and we set our two slaves up to fix it. Minions, I meant minions.

We were surprised when a lone demon approached the West gate. A couple of us immediately rushed him. Some of the more prudent party members stayed on or in the structure. The next round another demon appeared. The four of us that rushed up were in a good spot, and feeling pretty tough. Arlarond was on the roof of the building inside the walls and he started throwing spells at them. He kept spending his move action to search around, trying to find out where these demons were coming from, but they were too well hidden

Lucan and Therryk stood side by side and fought the demons, while Sambrielle and Ana stood on the wall and supported. The next round, another demon appeared. And the round after that. Zamir rushed to the gate, and the three defenders stood shoulder to shoulder and blocked the route around the edge of the wall.

The demons stopped coming to us, and started running around the corner to the open wall where our two companions were repairing the wagon. Before we could get there to intervene, one took a mighty swing at Scrag, the goblin, and he went down like a bag of stones. We split into two groups. Not on purpose, it just happened that way. Lucan broke off from the front gate fight and jumped up and over the wall to engage the demons coming through the other gate. Sambrielle joined him. Arlarond turned his focus to these new threats, and the other three of us focused on the last of the initial demons.

Lucan had the attention of the new group of demons, still augmented each round by another one coming from the bushes. Zamir, Ana, and Therryk finished off the last of theirs and turned to help their companions.

Therryk ran around the edge of the wall, trying to make best time to the other fight, and was startled when he noticed a Gnoll in the bushes. His eyes were closed and he was murmuring something. One axe thrown at his face ended his summoning ritual, and the endless flood of demons stopped.

This still left the few that he had already summoned, currently fighting in the entryway of the South gate. Now flanked and outnumbered, it was only a matter of time before they were brought down. Though their variable resistance to our various elemental attacks was annoying, it did not save them in the end.

We were pleased to discover that Scrag had only been faking injury, in the masterful cowardly way that Goblins can, and that the gnoll summoner had a very valuable staff topped with a black diamond. Not magic, but still good news.

Following the fight an Eladrin rode in from the East. We recognized him, he was one of Kerlos' men, one we had fought and defeated in the Moonstone Keep. He was impressed with our work, and told us that if we could but hold onto this ruin for another day, reinforcements from Southember would arrive, and we could go. We agreed, as getting in the good graces of the Eladrin is just as important as getting in good with the legion.

Shortly after he left, we saw two Lizardfolk approaching from the South. The one in the lead was carrying a makeshift white flag, so we let them approach. We had moved the wagon into the broken Southern entrance, so the introductions and discussion took place on the seat of the wagon. These lizardfolk had heard of our attempts to create dissent in the Legion, and were offering some small amount of help. Through some negotiation we learned that not all of the Orcish shamans followed the Red Champion blindly, and would like an opportunity to study the book of Orcish prophesies personally. Unfortunately, the Red Champion was keeping the book on her person, so the Shamans went along with her. . . for now.

The gnolls had been trying to find another copy of the prophesies so that they could give them to the shamans. The goblin raids on Fallcrest were one attempt to get the book, though we knew of no copy there. We agreed that we would help the lizardfolk do this, but in the process Therryk let slip that we were expecting an attack during the night. Arlarond suspected that the silent lizardman in the rear of the wagon might have occasion to use this information to our detriment. We told him as much, and as a good faith gesture he allowed us to keep the possible dissenter with us for now. Our plan was to meet up with him in a grove that he specified with the Eladrin copy of the Prophesies in 24 hours. If we were unable to make it we would need to send word and arrange another meeting place.

When the lizardman left we got to fortifying the Northeastern section of the outpost. With material from the building we were able to build a rude barricade, and we chucked the wheels of the wagon to provide some kind of protection from the south. When we were finished we split up into watches and tried to get some rest. Arlarond set up his Arcane Eyes to watch the bog. Sambrielle and Therryk kept watch for the first part of the night.

Around midnight we were attacked. Flaming arrows started striking around the courtyard. The Heroes were awakened, and the battle started. A group of Orcish archers stood 40 feet away and shot flaming arrows into the battle. They were guarded by two Wargs. More orcs rushed the gate, and a big orc, an obvious leader, quickly got inside the compound.

Sambrielle stood atop the wall with her sword as tall as she was and was rewarded for her courage with a barrage of flaming arrows. Therryk jumped down and charged at the archers in an attempt to draw their fire and was rewarded with just that. Inside, Lucan and Zamir closed with the Orcish leader and began to feel just how much pain he could dish out.

Our ace in the hole, Arlarond on the roof tossing spells around, was just in position when we were betrayed. The lizardman whom we had kept with us so that he would not betray our plans rushed at Arlarond and tried to shove him off of the roof of the three story building. He failed, but Arlarond knew that it was a matter of time before he was knocked down, and tried to leap down and mitigate his damage somewhat. He failed. On top of that, the lizardman pulled his greatbow from his back and started pumping arrows into Zamir.

The orcish brutes hammering at the gates were dispatched easily by Therryk and Sambrielle, but the archers focused their fire and with one volley brought the dragonborn down, and he bled and lay dying. The small halfling was now virtually alone outside the gates, with two wargs as tall as she, and four archers with no other obvious targets. Things were looking grim outside the gates.

Luckily, due to the nature of the gate, Ana was able to arrive and began bringing the wrath of Bahamut down on the orcs. She healed the dying and began to turn the tide of the battle. Glowing with the light of her god, her allies felt even more bolstered when blessed by healing from her patron.

Arlarond, too, took advantage of the gate, and began harassing the archers. He yelled at Scrag to pull the lever in the building, the one that controlled the counterweights and opened the gate. Scrag began to do just that. He yanked the lever back and forth, and what was a grim battle became even more uncertain with the addition of the heavy smashing gate in the midst of it.

Zamir, meanwhile, took advantage of one of Ana's many blessings to yank the lizardman from the roof. A bolt of lightning drew him down and he struck the ground, hard. Robbed of his vantage point and stuck in melee combat, he was forced to fight tooth and claw.

Lucan began maneuvering right away to get the orcish leader smashed by the gate. His trident is most adept and pushing and pulling enemies where he wants, all around the battlefield, and it was inevitable that the orc would end up smashed by the gate.

The wargs were finally silenced, and Therryk and Arlarond went to work shutting down the archers. A blast of ice knocked most of them from their feet, and Therryk's axe with Arlarond's magic began to bring them down.

The real fight was the orcish war leader. Briefly knocked into bloodied, he channeled his orcish blood and healed himself out of it. When he brought one of the Heroes of Fallcrest into bloodied territory, he would savage them even more. In the end it took a combined effort of all the party, with healing running low and powers spent, but he was brought down, smashed by the gate into a pulp. We ended there.

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This session took a bit longer than our usual ones, so once combat ended we were done for the day. Surprisingly, Jesse anticipates that this story arc will be finished up next session. We will see. I feel like from Therryk's perspective this is an enormous problem that will not be solved for months and months . . .but from a storytelling perspective I can see it happening. Colin hopes to run next, and we will be starting up 6th level. 6th level is a nice boost in power for some of us, Leaders of course can now add 2d6 to their healing, My mark improves a bit, feats are earned and Utility powers are gained. Good level, 6th. Of course, in a couple weeks I will be looking at 7th level and thinking how cool it will be to have three encounter powers. I am never content.

Jesse was saying as we wrapped up that this gauntlet of three encounters with no extended rests was done to stretch us. We sometimes rest more than I think is strictly necessary. Hitting that milestone is cool, though, Colin has a power gem, so he can bring back his Rain of Blows. That power is very sick. Very, very sick.

I didn't get any notes taken this session, but since it was a light roleplaying session that is mostly okay. I am not sure about the name of our Lizardfolk contact, and I had to think pretty hard about the order things happened in (demons>eladrin>lizardfolk>orcs). Since I do this more as a benefit to the group, should we ever be nostalgic our curious or . . .anything, and less as a showing off of our cool game, I really should be a little more consistent with that. In other news, I took a bunch of pictures, so that is cool, right?

Jay

2/21 Actual Play: The Rat Mother One-Shot

2009-02-25T14:05:00.000-07:00

This past weekend I ran a one shot, attempting gritty low magic 4e. It could be argued that 4e's very nature is against this, even outlawing all but Martial classes is not enough, since some of the things they can do are so over the top.

We did not outlaw any power sources. In fact, I scrounged preview material from around the web, and brought it in case anyone wanted to give them a shot. Since the plan was to roll 3d6 in order it made sense to provide a larger number of classes, hopefully accommodating any wonky rolled scores.

We were short, it was me, Jesse, Dan, and Chris. I had prepared a few 4th level and higher combats for our 1st level characters with 5 PC's as baseline. I did not pull punches. To me gritty means overwhelming odds and a sense of despair and inevitable failure. This is why I do not prefer gritty games. I don't like feeling like a . . .torturer, I like facilitating awesomeness.

Anyhow, rolling went well thanks to Jesse and his suspiciously well rolling dice. I had pre-rolled a Human Sorcerer, Jesse rolled up a Dragonborn Sorcerer, Dan rolled a Half-Orc Barbarian, and Chris had a Minotaur Warden. We were all members of a nomadic group of nomads, traveling travelers if you will. We were headed North with our 11 wagons to begin the Spring portion of our trading and festivalling with the cities there. We used Jesse's large 1" grid pad of paper, and I had cut out 2x3 'wagons' the night before. Each wagon was pulled by an ox. Despite their appearances. Although I sometimes wish I had 11 Large Oxen in my minis collection, I used what I had.

Due to some unforeseen delays during their trip the caravan was running late. The sun was setting when they drew within sight of their first city. A few moments later three individuals emerged from the brush. They were quite disturbed that the caravan had arrived just now and told them that for their own safety they needed to turn around right now and not come back. Unfortunately, time was not on the side of the party, and with the sun going down and these people insisting that they did *not* want to be here after dark, the party was left with no choice but to circle the wagons.

I let them arrange the wagons in a circle however they wanted. Jesse did it, and chose to leave the animals near their wagons to aid in a quick getaway. This seemed like a bright idea at the time, but was in hindsight not so great. One of the folks who had leaped out ran off to get help from the farmstead where they all stayed, and the others watched the road to the town nervously.

Sure enough, the sun had gone down but the sky was still purple with sunset when some creatures burst into sight. Two wererats, two human rogues, and two rats attacked the caravan. Right away there were problems. Dan, who is sometimes a spotty roller (I know, its the dice. It is random. There is no outside force. It is not his or anyone else's fault. But this happened with the first edition of Arlarond in our current campaign. Sometimes he is hot, and sometimes cold. Right now our melee striker was cold) was rolling on the low side, and my wild sorcerer only rolled even when he rolled like, 6es, and that was pretty often. Jesse's Dragonborn Sorcerer was the Dragon build and had quite a bit of success. He had Con problems like my sorcerer and getting close to do damage was dangerous, but he did quite well.

It was those damned wererats and their regeneration. At low levels that is such a tough thing to overcome. After the rats and wererats had breached the perimeter and killed the two outsider NPC's, as well as a couple oxen, they managed to infect Dan and Jesse's PC's with filth fever. For a one shot this is not world-ending, but since Jesse only had something like 4 surges to begin with it was kind of. . . mean of them. The next stage of the disease only triggered on an extended rest, so I though we would be safe for the rest of the session. It is not like you can get *double* filth fever.

I deliberately did not mention Chris' Warden because I want to separate him from the rest of the riffraff. He was stellar. I outlaw the oversized weapon property when I run, so it was not that, it was his huge pool of HP's and his AC of 19. He was pretty much invulnerable. He only got to activate his mark once or twice, but it was his powers that healed him and his daily. . .I'm getting ahead of myself. Also, more foreshadowing: they found a couple glass vials of silver used to coat weapons for combat against lycanthropes.

With no locals left to give them any sort of direction they party healed up (nobody chose a Leader, so the caravan included a few herbalists and lore masters who healed them between encounters. In a low magic way) and waited. A few more commoners arrived and told them what was up. Awhile ago the city was besieged by these huge rats, and their bites turned the victims feral. A few people sought refuge outside the city and kept their location as secret as they could.

Some of them took turns watching the road and warning travelers away. They hoped to complete their ultimate weapon and kill the source of this infestation, and the caravan had arrived with just the tools they needed to complete the job. They had build a huge ballista, with a bolt made of silver. All they needed was a bit more silver and the opportunity to fire it and they could end this all. Jesse went to work preparing his wagon for the ballista.

After a few hours they were attacked again. This time, rather than just a group of scouts, the attack was intended to cripple or kill the caravan entirely. The fire elemental marks the location of the large bonfire they kept roaring in hopes of keeping the enemies at bay. Jesse also mounted torches on the outside of all the wagons, keeping the whole area illuminated.

The first attack was a pack of Dire Rats and 2 feral halflings with slings. From the shadows around the caravan glittery eyes watched, and a few rushed from the sides. Jesse, Dan, and Chris all focused on the main attack, and I had the rear all by myself. The halflings were deadly, and could launch 3 stones each when their power recharged. Chris closed with them, and they would shift back and hit him again. So he used his daily. In addition to giving him another point of AC, it made all the spaces within 2 of him difficult terrain. No more shift-attacks for them. Dan took out the two minions on his side, raged, and charged at the main pack of rats. He had a power that added 7 temp HP each time it connected, and these rats broke their teeth on that temp HP.

Meanwhile, I was getting harassed. . .by two crappy little rat minions. 16 HP and a super low AC meant that I was just meat waiting to be eaten. I kept shift-attacking, but could not land a hit. These are *minions*, all I needed to do was hit them. Jeez. Chris, who was playing his defender to the hilt withdrew from the halflings and charged across the battlefield to save me.

He arrived just in time to help me kill them, and killed one of the rat minions on the way. The consequence was dire, though. The halflings, now free to sling stones again, turned their wrath on Jesse and Dan. The NPC's had long since died. They were soon joined by Dan's character. He went to negative HP's and fell. This is not the first time this same Half-Orc barbarian had died quickly in an unheroic fashion. His first appearance was as a an NPC in a 3.5 game run by Dan. Josh convinced him to scout ahead with a glowing falchion, and he was pin cushioned when he rounded a corner. The picture shows Dan, dead (the Ramborc) and the dead NPC's.

While Dan rolled dice for his next PC we struggled to finish the fight with us as winners. Most of the rats had died, and only one minon remained (whiffing as he tried to chew the leg off of an ox). Chris once again shut the halflings down and we won.

Dan rolled up a Halfling Bard and was filling in the numbers as dawn approached. An hour or so before daybreak the rest of the survivors showed up. They had the broken down ballista strapped their backs, and three of them helped Jesse mount it on the top of his wagon. Three more went to work smelting the silver to try and cover the rest of the ballista bolt.

Again, like clockwork, the rats attacked before the party was ready. I prefaced the attack with a metagame discussion. The rats and feral humanoids were all minions. The Large mini was the Rat mother, gravid with young. The NPC's told the party they needed at least one more minute to finish setting things up. The party had to protect the caravan for 10 rounds. NPC's are minions, too, and each one that dies lengthens the challenge. Firing the ballista is an auto-win, so the goal was to protect.

I underestimated the lure of killing minions. Jesse rushed in with his area attacks and killed quite a few in the first round. We all did our best to wipe out minions in the first round. The next round, 4 more appeared on our flank. The round after that 4 more appeared. With everyone in the same spot they just walked right in to the camp.

Of course, the Rat Mother was not just sitting back an allowing it to happen. She had reach, and as soon as she could, she grabbed Chris and kept him from going anywhere (for one round at least), and mauled the crap out of Jesse. This is where I took the picture. Jesse is bleeding out. The camp is filled with minions (The fiery bird thing is the ballista, and the elemental is the fire. The pale dude with the stick is me, and the halfling there is Dan. Chris is the Minotaur. Jesse is the blue dude lying down at the top.) Jesse shouted to one of our friends to grab the vial of silver from Dan's character and just dump it over the bolt. He went to do it and was flanked by two minions. I was almost dead. Minons kept arriving, swarming the wagon and killing our helpers there. Our friend managed to get the silver, get it on the bolt, and run it to Chris. All while being attacked. The other helper rolled an assist to help Dan take his second wind, and he used his multi-class cleric power to heal Jesse. They were both beat down again, however, leaving Chris as the sole remaining PC. He climbed up to the ballista. Rats were swarming up the front, clawing at him from the rear, and he rolled the shot.

And he hit. The bolt smashed through the Rat Mother. The remaining minions went into a frenzy and began tearing each other apart. Chris was able to go and save his teammates.

Chris is the only PC in that picture. He was swarmed.

That was all. I thought that will all new classes and no handy power cards we would take a lot longer to get through the encounters. It turns out that when half of the PC's are bleeding out combat goes pretty quickly.

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I feel less need to separate my random thoughts from the narrative with these one shot write-ups, but I still have a few things to ruminate on.

Here is the invincible rat mother

Clearly, either the party would have had to focus fire on her or go through my hoops to kill her. Her tactics, which she stuck to, were to stand back and use all of her actions to command minions. When she was approached she used frenzy and grabbed the defender to keep him from helping his friends and clawed the crap out of Jesse. Later in the fight she was dazed by me, which was a help.

She was a Soldier. I don't like that. This is what triggered my rant last week. In the end it really does not matter, but it can still bother me.

The Warden was sweet. Not so much for his marking, which we didn't really see, but because of his powers. They kept him standing. They kept the ranged enemies locked down. He had probably as much HP as the rest of the party. And the highest AC. Very cool. My Sorcerer was fun, but I only chose that build because of the numbers I had. I hate the random aspect. Jesse's build seemed cooler on paper, but is kind of scary. Low AC and lots of powers with close range is a disaster waiting to happen. Proper coordination with a defender should mitigate this somewhat, but I'm not sure I would jump to play one. . .yet. The Barbarian seemed fun. More rages to choose from will be cool, and higher levels where he can just about rage every fight will be nice.

The Bard was disappointing. Granted, he was only up for 1/2 of a fight. Less than 6 rounds. But, when you need a leader most is when you are bleeding on the ground, and the Bard just did not pull through there. Maybe the preview info we had was glitched or wrong, but there was not class ability that healed. His powers were cool, kind of. His at will that enabled him to mark for an ally has so many uses, and skill challenges or non-combat encounters will be his bread and butter. I was really hoping for a viable Bard as a class, not so much for my sake, but for Dan's sake. He wants it. When 4e came out my standard for it not sucking was the Half-Elf Bard also not sucking. Please don't suck Half-Elf Bard, not like 3.5.

So . . .the $64,000 question. . .is 4e gritty? It can be. Even with magic and fantastic races (Dragonborn Sorcerer is not gritty) I think we had a gritty feel. Low magic enemies and no magic gear helps. I think a campaign that attempted gritty would be well served by limiting classes or power sources. Swordmages would be out, but I think Artificers properly flavored would fit in well. Limiting the party to humans might work well, too. Keep magic items out and just give static bonuses to compensate. Rolling dice though. . .I think playing a character long term might make it less viable. Limit point buy to 18 or something if you really want to keep power down. No 20's for starting stats. As much as I hate houserules (I have one 4e houserule, no oversized weapons) for gritty to work you might have to consider some.

Next week should see the continuation of our main campaign. . .

Jay

Monster roles vs Player roles

2009-02-19T11:42:00.000-07:00

I want to look at the roles as defined by the game. First, Player roles:

Controller: Offensive characters who specialize in dealing damage to multiple foes or causing status effects.
Defender: High defense and good close up offense. They have powers that make it difficult to ignore them.
Leader: Inspire, heal, aid, and protect your allies, also has good defenses.
Striker: Deal high amounts of damage to a single target at a time.

Monster Roles:

Artillery: Do primarily ranged damage and protected well from ranged attacks.
Brute: High damage, low hit rate. High hit points, low defenses.
Controller: Manipulate enemies and the battlefield, inflict conditions on their adversaries.
Lurkers: Avoids attacks and deals high damage when they attack.
Minion: Cannon fodder.
Skirmisher: High mobility attackers, they are the baseline combat statistics for monsters.
Soldier: Low damage, high hit rate. Average hit points, high defenses. The opposite of Brutes. Have abilities that draw an enemies' fire.

They have three roles that they can have in addition to the others:

Elite: Two times as tough as a regular monster
Solo: Equal opponent of an entire party. Note that even though a Solo monster also has another role, but it must be able to function alone so the role is not as important for a Solo.
Leader: In addition to the functions of its main role, leaders grant bonuses and abilities to their allies. Unlike Elites or Solos, being a Leader does not increase the XP value of a monster.

Some of the player roles have direct analogues in the monster roles. Artillery, Lurkers, Brutes, and Skirmishers are all focused on damage dealing. This makes a lot of sense. Player roles exist as a way to facilitate teamwork. They present clear duties in combat with strengths built into the class. The DM has no need to co-operate with himself so the roles are different. Rather than a role defined as 'deal damage to one target', he should have roles defined by how he is using the monster. His Strikers need to be defined by how they deliver damage.

Defenders are almost a direct analogue to Soldiers. They have the same duties in combat, and some of the same strengths and weaknesses. Interestingly the player role of Controller is shared by Artillery and Controller monsters. The monster Controller says nothing about dealing damage to multiple foes, but instead is more focused on altering the battle in different ways.

Which brings us to Leaders. The player and monster definitions of Leaders are similar, but it is impossible to make a pure leader using the monster's roles. Your monster will be Brute (Leader), or more commonly Controller (Leader). This is unusual to me. If I were to make up an NPC Cleric focused on healing and supporting the other NPC's on his side, he would have to occupy some other role in the scheme before he became a Leader. Even more interesting, if I were to create a monster out of whole cloth that had a Cleric-like feel without using an established monster, I would need to choose one of the other main roles to base his stats on. Attack bonus, Defenses, hit points, these are all based on the six monster roles (excluding minions, of course). Adding a Leader template does not change the base stats at all.

Granted, creating a monster is less about his stats and scores, which can be tweaked to your liking anyhow, and more about the powers you pick. Still, I find it odd that there is no base monster role geared towards support. Say you want to make up a goblin shaman who heals in a different way than the cleric class. You create some cool powers appropriate for his level. He has a basic attack, and a suite of powers that heal and buff his allies. What role is he? By the book he is not a controller. By the book, he doesn't have a role. Your best bet is to call him Artillery or Soldier and ignore it from there.

My point is that the role system is great for finding and categorizing the monsters in the Monster Manual. How you use them, however, does not have to be in a rigid manner prescribed by the book. Just like player roles are flexible, monster roles do not have do define them wholly. Creating fighters who have high damage potential like strikers, or swordmages who have controller like abilities is easy and often done. Breaking the role's rigidity is par for the course, and will become easier as more books are released.

I hope you all excuse this self indulgent rant. A light bulb went off and I felt the need to put into words the mental block I had overcome. Questions or comments are welcome!

Jay

2/7 Actual Play: Southember

2009-02-18T11:07:00.000-07:00

Some additions this session!

Sambrielle the Halfling Warlord, played by Jes
Zamir the Genasi Swordmage, played by Chris

This is in addition to our usual crowd:

Therryk played by Jay
Arlarond played by Dan
Lucan played by Colin
Ana played by Colin (Chelsea had something *better* than gaming)
Jesse ran again...

We picked up where we left off last time, having stripped the bodies of anything useful. We were told by Troap to remain where we were until noon. There was some paranoia about a probable attack, but we elected to wait, and give him the benefit of the doubt.

At around noontime a goblin with a hand mirror approached us. When he entered the glade, lightning struck from the mirror to his face, and we saw Troap's face appear over the original goblin's. He told us that we might have some success talking with the gnolls. They are slavers, primarily, and are upset that orcs keep killing what they see as potential slaves. He gave us a claw to show to the gnolls, and the goblin fell to the ground, dead.

We decided to heed his advice, and Scrag leads us to the gnoll encampment. As expected, the gnolls were mistrustful of our intentions at first, but when we showed them the claw they took us to see a leader.

Troap had arranged help for us, two valuable slaves. We are introduced to Sambrielle the halfling warlord and Zamir the genasi swordmage. Sambrielle was part of a unit of guards from fallcrest in the area, and did not think any of her companions had survived. Zamir was a wandering sage, exploring the Fens when he was captured to be sold. While it is understood that we do not intend to keep them in slavery, in order to not upset our hosts, we kept up the illusion that they were our slaves.

We were led to an island of forest in the midst of the gnoll camp. Under the boughs of a large tree a tent had been erected. Inside the tent were the leaders of the gnolls. Much about the nature of the legion is clarified at this point, and we took time to draw out a flowchart in parchment in an attempt to understand the power structures.

Despite our relatively warm welcome, the gnolls were not as willing as the goblins to desert the legion. The told us of the gnome revolt. Some time in the recent past, the gnomes had revolted, believing that the others of the legion would join them when they broke away. Instead, they were slaughtered and the survivors split up as slaves for the remaining factions. The gnolls did not want this to happen to them, understandably.

In an attempt to 'talk shop' with the gnoll slavers, Therryk inadvertently learns of some Eladrin slaves here, in the gnoll camp. The gnolls were holding six Eladrin, one of them a powerful fighter. We negotiated a price for them, and purchased the Eladrin (and one Kobold). We had no real leads on where we should go next, so we felt like this was a good opportunity to return these Eladrin to their home. In order to control them, the gnolls had put their eyes out, and we led the crippled men and women to their home.

The eladrin city, Southember was a shadow of it's former glory. As we approached we saw the ruined fortifications that did not fade into the Feywild with the rest of the city. Even though the swamp had not yet managed to erase the beauty of nature from the city proper, it was abandoned and the outer parts had fallen into disuse and disrepair. We were allowed to speak with Kerlos, and brought into the center of Southember.

They were happy that we had brought their people back, but somewhat disturbed that we had bought them as slaves, giving the gnolls more gold to use in their war effort. The whole approach we were using, of attempting to break the Legion from within, was derided by the Eladrin that we spoke with. They counted 60 of their people missing or killed so far. The efforts to translate the Orcish Prophesy had not been tremendously successful, but there was some talk of a Therming Stone, an artifact supposedly kept in the South, and what we could to to derail the plans of the Red Champion.

We did share what we knew of the power situation with them, and offered our help in protecting the city. Kerlos had a job for us right away, luckily, and the next morning we left in a wagon for an Eladrin outpost. Many of the supply trains had been lost recently, and in attempt to draw the ambushers out we were posing as a lone supply wagon traveling to an outlying hold of the Eladrin.

We got within about 15 feet of the gate when we were ambushed by orcs. As often happens, we got strung out early and spent the fight trying to get back together:

The post-it represents our wagon with all non-eladrin or elf looking folk hiding under the silk canopy (only Eladrin. . .). As soon as the trap is sprung Lucan and Ana charge forward, and Sambrielle climbs up on the wall. The other two defenders are still waiting in the wagon.

With us strung out like that the two Hobgoblins fighting Ana shout the signal and slam the gate shut. From it's recess in the wall it slides out and crushes her against the opposite wall. Sambrielle leaps down to protect her friend, and the rest of the party is not far behind. Therryk clambers over the wall and leaps down with an attack to help protect Ana. Zamir places his mark on the other one, preparing to teleport through when he can.
Lucan struggles to get over the wall, but eventually the three defenders get into play and keep the heat off of Ana, allowing her to be pulled from danger. The Orc caster who was on the roof of the building disappears inside, and then appears at a window cursing us constantly with an armor debuff. Another group of orcs charges from the building and engages us. By now we have marginal control of the battle, and Arlarond is able to conjure a huge storm of Ice over the orcs, marked by the blue corners.
The new orcs are not minions like the earlier ones, and do not go down easily. The two hobgoblins (Soldiers) have high enough AC and low enough to hit that Therryk and Zamir spend several rounds whiffing back and forth with them. In that time Lucan dances through the orcs, stabbing with his trident and marking most of them. In a rush to get at Arlarond, who is laying down copious amount of damage, they provoke attack after attack, and only one manages to get through. He gets over the wall and goes after the caster.

The orcs begin to fall, and one of the hobgoblins finally goes down, leaving Lucan free to charge into the building at the caster.

Arlarond manages to finish off the orc in his face, and the final hobgoblin drops, leaving the orc in the window facing all of us alone. He is forced from the window by Lucan, but manages to grab the windowsill on his way out. Lucan stabs his trident into his hand and into the wood below it, pinning him there. Zamir's sword flashes with lightning and the caster is forcibly yanked down and across the battlefield to his feet...

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This is what I get for waiting too long to do this. 11 days and spotty notes means that much of this may not be exact or as detailed as it could be. We did not play last week due to the Valentine's Day conflict.

I abbreviated a lengthy amount of conversing at the gnoll camp. We went back and forth and over things multiple times, and came away with the sketch I posted here. It may be illegible due to it's rushed nature and cruddy picture, so I'll attempt interpretation:
11 o'clock - Splinterpaw Gnolls, slavers and members of the Legion of the Chimera.
12 o'clock - Gnomes, former members of the Legion of the Chimera and now slaves primarily held by the gnolls.
10 o'clock - Your guess is as good as mine...
8 o'clock - White Hills Goblins, led by Troap, and current members of the Legion of the Chimera
6 o'clock - Lizardfolk, members of the Legion of the Chimera, their numbers and affiliations are unknown.
5 o'clock - Children of the Five - Kobolds, members of the Legion of the Chimera and loyal to the orcs and their cause.
3 o'clock - Bloodspear Orcs - led by the Chunagarat (Red Champion in Orcish), the core of the Legion of the Chimera, they number at least 200.
Center - Drow - members of the legion of the Chimera, their numbers and affiliations are unknown.
2 o'clock - Your guess is as good as mine...
There are other goblin tribes, the total number of goblins is around 400, and the remaining allies number between 500-1000. That is a grand total of 1,100-1,600 in their army.
There was also some discussion about why Therryk wanted to buy a slave. I really tried to approach his alignment from his past as a ne'er-do-well, and as a Paladin of the god of civilization. From *his* prospective, slaves are a necissary evil. For most humanoids slavery is a way of life, and he has no problem as long as it benefits his God's ultimate goals.

So he bought a Kobold slave. Nominally to gather info, but also because of a bit of roleplaying. Plus, we now have one more on our list of replacement PC's:
The Graygrinder children
A sailor on the Dragon's Bane
Scrag
Unnamed Kobold

And I do love Kobolds so. The next session should be on the 28th, this week I am running a one-shot low magic first level game with some of the preview classes available. Hopefully it goes well...

Jay

1/31 Actual Play: Regime Change

2009-02-03T11:12:00.000-07:00

The regular crew was in attendance:

Jay: Therryk, a dragonborn paladin
Dan: Arlarond, a human wizard
Colin: Lucan, an elven fighter
Chelsea: Ana, a half elven cleric
Jesse: Jesse, a human DM

We began the session by releasing the gnolls we interrogated last session. It was decided that we should let someone know of what we have learned, and Therryk somewhat uncharacteristically had a good idea, and we went into town to talk to Arlarond's master about it. Therryk felt that including Lord Markelhay automatically made it official, which might be bad.

The Book that the Gnolls were looking for, The Prophesies of the Orcish Crusades, was not in Lord Markelhay's library. We were able to learn a scrap of information about it, however, that guided our next few decisions. The only known translation out of the original tongue was done by an Eladrin scholar, Solitare. All roads lead to the Eladrin, so that is the next destination for our heroes.

We return to the Moonstone keep with Ana to tell her father that this plot appears to have some real substance. Instead of random marauding orcs, this looks to be an organized movement with clear goals. According to the Gnoll we interrogated, the ultimate success for the Legion of the Chimera would be the eradication of civilized peoples in the Vale.

Lord Markelhay and Kerlos are aware of some of the threat, and Kerlos was already planning on going back to the Fens to help with preparations and to discuss the situation with Fallcrest. He had made an arrangement with Lord Markelhay to allow for labor sharing in the quarries. The two communities would work together pulling stone from the earth to build fortifications. Whether the sides would later try to tear each other's fortifications down will remain to be seen.

Lord Markelhay gives his blessing to journey to the Eladrin city, and we join with Kerlos and his remaining men the next day. The swiftest method is to take a boat downriver and then cross overland through the swamps. We go to our usual boat, and find that it's captain has renamed it Dragon's Bane.

The journey takes days, and the antsy party passes time by maintaining their fighting form with the crew. Kerlos indicates when it is time for us to disembark, and we begin the overland portion of our travels. He is skilled at navigating the treacherous terrain, and the travelling is swift. Two oddities are observed during our travels. The first is odd lights that appear in the sky. We are warned by Kerlos that legend tells that the lights will steal your soul if you stare too long. The other is a shimmering curtain hanging in the air. As we approach, Kerlos tells us that they are what remains of the former beauty of the land, curtained off from the decay by some unknown means. They are rare and shrinking as time wears on. He suggests that as night is falling, it might make a good resting place.

We set up camp in the middle of this island in the muck, and appreciate the quality that allows us to see out and prevents observers from seeing through the shimmering curtain. Partway through the night we are awoken by Kerlos. One of his men scouting the area discovered a small group of goblins travelling past us. We immediately prepare for battle, despite his wish that we just follow them and discover the location of their camp.

Battle is opened with Arlarond fireballing the 5 goblins. It ends there too, as they all drop to the assault and begin sinking in the brackish water. We are able to rescue 3 of them, and bring them back to our camp to question them.

We awaken the seeming leader of the troupe, and begin to ask questions. His name is Scrag, and when he is assured that we have slain his companions (to prevent them from ratting him out for squealing) he was very forthcoming about his intentions and what he knew of the plans of his tribe.

The White Hills Goblins are native to beautiful white hills far to the West. They were directed by the legion to come to the stinking Witchlight Fens. Scrag was not happy with the decision, and was willing to help us return to his camp and possibly allow his people to return home. He holds no position of authority, but was chosen to lead the scouting group simply because of his ability to return home. They were scouting out another goblin camp, not the Eladrin city. It appeared to us that the Legion might be showing a few cracks.

Kerlos and his men took the two surviving goblins back to their city, and we followed Scrag through the swamp for the rest of the night. We began to appreciate the skill with which Kerlos led us through the region. Scrag seemed to find pits of much as deep as he was tall, and briers and brambles. After a brief confusion where we thought he might be lost, we sighted a hill in the near distance, and he pronounced us home. He assured us that showing a white flag was a sign of peace even to goblins, and that we would be given the opportunity to speak if we presented one.

Scrag led the Heroes of Fallcrest into the squalid goblin camp. Aside from a hastily build structure at the peak of the hill, the goblins were all living in tents and other makeshift shelter. Since it was early yet, he offered to let us sleep in his tent until their boss woke up. He cooked us 'soup', which was as disturbing as you can imagine, and pampered us in similar fashion until we are allowed to speak with the goblin boss.

His name is Troap, and he is rumored to be a shaman or sorcerer of great ability. We are led to the building at the top of the hill and led inside. In the corners are four goblins with blank eyes and short swords. The situation begins to fall apart rather quickly. It turns out that the White Hills goblins are led not by one chieftain, but by a few different goblins, and Troap is but one, and this is just his camp of goblins. Each leader has his own camp filled with goblins, and even if Troap were to dislike the Legion as much as Scrag, which he doesn't, he can't speak for the whole tribe.

Redemption comes with a proposition to Troap. If we eliminate the other goblins leaders and allow him to be set up as the sole Chief of the tribe, he agrees to lead them from the Fens. It is decided that we will wait in ambush for a meeting of the leaders of the tribe, and slay them all. We all grab a chain and Arlarond creates the illusion of manacles. We are led from the village by Scrag, apparently to be sold to the Gnoll slavers. In reality, we go to one of the curtained off islands and prepare for an ambush. After nearly a day waiting we are informed via an animal messenger that the meeting is set for midnight.

We set up for the ambush. Arlarond has learned a new ritual that he can ward creatures away with, so we set up with Scrag at the top of a tree, Arlarond below him, and Ana at the base, and ward the whole area against goblins attacking. His ritual is performed beautifully, and we are sure that they will be reasonably protected. Lucan and Therryk climb trees and wait, hiding, for our victims to show up.

This is after the surprise round. The Christmasy character at the top is a Hobgoblin leader who came accompanied by two skeletons. To the right is a goblin fighter with 4 retainers. The fellow in the middle is Troap, who came alone. On the left is a goblin caster with 4 gnomish slaves. Therryk was spotted right away and the surprise round had he and Lucan leaping from their perches to attack the leaders of their respective groups:
- The Hobgoblin seemed like the biggest threat so Lucan and Arlarond concentrated on him. He died quickly.
- The warding against our attackers did not protect against undead or fey, so our plan lost some of its appeal when the skeletons walked right past the black line.
- Two of the Gnomes snapped rods in two and a large monster made of muck rose from the swamp. It was a Wichlight Mire Golem.
- From his protected position Arlarond rained down his death in a more efficient fashion than normal. The goblin that Theryyk ended up fighting was accompanied by minions, and Arlarond cleaned them out quickly. He activated his flaming shroud and caught skeletons and the goblin caster who were too close for his liking.
- The caster was rough. He had an insect theme, summoning a scorpion to attack twice, and attacking our minds with visions of swarming, biting bugs.
- Lucan didn't end up straying far from where he started, either. The Hobgoblin went down, and the Golem stepped right up and went toe to toe with him the rest of the fight.
- The Golem had several nasty abilities. He could create mucky difficult terrain right underneath you, and then got a bonus to his melee attacks against enemies in difficult terrain. He went twice a round, too, which might have seemed like a good idea at first but...
- Lucan had his deadly trident aura up, and Ana summoned her Consecrated ground, meaning that twice a round they were doing automatic damage to the Golem.

- The fire shroud killed of the skeletons, and Ana sparred with the last Gnome, but the real battle was the Golem and the Goblin caster.
- Getting the Golem bloodied did not take as long as killing it, and the caster recharged his scorpion power. Ana was keeping Lucan propped up, since he was the focus of most of the hits from both of the big assailants.
- When the Golem went down the caster made a break for it, but the ongoing fire damage from the fire shroud took him down after only a couple rounds of running.

We ended there....

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Once again we derailed the DM's plans pretty fiercely. Luckily this is all part of the joy of playing in a sandboxy game. Jesse handled it super without a hitch, though I think we all knew that no DM plans on his PC's entering into that kind of negotiation with a goblin tribe. That is what made it fun.

The highlight for me was Jesse statting up a Mire Golem like the Gravel Golem that I threw at them a few sessions ago. It is just that kind of internal consistency that makes a world fun to play in. Rotating DM's does not seem to be ruining this at all. If I had to guess, I'd say that we are going out of the way to include stuff from other campaigns, leading to above average internal consistency. That is just my opinion, perhaps other multi-DMed campaigns have suffered the opposite problem.

I am enjoying this chance to get to roleplay Therryk a little better. I still struggle from making him too flat in the beginning. Next level begins the deepening with my second multiclass feat, this one moving me into retraining some Warlord powers. It is 100% clear to me that paragon multiclassing is not more *powerful*, but I am more concerned about depth, at this point. I am willing to sacrifice power for utility, for sure. Strength Paladins suffer a lot with this. Take a look at what I can do right now at 5th level:
- Holy Strike - Radiant Damage
- Valiant Strike - Damage, better chance to hit

- Radiant Smite - Radiant Damage
- Staggering Smite - Damage and push

- Paladin's Judgement - Damage and heal
- Martyr's Retribution - Damage

- Martyr's Blessing - Protect an adjacent ally from damage

I understand that you could make say. . .a ranger that has little else to offer besides damage, my issue is that Strength Paladins have such a dearth of powers to choose from, and the ones they have are bland. Neither At-will has an effect. What is that about?! Bah.

Here's hoping Divine Power fixes this a bit, and that Therryk is still around to benefit from it. That's right, with all my apparent self hatred, I do like playing him, and he is useful as a damage sponge, healer, and off-striker. He has good AC, reasonable HP's considering his mediocre con, lots of surges, and does fancy damage on occasion.

I'll see if Jesse has the stats on that Golem for me to post. Colin and Chelsea took some pics, too, so maybe I'll make a second post, an update to this one later.

Jay

Failure is the Spice of Life

2009-01-28T21:15:00.000-07:00

As luck would have it my search for a blogging topic was jump started by this article I found through the wonderful RPG Blogger's Network, of which I am a junior grade member.

I'll wait while you go and read it. Go ahead, it's short.

I really got kind of excited trying to think of a creative answer to his post. His campaign world just got a lot more complicated. While complication does not always directly correlate to excitement, in this case, and in a lot of cases, it can. I began to realize that this is not the only situation where failure was a good thing...

Star Wars

While the original series is full of triumphs for the PC's, it also has it's failures. Half of The Empire Strikes back, my personal favorite, is a direct consequence of Han Solo failing his Mechanics roll and stranding the Millennium Falcon in normal space. The heroes still win in the end.
The biggest failure, however, the one that makes the series possible, is Anakin Skywalker's fall to the dark side and betrayal of the Jedi.

On the surface, this is not a good example for a role playing hook, but consider the string of failures, starting from Episode I, that I can think of right now:
- Obi-Wan and Qui Gonn fail to defeat the droids and get to the bridge, forcing the trade federation to sign a treaty and forestalling the war.
- Yoda failed in his battle against the Emperor.
- Leia failed to deliver the Death Star plans to Obi-Wan.
- Luke failed his rescue of Han and Leia, and loses a hand.
- The rebels fail in their assault of the shield bunker, and are only saved by the introduction of several key NPC's.

I am only highlighting failures that could arise in a similar situation in a role playing game. Did your players fail an encounter that was a lynch pin of the storyline? Perhaps they will need to take the story in a different direction.

Lord of the Rings

Gandalf's failure to recognize the ring for what it is does not really apply to this discussion, nor does Isildur's failure to destroy the ring waaay before the events of the 3rd age that we are familiar with begin.

The largest failure is the encounter where Boromir dies. Admittedly the sheer number of orcs makes me think it is above their level a bit, but regardless it derailed the story somewhat, and split the fellowship. This is the kind of consequence that can destroy a party. The group most likely to be PC's (thanks Shamus!) goes on an entirely different quest to rescue their friends captured in the attack. A perfect resolution for a failed encounter.

The other group fails their skill challenge in traveling through the wilderness and gets captured, and has to succeed in a more difficult skill challenge where they lose one of their PC's. Assuming Gollum is a PC. He is actually representative of a few PC's I have seen...

To avoid this post becoming too long to read I'll stop the movie examples there. Failure is a great opportunity to change the tone of the game, and to bring in an element that you might feel is missing in your games. In our own game which is well documented here, failure could have drastically changed the direction of the game at several key times:
- The first adventure was a success with the defeat of the Necromancer. Had he escaped, the party would have one more powerful enemy in their Rogues Gallery.
- Our fight with the necrotic essence in the strange catacombs under the Giant's Temple could have unleashed a dark presence on the region, had we failed, or exacerbated the problem.
- Our most recent adventure could have ended with a war.

What about you? Any failures that ended up becoming the beginning of a new adventure?

Jay

1/24 Actual Play: Scooby Doo

2009-01-24T22:55:00.000-07:00

Bit of a change this session:

Jesse DMed and did not play much of Halma, as will be seen in the write up.
Chelsea playing Ana the Half Elf Cleric
Colin playing Lucan the Elf Fighter
Dan playing Arlarond the Human Wizard
Josh playing Kithieren the Eladrin Swordmage
Jay playing Therryk the Dragonborn Paladin

We picked up right where we left off last session. The party had just defeated the Eladrin in combat and we moved to check for survivors. We were able to subdue 5 of them, and 2 died. The mage who got a thrown axe to the head and the rogue who burned to death both did not make it. Three keep guards were killed as well. Kerlos was obviously disturbed, but resumed his conversation with Lord Markelhay and ordered his guards to keep this quiet for now. The dwarven steward of the keep and one trusted guard moved the fallen out of sight for now and kept watch on the upper level.

Lucan arranged a barricade of the top floor. The talk of goblins in the area had him a bit paranoid, and he clued the rest of the group in on what he was told just prior to the fight. The goblin attack would also make a good scapegoat for the three dead guards. Arlarond went back home to let his master know what happened, and found out that several goblins had attacked the tower, as well. It was clear now that something else was going on besides regular demihuman aggression. Halma suggested that perhaps the goblins were getting in through some old smuggling tunnels in the bluffs.

After a group meeting it was decided to meet back at the keep in the morning to be present for the interrogation of the surviving Eladrin. Therryk returned to his quarters in the temple of Erathis. Ana stayed in the keep. Halma returned to his rented room at the Lucky Gnome. Arlarond went to his tower for the night. Lucan, however, was feeling the effects of the recent goblin attacks. He decided to wander the streets for a few hours and keep an eye out for suspicious things.

After it got dark, he found something suspicious. He saw a figure trying to hide in the bushes. He called out and it tried to flee. He easily caught up to the cloaked figure, and discovered it was a young human woman. She claimed she was in the bushes looking for a place to pee. Lucan believed her, but still took her in, since she was out late and that was suspicious and all. He arrived at the prison and was not happy to see that Constable Blackshield was the one on duty that night. He locked her in a cell and took the keys with him when he left.

The next morning we all met at the keep. All except Halma. He left us a note. Something came up and he would be in Hammerfast for at least a few weeks. We descended a few floors into the dungeon into a part of the keep seemingly dating from the war. We glimpsed a torture chamber, and had to be let through a double set of curtains to get to the Eladrin part of the prison. Kerlos and Lord Markelhay had reached an agreement the previous evening. Kerlos told his men that they had the option of returning to his service or leaving now and going home. Three of them decided to stay here under Kerlos. One remained silent and refused to answer. The last one just wanted to be free. He didn't want to return home or to stay as a vassal of Kerlos. He was granted his freedom.

Arlarond spoke to this Eladrin, whose name was Kithieren, and proposed that he might enjoy adventuring with us. He had no interest at first, but after several minutes of discussion capped off with a sparring match with Therryk he decided to remain with us for a share of the treasure.

Arlarond has a ritual he thinks will help us find the goblins. We go the the map room and he spends several minutes summoning a ghostly hand. The hand points to a spot in the back of the keep near the wall. We search the area, but only find the broken bones and equipment of the defeated goblin invaders. We determine that the ritual failed.

Our next bright idea is to ask the girl that Lucan found the night before. Ana recognized her as a small time entertainer who always seems to be living beyond her means. It doesn't take much to convince her to help us, and she gives us the entrance to a smugglers cave readily. We leave her locked up while we go and investigate.

The old warehouse near the falls does indeed hold a secret, a false wall that leads to some caves under the city. Arlarond sends the key back with a messenger, and we delve under the city, hoping to find some sign of the goblins. We find none.

The path we chose leads us underneath the upper quays and emerges outside the city walls, in an orchard to the north east. We trek back into the city to try the other tunnel we found. It is another fruitless search, this time coming to a dead end.

We decide to try the old catacombs under the city. Therryk knew of them from attending funeral rites for patrons of his church. No goblins were found there either.

Frustrated, after almost an entire day searching, we decide to let Arlarond try the ritual again. This time he asks and the hand points to an abandoned keep about an hour's walk north of town.

Kithieren thinks that our idea of adventuring is tame and boring. As the day comes to a close we might be inclined to believe him. We approach the keep from the west. The sun is setting behind our heads when we finally see signs of goblins. There are some figures moving on the towers of the keep.

As we get closer we realize that this is not just an abandoned keep, it is a ruined keep. The upper floor has fallen into the ground floor, leaving it inaccessible. Goblins are everywhere on the top of this keep, which is now only about 5 feet off of the ground. The towers are still standing, but that is about all. We get as close as we can get under cover of an overgrown orchard, and then rush the building:

The tree line is to the left, with the goblins all massed on the roof of the building to the right. The square is a tower, 30 feet high. Kithieren is the one in front, he just ran to the corner there. Therryk was only able to get partway across in the surprise round. The rest of the PC's have yet to act:
- Kithieren shows off his fey heritage by teleporting to the top of the tower and attacking the goblins there.
- Lucan uses his trident to vault himself up onto the crumbling structure. He is such a badass.
- Arlarond shows off his shiny new spell and fireballs the sleeping goblins. They are now awake and crispy on one side.
- Angry goblins swarm Lucan, surrounding him almost completely. He is delighted, since now he can use *his* brand new daily, one that pokes all the adjacent enemies with his trident.
- Ana keeps to the rear, healing and calling her god's favor down on the increasingly overextended heroes
- Therryk misses pretty much entirely, with both encounter powers and one daily, plus most at-wills. He is a non issue this fight.
- Gnolls appear behind the goblins from their concealment in the rubble. Two gnolls with bows begin shooting arrows at the closest members of the party, who also happen to be the surrounded members of the party, Lucan and Kithieren.
- Kithieren displays his teleportation and elemental mastery by pretty much going where he pleases and attacking multiple enemies.
- One such attack vaporized a goblin and damaged several others, allowing him to teleport to a more advantageous position.
- Ana consecrated a patch of ground and began moving it around the battlefield. Enemies that stayed too long began to get hurt, and hurt allies recovered their strength.
- Arlarond put a sheet of ice on the tower and the stairs, causing two goblins to fall to their deaths when they lost their footing.
- We began to turn the tide, despite Lucan falling and Kithieren becoming close to falling himself. Arlarond's impressive damage and Lucan's deadly aura made it an inevitable win for us.

- Blue rings are Lucan's mark, Orange is Kithieren's, and Pink would be Therryk's, if he had any. Red are bloodied.
- The last goblin bolted, and Lucan and Therryk chased him down. The two gnolls in the tower shooting arrows kept it up, but Arlarond conjured his flaming sphere in the room, and Ana moved her consecrated ground to cover the same area, and the arrows soon stopped.

The only gnolls to survive were the last two. We tied them up and set up camp to rest for the night. During the night one of them woke up and began howling and yelping, waking us up. He was stubborn, but we were able to reach an agreement. He told us all we wanted to know, and we let him go. He was upset with us for killing their goblin slaves. They had come here and sent their slaves into the city to steal some kind of book of prophecy. We discovered that his tribe was working with other tribes who call the Wichlight Fens their home. They made up something called the legion. We went back to sleep, anticipating a trip to the Fens first thing in the morning.

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It is rougher than I thought to do these as a player, coming from a few sessions as a DM. I didn't take the notes I should have...but I got pictures?

So these little notes might be shorter, since I don't have DMing feelings to share. I was disappointed in my character though. Utter fail as a *defender*. He would be a sub-par striker if he could hit with any sort of regularity. I do blame the dice. By the numbers, I should be more effective.

Having seen a swordmage in play for the first time, I am pretty impressed. Very high magic flavor and an effective suite of powers. Like, the opposite of a paladin. Okay, enough sour grapes, I promise. Eladrin seem to be destined to be swordmages, it seemed like Josh had a good time, too. Hope he is able to keep playing with us.

With no DMing in the near future for me, I have been thinking a lot about other aspects of roleplaying. Perhaps if I feel like any of those thoughts are in any way profound I'll post one or two. Perhaps.

Jay

1/17 Actual Play: Lots of answers, lots of questions. Kinda like Lost.

2009-01-21T14:21:00.000-07:00

Full house for this session:

Jay: the zombified (due to his DMPC status) Therryk, a Dragonborn Paladin/Warlord
Chelsea: Ana, the Half Elf Cleric of the Platinum God, and bastard daughter of Lord Markelhay
Jesse: Halma the Human Rogue and aged streetrat of Fallcrest
Colin: Lucan the Elven Fighter and self exiled former warrior for the proud elven tribes
Dan: Arlarond, Human Wizard with a back story ripe for exploitation by the DM

We picked things up right where we left off, after a short recap of recent events. The party, thinking to explore the now abandoned mine, approached the only structure there. When they get near it, an Eladrin steps through the Feywild and appears directly in front of them.

He introduces himself declares his intent to kill the party for what they have seen and done. Some back and forth diffuses the immediate tension, but whether or not killing will happen is far from certain. His associates open the door and saunter out of the cabin, and the party now faces 8 well armed and competent Eladrin warriors.

The leader of the Eladrin, who gives his name later as Kerlos, is very calm about informing the party that this quarry was theirs, and that they had no problem allowing the people of Fallcrest to use it for now. Eventually they would come and take what they wanted or needed from them. He agrees to go with the party to Fallcrest to discuss a possible non-violent end to this confrontation.

During the journey several conversations are had:
- Kerlos is not afraid to let the party know some small details about him and his people, as he does not fear them. His people have recently returned from the Feywild after a long absence, and were quarrying material to build fortifications for their city.
- He indicates that in the past his people had been in a conflict with the people of Fallcrest. Though many races make up the population of the city, he and his people refer to them as the Humans.
- In a conversation with an Eladrin wizard, Arlarond is mistaken for his master, indicating that the Eladrin know of him from the previous conflict.
- Kerlos' people aren't too keen on him doing this. They would like to just kill the party and get on with it.

The party makes it to the plains outside Fallcrest after a couple of day's travel and decided to enter the city in the morning. They think that Lord Markelhay might be inclined to harm or discredit the Eladrin, and that bringing them in with a fanfare, escorted by the Heroes of Fallcrest, might bring them some measure of protection.

Three things happen before they get back to Fallcrest:
- Halma sneaks into the city to spread the word that the heroes are returning. He goes straight to the docks and finds the crew of their ship. They are more than willing to help, and split up to cover more ground. He then goes to the Half-moon trading house, the clients that the Guild was recovering the goods for, and is able to determine that their belongings were returned.
- Arlarond is visited by his master and a mysterious outsider. A traveling circle appeared outside the camp shortly after dawn, and Nimozaran the Green and another robed figure step through. They pull Arlarond aside and speak with him. The party doesn't overhear anything, but they do witness the other man pulling his hood back. It is a warforged, with the holy symbol of Ioun emblazoned on his chest. Arlarond shares some of his new knowledge with the party
- While Arlarond is talking with his master, Ana sneaks away. She is conflicted and wants to give her father a heads up. She makes it into town, and is able to speak with her father.

Lord Markelhay is still hosting the Elven Lords that arrived during the Festival. He tells Ana that they have been telling her about the Eladrin returning, too, and that her report is enough to convince him of it's truth. He was certain that the Eladrin had 'sunk below the swamp', but where magic is concerned anything is possible. Ana tells him that the party believes that all the nasties that they have been fighting recently could all be part of a rift that is somewhere in the Wichlight Fens. She thinks that he should at least consider talking with these Eladrin, as Fallcrest can use all the help it can muster if there is another threat on the horizon. The Drow, the Undead cult, these marauding demihumans, and now Eladrin might be too much for Fallcrest to deal with on it's own. He agrees to speak with their leader.

She catches up with the party as they are traveling to the gates of Fallcrest and learns what the rest of the party learned from Arlarond. There is no rift.

At some point more than 30 years ago, but not much, the city of Fallcrest and an Eladrin settlement began fighting. The Eladrin claim that this conflict was because they are entitled to the Nentir Vale. The fighting escalated until the point where some cataclysm happened. The Eladrin completed some ritual designed to win them the war. In response, the wizards of the tower prepared a ritual to rob the Eladrin of their power. As Fey creatures they naturally chose a place to live that was beautiful and close to the Feywild. Nimozaran the Green earned his title be performing a ritual that destroyed the land around the Eladrin city, and shortly after that they disappeared.

Arlarond thinks, as do many who know of this war, that the Eladrin created the plague. His master stressed that there is no evidence of this. The plague is entirely natural, as far as he can tell. Despite their new suspicion they party decides to 'give peace a chance'. The Heroes of Fallcrest are greeted with a roaring crowd. The Lord has managed to get ceremonial guards onto the palisade, and constables keep the road clear enough for the party to make their way to the makeshift stage. The Elven lords are there, as is Lord Markelhay. Nimozaran is absent. Ana speaks first, and welcomes the Eladrin emissaries to their city. Lord Markelhay follows her, and genuinely seems to support the idea of working with the Eladrin. He declares the Fall Festival should continue, and the crowd roars as the whole group of them, Heroes, Eladrin, Elves, and dignitaries, make their way to the Moonstone Keep.

Several party members detect what they feel are unsettling looks and conspiratorial glances between members of Kerlos' retinue. When the whole group gets to the keep, Lord Markelhay and Kerlos begin their talks informally, in his study, and the other groups are led to separate sitting rooms.

Lucan takes the opportunity to speak with the Elf Lords. He had been avoiding them. It is clear that they hold him no ill will, and they begin to speak about recent goblin activities. He tells them of the goblins they have run into, and he finds out that just last night a group of Goblins came over the outer wall and into the courtyard of the Moonstone Keep. These goblins, like the ones Lucan had fought with the party, all had obliterated their ritual scars with ugly brands on the palms of their hands.

His conversation is interrupted by the sound of shattering wood. The Eladrin have made their move. Halma is just getting back from the kitchen, having gone to grab some snacks for the party:
- The upper floor of the Moonstone Keep is not a place for big, epic, open battles. It became a dirty, scary slaughter.
- The dissatisfied Eladrin troops began their assault by kicking in the guard room door outside of Lord Markelhay's study. This attracted the attention of the Elves, who joined in the fight.
- Kerlos was the first one there, and he shouted at them to stop. They did not listen.
- Lucan and Arlarond made up the choke points at the ends of the two halls where the fighting occurred. Arlarond was next to Kerlos, but the sneak on the other side was still able to get some cuts in on him.
- Lucan did a great job of keeping the Eladrin bottled in on his end, despite the teleportation of the Eladrin. By the end of the fight all of them had used their power, yet none got away past Lucan.
- Halma arrived with the food, and did the only natural thing. He flung the pitcher of cheap wine 30 feet down the hall and struck the other rogue with it, drenching her.
- The first round of actual combat was clearly in the party's favor. The Eladrin Warlord died. None of the good guys were seriously hurt.
- The second round all hell broke loose. The two wizards on the other side got off their dailies, and spent action points to shoot off their encounter powers.
- The two rangers did the same, and dropped Lucan and Halma into negatives.
- Ana and Therryk finally made it to the fight after that, Ana just in time to heal her fallen comrades, and Therryk to hurl his axe at the rogue, and then charge her, lighting the cheap liquor on fire with his enchanted axe.
- The focus fire on the rogue killed her before she was able to go again.
- After being on full defense for two rounds, Kerlos finally acted, and his action was to attack the other Eladrin. Two rounds of shouting at them to stop did nothing, so he felt compelled to act.
- Arlarond conjured his fiery orb, and because of the size of the room it shut most of the attempts at escape by the Eladrin down. Unfortunately, it also dropped the just-healed Halma back into negatives.
- The Eladrin were now on the defensive, but the fight was still about even, with 5 of them to the 5 party members and Kerlos. Ana's healing was amped up considerably because of her daily, and both defenders were now in play.
- The only melee fighter left on the other side dropped, and even though the two wizards and two rangers put up a fight, it only took another round or two to finish them off.

We stopped after searching the bodies and recovering more phat lewt. Jesse wanted to pick up right away, and I'm a little nervous...

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My last DMing for awhile. I was reasonably proud of how it turned out. I don't know why it is so hard for me to say, but I have been fibbing about something for awhile now, and it's bugging me, so here it is:

I don't prep for games.

Of course, I sat down at the beginning and wrote out a one page outline, and after I had decided on the 3 story encounters I put together 4 more *random* encounters. I knew what would happen if the party chose to follow the hooks. I knew what I would do if they didn't.

The rest of it was me, standing in the shower, driving to work, falling asleep in church, whenever, just thinking about what I had laid out, and why.

So, when the party decided to talk rather than kill, they were not destroying any sort of carefully planned anything. I had not planned anything. I knew what I knew (Eladrin had a war with Fallcrest!) . I had 5 NPC character sheets and that was all. I ad-libbed everything. I made some things up.

Some of the stuff I had thought about came in handy. I had thought that if the party needed some exposition regarding the whole mission to the quarry, Nimozoran should be the one to do it, in a mysterious, comes at night and goes with a teleportation ritual sort of way. All this stuff was sort of floating in my head, and when it all came out . . . it came out better than I thought it would. I am not trying to convince anyone that this is Shakespeare, just that I was entertained, and hopefully so were my friends, and . . . that’s all?

On to the other stuff. Running NPC's is kind of a pain. Their stat blocks are huge. This is an inverse relationship to their HP, which are small. I never marked with either NPC Fighter. The Rangers only quarried towards the end of the fight. The wizards never used their wands.
In a big field, 1 on 1, the party wins hands down. With superior numbers, the party can still win . . . so far. At higher levels this might change. The thing is, NPC's have no real distinction between Daily and Encounter abilities. They only get to fight once. They might as well (and I hate this phrase) 'go nova' and use daily, action point, and encounter. After that they are just bags of HP. Not very big bags.

My one regret with this storyline is the strain that puts on Eladrin player characters. Were anyone to die and want to try one out, I have just created a good roleplaying reason for everyone to hate them. I don't really want to do that to anyone's character. It might be a non-issue.
I'm out, return next week for more pictures and better combat notes! Hopefully Therryk is cured of his Zombie state! Hurrah!

Jay

1/12 Actual Play: Kill, Kill, Kill

2009-01-12T18:16:00.000-07:00

We were one short this session, but Colin played Ana along with Lucan, so we still had 5 characters:

Jay, playing Therryk the Dragonborn Paladin and DMing
Dan, playing Arlarond the Human Wizard
Jesse, playing Halma the Human Rogue
Colin, playing Lucan the Elven Fighter and Ana the Half Elven Cleric

As I mentioned before, the fight was barely won by the PC's and they found a good place to camp for the night. Ana was feeling the pain of repeated focused attacks by the Ettercaps, and was a little woozy when Arlarond's Eyes of Alarm began repeating

"Warning. Warning. Warning. Warning. Warning. Warning. Warning. Warning. Warning...."

Waking to the alarm, the four heard the creak of a wagon approaching. The dim glow of a lantern appeared and the party hid, preparing to spring an ambush.

They were taken aback when they recognized their horse. . .pulling their wagon. Lucan stepped from the shadows, and greeted the driver. It was the captain of their hired ship from earlier. He had heard that the party left with a different crew, and had his ship moved down the falls so that he could take over the duty of ferrying them down the river. He spied the small boat tied up at the bank and sent it back to Fallcrest.

While the party appreciated the gesture, they did not feel that they needed the help. . .at least right now. Lucan volunteered to escort the captain back, and the party all crawled back in their bedrolls.

A few hours later, with Therryk on watch, the three sleeping party members were shaken awake. It was just before dawn, and Therryk had heard something sneaking up from the Southeast. The party had just begun to explore what it might be, when two beefy goblins with battleaxes stumbled into the clearing.
- This fight was a wizard's dream. 2 melee goblins, 2 sharpshooters, 1 hexer, and 12 minions.
- The sharpshooters attempted to stay at range where they had better skill at hitting the party, but Halma closed with them. He enjoys shutting down the ranged element, and did a super job this fight.
- Arlarond's staff rained flame down, missing his allies but scorching all of the goblins within sight of him. Most of the minions dropped dead.
- Lucan and Therryk had the goblins with axes locked down, until both of them maneuvered to flank Therryk and hacked him down, unconscious (2 crits!)
- Ana spent much of her time healing us back up, as the goblins whittled us down.
- The hexer maintained a large area of the battlefield with a thick cloud that hampered melee combat. Unfortunately, with the battle the way it was, most of the damage was being done in other ways.
- Still untouched, the hexer attempted to retreat after the last of the minions and axe wielding goblins dropped. Halma had kept the sharpshooters mostly out of it, and with the goblin's front lines gone, the party quickly overwhelmed and slaughtered them.

More loot was found, and the party decided that the night was over, so they may as well adventure on. Lucan returned shortly after the party struck camp, and they resumed following the wagon tracks East.

After a couple more hours of walking, the party saw a ruin in the distance, and snuck up on a collapsed settlement. Too small to be self sustaining, the stone ruin was most likely an outpost or monastery of some kind. Anymore it was swallowed up by the forest, with thick undergrowth coming right up to the edges of the buildings. The wagon tracks entered the ruin, and they found the empty wagon inside an old building.

Halma did some initial sneaking, and saw that there were a few humanoids lounged in a nearby building. The largest one in the settlement, at some point a large statue or obelisk had collapsed, taking out the majority of the West wall. The roofs of all of these buildings had been destroyed, meaning that the only shelter was to be had in this two story building, as the second story floor protected the lower level from the elements.

Halma climbed onto the second floor and hid, while Ana attempted to parley with them. Hostile from the beginning, the ruffians became more dangerous when it appeared that one of the dragonborn recognized her. All attempts at diplomacy collapsed and cowboy diplomacy ensued.
- 2 Dragonborn Soldiers and 3 Dwarven Bolters faced the party.
- The Soldiers were able to pin the party between a wall and the rubble of the collapsed wall for a few rounds, and the dwarves were able to hit very well.
- Halma dropped down behind one of the soldiers and Lucan charged in. Lucan is very good at moving enemies around and the Soldiers were now the ones pinned in the corner of the room by Lucan, Halma, and the terrain.
- Once Therryk was able to get in on the fight, Halma was able to disengage to attack the dwarves. They had scattered due to an earlier cold attack from Arlarond.
- It was down to two of the dwarves hiding in a storage room, and Arlarond hit them with a less powerful blast of ice, but this one knocked a dwarf down and coated the area in ice. That was the end for them, and the encounter ended.

Searching the storage room, the party found trade goods consistent with what they were looking for. They found some magic items and art objects on the bandits. Halma tied up two of them, a dragonborn and a dwarf, and when he attempted to move them into the rubble something caught his eye. A long overlooked vault that must have been inside the statue. He pried the lid off, and the chest inside held a king's ransom in residuum.

It was decided to send an animal messenger to the crew of their ship and have them bring the wagon. With the wagon loaded with goods and two groggy criminals, the party settled down in the best defensible position around, the bandit hideout they had just cleared out.

The wagon made it's way back to the boat, and the party settled down to wait and relax. Halma, from his position on the second floor, had only a second to warn the party of the approaching orcs before they burst into the ruin. Leading the charge was an 800 lb boar:
- Unfortunately, due to the layout of the party at the time, the boar was able to charge in and attack Ana and Arlarond, the two squishiest members of the party.
- Following them were two orcs with axes, and two more with a brace of handaxes at their waist.
- The whole fight was a condensed mess in the building, with almost all participants crowding in right around the boar, either to hit it, or on the orcs side, to hit the party that had come to hit the boar.
- Without room to charge and gore, it's preferred maneuver, the boar had to shuffle back 5 feet at a time, and charge. He was able to do this only once before the concentrated fire took him down.
- The big orcs were the real threat anyways, and once they were bloodied their battle rage began to inflict some serious damage on the party.
- Once again Halma moved to intercept the ranged element, only to discover that they were just as effective, if not more so, while in melee. Luckily the rest of the party joined him a round or so after they entered melee combat with him
- Another victory for the party, and more gear for them to use.

At this point they were pretty badly beaten, and when the empty wagon returned they elected to remain there over night to nurse their wounds and prepare for more battle. They were surprisingly unmolested all night, and with Ana's knowledge of where to go, they intercepted an old road that wound through the quarries in the area.

It was a beautiful fall day, the party was riding in the back of their wagon, low hills all around, and then something had to go and ruin it all. Of course.

The old road was rounding a bend to the left, and appeared to end in a large quarry with a run down shack. Something was out of place, the party noticed immediately. In the smaller quarries that the party had already passed, nature had reclaimed them to some degree. While the square blocky cuts made to remove stone cannot be erased so quickly, the vegetation had returned in all other cases.

The bare stone was their only warning, as the wagon pierced the illusory bubble protecting the quarry and the party was witness to chaos. A teleportation circle near the wagon was flocked to by a host of people. At first the party could easily mistake them for elves and halflings, but they didn't look quite right. It was Eladrin and Gnomes, working together at the quarry.

With the advance notice that the party was arriving, the squatters at the quarry had made preparations. A handful of Gnomes rushed towards the party, led by two that had rods. As they entered the gravelly region near the road, they snapped the rods in two, and a large creature made of gravel and stone rose almost immediately from the rubble. Riding on his shoulders were the two gnomes, and they controlled him with the rods that were sticking from his body. The rest of the gnomes disappeared in a glamour created by a gnomish wizard, and the golem rushed the party:
- The party had half a mind to talk their way out of combat, but it was clear they would not be allowed the chance.
- It was obvious to everyone that the golem was the real threat, and everyone focused on him. . .except for Halma, who made his way to the other side of the battlefield to combat the wizard and the three other gnomes that had disappeared.
- The golem got to go twice a round, on account of him having two controllers, and he proved his deadliness by unleashing an avalanche on the party, leaving the area covered in debris and badly hurting those caught in the area.
- The other gnomes were much less powerful than the party, and served mostly as a distraction. Upon breaking their hide to attack, they were opened up to much killing by Halma
- It took only a few rounds to bloody the golem, which was signalled by a blow from Lucan killing the gnome nearest him.
- The golem managed to put some serious hurt on the party before it died, bet even then, it was almost to single digit hit points before anyone found out it had reach. They had swarmed it so quickly.
- Arlarond was the one to do the deed, blasting the second gnome from his perch on the shoulder of the gnome with a magic missile.

We stopped there, as any further exploration of the quarry was likely to initiate another encounter...
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

So, as predicted by my, I was a bit rusty. I didn't have much creative drive this time at all, and so to me it felt like a series of combats. No real roleplay. In fact, it was so combat heavy we blew through 4 encounters. That is double what I was expecting.

With Chelsea gone, I thought to bring the wagon along. Ana could remain in the wagon while the party did their thing and no oddity would have to occur next week to bring her back to the party. Colin had just planned on playing her as well, so the arrival of the wagon was a bit awkward.

My idea with this sandbox is to have encounters related to the adventure, and encounters that I would put in when I felt they would be. . .entertaining. Or relevant. They are random encounters without the random aspect that I dislike. At this point the party has fought all of the random encounters, and there is only one story encounter remaining. Amazing what skipping all roleplaying will do for the encounters per session ratio. We were at something like 2:1, I'd guess. so four is. . .out there.

Hopefully next week, with the resolution to two 'quests' to get through and a major battle, we will get some good combat and roleplay both, and everyone will have fun.

The Gravel Golem was an invention of mine for this combat. I had toyed with the idea of a de-leveled bulette, but the de-leveling left it weak. I attempted to build a bulette with the creature creation rules in the DMG but didn't really like it. I present the gravel golem to you, warts and all:

Gravel Golem

Level 6 Elite Brute

Large Fey Animate

XP 500

Initiative +5

Senses Perception +6

HP 172; Bloodied 86

AC 19; Fortitude 21, Reflex 17, Will 18

Immune Disease, Poison

Saving Throws +2

Speed 6

Action Points 1

M Swat (Standard; at-will)

Reach 2
Target: One creature
+9 vs AC 1d6+4 damage and push 1 square
Bloodied damage: 1d10+4

R Boulder (Standard; at-will)

Ranged 5 Burst 1
Target: Each creature in burst
+7 vs Ref 1d6+4 damage
Bloodied damage: 1d10+4

c Avalanche (Standard; recharge 6)

Close blast 3
Target: Each creature in blast
+7 vs Reflex 3d6+4 damage, 1/2 damage on a miss
Bloodied damage: 3d8+4, 1/2 damage on a miss
Effect: The area is difficult terrain for the rest of the encounter

Double Actions

A Gravel Golem rolls initiative twice, gets two turns during a round, and has a full set of actions (standard, move, minor) on each turn. Each set of actions corresponds to a different Gnome. The Golem's ability to take immediate actions refreshes on each of it's turns.

Bloodied Fury

A Gnome is killed when the Gravel Golem is bloodied and the Golem only has one turn each round for the remainder of the encounter. In addition, each of the Golem's attacks now do the bloodied damage.

Alignment Unaligned

Languages

Str 20 (+8)	Dex 14 (+5)	Wis 16 (+6)
Con 16 (+6)	Int 3 (-1)	Cha 7 (+1)

I really liked how he performed, very brutish. He did not hit a whole lot and was a pretty big and easy target in turn. The one alteration I made while running it. . .and regretted it. . .was that I did not take away his second action once he was bloodied. I felt that they had bloodied him so fast, that he would not be worth his status as an Elite if I did that. Colin asked about it once the session was over, and it would have been a cool thing had I done it. Thinking about this later, giving him tremorsense should have been obvious. Starting him further from the party would be a good idea, too, allowing him to use more than just his basic melee attack.

Next week we finish my adventure and hit 5th level. The rest of the session will be character creation for a Star Trek one shot that Dan wants to run. We are planning on using the FATE system, which I have not used before. Should be interesting.

Jay

Back in the Saddle

2009-01-08T12:30:00.000-07:00

Uh, wow. I have not posted in almost a month.

This is mostly because we have only played once since my last post, a 16th level one shot run by Dan. It was a lot of good fun, I got to play the Dwarven Ranger I have been itching to play. Honestly it is just the dual wielding dwarf that pushes my buttons, whether it is a fighter or a ranger. . .something about using two uberweapons at a time makes me happy. Can't imagine why. Though my first ever character was a dual wielder. I have always liked the idea of it, and in 4e there is a lot more chance to make it viable. The parrying dagger combined with two weapon defense is just as good as a shield, and a lot cooler for me to imagine. What a nerd.

I didn't blog about the one shot because with the holidays eating up increasing portions of my free time and work and trying the warcraft free trial . . .blogging took a back seat. So did most things D&D, really.

I run again in two days. Luckily I have all my prep done. I have started putting my adventures together a level at a time, so I will run until the party is 5th. That way I can use the DMG's guidelines for encounters (3 at level -1, 3 at the party's level, and one at the level +3) plus add a quest reward and we don't worry about giving out experience. Everyone levels together whether they show up or not.

I am a little anxious about whether I will be able to get with it right away. A month long DMing break, compounded by ending on a cliffhanger, will mean that I am liable to make at least one stupid DM call. I have decided to call the end of the fight. Although Chelsea was taking a beating, the rest of the party was still doing. . okay. Jesse tends to run out of surges first, which you might imagine since he is the most frail of the melee types. We were going to have to rest anyways, so I decided that trying to pick this up after such a long gap would be a stretch. The party will start with an extended rest, and move on from there.

I also am moving to make a change about my stupid, stupid DM mistake from last session. Someone asked if we could keep our same boat and crew from the last adventure, and the waterfall made me say that no, we couldn't. A classic example of saying no when I should have said yes, and for no real reason other than it was seemingly impossible. This in a world filled with magic. I have since thought of a half dozen or so good reasons why the boat and the crew could have come, and I am going to bring em along. Why not, right? Building up cool NPC's is part of what makes DMing enjoyable.

So. . .I *will* be getting back on it. If there is anyone that was following along. I don't get much traffic but I do get some. Probably my mom or something. Hi mom!

Jay

12/13 Actual Play: Part II, or the beginning of something exciting.

2008-12-15T15:12:00.001-07:00

Continued from above! I just don't have the heart to pile all that text on you at once. Maybe I need to assign someone to take pictures for me. A lot is on my mind already as I DM, I can't imagine where I would put one more thing...

The party went on up to the Moonstone Keep to see if they could find out what was going on. Lucan was clearly not happy about the arrival of the Elves, and did what he could to remain out of sight. Arlarond distracted the soldiers by using his magic to help them groom their animals. Ana tried to convince the guards to let her in the Keep, but they had been told nobody gets in, and her wiles fell flat.

She remembered that as a child she would squeeze out of the window in the laundry. She found the low window and climbed in. Arlarond sent his familiar through, and had it take the shape of Petunia, her 1/2 ton pet pig. With this ready excuse for being where she shouldn't (the pig did it), she snuck through the first floor and up the stairs. With a couple close calls but no alarms, she made it to a secret passage behind the Lord's study. All those years of snooping around paid off again, as she had a front row seat to the tail end of the meeting of the Lords. With little context, she was only able to find out the the Elves had come to warn Fallcrest about an old common enemy. Lord Markelhay did not seem convinced and asked the Lord if they could continue their conversation in the morning, after he had slept on it.

Ana returned to her friends and relayed what she had overheard, but Arlarond and Lucan, the two most steeped in History and the Elves could not think of what enemy they could be referring to.

After that dead end, the party elected to get in a good night's sleep before setting out in the morning. After a geography refresher they decided that checking up on the quarry and finding the fate of the stolen cargo would both be possible, since they were both in an unknown location South of Fallcrest.

Halma needed to create a diversion. He had a room paid for at the Lucky Gnome, but in a concession to common sense decided that putting a decoy in his room and joining the rest of the party in our Inn of choice was a better idea. Ana and Arlarond went with him to make sure he was safe, with Lucan and Arlarond not far behind.

He procured some dummy making supplies, straw, cloth and the like, and snuck in with the bag of holding to build it in his room. He did not count on Ervan waiting there to speak with him again. Ervan missed Halma, but spotted Ana and called her over to his table. He wanted to know where Halma was, and was getting quite verbally abusive until Arlarond intervened. At one point several of his lackeys stood up and he demanded that she leave the place.

After a verbal pissing match with Arlarond, they all sat down at his table, and talked things out. Ervan was mostly concerned about how this will hurt his reputation. As a dealer in information, if nobody trusts him that they will be paid he will loose business. He can't show weakness or allow it to look like he let Halma walk all over him. He needed the goods back with their owners, and he was willing to pay his informant out of his own pocket and let the group keep the entire reward if they would fix this for him.

During this exchange several things came out about Halma's past. He was a one-time leader of a splinter thieves' guild, and in the recent past had become involved in a brutal and nasty guild war. He managed to emerge with his skin whole, but with nothing else. For the past five years he has stayed a drunk and Ervan has moved up, to the point where now Ervan was in some position of power in the new guild, and Halma had no standing at all. The bad blood from this past feud had caused Ervan to overreact when he thought the olive branch of an offer of work had been abused by Halma. With both sides seeing a clearer picture, some agreement was reached. While working for the guild was on some level distasteful for members of the party, working to help clear their friend's name was noble and good, so they agreed to do this one thing for Ervan. For his part, Ervan seemed to view this as the beginning of a new long and beautiful arrangement between the Heroes of Fallcrest and the Guild of Thieves. It will remain to be seen now this develops.

The night passes uneventfully, and the group departs on a boat early the next morning. The storm is still putting a hurt on river travel South of Fallcrest, so a smaller boat was needed. Large enough for them to take their wagon, of course.

After almost eight hours of travel, the party spies a boat wreck on the Eastern shore of the river. It appears that they found the boat they were looking for sooner than they thought they would. They disembarked and started towards it to investigate. About fifty feet away from the boat they were surprised by an abomination made of plants and plant parts emerging from the forest -
- Three darts whizzed from the river's edge and caught Lucan on his neck. While the darts were trivial, their poison caused him to act sluggishly.
- The three lizardfolk with blowguns scattered, two of them disappearing near the wreck, and one making for the treeline.
- After the party rushes towards the Vine Horror, he takes his action (Having delayed since the beginning of the round), to run to where he can hit the whole group and unleashes a horrific crushing vine attack. Roots and creeping vines erupted from the ground and began crushing and killing the whole party, except Therryk whom he missed.
- The Greenscale Darters targeted those Heroes that managed to burst free of their vines, trying to keep them poisoned and slowed.
- The status effects were mostly an annoyance, since the main combatants were too tender to protect themselves once the party freed themselves of the vines and the effects of the poison. They were unable to retreat into the safety of the river or the trees, and were killed quickly.

Searching the boat was profitable. Aside from signs of struggle and several indications that suggested that the crew had been taken or killed by lizardfolk, Ana found a strongly enchanted Rapier, and some gems and gold were recovered from the lizardfolk.

Wagon tracks lead into the woods. The wagon appeared to be heavily laden, and pulled by horses, so the party figured that someone had taken the cargo that was on this boat away by wagon. The party headed East though the forest. By now the sun was low in the sky, and the thick foliage blocked much of the remaining light. The trees here were twisted by some unknown force, and misshapen.

The Heroes never saw it coming. From high in the branches Two Deathjump Spiders and Two Ettercaps descended on silent webs, and struck the party from the corners. Thinking to make themselves hard to hit with an area attack, the party had spread out, two defenders in front, cleric and rogue in the rear, and wizard in the center. Each of the corners was attacked, with only one of the spiders hitting, and then the apparent leader of this ambush struck. An Ettercap with a longspear covered the entire area with a sticky web, immobilizing some and making it difficult for the rest to move -
- The spiders leapt around, but missed with every attack. They were singled out and eliminated quickly by the party.
- The Ettercaps with axes tried a few different targets with little luck, but were finally able to flank on Ana and both hit. Their poison was deadly effective, and she was stunned and poisoned until she fell to the ground, unconscious.
- We stopped there.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

The orange die is a flaming sphere courtesy of Arlarond. The red outline is the webbed area that is difficult terrain. You know, difficult terrain is my new found best friend for making difficult combats. This is a 3rd level combat, so it should be not difficult, but the ambush hitting all of the party meant that only Lucan, who is an elf and can shift in difficult terrain, and Hamla, who got out in his first round, have been able to do much in the way of moving. I apologize for the cruddy pictures. Cellphone camera + bad lighting combined for cruddy pictures. The air and fire elementals are the ettercaps flanking a dying Ana. The monster next to the die is the Ettercap Webspinner, who is still untouched. The earth elemental with the red ring to show that he is bloodied is a spider.

I am really coming around to liking the pipe cleaners a lot. My only difficulty with them is when it comes to PC's. It is easy to determine which monster is bloodied or marked, but players keeping the marks at their spot is not working 100%. Having them be on their minis would be a little better, but since the healing and debuff removal of PC's is many times better than monsters, we would be constantly moving and removing them. I think a good compromise is using the little markers that came with the whiteboard (they look like Sorry pieces), putting them at the edges of the board in front of each player and stacking the conditions up there. Putting the markers at the initiative count would work too.

So. . .the confrontation with Ervan was not in the cards. Originally he was going to be there to harass Halma a little more and press the urgency of his request. It was roleplayed well, though, and the moral quandary the party was put in was just delicious. I am a little sad to have had Therryk be there, but not roleplay his possible connections to the Guild. One of the reasons I have DMPC's and wish we had one more reliable player.

Ana's spy mission was also improvised. Especially entertaining given that she does not have the ranks in stealth to pull something like this off reliably. Lucky rolls on her part paired with unlucky rolls on mine got her all the way up unobserved. Good bit of fun there.

The combats this go-around are built with a better eye to enemy combat roles. The first combat I knew would be short. 3 Lurkers, 1 Controller, and 2 Minions. The Controller was dead meat the instant he showed his face, and the Minions are there because I delight in mixing them in with the regulars and seeing my party sweat. I have a new love of Lurkers. They do crap damage compared to Skirmishers. I don't care, they are fun to run.

The second combat is currently paused. I had a friend who would pause Super Mario Brothers while he went to school, and come back something like 6 hours later and pick it up again. Kinda like that. I think it could still go either way. Ana is down and taking ongoing 5 poison, she is stunned and restrained, and flanked by 2 Ettercaps, neither of whom is bloodied. The spiders are all but dead (one down, the other one a virtual minion), but they never hit anyways. The other Ettercap was only recently hit at all, and still has a lot of fight in him.

Thus, the party will have fought two 3rd level encounters, and be in rough shape and need an extended rest. 4th level is not looking good for them. I am a little worried for them...

Jay