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Dec. 5th, 2010 02:18 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
brushwolfThe player characters raced towards the town as the floodwaters rose, desperate to save the townsfolk, and fought off a giant constrictor snake. That's when we found out the hard way the town was also being attacked by "Black Maga," the Mother of Oblivion, considered by some to be an actual child of the goddess of all monsters - incredibly ancient, incredibly evil, incredibly ugly, nearly impenetrably scaled, and CR 15. Her breath weapon confused four party members, took all four down 2 wisdom temporarily, dinged the sorceress for two temporary levels. Then she grappled nearly the entire party - except for the druid, rogue and ranger - and took out most of our hit points.
The sort of fight paladins dream of dying in, the sort of fight where either victory or death would still ensure glory and honor. Only in this case, Cadell was grappled without any realistic chance of breaking free and, out of character, I hadn't realized that you could theoretically attack with something other than a dagger while grappled. So Cadell's course of action faced with certain destruction was to upend his sword and calmly pray to his god, blasting everything with sacred light - two uses of channel positive energy thanks to an action point. My idea was to go out as basically a holy hand grenade. The channeling did only a disappointing amount of damage to Black Maga, but it practically healed everyone the monster had grappled.
An instant after the huge flash of sacred light, there was much much larger flash of a different and older sort of sacred light - the druid called down lightning strikes. Enough that Black Maga thought about how much damage she'd taken. About the sorceress' minor image of the gold dragon screaming down from the sky. About the way her opponents were largely intact. She released everyone, booked it towards the flooded lake, and vanished beneath the waters.
You'd think that surviving - let alone driving back - an assault from something that powerful would be the highlight of the game session, but it wasn't.
The highlight of the game session was actually when the half-orc, all decked out in a hat of disguise, enlarged up to ogre size, and holding a captured ogre hook from a defeated chieftain, successfully bluffed a work team of five ogres that he was the deceased chieftain - and the angry, disappointed father of the ogre gang's boss. Rather than face the ire of chieftain or some trolls, the ogres decided to head for the woods. It was a masterpiece of grunty character acting (I think we'd asked D'auzier to go because he had the highest intimidate score out of all of us).
The reason we came up against an ogre construction team scared stiff of some local trolls in the first place was that the ogres had apparently been hired to knock holes in a big, millenia-old dam. The reason we were interested in stopping ogres from knocking holes in a millenia-old dam was that if someone didn't go in there and figure out the floodgate mechanism - something which hadn't previously been worth fighting trolls to the locals - that "floodwaters rising" mentioned before was about to become "huge chunks of local geography would be swept downstream."
Also, the long-past civilization which built this particular dam were apparently Warhammer 40K humans, because the whole dam was carved to look like skulls, with little skulls, with some skull decoration on the skulls, with some extra skulls as accents. The troll inhabitants had freshened the decor up with a scattering of tastefully placed skulls on stakes. Oh, and there was a lot of fungus. So far in this campaign there's been fungus everywhere, which Kelly thinks is a metaphor for the rot and decay that ate the past civilization, and which I think is a metaphor for Paizo's staff living in Seattle.
Big troll fights ensued. The boss troll turned out to be an enormous scrag (aquatic troll, with a seriously cool illustration) with a military fork sitting in a large pool of stagnant water - which meant he could hit everyone even vaguely in the room, but hitting him meant ranged attacks or going through the stagnant water. Cadell's standard tactic for boss fights (smite evil, lay on hands to save fellow party member, run at it while wearing heavy armor) wasn't just not helping here, but actively detrimental, since he was the PC who got knocked into the water first. Luckily the cleric's solution to "uh, well how do we fight this?" had already been summoning four sharks, and Cadell's ride score is pretty decent. Kes - whose rogue was flying around doing ridiculous amounts of damage to the boss troll - made some offhand comment about how theoretically someone could ride a shark. What happened next was both a logical next step and ungodly dumb.
Cadell only got a round worth of enjoying his new status as a shark-rider before we (and by we, I mean mostly a druid with lots of buff spells. Druids are scary folk!) defeated the boss troll and moved on to the dam's control room. The same ancient civilization that carved skulls all over their stuff apparently controlled the floodgates with energy drawn from two summoning circles containing trappedpsykers extraplanar beings. Specifically pit fiends. Specifically one pit fiend which had perished long ago and a second pit fiend which, dessicated, suffering, and therefore not really working as a power source for lawful evil civil engineering projects, begged us to kill it.
Clearly, someone had to step into the circles and feed theastronomican dam more life energy to control the floodgates. We had no idea whether the person stepping into the circles would be trapped there forever, or whether this was a step in, step out sort of deal (it was a step in, step out sort of deal - everyone in the group is homegrown prime material plane, and not bound by the circles). This is how you can tell the party's good aligned; three people volunteered for it. And then, then, D'auzier said what you don't say if you want your paladin to stay alive. I'm probably getting some of it wrong, but this is the gist of it...
Cadell: "That creature is a slave. It should be set free!"
D'auzier: "That creature is a monster. It was made to be evil and it will always be evil and if you free it, it will recover off-plane and show right back up here later and kill a batch of people. Right now it is serving a useful purpose and keeping a lot of people alive. Are you a paladin or a coward?"
Cadell: takes off running and seats himself in the middle of a summoning circle he largely expects will kill him, takes -1 temporary level instead, enough life energy that the rest of the party who honestly have more brains can actually successfully operate the floodgates
Pit Fiend: crumbles into small pile of ash
D'auzier: "You dense, irritating... happy now?"
The sort of fight paladins dream of dying in, the sort of fight where either victory or death would still ensure glory and honor. Only in this case, Cadell was grappled without any realistic chance of breaking free and, out of character, I hadn't realized that you could theoretically attack with something other than a dagger while grappled. So Cadell's course of action faced with certain destruction was to upend his sword and calmly pray to his god, blasting everything with sacred light - two uses of channel positive energy thanks to an action point. My idea was to go out as basically a holy hand grenade. The channeling did only a disappointing amount of damage to Black Maga, but it practically healed everyone the monster had grappled.
An instant after the huge flash of sacred light, there was much much larger flash of a different and older sort of sacred light - the druid called down lightning strikes. Enough that Black Maga thought about how much damage she'd taken. About the sorceress' minor image of the gold dragon screaming down from the sky. About the way her opponents were largely intact. She released everyone, booked it towards the flooded lake, and vanished beneath the waters.
You'd think that surviving - let alone driving back - an assault from something that powerful would be the highlight of the game session, but it wasn't.
The highlight of the game session was actually when the half-orc, all decked out in a hat of disguise, enlarged up to ogre size, and holding a captured ogre hook from a defeated chieftain, successfully bluffed a work team of five ogres that he was the deceased chieftain - and the angry, disappointed father of the ogre gang's boss. Rather than face the ire of chieftain or some trolls, the ogres decided to head for the woods. It was a masterpiece of grunty character acting (I think we'd asked D'auzier to go because he had the highest intimidate score out of all of us).
The reason we came up against an ogre construction team scared stiff of some local trolls in the first place was that the ogres had apparently been hired to knock holes in a big, millenia-old dam. The reason we were interested in stopping ogres from knocking holes in a millenia-old dam was that if someone didn't go in there and figure out the floodgate mechanism - something which hadn't previously been worth fighting trolls to the locals - that "floodwaters rising" mentioned before was about to become "huge chunks of local geography would be swept downstream."
Also, the long-past civilization which built this particular dam were apparently Warhammer 40K humans, because the whole dam was carved to look like skulls, with little skulls, with some skull decoration on the skulls, with some extra skulls as accents. The troll inhabitants had freshened the decor up with a scattering of tastefully placed skulls on stakes. Oh, and there was a lot of fungus. So far in this campaign there's been fungus everywhere, which Kelly thinks is a metaphor for the rot and decay that ate the past civilization, and which I think is a metaphor for Paizo's staff living in Seattle.
Big troll fights ensued. The boss troll turned out to be an enormous scrag (aquatic troll, with a seriously cool illustration) with a military fork sitting in a large pool of stagnant water - which meant he could hit everyone even vaguely in the room, but hitting him meant ranged attacks or going through the stagnant water. Cadell's standard tactic for boss fights (smite evil, lay on hands to save fellow party member, run at it while wearing heavy armor) wasn't just not helping here, but actively detrimental, since he was the PC who got knocked into the water first. Luckily the cleric's solution to "uh, well how do we fight this?" had already been summoning four sharks, and Cadell's ride score is pretty decent. Kes - whose rogue was flying around doing ridiculous amounts of damage to the boss troll - made some offhand comment about how theoretically someone could ride a shark. What happened next was both a logical next step and ungodly dumb.
Cadell only got a round worth of enjoying his new status as a shark-rider before we (and by we, I mean mostly a druid with lots of buff spells. Druids are scary folk!) defeated the boss troll and moved on to the dam's control room. The same ancient civilization that carved skulls all over their stuff apparently controlled the floodgates with energy drawn from two summoning circles containing trapped
Clearly, someone had to step into the circles and feed the
Cadell: "That creature is a slave. It should be set free!"
D'auzier: "That creature is a monster. It was made to be evil and it will always be evil and if you free it, it will recover off-plane and show right back up here later and kill a batch of people. Right now it is serving a useful purpose and keeping a lot of people alive. Are you a paladin or a coward?"
Cadell: takes off running and seats himself in the middle of a summoning circle he largely expects will kill him, takes -1 temporary level instead, enough life energy that the rest of the party who honestly have more brains can actually successfully operate the floodgates
Pit Fiend: crumbles into small pile of ash
D'auzier: "You dense, irritating... happy now?"