Forum: Public Forum

Ian,

Hummmm... you could have posted pictures of the minis, but yes, I guess this is enough.

Laurent,

Fellow players,

I think we all agree that Ian ran a great game last night, with the added bonus of half-decent dice rolls in favour of Makoa for a change.

Battle at the battlemarket.

Getting through the Northern entrance seems to have been the right thing to do. There is something dodgy about that jester. He looks too much like a Pit Fiend under an illusion spell to me.
From that side we accessed the medium-threat Bugbears first, therefore had our front line fighters (Shari and Makoa) on then straight away. Getting in from the other way, the jester could potentially have turned out being something else, and the evil fighter woman and the Ogre would have dropped on us quickly. To be fair, Makoa could have managed a grappling manoeuvre or two against him, but better be safe than sorry and have Fauda get squished instead!
So, yes, good tactics on our part. Plus, the dance from Arsenda and the drinking at the bar for Makoa was priceless.

Makoa is currently moving (technically double-moving) towards the first floor to take down the archers. The character is only aware of one of them being asleep, Makoa has also judged that with the Ogre down, Shari and the rest should be able to wipe out the rest of the Bugbears (some were still alive when Makoa got to the Ogre). It may look like splitting the party, but he is only going after the Gnoll archers. Arsenda is also on the first floor now. Talking about that, I assume the acoustics of the battlemarket are such that we call all hear the singing.
The end of rage rules are pretty limiting, Makoa is to be fatigued for twice the number of rounds of the last bout of rage. I have gone through one round of fatigued state, with three to go. The fatigued condition is not the end of the world though, only -2 to STR and DEX, even though moving from an even STR modifier (+2) to an odd one (+1) (when not raging) costs me on my two-handed damage. The nasty bit about being fatigued is that I cannot go back to a rage (seven rounds left) until the end of the effect.
The plan of course is to keep the last seven rounds of rage to LIBERATE THAT LOVELY AXE, from the hands of the idiot who offered 500gp for each of our heads instead of watching Arsenda do some pole dancing while Makoa got drunk!

Support characters.

The Witch Doctor Mokal is extremely useful. While reading the entry of the class in the Advanced Player's Guide I thought it was a bit underpowered, like a poor man's Sorcerer. However, after seeing James play it, the hexes are pretty cool, basically it is one free spell per PC/NPC/Monster per day. This makes the class extremely versatile, the more PCs, the more healing, the more opponents, the more hexing. The save DCs may be lower than for the more standard spellcasters, but the spells can be cast more than once (even if limited to once per day per creature).

Laurent,

Ian,

I know this is a very early warning, but I shall be in South Korea on Wednesday August 24th.
Technically I could run the game via Twitter feed, WotC like , at night from my hotel, but let's be old fashioned and merely swap RotRL with LoF for that week.

Should we swap LoF to RotRL on August 17th, then of course RotRL for LoF on August 24th?
Or RotRL for LoF on August 24th then LoF to RotRL on August 31st?
Any input from the players?

Laurent,

will ask the others what they want on wednesday at the game. but cannot see it being a problem

I'm back, looking forward to getting involved again. Was my character benched or did someone else play it? If he was benched is there a sensible way to get him to the fight?

David,

Your character Akha unexpectedly levelled-up five times and is now running the show.

The running joke on Rise of the Runelords is always about violent death, so let's start another kind on Legacy of Fire!

I think you are parked, but you can always make an entry from the other door. We can assume that Akha went skulking around for a pincer movement or something. Unless Ian has something up his sleeve, we have finished with the ground floor of the battlemarket. There might be one sleeping gribbly or two that may require a throat slitting manoeuvre or some still standing, but the main dangers: One crazy woman, a grappling Ogre and the main group of Bugbears have mostly been dealt with.
We are all on initiative of course

Laurent,

ding i have thought of way to get you back in and will discuss it with you tonight at the game. as laurent said the have mostly cleared the ground floor and are on the way to the upper floors of the battle market. depending on how things go you may even finish book one tonight.

Excellent news. I shall see you all tonight.

brutal encouter last night with the end of the battle market, but high rewards from it (just short of 4k XP each! and still adding up the loot ) it was always going to be a hard slog that needed to be done in one go. yes the 2 front line fighters did go down but after doing a fair amount of damage to the genie. shines and leveling to be done next session and then the fial part of the book and book one of the adventure is completed on to book to and the carrion king himself!

Fellow Players,

Front line meat-shields.

I was not surprised that Makoa got dropped, this is the curse of the Barbarian. This class is a bit more complex, and interesting, to play in D&D Pathfinder but still boils down to "Hit them hard before they hit you". I just love playing Makoa against gribblies (monster with a lower CR than the PC character level), they tend to have less HP than his minimum damage while raging. Of course, the bane of Makoa is his stupidly poor AC when fatigued and enlarged. Right now it drops to 12! 15 - 1 (from -2 DEX due to being fatigued) - 1 (from -2DEX due to being enlarged) - 1 (from AC drop due to size for being enlarged).
For long fights , such as this one, the rounds of rage must be carefully spent. The original plan was to rage for the last six rounds when facing the Genie, but with most of the party playing with low-level Gnolls and the "combat Druid" and I facing even more Gnolls (and their boss!) on our own; I decided to use those last rounds of rage. So yes, the end-combat with the Genie saw Makoa fighting while fatigued! Therefore no rage, lower to hit modifier, and terrible AC. Being enlarged was cool though, it cost me more AC, but the 1D12 to 3D6 damage die adjustment was welcome.

What became a worry was the speed at which our Fighter got dropped. It teaches the others that CON is indeed important when it comes to bringing people from death's door. Makoa had three rounds of bleeding before dying for good and Shari at least a couple.

Airsenda's contributions.

In my old D&D game back in the days when I was in Manchester, we had a party in which the Bard was always the last man standing. He had Weapon Finesse with his rapier and a strength penalty... ending with him dealing one or two points of damage per hit and a death by a thousand cuts for whatever miniboss or serious monster we were facing. Our current Bard turns out to be pretty useless once out of spell and out of voice!

Makoa's next level.

Makoa will stay true to his Breaker archetype and select his fourth level rage power accordingly. He shall therefore go for smasher.
I could have tried to go for a sunder manoeuvre on the Genie's armour, I forgot, my mistake. The broken condition on a suit of armour halves the AC bonus, so this could be pretty powerful and from now on, assuming adequately armoured minibosses (+4 armour bonus, part of it magical or not, it does not matter), losing half the armour bonus to AC technically translates to a +2 to hit for everybody on the target. This is pretty good!
Now that Makoa can ignore hardness once per rage, whatever suit armour is going to get ripped to shreds. Hopefully our Cleric of Abadar will have access to spells to rebuild the scraps. Magical suits of armour tend to have quite a lot of HP, so an average damage roll from Makoa should still leave a couple of HP necessary for it to be considered broken but not destroyed (no HP left for the object).
Talking about armour, if we can find a +1 suit of light armour somewhere, Makoa would volunteer to wear it too.

Loot.

If Makoa is to claim any loot, he shall say "Dibs on the big guy's battle axe!"
With a +1 to STR as a fourth level advancement and that axe, which should at least be +1, no door in Katapesh shall be safe anymore!

Back to the Vaults of Greed in RotRL on Wednesday, and a levelling-up start of the session to LV13 for all.

Laurent,

game page has been updated with your deeds and the next few events have been posted on the calander for you to sign up to.

And... I have signed in this time!

book 1 finished characters went and did some things for 1 yr and then we get on to book 2 for the next session. matt with regards to pesh i have looked in both the GMG and the dark markets and they both have differing things for pesh, so i am going to go with the following for it
Pesh
Type – ingested or inhaled

Whey:
Addiction – xxxxxxxxxx fortitude xx
Cost – 1 gp
Effects - for 1 hour the user gains an euphoric state and 1 temporary hp, but also is at xx to saves Vs illusion and mind affecting effects

Raw:
Addiction – xxxxxxxxxx fortitude xx
Cost – 10 gp
Effects - for 1 hour the user gains an euphoric state and 10 temporary hp, but also is at xx to saves Vs illusion and mind affecting effects but has 1D2 alchemical str bonus

Refined:
Addiction – xxxxxxxxxx fortitude xx
Cost – 20 gp
Effects - for 1 hour the user gains an euphoric state and 15 temporary hp, but also is at xx to saves Vs illusion and mind affecting effects but has 1D4 alchemical str bonus

i have removed the neagtive effects as you dont get to know them untill you try it .if you use and fail the addiction save and can not get any more there will be other negatives effects. but to be nice i will give you your first shot for half price

Just a quick thought before everyone spends their share of the loot....

How would everyone feel about donating 165gp to a party healing fund? That would give us a total of 1155 gp, which would buy:

1 x wand of cure light wounds (50 charges, D8+1 heal) (750gp)
4 x scroll of remove fear (cleric lvl 1) (4@ 25gp = 100gp)
1 x scroll of lesser restoration (cleric lvl 2) (150gp)
1 x scroll of remove paralysis (cleric 2) (150gp)
And 5gp change.

Now, Tariq could memorise these spells, but that would be instead of buff spells (bless, shield of faith, bull's str, bear's endurance), and they don't come up all that often.

We could, if we're cautious, buy some others as well:
2nd level = 150gp each - Delay posion (would be for 3 hours)
3rd level = 375gp each - Remove Blindness/Deafness; Remove Curse; Remove Disease
Wand of cure moderate wounds (50 charges, 2d8+2 heal, 4500gp)

But this gets expensive, and Tariq has a (small) failure chance for using scrolls for spells of a higher level than he can cast yet. What say we buy the first lot, and then look at getting some more if/when we get hold of more cash?

Adam,

With Makoa as a HP tank (53 raging at LV4 at the moment before buying anything to boost his CON) with a big sign around the neck that says "Hit-me-my-AC-will-never-reach-20" I earnestly agree with pooling up some money for some healing resources.

Anyway I look at it, Makoa will always have a crap AC: Rage takes the DEX down, the odd enlarge person loses him another 2 points of AC (1 for size and 1 for another -2 to DEX), etc. Makoa has better live with it and maximise his HP total and damage (kill the bad guys quicker than they kill him).

Cannot win on all counts with a Barbarian and aiming for average "to hit", AC and HP total is a recipe for disaster. A Barbarian built is by design imbalanced... Thus: So long AC.

So, yep, bring in the NHS!

Laurent,

Fellow Players,

Bumbling along.

Great game tonight and a perfect example of a group that has played too much together, to the point of forgetting about the essentials: Having a merchant caravan utterly devoid of trade goods was amazingly funny when one looks at it.

I rolled a CRITICAL.

Too bad the Gnoll did not have nearly as enough HP for Makoa to enjoy it.

James knows everything.

While we were busy looking for sewers and gunpowder James' character had all the background information on the House of the Beast. Again, nobody saw that coming.

All in all another enjoyable session of D&D, thanks Ian.

Laurent,

Fellow players,

I am sorry I will not be able to make it tonight.

The weekend break was great except that:

• Warm weather.
• Opened windows at night.
• Nice and cool air-con in the car.

is in fact a really bad mix and has led to a serious cold. I have only showed up at work for a couple of hours today. I got it all, blocked nose, headache, coughing... all this in bleeding August!

Laurent,

Firstly, thanks for another great session.
For the sake of Makoa, Laurent and Ginge.

We headed as originally planned straight for the main entrance where we faced a group of dire hyenas with gnoll riders, who almost took out our druid (down to 0HP)and his faithful camel You-Bastard, despite the bards beautiful song and dance and the clerics cunning but unclear to the rest of the groups five-foot step plan. We then proceeded inside.

Inside Akha thought he’d try out his knowledge of nature by tasting some droppings, he may have got sick, but he successfully worked out that they were hyena and gnoll droppings (something the rest of the group has simply guessed). Whilst sickened, he couldn’t defend his long standing desire to always go left first as the fighter’s desire to go right was too great. We came across a tower with a door blocked with rubble after realising it would take hours to move we discussed (for what seemed like hours) what we should do next.

We went for the option of climbing the stairs (no railings and slightly sloping to our un-advantage) on the outside of the tower in the hope we could get in at the top. We only got a third of the way up before been attacked by gargoyles which were spotted by the druid who had remained at the bottom of the stairs. The majority of the party decided to run down, the witch using his ring of levitation jumped of the stairs and was attacked in mid-air (Dragon Ball Z style). The ranger waited on the stairs to see if he could get a couple of shots off if the gargoyles flew by again, although successful he got knocked off to the bottom.

Finally everyone got to the bottom of the stairs and we got the best of them, then the druid went to look up at the top and found nothing, the witch not happy with his assessment also went to have a look at the top and may have disturbed something… (but what, I'm sure we'll find out next time)

I think that sums it up pretty well. I’m sure there were other great deeds I’ve missed, including the cleric keeping check of all our loot, which is generally a thankless task.

Fellow players,

Barbarian punching bag.

I should have kept silent last time about having our Druid around as a meat shield, because Makoa got a drubbing at the hands of slaves he wanted to recycle. At the beginning of his turn he raged so that he would definitely overrun the slave in front of him and whack the second Gnoll commander for a punitive strike. The movement, hitting and damage-dropping parts went well of course as the opponent was slain in one swift strike; but the attack of opportunity bits was catastrophic. Gaussian distributions theory told me that I would at most gather a lousy hit from one of the gribblies. As you know I collected close to thirty points in one go, which added to the initial volley of arrows knocked Makoa down!

Slithering things.

I think we all need to look at the wildshape feature of the Druid to give proper advice to Matthew and others who play this class. The new rules are indeed designed to be simpler than the very complex 3.5 mechanics. There is indeed a dearth of feats related to improving wildshape, which is pretty odd.

Monster generator.

After talking to Ian after the game: This is call "barracks". We need better tactics before we start an actual encounter. The last one was with cannon fodder and we went all 4th Edition on these things literally wasting rounds of rage, singing and wildshape, as well as a few spells. Sure it was fun to eviscerate everything by rolling a 2 or a 3, but we should be better at playing D&D than that. I was of course as much as a culprit as any other!
The only problem we had was with the volleys of arrows and a Ranger turned into a pincushion. Still this is only a matter of burning charges on the wand of CLWs, thus a matter of minor cash resource expenditure.

We need to make a push for the Gnoll barracks, wherever they may be so that we can go back upstairs to recuperate and avoid a delaying encounter like this one. We are collecting a bit of XP but we do not get much of a challenge in the end.

Fun session anyway, we need to find a use for that friendly Goblin. Lamashtu may be an evil goddess, technically an ascended Demon Lord, but she is still less despicable to LG people than Rovagug. Rovagug is the Tharizdun of Golarion, i.e. a god dedicated to utter destruction of everything, world, universe, everything!

Laurent,

Fellow players,

Barbarian punch bag.

Another group of gribblies backed by a mini-boss and another shameful defeat for Makoa, always compounded by stellar results when facing tough opposition though. Both the Ogrekin and the Giant Spider got whacked pretty quickly. Why, oh why, does my PC attract rolls of 17+ and natural 20 from puny CR1 (or lower!) creatures and end-up soaking up 50+ points of damage in one round is beyond me!

Special mentions to our healers who fought very hard for the "Least effective healing spell of the month".

Thorn in the Carrion King's butt.

When we meet the big bad evil individual, Makoa shall start with a taunt, technically an intimidate skill roll (that he may even win!) while shouting something about the good times he would have had with the Carrion King's harem.

Location.

We are in a strangely quiet part of the dungeon, I have the feeling that things are going to turn sour very quickly. We should not forget that we have not buffed up on spells yet, beyond the basics such as Mage Armour.

Interesting game as usual, back to it in a fortnight I guess.

Laurent,