Forum: Public Forum

i plan on running a LoF session unless there are any objections

Sounds good with me.

Dear players,

Guess who dressed-up today in T-shirt and barely a light jacket rolled-up in his bag before walking to work?
Yes, humble me, who now seats in front of his PC emailing this in a fresh set of clothe.

Anyway, see you later tonight for an again much delayed session of (Rise of the Runelords).

Laurent,

Dear players,

I had planned two encounters for the evening, but got very bad with the timing in the end as when we started the Heptaric Locus and realised it was not "around nine" but quarter to ten.

Spell-fight at the PC's corral.

With the PCs having been relatively diplomatic in Xin-Shalast so far, I had planned for them to meet with Most High Ceoptra at some point. To be fair, if I had indeed brought Bestiary II you would have had a clowder of Lamias. Lamias are kind of feline, so the word clowder seems appropriate; it also allows me to show-off about knowing my collective nouns. Then I remembered the disfigured Lamiakin, the Hungerer, when flipping through the book; so I quickly re-jigged my plan and brought Most High Ceoptra with one of these.

Most High Ceoptra had been trying to get someone to answer the door, then becoming bored and totally ignoring the requirement of petitioning the local judge for a search warrant, she decided to get that door opened. A simple "Hey you!" would have attracted her attention and led her to stop her pet from ramming the doors.

The plan was:

• Impress on the scouting player that the fight was going to be over the odds.
• Hope the party takes the cue and sends in Marcus to sweet talk the encounter.
• Most High Ceoptra gives more information about the Spires of Xin-Shalast; ergo helps me give away all the juicy stuff a GM can read but find extremely difficult to impart on the players via their PCs.
• The PCs explain the various "accidents" of late, the untimely disappearance of a nascent Yeti battalion, the change of ownership with the food business and other happenstances.
• Lower Xin-Shalast remains more or less safe for them.

...then a Cleric runs amok and utters a maddening cry of "Destruction to the Demon!".

The "plan", such as it was, did not indeed survive the proverbial first contact with the enemy. Worse, the Hungerer, which was a decent CR15 on paper, rolled poorly against a Destruction spell. As mentioned Most High Ceoptra needs meat-shields to be worth her CR and as it was from the surprise round, a 70HP meat-shield would not have allowed many of her Oracle spells to be cast.

The Heptaric Locus.

You could have decided on a "Gladiator" approach, complete with bad Russel Crowe impersonations... but no. Despite all the hints, the party chose to sneak in and get a tactical terrain fight on the terraces.

The good thing about this combat is that thanks to the size of the locale, I can bring as many spidery red monsters as I want. I think I can also use a Spectre or two considering the place has seen many deaths in the past as mentioned in the original version of the adventure (the red things are new). This should be an insurance against crappy save rolls for my monsters and help have at long last a proper fight with actual risk being involved for the party.

See you in two weeks for more of Rise of the Runelords.

Laurent,

Double posting Laurent suppose thats one way to get you post count up to 1000 quicker . As for the Lamia I don't remember her turning in to a plank of wood but then she might have been bored knocking on the door and done it for amusment while waiting and turned back before we got there.

(sorry could not resist am in silly mood)

Ian,

I had not seen the double-post, but I remember that the webpage was hanging after the submission, so I clicked again. The post has now been removed.

Also, Most High Ceoptra is now "bored" as she should have been from the beginning and no longer "board". Well spotted, sorry "perceived", as we no longer use the 3.5 skill set.

Nine hundred posts already, I had not noticed.

Laurent,

Dear players,

Gamigin and his red spidery friends.

This was a good fight, well timed to fit within our allocated playing time.
As you may have noticed, it was very tactical for the GM, a lot of options, a lot of special and spell-like abilities to use. I forgot one though: the Scarlet Walkers had tremorsense, so I could have caught Marcus had I thought about landing them, so that they could touch the ground, then use their tremorsense, there could have been a bit more blood shed.

There is some loot of course, we shall see to that next week before we move to a Blue Dragon encounter.

I have updated the game page. According to my accounting, eighty sessions have already been played. Andrew and I having been there all along. I hope to finish the story before we reach session ninety; but as we saw yesterday, fights can easily last two hours. There are a lot of planned fights in the final stages, the Spires of Xin-Shalast being slightly bigger than the Dire Rat infested basement of an inn encountered by every single group of first level character worth their salt.

After Rise of the Runelords.

For various reasons I may have to drop that idea of a home-brew campaign. Instead I shall run some one-shot adventures. I have a lot of them to choose from. This would allow us to change characters and playing level more often. Especially we could decide to force ourselves to play some archetypes or classes never played before.

Again, Rise of the Runelords has not finished yet!

Laurent,

Hello,

There is no actual thread for this, so I am using this one.

This is intended for my fellow "Honey Badgers":

I was wrong about Francisco Scaramanga's third nipple. There is an IMDB entry about it, but nowhere does it say that Christopher Lee suffers from the condition.

See you all tonight for a fight with a F-for-you-know-what big Blue Dragon. It is gargantuan in size (20 ft. by 20 ft.). I expect the fight to last the whole evening, I shall bring a couple of Bestiaries in case the whole encounter falls flat.

Laurent,

Dear players,

Dragon fight.

I must have said that I had prepared for several scenari; knowing perfectly well that when I plan something you always manage to derail the GM's approach.

I had plans for:

• Having Ghlorofaex fight you outdoor.
• Having Ghlorofaex fight you inside his lair when he was resting.
• Having Ghlorofaex fight you inside his lair, had you managed to sneak in while he was on duty elsewhere in Xin-Shalast.

What I did not expect was for Andrew's character Larken to manage to go through my Dragon's SR thrice in a row, and surely did not expect to roll so low for those saves.

I do not like to cheat as a GM, so I had to find an explanation to keep Ghlorofaex as a proper challenge and actually generate an interesting combat. As I was telling Ian after the game, if the party had had access to some teleporting- or flying-magic or any other way of covering 500ft a round (my Dragon fly speed when double moving) I would have given you more shots at Ghlorofaex who was running slightly below fifty hit-points at the time.

The "story part" was that Ghlorofaex is a key ally of Karzoug and a general to be of the, soon to be, risen armies of Xin-Shalast; so he has friends! As you already know I have already had Most High Ceoptra do some errands in the Lower City; although the text calls for her to be only in the Spires. So it was not really a stretch on the imagination to have Ghlorofaex fly around to find her and be the recipient of a couple of heal spells and others of the cure variety.
However, this must be a one-off because Dragons are particularly proud monsters and having Ghlorofaex show such weakness to Most High Ceoptra has made him particularly hateful of the party. He shall therefore not go back for another dose of healing, not this day in any case as the healer would be running low on high-level spells.
I need to review his treasure treasure hoard to see if he has some healing material stashed there. He has access to dimension door so he could always blink away.

Illusions in the game.

I hope you agree with the way I have handle the Mirage ability of Blue Dragons and other hallucinatory terrain. The dodgy bit about illusion magic is always how to adjudicate the "interacting with" statement. If taken to the letter, the slightest hint of meta-gaming makes illusions utterly worthless in tactical combat situations. If forced upon the players, it can look too much like railroading or deus ex-machina, which always suppresses the fun.

Game page.

As you can see, we played the eighty first session yesterday.
I have updated the game page and also the link to the free player's guide. It now links to the newer version corresponding to the anniversary edition. While we shall not introduce any new PCs - I expect you to resurrect your fallen comrades if any with the stupendous amount of loot you have gathered - you may have a look at the free content anyway.

Laurent,

Hi all,

I may not be able to make it tomorrow. I have to finish, print, and soft-bind my thesis as well as fill in sheets which probably state that I have finished, printed, and soft-bound my thesis. So it depends on how well that all goes and how tired I am.

Ding

Duly noted.

Dear players,

Ghlorofaex's demise.

As pointed out at the beginning of the session, my Blue Dragon had indeed been badly hurt, but not as much as I thought it had; thus the fight went on for a bit longer to the satisfaction of all.
Thanks to a very stern and precise reading of the rules, the demented Larken saw one of his spells fizzled as prayer indeed does nothing to help with caster level check against SR.

Dagar the Paladin is a bit overrated as Marcus had to do all the work and kill Ghlorofaex. Technically he could have done so single-handedly with a hand tie behind his back, but that would have require at least a move-equivalent action, which was not possible since the coup-de-grâce action is a full-round action.

The obligatory pun on the Spiders of Leng.

Having robbed Adam of a pun on Bruce and a scroll of foresight by a whisker; I sort of disarmed one on the Spider of Leng. Now that I have had a night to mull over it, may I present you with an improved version of the pun?

As you know, Tellas is now broken as per the result of an insanity spell. To others, he will appear a bit dizzy, as if he was in a cloud of star dust. So...
Tellas is "dizzy as if in star-dust and the spiders from Leng" are attacking.

Yes, I know, this is a bit far fetched, but, given the situation, one had to try.

In passing the standard Spider of Leng have been given the advanced template, so they have a +2 bonus to hit/damage/yada-yada... which I need to remember when I need to switch to melee.

Also, I have conceived of an interesting planar behaviour when playing at the edge of Leng as your characters are at the moment. I will put the idea of slightly morphing terrain to your approval before using it in the game at the next session.

I will read, again, the next passage, this time from the new book, and hopefully we can start playing in the very last building-cum-dungeon of the whole campaign.

Laurent,

And the game page has been updated too.

Laurent,

Dear players,

I am not feeling really great today, suffering from a cold I caught over the weekend.
While I believe I should be able to run the game tomorrow, please check for a possible cancellation post tomorrow afternoon. I shall decide around noon.
This is currently no more than an inconvenience (blocked nose, mild headache) but knowing my luck...

Laurent,

Dear players,

I am sorry but I shall have to cancel the game tonight.
Headache, coughing, etc. the usual less than enjoyable symptoms...

Laurent,

Fair enough - hope you're feeling better soon. I'm just getting over a similar cold, and probably an evening not spent in a chilly basement would do me some good as well.

Adam,

Yes indeed.
Were it not weird for me to say it on a public forum, I would state: "So would my wife say". However, I have not said it, so it is not weird and shall have no effect whatsoever on the public understanding of our mutual heterosexual behaviours.

Laurent,

Sorry all, I can't make it on Wednesday due to an inpromptu trip to the Norfolk coast. Hope it goes well.

Noted, thanks for the head-up.

Laurent,

Dear players,

The spiders of Leng.

As you may have noticed, last time I should have opened with a diplomacy round instead of an ambush. When preparing for the game yesterday, I read a paragraph about that that did not appear in the original version of the adventure.
I have tried to adapt things, but I am aware that it may have sounded a bit off-key. Well... GMs always try to act like cats and aim to end-up back on their fours when falling.

In the original adventure, there was no way the PCs could have found any clue as to what the Leng device was. I guess the guys at Paizo have tried to crowbar a few clues about it in the anniversary edition.

Karzoug is dead!

All those years to find Karzoug and smoke him with a disintegrate or equivalent and what an anti-climax!

Well, anti-climax according to Marcus that is. Marcus has all but uttered: "K's dead baby. K's dead" as Butch would have said about Zed in "Pulp Fiction".

Technically Marcus did kill Karzoug, well "a" Karzoug or something looking like him anyway, with his Dominant weapon. I sincerely hope that my die-rolling will improve soon because that "2" made the Big Guy look as ridiculous as that Blue Dragon, Ghlorofaex did a couple of session ago.

Giants, big Giants and bigger Giants.

So far, so good for the party, one Giant down, many more to go. As I have indicated during the session, this is going to be a succession of "all out" battles all the time, so you will need to do some hit-and-run operations or risk being rolled-back, even rolled-over, by waves upon waves of enemies.

It is all about timing, and right now the timing is playing for the other side: They are massed being that door, with an assembled force of a very serious CR. Think of the three remaining Cloud Giants as "fodder", one Rune Giant as the mindless brute behind the door, all these sitting between you and another statue/projected image of Karzoug. The size of the Giants will not break line-of-sight for you, or the Karzoug statue, as one can easily look through the arch of the Giants' legs.
All the Giants have reach, the bigger they are the longer the reach.

Tactically, if you always engage full-on in any encounter, you can expect a respite of three to four rounds before the next one. If you take the safe option, as you did at the beginning of this fight, the opponents will always play for time for a round or two in order to wait for reinforcements.

To be fair, I do not see any optimal way to get around that. The final dungeon is meant to be epic and represents the end of the campaign. We shall most probably see some dead PCs (later resurrected I assume) or some calculated retreats. I will try to call for some level checks for the PCs to assess the difficulty of the encounter. As a rule of thumb, if a named NPC shows-up before the end of the current wave of combat: Flee!

Note that there is only one entrance to the complex, if one is caught behind enemy lines, that PC is likely toast. So avoid splitting the party by trying for a fancy flanking position. That "+2 to hit and sneak" combination could cost a lot more than it brings.

Oh well, we shall see.

Laurent,