Forum: Public Forum

on Sun 06 of June, 2010 18:37 BST, by Laurent posts: 1029 United Kingdom

Rise of the Runelords

Click here for the game page.

The campaign ran from Wednesday, November 4th 2009 to Thursday, March 14th 2013.
The party succumbed one fight before the final big one with two casualties (Dagar the Paladin, Telas the Fighter/Thief) and the last two joining Karzoug the Claimer's team (Marcus the Shadow Dancer and Thorak the Storm Druid).
Let this thread be dedicated to the memories of the various PCs who have fought and died against avaricious evil.
We had close to four years of fun, even if as the GM I did not intend to finish the players off so close to the final goal. We played by the rules, monsters and PCs died by the rules, with no GM screen, no fudging of the dice and only a very tiny handful of re-rolls over the years.

Dear Players,

This is it, the new official thread for our weekly game is now located HERE.

Once the whole team has been made aware of the migration, I shall compile all the pages from the Meetup forum and save them as HTML files. These files in turn will be zipped and stored on this website. Finally I shall edit this message and put a link to these archives, so that all of you will be able to peruse them and recount your exploits to your grand-children while holding a glass of old port in your hand by the fireplace... under an imaginary +4 longsword displayed in 3D above that very same fake fireplace of yours. smile

This site may not look as swank as the Meetup one for the moment, but it can only - and will - improve. You are therefore invited to use it, moan about it in the "Debug" thread, thus directly or indirectly improve it.

I propose that our group makes use of the "Friendship" option in TikiWiki, so we shall invite one another to our respective circle of friends. Note that as your GM, being your friend or not will mean nothing to me, I will still send you ugly monsters to kill your character and laugh maniacally about it later!

Next game
As the Trickster would say (*): "I have conceived of a plan..."
I have designed the golem workshop, got the NPCs ready for the potential social interactions. I have even prepared a little sewer encounter for you to enter the location from below in your search for Ironbriar. The "Buzzing Bumblebee" is now a tavern/inn instead of a mere tavern.

The workshop will have all sorts of Golems and constructs available. This is a shop, you could, and should, visit it as potential customers. Even if buying a Golem would still cost a pretty penny at your current level of earnings.

(*) 300 XP for those who pick up the obscure reference. Nope, not Baldrick.

Laurent,

on Thu 14 of Mar., 2013 15:44 GMT, by Laurent posts: 1029 United Kingdom

Dear players,

Just a quick post to mention that your GM has done some homework and realised that a quickened spell does not provoke attacks of opportunity. Most High Ceoptra, whom you are currently having an antagonised relationship with, has that feat. The elderly gentleman you have been dying to meet for a while, Karzoug the Claimer, has a pretty expensive rod that allows him to quicken his spells too.

I know, I should be spending my time on better things, being married and all, but I must strive to make my encounters a bit nastier. So I have taken refuge in the rules. GMs should be of LN tending towards LE alignment to offer a sense of achievement after a successful fight. evil

The Eye of Avarice.

Looking at the final encounter, with neither high-level Priest- nor Mage-like classes in the party, the fight could be of a very tall order, especially considering Karzoug's collection of time stop spells. According to the story, he has been spying on the party since you set foot in Xin Shalast, hence knows your classes. Unless I roll very poorly, taking into account the number of opponents in the Eye of Avarice, the likelihood of success is pretty low. Forget the brilliant energy issue, this time the enemy will have a lot more actions per turn than you will.

Expect losing the game at the very end of the campaign. The party's choice of classes has given us a lot of fun overall, do not blame yourselves for not having the standard Fighter/Cleric/Rogue/Wizard profile that the adventures are designed for.

Laurent,

on Thu 14 of Mar., 2013 23:23 GMT, by Laurent posts: 1029 United Kingdom

Dear Players,

Well this is it, THE END.

As mentioned tonight, I had not expected to do a TPK tonight. True, as posted earlier, I expected a TPK against Karzoug the Claimer, but this should have been on Wednesday.

Agonising over wisdom drain.

After dropping two PCs in about two rounds, and getting re-rolls on the wisdom drain, we agreed to "reload" the game if we could find a way of using the party's resources to drop Most High Ceoptra. We concluded that yes, as indicated in the previous post, the party just lacked a high-level arcane spellcaster. Most High Ceoptra should have been mazed, feebleminded, or zapped with a "save or die/become useless" type of ninth-level spell . There is nothing that we could think of that could ward a PC against wisdom drain at least with the class abilities available to the party at that point in time in the adventure. Maybe we were wrong and there are solutions, but we just could not figure them out.

Nostalgia.

There is only nostalgia for Rise of the Runelords now. I have updated the game page. Feel free to point out mistakes in the storyline. I started it again when we switched websites, so the very first couple of adventures are missing.

Looking at my archives, we started on Wednesday, November 4th 2009 and I opened the thread on the old Meetup website that very evening after the game at 11.41 p.m. to be precise!

If you install 7-zip on your machine, I have uploaded my RotRL archives from the days when we were on Meetup. Extract the file in a folder and open the pages of the thread with Firefox or M$-Explorer. These are all .htm files with the relevant sub-folder for the images and everything.

Rise of the Runelords.7z

If you insist on a RAR or ZIP file, tell me and I shall upload one.