Spoiler: DM notes
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So this hit squad started as a group of three beasties, three being an important number.
The Facilitator:A Protean Scourge Arcanist (MM3), half of which Puck squished earlier
The Handmaid: An Olethros Psychopomp (Pathfinder bestiary 6, I know I know)
The Executor: A Horned Devil (Core monster manual)
And since these creatures were acting as agents of a hidden deity of Fate, they get some frankly unfair abilities:
The Shrouding Skein: Constant Greater Invisibility. Also, those with insufficient will (i.e. grand majority of NPCs) will find it near impossible to recall these individuals even if they somehow see them
The Aegis of Destiny: Fitting with its grandiose title, this forces all attacks against the recipient to roll twice and use the lower roll (so disadvantage on attacks against the agents)
In addition, each agent had their own ability, just because I’m a terrible creature.
The Facilitator had Walk the Skein - Greater Teleport at Will (self only), as well as their Split and Reform abilities were sped up drastically, not that it came up (SPOILERS).
The Handmaid had Punish the Defiant - The Handmaid’s killer must immediately save vs a heightened Bestow Curse.
Finally, the Executor had Inevitable Fate - a recharging Fortunate Fate as well as DR 10/Chaotic on top of its normal DR.
All of these abilities could be dispelled for the encounter, and in fact in the case of Inevitable Fate, were very important to do so. So with unfair evil-goddess powers lined up, here we go.
Oh, and I also swapped the Executor’s summon ability from Barbed Devils to Bone Devils. While a lower CR, they were far more important for this fight.
We start off right where the last session cliff-hangered, the rest of the party bursting into the Forge workshop to back up their companion Spotter. The Forge is in chaos, fire blazing from the pool of molten steel, smoke spewing about, and the workers frantically scrambling to get away from the unseen creature destroying things. Puck makes it up next to Spotter, and with his shiny new Battlevisor, can see what had smashed the Crucible and was standing there all menacing-like.
It looks mostly like a Horned Devil, a nasty foe that the party had faced before. However, there’s some differences. The Executor has patches that seem to be made from silver. With a closer look, those silver parts are made of incredibly fine silver thread. It looks solid until the limb flexes or moves, revealing an unnerving emptiness in those sections. As well, the Executor has arachnid hints, the wings looking more like exoskeleton and webbing rather than skin and bone, and multifaceted eyes. All in all, cheerful looking. With that, it’s TIME TO
RUMBLE!
So apparently all my complaining and whining about how hot the player’s dice are upset my black&red GM dice, and they started off the encounter in spectacular fashion; the Handmaid and Facilitator going 1st and 2nd while the Executor was rumbling up for 4th place in initiative. The Handmaid is far enough away to be out of Angelena’s
Invisibility Purge, and has terrain blocking line of sight to Puck, so she lines up and shoots Sona twice and Angelena once, critting on Angelena and once on Sona. That means of my first 7 rolls for this fight, I rolled 3 20s.
Squeaky GM gets the crits.
The Handmaid’s bow does a lot of damage, especially on crits, so the resident spellcasters are understandably alarmed as they are both nearly half-killed on the first turn. They’re also creeped out by me marking down ticks next to character names, and describing how the arrows fade away into silken threads after landing; threads that cling and move like they’re attached to something. The Facilitator follows this up by running along the side of the Forge (spider climb) and zapping Talvosh with an
enervation for 3 negative levels. The Facilitator is definitely in range of the Invisibility Purge now, and is an ominous robed+hooded figure standing sideways in defiance of gravity, eerie marionette strings trailing away from fingers.
Angelena goes into full damage control mode, using armbands and rods to slap
Death Ward onto her/Sona/Talvosh, and a maximized mass cure crit so the two of them don’t die. Then the Executor glares as it notices Puck can actually
see him, waving a claw and managing to summon 4 Bone Devils. Said Bone devils mess everything up, throwing up ice walls and teleporting about to make the battleground faarrrr more complicated. The workshop is tall enough that flying above the walls is possible, but that requires...well, you know,
Flight. Spotter retrieves his bow from the nearby workbench (fluff description has him just barely snatching it away from the grasping claws of a Bone Devil) and falls back towards the rest of the party to try and prevent everyone from being cut off with ice walls. One of those walls has blocked Puck’s path to the Executor, so instead he rockets at the Facilitator, chopping deep into its side and activating a brutal surge to smash it into the wall, rendering it very dead (he had managed to activate his vest as he rushed into the workshop). Sona anklet-hops next to Angelena to avoid being walled off by herself, while Talvosh turns his flying boots on and prepares for a charge.
The Handmaid takes potshots at Puck (as he’s the only one flying about in sight) and fills him full of arrows , while the Bone devils dart about and cause more problems with ice walls, and also hitting both Talvosh and Angelena with
Dimensional Anchors. Alarmingly a second Horned Devil appears with a roar! Spotter quickly determines that it’s just an illusion with a single arrow, and uses the rest of his on a Bone Devil.
Puck shoots back towards the Executor and trades blows, getting the worse of the exchange due to the Executor being extremely resilient (high AC, high DR, regeneration, and the Aegis of Destiny essentially negating the chance for a crit). He’s at extremely low health when Sona busts out her new shiny Robe of Mysterious Conjuration to call up a bunch of Clockwork Mender Swarms, which zip over to Puck and use their sacrifice swarm ability to heal up a big chunk. This ends up being used multiple times in the fight to keep Puck from being reduced to a pile of scrap.
Angelena and Talvosh are shut down by Bone Devils teleporting all around them and surprise attacking them. When Talvosh lands a hit, they splatter, and Angelena’s spells have much of the same effect, but the battlefield keeps getting blocked and divided with ice walls. That plus the dimensional anchoring means the usual tactics of transposition and dimension stepping are nowhere near as effective. It’s almost as if the enemy is aware of the party’s preferred tactics *Insert smug chortle*
As Puck is patched up by the mender swarms sacrificing their bodies to repair his, the Handmaid darts forward with her super speedy flight speed, silken threads trailing and fluttering behind her. Puck can see now that his archer is a robed figure wearing a metallic mask shaped like the face of an old woman. It almost hurts to look at, though, the features twisted and just wrong to look at directly. Said Handmaid reaches out and taps Puck, and I call for a Fort save with a penalty equal to each time he was shot with an arrow. Luckily for him he rolls really high, and he is not frozen outside of time permanently in
Temporal Stasis. His retaliation is to chop downwards and use a brutal surge (since they’re fighting in the air) to send the Handmaid cratering into the ground.
The battle swings back and forth, Spotter shooting anything he can see as Bone Devils pop back and forth, Angelena and Sona fighting back as they try to avoid being herded into separate ice corridors. Talvosh manages to join Puck in attacking the Handmaid, and they chop a good chunk of her health away before she withdraws and zips out of sight (and invisibility purge range).
I land another crit on Angelena, and there is much despair...except it’s a Bone Devil claw attack...so a mighty crit of 2d4+4. However, the Executor teleporting behind Angelena is a much better cause for despair. Spotter and Sona manage to finish off the remaining Bone Devils except for one, and start trying to break through the ice wall separating Angelena from them. Talvosh zips back to fight the Executor, while Puck uses the last charge of his Vest of Flying to shoot after the Handmaid.
Puck is fast enough that the Handmaid barely had enough time for a full attack on Spotter before he was bearing down on her. Seeing as actually landing a blow was a serious problem for both Puck and Talvosh against these foes, he takes the direct approach and dungeon-crashes her into the wall. He needs to beat her check by 20 to make the distance! The Handmaid is many things, but physically strong is not one of them. The wall cracks and craters, and one more attack after that finally finishes the Handmaid. As she dies, she reaches out and annoints her murderer with a smear of blood, calling down a terrible curse!
Which Puck is immune to. So good luck there :P.
Talvosh lands some heavy blows, and Angelena lashes out with a
Sound Lance, blowing a massive hole in the Executor’s chest. There’s cheering and celebration!
Except the Executor stands back up as
Fortunate Fate triggers, his wounds regenerating and healing almost fully right before their eyes.
“The Plans of our Lady are not so easily deterred.”
Angelena gets dropped into negatives from a flurry of chain blows, and Talvosh takes a renewed beating from the hulking behemoth. The final Bone Devil, barely holding onto consciousness from a
Cometfall, sees his moment to shine and repeatedly stabs the unconscious Angelena, finishing her off with glee.
Puck manages to fly back close enough to call out a warning about the magic surrounding the Executor, and Spotter bashes open the ice wall. He’s at such low health however that walking through the supercooled fog will probably kill him, so he takes some pot shots at the Executor instead. Sona peers around the corner and throws out a
Greater Dispel and manages to succeed against the Executor’s Inevitable Fate blessing, shattering the
Fortunate Fate spell.
Spoiler: DM NOTE
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I forgot that there should have been a round where the Executor should have disappeared again, seeing as how Angelena had the Invisibility Purge on herself. My goof, so I just rule that it was dispelled as well
The party piles in their final attacks, and with a roar, the Executor falls. Talvosh immediately falls into a pile of beaten and mangled flesh, far beyond the chance of saving even if Angelena was still alive.