Exile: World as Dungeon [3.5]

**Telok** · 2013-08-08, 06:10 PM (ISO 8601)

Despite the pit being an obvious deathtrap it didn't stop them this time either.

They didn't hunt down the vamp or stick around to see if it came back to the coffin. They went to the pit, sat down on the edge, and spent a couple hours splicing twenty 50' ropes together and tying them off around the bridge. Since that bricked up passage in the vamp's room leads to the other side of the pit it was over there watching them for a bit before it went back to it's burial site and rejuvenated. He knows about them now, he has a score to settle, and he's patient. I figure that "wait until they come back through out of spells and beaten up by the stuff below" isn't too much of a plan for a 12 Int fighter to think up. So he'll Spider Climb about 100' up the opposite pit wall and wait for a good opportunity. I should explain something, the stuff in this dungeon is under orders to stay in certain places and do certain things. The living spell couldn't leave the pit or attack undead and golems, the octopus has to stay in the lake and not attack the boat, the golem half way down the stairs has to stay in it's area and throw people down a pit, undead in there have to stay on the level they were created on. The lich set up defensed that are either very dangerous and hard to kill, or can make more of themselves (specters, ghasts, vampires). The whole place is predicated on the defense in depth strategy and giving the intelligent defenders time to prepare an overwhelming attack. It's the stronghold of a lich, not a quick-bake easy-mode by-the-numbers dungeon.

The artificer UMD-faked a Mass Fly spell for them (and an Iron Body via scroll for himself) and they threw down the rope then flew after it. The artificer also cast Light on a dagger, tied it to one end of a 50' rope and secured the other end around his waist. Now it's 400' down to the surface of the lake, 300' of pit and 100' of cavern (and 70' of black water) which means that 600' of rope splashed into that lake... Loudly...

The warforged artificer went in, and three rounds later came back up at half hit points being beaten against the stone pillars in the lake. There ensued a general melee, the rogue fled, the sorceress Fireballed twice and died, the spellthief lost four levels but snagged some loot, the octopus almost got to pull the artificer back down by his dangling light dagger. Five minues later they got back to the top of the pit with a mushy sorceress body, two magic items, and 350' feet of rope.

"That octopus is dynamite!"
"Would it help to confuse it if we ran away some more?"
"I have a plan."

It was even a pretty good plan. Burning through the artificer and spellthief spells they flew down again (quietly), summoned a bevy of small earth elementals on the bank, spammed Comprehend Languages, and had earth-gliding minions do all the dirty work. They then retreated into the surrounding swamp and settled in for a day to do a bit of Identifying and buffing up for the saves on those negative levels. They got out with all the money, half of the potions and poisons are ruined, and they have about half the magic items plus the psychic warrior's maps.

So they came back a couple days later and tried to cross the pit. The spellthief made the save and balance checks to not fall through the illusionary middle of the bridge and the Minor Creation wooden bridge section found the invisible wall on the other side. Safely over that they fought two Wights and four Ghasts. It was supposed to by two Specters, two Wights, two Ghasts, and twelve Skeletons, but we were down to three people so I went light on it. Still the spellthief was paralyzed for four rounds and the rogue has a negative level. The Imps in the shrine to Yredelemnul (unidentified because they all failed Kn:Religion 10 checks) decided not to screw with them and they went down the stairs. The spellthief was totally stealthy right up to when he walked around a corner and came face to face with a flesh (ex-stone) golem which promptly threw him down a pit. He Swift Flew back up and got thrown down again surviving the impact with one hit point. The golem chased the rogue and the artificer blew it up with blast rods. I need to check if those are affected by spell resistance, none of us could remember and I didn't bother stopping to look it up in the middle of combat.

At the bottom of the stairs it's cold. This is a theme in Exile, long term undead presences and auras make places colder. It's both a hint and a set up, most cold dungeon areas are undead infested but just one or two have ice slimes and cold drakes or cyro-hydra. It's just cold enought that trying to rest down here without cold-weather gear is hazardous. Anyways they got down, melted a portcullis (no mechanism, just a DC19 Str check to raise), and started looting tombs. The pack of ghasts and wights in the main area were all over at the lake on the shore end that the PCs never went near, they were watching the octopus fight and waiting to see if any meat came their way. When the spellthief fought and killed a wight that had been locked in one of the main area crypts that brought the other two PCs with lights and made a fair bit of noise. They are at the middle crypt on the east side of the dungeon, twenty assorted wights and ghasts are running towards them, plus the vampire Elite Imperial soldier whose tomb they were fighting outside of is getting annoyed at all the noise.

We left off there, it's December 22nd and the ex-sorceress and ex-dread necro made new characters although there is a chance that the sorceress could be raised. There are NPCs who can do it and the artificer did Gentle Repose her body. It's just that anyone escaping alive from the Crypt of Drath is once again in question.

**Telok** · 2013-08-25, 10:54 PM (ISO 8601)

Hey! Seventeen days to fall off the front page. Time for an update!
I write as DwarfFortress generates a world. Our original party member Ranger finally got to come back, the sorceress rerolled to an anti-undead oversized-TWF bastard sword ranger, the dread necro is getting reincarnated (eventually) by the Ranger's cohort (Favored Soul of healing goddess with Versatile Spellcaster).

The artificer and spellthief continued on without the rogue (His mother had him out doing something, the perils of playing with an 11 year old). The spellthief heard the ghasts coming and the two took up ambush positions by a crypt, they knew there were more than 10 critters coming. Actually there were ten, I cut it down because of low player count. They Fireball ambushed with a scroll and then tried to "kite" which is a CRPG tactic that failed here. Three dead ghasts, two dead wights, five living ghasts, one dead spellthief, one out of infusions artificer. Due to his ongoing Body of Something (war?) infusion they couldn't kill him so eventually they just ran off with the spellthief's body. He got it back a little while later after using a Wall of Stone scroll (old old loot) to strand a single ghast and the body in with him in the small temple of Yedremmy on the middle west side of the map.

He left, consecrated a random bit of swamp, buried two bodies and kept the dread necro iced as he traveled back to Almaria and the Tower of the Magi. In the meantime the Ranger is contacted by Milo, the sage in Formello and a former student of Solberg, and asked to "help some adventurers who are in trouble." She drives a hard bargain but agrees to help. She's given a map, basic information on Drath (famous, High Necromancer in Imperial Mages Guild, golem bodyguards), a scroll with lots of spells (2 grease, 2 magic circle vs evil, death ward, 3 sending), and an undead bane morningstar. She hot-foots it down to Mertis and recruits a ranger (ex-sorceress) and a crusader (crusader 1 / fighter 9 using the fighter access to the Martial Strike feat for wider disciplines, ex-spellthief). They pass through the Tower of the Magi, pick up the artificer, and research Drath (info about his applying vampire template to animals and controlling living spells, that he was an enchanter and necromancy was his hobby, his wife was a succubus). Half of them head to the Castle for more research, half head to Fort Emerald to reincarnate the dread necromancer. The emerald at Fort Emerald maximizes the reincarnate and the DN comes back as a necropolitan orc. The DN has immunities, 18 Str, darkvision, and 30% more hp. He also has two wasted feats (Tomb Tainted Soul and Weapon Finesse) and is immune to Psychic Reformation. The DM giveth and the DM taketh away. The next bit of research enlightened the party about Drath's love of mind-screwing enemies and that his bodyguards were stone golems. The party reunited and rowed laboriously from Almaria to the Crypt of Drath. It was now the 9th of January.

They looted three unidentified potions out of the crypt next to the vampire's hidden coffin and left to explore side passages. The vamp investigated and noted that all crypts but one were opened so he settled into an ambush spot near that one. The party found the laboratory area guarded by five large stone statues. Two stylized warriors, a mage type, a succubus, and a mhorg. Thanks to Nystul's Magic Aura they all turn up different schools of magic and the players are mightily confused. The golem is the succubus statue and that aura is around it instead of on it, I think they missed that hint. They turned back and went to the last crypt, where they were nicely ambushed from behind. A smart soldier vamp with 30ac and Combat Expertise frustrated them, although his damage was low (unless he landed a slam) and his touch AC was only 14 on all but one round. With magic blasts they zeroed his hp and as he was trying to escape the DN charmed him with Command Undead (the second level spell). They first asked him to show them where his coffin was so they could help him (good thinking). When he went through a crack in the wall they called him back and, assuming there was a trap of some sort, asked him to show them safely where his coffin was. When he went through the crack again... I don't know what they thought at this point. They ended up telling him to go rest in his coffin until he healed and come back to them. We had to break for the ween then and I was a bit bewildered by what they were doing.

We reconvened the next week and the rogue was back ("The warforged abandoned you in the swamp, you had to eat swamp rats for two weeks until he returned with fresh adventurers to sacrifice to the monsters in this horrible pit. Swamp rats taste really nasty.") but we were without the artificer, this would prove to be unpleasant. Someone during the week had an idea and they just bashed down the wall the vampire went through and staked him in his coffin. Detect Magic found the two piercing crystals behind the coffin and they took his non-magic short sword, chain shirt, and century old boots. No, I don't know why.

They made for the lab and triggered the stone golem. They sat there, not moving, and traded full attacks with it. The crusader and dread necro did all the damage, the necro via a summoned zombie wyvern. In exchange it brutalized the ranger (not the Ranger who stood back and shot arrows), DN, his zombie, and crusader down into single digit hit points. I suggested that the party war cry should by "Beat it with your face until something breaks!"

They scrounged in the lab and found the two alcoves with monsters, two specters in one and two chain devils in the other, trapped in permanent force cages. They used a piercing crystal and fought the specters but left the devils for later. Which is a pity because the secret panel with the important lever is in the devil chamber. Sort of off-handedly they cleared the skellies and remaining ghasts from the temple between the lab and the lake.

They explored the western part of the black lake. The Ranger had picked up the Claw Boots which give a slow climb speed (and other bonuses) and crossed to the other bit of shore that was close enough to see. They tied off a rope about three feet above the water (I warned them that it would dip in the middle under weight) and began to cross. The octopus actually didn't hear them until the DN failed a no-ranks DC20 balance check to tightrope walk across. Ker-spash! People got clobbered up and dragged into the water for a bit. When the octopus was at half hit points I rolled a d20 trying to roll under it's 4 Int. I'd done this in the other fights but hadn't made it, this time I rolled a 3. It's an Evolved Vampire Giant Octopus and it had just remembered it's Cone of Cold ability. The crusader died hard, so did the Ranger's cohort, the Ranger survived but lost all piety doing so. The next round the DN, on the fifth try, got the octopus to fail it's save against Command Undead. The octopus was charmed and, since nobody still animate was in the water at the time, it consented to stop attacking them.

See, like almost everything in here the octopus has orders it is compelled to obey. It must "stay in or near the water and destroy anything that gets in the water that isn't in a boat." Asked nicely it was perfectly willing to ferry people around the lake as long as they didn't go in the water. Since they didn't want to take another dunking in the cold water it never came up. They mapped the whole lake in short order. They found the entrance to the tunnel to the lich, and the exit spot for the secret passage that the (bypassed devil-room) lever opens up. The next hour was spent trying to find ways in. These entrances are 15' x 15' x 3' magically hardened stone slabs with a backing of lead that is enchanted with a dimensional blocking spell (yes, trying to teleport through dumps you into the stone slab).

We had to leave off there. I gave broad hints that there was still one room that they hadn't searched. It is the 9th of January, my original plan was that the lich (alerted by the opening of his passage) would have a mhorg with the Green Crystal Mace disguised as himself to confuse his attackers. I'm not sure that they can handle that. I'm not sure that they can handle a solo enchanter lich with troop-commanding PrCs that lost him two caster levels, at all.

**Telok** · 2013-09-05, 10:51 PM (ISO 8601)

Things are getting freaking hilarious. I'm having a hard time not laughing continuously.

The rangers couldn't make it (illness) but everyone else did. The crusader rerolled as a cleric of Vehumet (god of blowing stuff up with magic, domains: magic and destruction) and we were joined by a young lady who wants to play D&D but her family is against it. So she's going to hang with us and provide direction and character to a soulknife while I roll the dice and make the tactical combat decisions (she gets strategy decisions). It weird and sort of stupid, but it's family stuff so I'm not going to argue. To recap, our dauntless heroes are;
An 11 year old girl (Rogue) played by an 11 year old boy who is the son of...
Our resident "That Guy" who is a Necropolitan Orc Dread Necromancer 8 / Devotee of Kikubaaqudgha 1. On the plus side he's not playing yet another female sorcerer, the minus is that he has to sacrifice character levels of people three times a year (May 23rd, Aug 26th, Nov 2nd) and every time he levels up.
A warforged artificer tourist with a magic Polaroid camera.
An elven Cleric of Vehumet, much more exploder and much less healer than most would assume.
A human Soulknife.

I had the artificer use one of his scrolls of Sending to contact Milo in Formello about reinforcements, by DM fiat the spell twisted and went back in time allowing the cleric and soulknife to appear in a timely manner. It got the game moving. Then they argued for ten minutes about whether of not to kill the two trapped demons and finally decided to after I gave some hints that it would be a good idea. Once defeated and coup de gras were performed elven auto-search easily found the lever hidden behind the wall of the cell. That opened the passage near the lake, under the canoe they found the lever that opened the slabs and pulled it. The DN went to "distract" the octopus by jumping in the lake again, because having the octopus charmed made it perfectly safe. Right? Since speech is unintelligible underwater and this water is inky black he got attacked. On the third round it surfaced and he could control it again, after it beat off 3/4 of his hit points. Everyone else was fine, the octopus is under orders to leave the boat alone. Behind the slab is a thin stone facade with a door in it, opening the door causes the facade to collapse. They told the rogue to pick the lock and open the door, nobody reminded him about searching for traps. The door was unlocked and the facade collapsed unleashing a horde of 40 ghouls. It was an easy fight, the artificer dropped Shield of Faith Legion meaning the ghouls had to roll 20s to hit while the soulknife combined Bladewind (class feature ala Whirlwind feat) an undead bane mindblade and Great Reach Bracers to nuke everything within 15 feet. They proceeded down a long spiral ramp.

I had reduced the opposition from a mhorg, bodak, and the lich by dropping the bodak and exchanging Forcecage and Mindfog with Power Word Blind and Baleful Polymorph. Thanks to the alarm on the facade the lich was prebuffed with Mage Armor, Shield, Protection from Good, Protection from Fire, Globe of Invulnerability, and Invisibility. The mhorg had a used-up wand, the Green Crystal Mace, and a single rank of cross-class Disguise skill. The mhorg took 10 on disguising himself as a lich and acted like he was casting spells with the wand. They fell for it and went after the mhorg. The lich's Walls of Fire and Chain Lightning were the most effective spells after PW:Blind, the party saved against everything else but the save-or-lose spells kept up the feeling of danger. A Wall of Iron from an old scroll by the artificer took out the mhorg although the soulknife got the killing shot. Likewise the soulknife did much of the damage to the lich (the cleric helped) until the artificer killed it with a blast rod. The DN spent the fight healing himself (Wall of Fire does double damage to undead, who knew? I did.) and trying to dominate the lich with his PrC ability while the rogue failed a save against a Fear spell early on.

After the fight our heroes gleefully looted everything they could carry that looked valuable except for the lich dust. The loot was gold jewelry (3000 gp), the lich's spell book (radiating a strong necromantic aura), a Tome of Death, 1200 silver coins, a crystal helmet, +5 natural armor robe, 10 expensive potions (~10,000 gp), a small magical whip, and the Tip of DemonSlayer. I rolled to see when the lich would reappear, they have 9 days to identify and destroy the phylactery. The first two days were spent climbing out of the dungeon, crossing the swamp, resting, and preparing spells or burying people. The third day saw them boat eastwards across the lake to the Honeycomb where they tromped through the tunnels for three more days to get to Mertis. The dread necro snatched the books and went wandering off outside of town to locate an undead cohort (an old character that died near here a long time ago, a ghoul fighter-6 TWFing bastard swords), by opening the books he discovered that one was a Tome of Death and the other was a 700 page spellbook with 620 spell filled pages and 20 blank pages. Two of the spells in that book are custom spells which excited him even though he couldn't decipher them. Nobody noted the page count discrepancy, which is a pity because those pages are what makes the spell book also be the lich's phylactery. Meanwhile the artificer Identified all the other loot. The whip is a small Bloodfeeding Mighty cleaving Throwing whip (yes, it's a useless +3 weapon intended to be sacrificed to a god for piety), the helmet a cursed Reverse Capacitor Psicrown of Discerning Watcher, and the potions clocked in at 3 white dragon breath (Fire Breath Elixir doing cold), 2 Remove Curse, 2 Nondetection, 3 Elixir of Truth, and 4 Bull's Strength. When the DN returned the cleric deciphered the unknown wizard spells for him. All told they've spent two days in Mertis, the lich can return in two days.

So it's the 16th of January. I'll put the custom spells in a spoiler, the artificer and DN have a plan to bribe a great dragon to help with making a permanent gate from somewhere to under Fort Emerald so that they can perform the custom spells under the spell maximizing influence of the emerald. Plus they want to sell illicit access to the emerald, I'm not sure to whom. I did note that unsupervised zombie badgers would stand a decent chance of trying to dig through the emerald if given the planned command of "Dig a really big cavern right under the fort." There are also "plans" to bring the undead octopus out of Drath and set it loose near the slitherazi in hopes that it will start a... vampire apocalypse? Oy. Everyone else just wants to go to the Castle and start on re-forging DemonSlayer, actually following the whole plot up to now. And the lich will return soon, possibly again and again and again.

Custom spells:

Spoiler

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Forced Evolution: Sorcerer/Wizard 6, Necromancy, VSM. (This is the one they guys want to maximize.)
This spell takes 8 hours to cast and consumes 1000 gp of materials per hit die of the target.
One unresisting undead creature has the Evolved (Liber Mortis) template added to it. Using this spell on a creature dispels all magic currently on the target.

Irresistible Template: Sorcerer/Wizard 7, Necromancy, VSM. (This is how the living spell and vampire octopus were made.)
This spell takes 8 hours to cast and consumes 2000 gp of materials per hit die of the target (including the final adjusted hit dice, e.g. a Titanic animal would cost 50,000 gp).
One unresisting creature has a template added to it. If the target is a valid subject for the template then this spell may be used again to add another template to it at a later date. If the target is not a valid subject for the template then may or may not be added to the target creature (DM's choice) and this spell will have no additional effect on that creature if it is used again. Using this spell on a creature counts as a hostile act and dispels all magic currently on the target.

**Telok** · 2013-09-13, 08:14 PM (ISO 8601)

This week saw the cleric, dread necro, artificer, and soulknife complete a major milestone in the plot and level up to 11. And apparently the lady can roll the dice for her soulknife character, so that's good. Next week should see the return of our long absent ranger as she recovers from a nasty bit of illness.

The characters left Mertis for the Castle where they picked up the other bits of Demonslayer (the DN bought 43 HD of onyx at the Tower of the Magi on the way through). Rone sent a message to Solberg while the artificer faker up a scroll of Extended Mass Phantom Steed (it's from ebberon and that isn't the exact name). The party dashed north towards Fort Draco at 30 mph on steeds that walk on water. The random encounter with a giant pike failed to appear in the first couple of hours on the water, same with the random slith patrol boat. The dice decided that there was an attack on Fort Dranlon going on, but the party decided to bypass it. I made a sad face because the lich needs a nearby dead body to come back. The random giant spider encounter didn't occur either. Then they were at Fort Draco with four hours left on the steeds, they had been in the saddle for about sixteen hours. The living characters fell off and went to the inn for baths and rest, the artificer and necromancer went to go see Motrax.

The artificer pulled a really neat stunt with Motrax. It's pretty widely known that Motrax likes cats, so he pulled out a 1 HD cat effigy and gave it to Motrax. So they talked with a very happy Motrax and askes questions. First, it appears that Motrax isn't going to bother leaving a last will and testament so once he dies it's open season on his treasure. Second, the people really knowledgeable about teleport effects are Gazaharad (imperial high muckety muck), Koth (reclusive and scholarly great dragon), and Erika Redmark. So they got pointed to Erika again, I think it's so nice when players follow plot lines of their own initiative. Lastly, Motrax correctly identified the lich's spellbook as a phylactery and causing all sorts of consternation for our heroes. Then they skedaddled back to Draco.

Solberg showed up in Fort Draco and with Boutell reforged Demonslayer and told them how to kill the demon lord in the Tower of the Magi, he also sweetened the deal by offering them a 25% discount on non-scroll/potion purchases there too. For having completed a major plot point the party gained a level, they are now 11th level except for the necromancer who wants to continue his PrC that requires him to sacrifice character levels of people, he is still 9th level. They spent the night and then took almost three weeks to walk back to the Tower of the Magi. On the way they stopped in Mertis and gave the lich's spellbook to the 5th level NPC cleric of Elyvilon for her to sacrifice to her god. There is now a grateful 6th level NPC cleric of Elyvilon in Mertis along with a 6th level ex-PC sorcerer. In other news they could have sacrificed the book on an altar of Nemelex and gotten two Legendary decks of cards. The artificer did have the presence of mind to copy the two unique spells with his magic camera first.

At the Tower they went straight to the experiment chamber, through a bit of four dimensional architecture liked to a trap (Solberg told them how to bypass it, but not what it does), and through two permanent walls of force to get to the chamber that the demon lord is trapped in. In a blank 25' by 25' by 25' stone room they did not find a demon, they found a rough tunnel clawed into the stone and a weeping, battered apprentice with her arms and legs broken. They spread out a bit, checked the tunnel (it only went 20 feet or so with lots of rubble), and talked to the girl. Then someone remembered that DemonSlayer can Detect Demons and a few seconds later the soulknife (the only PC who had martial weapon proficiency any more) announced that there were two demons in the room. The dread necro admitted that his familiar was actually an Imp (he never uses it anyways) and the "apprentice" slapped three of them with a lightning bolt. Initiative was rolled and the Horned Devil went first. It stood up, dropped the illusion, and announced it's name and intention to kill and rape everyone. Yes, the BBEG's first combat round was spent posturing.

The fight took 14 rounds total (the party spent five rounds before the fight doing stuff). The demon Fireballed the party three times, always hitting everyone and never bothering to SLA on the defensive, nobody took the AoOs and the DN's cohort died again. Hit point damage was done by DemonSlayer, Slay Living (cleric cast, made the save), and one negative energy burst from the DN. Regenerating stun damage was done by mindblade, blast rod, and demon bane weapons (artificer and cleric). The DN also tried to use the Tome of Death but since he can't cast Read Magic he can only get what the book gives him, Death Ward in this case. By the end everyone was bloodied and they all had Infernal Wounds. It took all the cleric's healing spells (he channels negative energy) to stop his, all of the soulknife's remaining HP and all of the artificer's repair spells to keep the other two alive for him to make the untrained Heal check. The DN just fondled himself for negative energy every couple rounds so they could take 20 on him last.

We stopped there for there night, it is now February the 9th in game. I'm glad that I didn't give the demon his spiked chain, that would have harshed them all up. There is some talk of the DN animating the body which will have consequences as there are laws against demons and undead in Exile. I think that the most probable thing to happen will be the almost immediate destruction of the skeleton (too many HD for a zombie) and a slap on the wrist (and a reputation downgrade) for the DN. And of course the necromancer needs yet another cohort, he's all out of freebies so he'll have to attract or create one. Plus, if it's higher than ECL 8 it will abandon him pretty soon after discovering that he's not good enough (the penalties to his leadership score are starting to stack up).

**Telok** · 2013-09-18, 08:26 PM (ISO 8601)

We left off last week with the party having just killed a Horned Devil. So they started out having to get out of the "Secured Area For Storing Incredibly Dangerous Stuff" room. Well actually the dread necromancer first cast Animate Dead on the dead demon and messily extracted a large skeleton. Then they cut through the regenerated walls of force and went back through the magical experiment rooms. All of this went swimmingly until somebody said: "What happens if we don't follow the instructions?" I had worked out a very strong yet relatively simple trap that would kill almost anything not specifically prepared for it, was within the capabilities of the NPCs to create, and was almost impossible to set off by accident. I wrote down the trap, it's operation, and the bypass method on a sheet of paper. Last week I tore that paper in half and (as Solberg) handed the half with the bypass instructions to the party. I told them there was a nasty trap if they didn't follow the instructions going in and coming out.

The soulknife and cleric didn't wait around. As soon as there was talk of experimenting with the trap they left to go find a dorm room to sleep in. The artificer and DN fooled with the trap.

Spoiler

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1) Close the door and block all light from coming in through any cracks.
2) Dispel all of the lights in the room.
3) Locate and push upwards the hidden panel in the limestone ceiling.
4) DO NOT pull the lever. You will die and it will hurt the whole time.
5) Rotate the panel one quarter turn clockwise and let it back down into place.
6) Wait for the lights to come back on.
7) There will be a new door in the far wall, go through that one.
8) DO NOT try to open the door to the main hallway. You will die and it will hurt the whole time.
9) Reverse the instructions to safely exit.

There were a few more details but that was the important stuff. What happened was that the artificer opened the ceiling panel while the lights were on. This set off two Walls of Stone covering the walls with the doors in them, two Walls of Force covering the new stone walls, and broke a cask of caustic gas (10x10 area, 1d8 acid damage each round for 10 rounds, Fort save 13 vs. inhaled poison [Nausea/1d3 Con] each round you're in the gas). While they ignored the piddling acid damage (and neither of them breathe) and fooled with the panel some more the gas slowly ate away at the limestone. On the third round it had done more than 16 points of damage and two larger casks of the gas fell out of the ceiling and shattered. This filled the whole room with the gas an kicked the damage up to 3d6/round. After another two rounds the entire ceiling had taken more than 24 points of damage and it collapsed. The light spell on the ceiling failed, plunging them into darkness, chunks of limestone hit them (1d6 bludgeoning, Ref 10 for half damage), and the extra-dimensional space above the ceiling was opened to drop a twelve foot thick layer of lava on them. The gas, when compressed in an air-tight container and heated, exploded (8d6 fire/acid, Reflex 15 for half damage) consuming all the oxygen in the air (suffocation!) and turned into a thick noxious (Fort save 15, inhaled poison, Nausea every round while in the cloud) smoke that obscured vision. Then the lava hit.

I gave them one round before I had the lava burn and crush them to death. The warforged artificer swam to the top of the lava and donned a fire resist item, the DN discovered that the entire Tower of the Magi is under a Forbiddance spell. Twelve hours later the cleric and soulknife came back and started getting the room cleared (lava is molten rock, rock to mud means really really hot mud) in search of loot. It turned out the artificer had survived by getting off a Wall of Ice spell and turning most of the top of the lava into obsidian and standing up there. The DN, his familiar, and his new skeleton were incinerated. The DN's ashes were sifted from the dirt and he was Reincarnated as (he chose to use the AD&D list) an eagle, Flesh to Stone -> Stone Shape (craft: sculpture) -> Stone to Flesh turned him into (at his request) what mostly looks like a Slitherazi. The DN was now 8th level, has a reputation as a Chaotic Stupid leader (the excavation and reincarnation were pretty public and seen by several faculty who are still in the tower), and his only non-immolated gear is a Bloodstone Spell-storing longsword, a mithril chain shirt, and a new spell component pouch.

After the soulknife used a five pound gold nugget she had found in the ex-lava to buy some potions and a type II Necklace of Fireballs the party left for points west. They avoided all towns, passed through Fort Saffron and Fort Spire, drank a beer in Spire, and went to Erika's Tower. Numerous random encounter rolls failed. Le sigh. Plus a lack of self promotion combined with absolute unwillingness to talk to non-plot critical NPCs is retarding their reputation as powerful and capable adventurers. Bards are not singing about their great deeds.

In Erika's Tower they bashed through the liars (netted two Hellcat skins though, and why is the soulknife the only person who can reliably cope with invisibility again?), fought the basilisks (only had to make two saves), and pulverized the immobile Stone Golem that I keep expecting people to just walk past (Erika is going to switch to something cheaper to replace in that room). The DN died twice to the golem, piety brought him back once, stupidity put him back down, and the cleric did the Revenance -> Revivify combo to get him back. The DN is now 7th level.

That's where we left off. It is the 25th of February and I need to decide what Erika replaced her two behir with while the replacements grow to maturity.

**Telok** · 2013-10-01, 07:43 PM (ISO 8601)

Two week update this time. Not much action happened the first week, I literally cover it in one paragraph. This week our old and much missed ranger returned to us, just in time to die. The warforged artificer isn't with us right now, RL stuff.

It turns out that Erika replaced the behir with an elite array hydra. It's HP and AC went up while it's attack and damage went down, it was up to Int 6 and +12 hide checks too. It took them about twenty rounds to kill it, and it was only attacking half that time. Still killed the cleric (piety save) and several summoned zombie wyverns while harshing up the soulknife pretty well too. Erika known that the Empire is teleporting soldiers down to keep an eye on things and is in contact with Koth. She sent the party off to Bharga to track down a possible lead to an imperial outpost. After passing through Bharga and the (now abandoned) Giant Castle they arrived at Pyrog's Lair where Lucky Lucy (orc duskblade7/fortune friend2, custom item 3/day wraithstrike) had killed Pyrog with the Spazzhammer and taken over a tribe of giants and ogres. The DN wanted to attack because Loot! but nobody wanted to back him up. They were pointed to a chasm with a blue light off in the distance in it. Interestingly this actually is an imperial outpost.

When they arrived the cleric cast Air Walk and went scouting. Good, fine. It's half a mile over to the landing with the light, which comes out to two average random duration CL5 Fly spells with a Featherfall in between. Since there are some scrolls of Mass Fly and a couple who can cast Fly the occupants have no problems. On finding the landing unguarded and the front door unlocked the cleric went inside. Not good, not fine. There are supposed to be eight(8!) Invisible Stalkers in there. I cut it down to four and he still went unconscious before he got to act. After he had been gone a while the rest of the party started looking for an invisible bridge... I can't explain this one.

Eventually an Imperial Priest (of Zin) lays down a Lesser Vigor on our tied up and stripped naked cleric of Vehumet and some officers get to questioning him. Things are generally inconclusive and they leave him tied up in a storage room. The fiery burst reserve feat got the ropes (and him) and he ransacked the adjacent room, managing to impromptu craft himself a holy symbol by carving a lightning bolt shape out of part of a chair and a sharpened belt buckle. His escape attempt went well until the main room where archers, a shield wall, and two officers stopped him.

Nine hours pass. The ranger has walked to the southern edge of the chasm and back around using the effective climb speed of the Claw Boots. She finds the landing pad, unlocked door, and seemingly empty room. The four Invisible Stalkers clobber her dead after she enters without saying the password. Piety revives her just in time to get dragged off to become another captive. There's a circular Wall of Fire in the passage and her captor (wizard) has to cast Resist Energy on her to get he through. In the main room (our cleric is tied up in this room and under guard this time) she stops faking and uses an Amulet of Vermin to call a Huge Monstrous Centipede as a distraction and try to escape. The wizard dispels her and let's her try while everyone else focuses on the centipede and the cleric, who is again lighting the place on fire. The ranger jumped through both sides of the Wall of Fire and fried, the cleric was executed because the soldiers can't keep someone with a supernatural fireburst ability captive, and the DN got pushed into the chasm by the soulknife...

It's a long story and we all agreed that he deserved it. Even his son agreed that he deserved it.

The rest of the session was the soulknife going back to the Tower of the Magi to try and get he Hellcat skins turned into a cloak of invisibility and everyone else making new characters. The cleric is getting replaced by a dwarven wildshape druid, the ranger is becoming a warmage (I need to suggest some magic items to her), and the DN will be replaced by a stupid fighter. No, really. A dwarven sneak attack fighter wearing battle plate with Vexing Flanker, Telling Blow, and a pole-axe. Dump stats are Int and Chr, all his magic items are +AC stuff. He has no ability outside of melee combat.

**Telok** · 2013-10-09, 08:14 PM (ISO 8601)

Well one of our old players showed up this time, with a warmage/wild-mage who worships Xom. Two people showed up late and had to wait a bit but they both needed more time to finish characters (the ranger and dread necro who died last time.

The soulknife decided to take another stab at the Imperial outpost and recruited a dwarven shapechange druid - scout - warshaper (he has more levels of scout than druid but calling him a scout is inaccurate) and the aforementioned wild-mage, plus the artificer caught up with her and wanted to know what the heck happened. With introductions and explanations and excuses finished they set off. Again it was an uneventful journey, no undead bandits, no marauding giants, no too-stupid-to-live gangsters from Spire. I need to use different random encounter dice.

So ten days later our heroes arrived back at the chasm. The druid and warforged (dire bat effigy via crafter spell and a cart of supplies and tools) ferried everyone across. This time they decided that an empty room looked suspicious, and discovered that the only person who was prepared to deal with invisibility was the soulknife. Really, they're level eleven and simple invisibility is still a problem for them. Anyways once they saw invisible things (invisible stalkers don't actually have any description) the artificer laid down glitterdust while the warmage and soulknife blasted away.

They warmage put Fire Shield on everyone to get through the barrier and just before they burst through the door into the outpost the artificer went "<knock><knock><knock> Invading orc horde! Open up!" on the door. With surprise ruined a fight ensued. They pretty much stomped the place, Empowered Fireball and Blast of Flame killed and a Sleet Storm put out the fires. The Imperial mage commander and his pet demon lasted five good rounds. I've got to stop using so many enchanter and transmuter specialists, his only spell that worked was Confusion and only on the warmage (low roll). Still the warmage did Phantasmal Killer the artificer, who died from fear (really low rolls). They immediately looted his body and discovered, among other things, three Elixirs of Reincarnation. With the attitude of "nothing ventured, nothing gained" they brought the warforged back as a dryad... He's decided to retire after this, the thought of having to lug around an oak tree in a wagon while adventuring apparently isn't appealing.

Loot from this dungeon is good. Lots of official Empire documents, a couple of Imperial secret passes, aptitude giant bane TigerClaw (Soaring Raptor Strike & Wolverine Stance) scimitar, steel plate [styptic & shadow], banded mail of luck[dmg220], bearskin armor [mic16], Khoth's scroll(plot point), the Lightning Axe, Winged Shield (dmg221), tigerskin armor (mic22). And other minor stuff plus some of the bits off of the last two adventurers to die in here.

Interestingly both bearskin and tigerskin armors specify that they work while the user is wildshaped. Since druids lose all spell casting and supernatural abilities for 24 hours if they wear metal armor or shields I really don't know who that stuff is supposed to benefit. Wildshape rangers can use it but it seems odd for an entire line of Magic Item Compendium armors to be created for a single, optional, variant of a class.

Anyways it's April 25th now. Our heroes are going to stay in the outpost (after dumping some bodies outside) for a couple of days and then leave, they'll probably go to Erika's Tower and the head up to visit Koth. The only Imperials attached to this outpost who were not present during the raid were three slayers (roguish Imperial PrC) who are undercover in Exile towns and the next set of supplies and replacements isn't dut until early late May. However the next scheduled report is due in three days, so by April 29th the Empire will know something is wrong with it's Exile spy outpost. I'll need to check Planar Binding and Planar Ally to see what's available to be sent down to investigate.

**Telok** · 2013-10-25, 06:35 PM (ISO 8601)

The cleric couldn't make it this week due to the after-effects of a two day charity even she volunteered at. However two replacement characters were present, a stonechild warblade with UMD (eternal wand of enlarge person and the Throw Enemy feat) and a goliath psychic warrior who is a copy of an earlier character. While I, and many others, don't like copy characters I'll let this one slide because the player is completely inept at (and bored by) anything but combat and we're playing at his house because of his kids and the fact that it's at the middle of the circle formed by everybody else's homes. In short he adds nothing to the party but combat numbers, I can always add more mooks to the fights.

With only three players and no cleric we all knew that they couldn't take the fight that they had just picked, they tried to run but weren't hidden and started at medium range with enemies armed with long range spells. I had to do something I really don't like to do, deus ex machina. A shadesteel golem ripped the Imperials apart while the party heroically ran away.

Once the explosions and screams stopped they went back to investigate. There was a guy kicking corpses and wanding the shadesteel golem with Darkness, since the party didn't attack and weren't Imperial he was friendly. This was Gilbert, he explained about Lord Aydin (ex-assistant to the Lord High Diviner of the Imperial Divination and Information Bureau) and Lady Josie (his wife and a 13th level Artificer), the wards and golems, the Imperial assassination teams in the area, and asked if they had any beer. Aydin is a teetotaler so all the summoned/created food is non-alcoholic and nobody here has had any liquor for three years now. So the party met Aydin, ignored his wife, asked a few questions about the teleporter and left. On the way out they recruited two of Aydin's retainers who just happened to be the goliath and stonechild. Lack of booze is an amazing motivator for some people.

Row, row, row the boat, back to lizard land! So the warshaper/druid scouted as a bird, missed the dragon carving by not coming within two miles of it, and reported lots and lots of lizard and drake encounters. They left, another 20,000+ gp of loot abandoned. So further back downriver they disembarked at Koth's cavern. A day's walk and they talked to Koth and got the ritual to open the teleporter to the surface. They wanted maps which he doesn't do, and walked back to the river to travel south in search of the teleporter on the west bank. I have absolutely no clue as to how they came to the decision that the place is on the west bank of the river, Koth only said that it was north of Spire and west of the giants.

At the next cave they explored west to and through the lava fields over three days before taking a little northern passage that wends it's way back up to Koth's cavern (swearing about wasted time). In the middle were another 50+ miles of lava fields leading off to the northwest, they declined to explore those. They fought a couple of minor random demon encounters in the lava fields, mostly letting me gauge their strength better. Five babau, five hellcats, and two bearded devils are not a serious threat anymore. Then they walked back south on a different part of the loop to the cavern where they left their boat (more swearing). SO they moved back inland and went south of the lava fields.

We stopped just as they sighted a lonely old crazy wizard type. He is in fact an crazy lone survivor of an Imperial outpost that Koth destroyed months ago. The four warforged titans under illusions of boulders are his dragon trap. It's the 15th of May and I need to work on my crazy person babble before the party ticks him off and he attacks them.

**Telok** · 2013-10-29, 05:57 PM (ISO 8601)

We picked up where we left off sans the soulknife (food poisoning) and the PC quickly insulted the crazy wizard which started the fight.

The warmage zapped one warforged titan with Prismatic Ray and sent it to another plane where it will wander pretty aimlessly for a very long time. In turn he was zapped with Baleful Ploymorph and turned into a badger. Once he realized he had Scent he tracked the invisible wizard for the warshaper/scout to kill him. The stonechild warblade grappled two titans, sequentially, and had one of them pinned for a couple rounds so others could kill it. That was impressive. The only loot was a spellbook, they didn't bother to do anything about the bodies.

Two days later they found big swamp just south of them and started scouting a bit (via the scout shapeshifting into bird form and flying around)), this found them the Old Vatahani Crypt. A day later they were at it's entrance and confused, this is where we discovered that the reincarnated-as-a-dryad artificer had made off with the Blessed Atheme. It turned out that he actually made off with all sorts of stuff.

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35,000 gold, 50,000 silver, Green Crystal Mace, a sapphire necklace (2,000 gp), Ring of Fire's Friend, mithril chain shirt +2, Ice Fang, misc. magic breastplate, misc. magic full plate, Banded Mail of Luck, Bearskin and Tigerskin armors, a robe of +5 natural armor, the Electric Axe, Vest of Resistance +3, Spellsight Monocle, Dimples, sixteen Healing Belts, a suit of obsidian stone plate armor, Imperial top secret pass-card, Lifeshield, heavy +1 shield, called full plate of heavy fortification, Discerning Watcher Psicrown (411 pp but cursed), six pounds of mithril, eighteen pounds of adamantine, eight pounds of raw gold.

If these guys whine about not having enough wealth I will beat them with their own inventory lists bound inside an unabridged dictionary.

When the warmage failed to figure out what sort of invisible forcefield the cleric pulled a Divine Insight spell out and nailed the 50 Spellcraft check to identify it (as the spell) even with the -5 penalty for the effect being a psychic power. Since it was a caster level 27 Alter Reality to create a force field and not a Wall of Force they were still kind of confused but at a loss as to how to bypass it. The goliath had boots that allow very short range teleports but once he knew that worked he got smart and returned to stay with the rest of the group. The warmage started Acid Splattering the wall near the entrance but found that while the unworked exterior wall dissolved the walls of the entrance were still unaffected several feet in. Eventually the warblade just hammered through the wall nearby with sheer strength and boulder throwing, the force field stopped protecting the entrance tunnel after the first bend and he came in beyond that.

Confronted with an alien looking blade made from starmetal stuck in the floor of an open room our heroes paused, and worried. Eventually the goliath spent 1/3rd of his power points to buff and went to pull the sword. It didn't. Turns out it unscrews... And then the "lightbulb crystal" in the ceiling summons twin 9th level astral constructs (innate invisibility and 29 power resistance). Yes I took a cue from Forbidden Planet, everyone who's seen that film raise your hand. Everyone who is less than half the age of that film raise your hand and you young whippersnappers can get off my lawn! Kids these days. If my knees were in better shape I'd chase them down and beat them with my cane. The goliath got all of 15 feet towards the door before he dropped. The warblade dropped, everyone but the warmage got hit, almost nobody could hit the things or penetrate the power resistance. They were total melee brutes and the party melees stood next to them and fought, during the whole fight only one of the astral constructs used a single move action. Mass Fire Shield, a hit from the warblade, and a single Orb of Acid spell killed both 144 HP constructs. Although the party did get a round where one of the constructs didn't attack them, when the goliath dropped the alien sword the construct picked it up and put it back in the hole.

Afterwards there was discussion about taking the crystal, it detected as magic but the only obvious thing it did was give off light, but that was abandoned because nobody wanted to carry a thirty pound rock that gave off purple light as bright as a torch. That's probably a good thing because the crystal recharges in twelve hours and then recreates the astral constructs if the sword isn't in place in the chamber. Man I don't even know how much that thing is worth, probably a lot. More than twelve gallons of Quintessence? Dosen't matter, they didn't stay to investigate or dig up the floor to find the buried and sealed crypt. Still a geyser of pressurized Quintessence spraying them would have been funny.

It's May 20th, they'll probably spend a day sealing up the crypt with rockfalls before continuing on south. Oh, I almost forgot the sword's stats, it's not magical... Yet.

Alien Spiral Blade

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A spiraling, double edged, serrated hand-and-a-half sword (masterwork starmetal bastard sword). The sword is +2 to hit and does 2d4 slashing damage, it threatens a critical only on a natural 20. On a critical confirmation the damage changes to 2d6 piercing and the damage multiplier is x5. 75,000 gp value.

Starmetal (CArc p141) Green/Grey metal
Items weigh 15% more
Costs 600gp per pound of weight
Item has an minimum of 20 hardness
Armor
Light Armor – Damage Reduction 1 / Adamantine
Medium Armor – Damage Reduction 2 / Adamantine
Heavy Armor – Damage Reduction 3 / Adamantine
Weapon
Bypasses all forms of Damage Reduction
Does +1d6 damage to Plants
Does +2d6 damage to DR/Silver
Does +3d6 damage to DR/Cold Iron

**Telok** · 2013-11-05, 11:14 PM (ISO 8601)

Near death experiences and ICK!

This week was almost as much fun as having giants hit people with Awesome blow. We didn't have the warmage this week, he's working in Barrow right now, but everyone else showed up. The party abandoned the crypt without sealing it and explored the swamp, a day later they found the Imperial outpost that Koth wrecked long ago. There were some amusing moments when it turned out that a chasm 100 feet across and 200 feet deep is a real barrier and an invitation to enact a Three Stooges skit for people with only 100 feet of rope. This with a wall that's a DC 5 climb check they can take ten on... Well, heroes...

Inside, the entrance looks like, er... Have you ever seen a bear tear apart a styrofoam cooler to get at something inside? The entrance looks like the remains of that cooler. Inside they found several sets of remains consisting of only bones and metal resting on a clean and dustless floor, and another normal set of remains in a dusty and dirty corner. I nixed the Spellwarped Hellwasp Swarm here, without the warmage it would have been a righteously nasty fight where only the cleric could have done anything (alchemical splash weapons? inhaled poisons? what are those?) and stopped feeling worried about putting a 24 HD gelatinous cube in here too. As the party spread out they got louder as they called to each other and apparently giant jello d6s can hear, so when the goliath psychic warrior spotted a magic glowing ranseur floating towards him (and made the DC 15 spot check) the fight was on. At 340 HP and 8 AC the cube was meant to reward smart melee and casters, there were four places in the dungeon where it couldn't go and they'd seen three of them already, but the cube sucked up everyone except the soulknife. She refused to close with it after it engulfed the goliath and warblade, and kept refusing while it got the dwarf warshaper/scout/druid and cleric who unwisely ended their turns next to it. I'm still somewhat amazed that everyone failed the DC 17 Reflex saves to avoid entrapment, failing the DC 32 Fortitude saves against the paralysis was not unexpected. In the end the soulknife killed it before anyone suffocated, they were very slimy and ended up washing off in a swamp. With leeches. Normal, not giant.

Relatively undamaged they re-crossed the chasm (handwave) and tromped south. Once they saw Erika's Tower in the distance they made for the river and constructed a raft. Three days of poling upriver got them back to Bharga where they rested a night, identified the Deadly Precision - Last Resort - Elf Bane magic ranseur (the warblade immediately sacrificed it), and bothered Calder about a scimitar. So Cleese talked with a couple of them, but not the soulknife because she was resting and having a nice hot bath. The cleric picked up rumors in the bar, but not a date. A Zelekhut flew out of the Fort Exile teleporter and away. The adventuring party The Scalding Spears of Shoredan discovered some magic mold in the north of the giant lands and made an elixir to cure Patric's wife. Kilroy's Hired Killers, another adventuring party, had cleaned out a nest of wight bandits plauging the roads between Fort Saffron, Blosk, and Dharmon, they also found evidence linking someone in Spire to the raids and collapsed a secret tunnel between the Abyss (local, not planar) and the Great Cave. The king personally congratuladed and rewarded them. Meanwhile the guys wanted more info on Imperial outposts and sightings but the last group of adventurers that Cleese sent out disappeared except for one person who wouldn't talk about what happened (<cough> soulknife <cough>). Cleese offered them a shot at the 'mysterious blue flame' that might be something but they turned him down without any explanation. About this time they realized that they hadn't actually searched the area or illusionary boulders where the crazy mage and warforged titans had been. I think that within fifteen minutes of that realization they were out of town and backtracking.

Two days later they were discovering that there was no secret Imperial base hidden by a crazy old wizard who was now pretty rotten and stinky. Two more days later they were back at Erika's Tower and talking to her. Erika had deciphered the Imperial documents (that Cleese would really like to know about but doesn't) and had a password. She then told them to go tell Athron that she was calling in her favor in the form of Athron telling the heroes where the Empire teleporter is. They were debating how to get to Athron when Erika offered to cast some Phantom Steeds. An hour later the party was mounted on CL 30 horse-shaped force effects and traveling at 50mph. There was a brief halt at Fort Saffron because all the wards and defenses were up, the party learned that Fort Remote had been destroyed by demons and King Micah wanted a strong adventuring team to clear and investigate the area. Without saying goodbye they left the fort behind and traveled to the Almaria river and upriver across the water to Athron's Lair.

None of these character has been to Athron's Lair before, it's just been a mark on a map that they inherited from a previous untalkative adventurer. So ten hours of riding magic motorcycles later then entered a cave with statues all over it. Well they were stopped by the Wall of Force again, didn't check any side tunnels at all, and the goliath used his Dimension Stride boots to skip over. Armed with the password that Erika had given them he passed the guardians and confronted Athron.

PC: "Dragon! I, uh, I'm here for, uh, Erika said something... She called something a something... You should tell me where the Empire is at! Yeah, now."
Athron: "You sound like food."

At this point the soulknife remembered that she had the same sort of boots and rescued him from himself by remembering what the DM as Erika had said all of fifteen minutes ago in RL. This got them instructions to the teleporter, the warshaper and cleric wrote them down (the soulknife made an autohypnosis check to perfectly recall them). Then the goliath started badgering Athron for something more, I'm not sure what since he wasn't making much sense in or out of character. It's not a medical condition or a drinking problem or anything, the player just doesn't grok anything outside of combat because he gets bored when he's not doing or taking HP damage and ignores what's going on. He's still good for comic relief though, he almost got eaten this time.

Back in the saddle the characters zoomed to the Castle, the major domo recognized Demonslayer and the soulknife (in that order) and trotted them off to see the king. Information was given (scanty), rewards were promised ($10k per person), assistance was solicited by the soulknife and cleric (good girls!) which got everyone potions of Protection from Evil, Barkskin, Align Weapon, and couple of holy waters. They zoomed over to Fort Remote and saw the twenty foot tall demon with a pile of heads from half a mile away and prepared to fight. At this point I reminded them that their time in the saddle (which I had been continually updating them on) now totaled sixteen hours and that they were all Exhausted. They relented and backed off a mile to rest for eight hours.

Ten hours later (power points and spells had been spent as people were prepping for the exhausted attack) our heroes were back in position and nothing had changed. The big demon was in the same position, the heads were still there, nothing raised any suspicions. Nope, nothing suspicious about a Pit Fiend standing in the same position for ten hours after heroes rode into sight and away again. Of course they didn't try to identify the big demon in any way either. Well they charged in and hopped off the steeds (mostly, the warblade remained mounted and everyone failed spot checks at a penalty for moving so fast) at which point he big demon started a five minute monologue about he was Gra-Hoth and had destroyed the fort and his minions were going to release him and... So the players got ambushed.

Three Hellcats attacked the steeds to cut off retreat, three Babau started to teleport in from back of in the darkness of the ruins, and twelve Vargouilles tried for the goliath who was again huge and out in front. Note to self: One HD goobers can't hit level 11 characters worth crap. The first six missed, the others screamed. Eventually everything ended. Three steeds went in the surprise round, one Hellcat escaped with nine hit points, the Babau didn't have time to focus on paralyzed people because the soulknife with Demonslayer and the warblade with the Alien Blade were cutting them up. The goliath was paralyzed in the first round by a DC 12 Fort save vs a mind affecting fear effect, four Vargouilles kissed him in the following three rounds (out of about twelve attempts when they only needed to roll higher than an eight) but he made those saves. The warshaper was paralyzed (natural 1) on the second round but none of the nine or so kisses hit him, needing to roll an 11+ just wasn't happening there. Slimy, nasty, demon frenching. There was much wishing for mouthwash.

We stopped there, almost no damage to the party but about 40% of their other daily resources expended. It's June 4th now, I made a mistake last time, the date should have been May 26th. I'll stick the Spellwarped Hellwasps in the ruins of Fort Remote with another demon, a bone or ice devil I think. No sense in letting a statted monster go to waste. Then we'll see what the players do. They only have a couple of days before Kilroy and his band get to the Castle and are offered the mission to kill the Slitherazi King. If the players go to the teleporter location they'll find that Erika told them to come back and talk to her again for a reason, she gave them the password to Athron's guardians not the code phrase and other information to get to the teleporter.

Well, we'll see what sillyness they get up to next week.

**Telok** · 2013-11-16, 11:10 PM (ISO 8601)

Chapter 7: Yet another failure to follow written instructions.

Sadly we had no cleric this week. Our heroes knocked around the ruins of Fort Remote for a few hours until the phantom steeds evaporated and then they started walking the 120 or so miles back to the Castle. For some reason they didn't stop at Dharmon or Blosk for a hot meal or a bath.

Back at the Castle they gave a full report and accepted a commission to kill the great demon Grah-Hoth. By Rone's recollection Grah-Hoth was wounded when he was imprisoned so he ought to be an easy kill once the players get to him. He even gave the PCs written instructions to get through the defenses.

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Skaragath is south east of Erika's Tower, a small river of lava passes underneath the basalt wall blocking the tunnel.
Don't try to sneak in through the lava, there's a nasty trap down there that will kill you.
Say a password and a door will appear. <password>
Enter, don't attack the afrit.
Perform the ritual in from of the mural in the south room, the exit will appear. <ritual>
We never planned for anyone to return, so when you leave the invisible stalkers will attack.
At the black tower there are more invisible stalkers.
You'll want to sneak in because iron golems will jump off the top of the tower and attack if there is combat.
Say a password to unlock the door. <password>
Use the Blessed Athame to cut the top off the iron bottle.
Kill the wounded demon lord when he emerges.

They asked no further questions.

Immediately our heroes walked to the Tower of the Magi, 140 miles in the other direction. This did actually make sense since they each had $15,000 in their pockets and the Tower is the only "magic shop" sort of place that this batch of characters knows about. They could ask people and be told of other places but that would entail talking to NPCs and possibly treating them like people instead of mindless MMORPG mobs with glowing marks floating above them. The soulnkife commissioned a Cloak of Invisibility made from the skins of six Hellcats and the warmage paid for a Rod of Wonder to be made for him (I couldn't find a good d1000 table and I'm not using a 50 page d10,000 table so I found a 120 entry version on the web), those will be completed around the end of the month. A few potions were bought and the party waited a day for apprentices to make them 7 potions of Invisibility. The goliath psychic warrior made them all wait another day for those same apprentices to make seven potions of See Invisibility, then he forgot to pay for them or write them down so he apparently didn't get any of them, we found this out later at Skarragath. They hiked back to the Castle and bummed another set of Phantom Steeds off of Rone and were at Skarragath five hours later.

At Skarragath they walked up to the front of the building (from the west) and said the password. Nothing happened. There was much consternation and confusion, the password was said several more times, the ritual for inside was done a couple of times. Still nothing. Finally the warmage looked around the corner of the building and saw the door... Once inside they ignored the "afrit" (a polymorphed Noble Salamander) and the door on the north wall and went into the south room to perform the ritual. No door appeared. They did the ritual several more times around the room and in front of the afrit. At this point I decided that the ritual was "I'm a Little Teapot" and told them to act it out every time. After a couple more iterations somebody finally checked the north room and saw a door in the eastern wall. With everyone gathered in the room they opened the door and saw the Black Tower a few miles away, lit by lava pools. When the druid/warshaper/scout stepped out of the room the Invisible Stalkers attacked.

Confusion reigned for a good long while. The stonechild warblade threw the druid back inside, someone did the "I'm a Little Teapot" again, the psychic warrior discovered that he hadn't actually bought the See Invisibility potions he had ordered and that becoming huge in tight spaces made him easy to hit and didn't help his to hit even after the 50% miss chances. Towards the end the psi-war had spent half his power points on Vigor and killed one Stalker, the warmage did lots of Fire Shield and AoE fire blasting but ended at 6 HP, the soulknife and druid killed a bunch while the stonechild avoided all damage by not attacking anything or trying to go out the door, three Walls of Fire cut off almost all free movement and line of sight. After killing sixteen Invisible Stalkers they talked to the "afrit" and he refrained from killing anyone if they promised to free him from Skarragath and the polymorph spell making him look like an afrit.

We left off there. It's the 15th of June, I hope they do better at the Black Tower. Fifteen stalkers and five iron golems (plus magic lava pools to heal the golems) will harsh them up if they try the brute force melee approach. Plus the fact that Ghrah-Hoth is a Pit Fiend with Wall of Blades, Iron Heart Surge (via feats), and his telepathy and demon summoning working outside the bottle he's imprisoned in. Plus, he's not wounded. Luckily he has better things to do than kill heroes foolish enough to release him, he'll just stun them with Blasphemy and leave. They'll level up to 12 if they don't get themselves killed.

**Telok** · 2013-11-21, 04:05 PM (ISO 8601)

Chapter 8: Spastic monkey plan D! D is for "dumb"

We picked up right where we left off last week, with the addition of the cleric showing up. Healing was performed before our heroes left the building. Outside of Skarragath the party could see the Black Tower almost two miles away and started marching towards it. Half a mile later someone suggested that they might want to tackle the tower fresh, with full spells and health. So they camped next to a lava pool.

Let me set the scene. This cavern is bare rock, nothing lives here, with lava pools that become more frequent towards the back of the cave. The party has marched (with lights) to a mile and a half away from the tower and then camped next to a lava pool. They have been able to see the Black Tower the entire time. They have been warned that tha tower is guarded by Invisible Stalkers and Iron Golems. They make effort to prepare defenses or conceal themselves.

It took six hours for the first patrol of stalkers to find them. They killed two while two more left for reinforcements. Half an hour later five stalkers showed up and tried to carry off the dwarf (he was on watch and they planned to drop him in a lava pool). They killed three, two died to an Arc Lightning spell fifty feet off the ground and the stonechild threw another into the lava, twice. Unfortunately the warmage also died, max damage crit to the face. With one dead, several people wounded, and everyone out of spells, powers, and magic item charges the heroes changed tactics. They moved five hundred feet away and camped in the darkness. Fifteen minutes later five more stalkers showed up at the lava pool and (darkvision and improved tracking) followed them into the darkness. After liberal use of the deceased warmage's dust of appearance and necklace of fireballs three more stalkers were dead and everyone wass wounded, some rather severely. This time they walked back to Skarragath and slept inside, out of the line of sight of the Black Tower.

Eighteen hours later our valiant lunkheads emerged, healed and rested, from Skarragath and marched straight up to the Black Tower. At nine hundred feet away they stopped to buff and make spot checks, they were puzzled because they hadn't seen any golems yet. Then they topped off with the cleric casting Silence on the goliath and stonechild, this was a "plan" to avoid triggering the golems. At the tower the remaining seven invisible stalkers attacked by dropping rocks and the dwarf/druid/warshaper/scout jumped up to the top to do... something. He found that the golems were laying on the top of the tower behind a five foot high paparet. He chose to fall prone in an adjacent square, off the tower.

With the golems activated any pretense of a plan evaporated. People chugged potions of invisibility, ran away, or got clobbered. Eventually the invisible soulknife and warshaper made it to the south side of the tower and went in the door. The warshaper, on finding that the iron bottle was glued to it's pedastile, cut the pedastile off. He avoided the spray of quintessence but got grappled by the two chain devils that Grah-Hoth summoned behind him. Hearing combat, the golems raced over. The dwarf did escape, he flew off as a bird while sucking down four attacks of opportunity from the golems.

So a battered party is in the process of regrouping and hiking back to Skarragath. Since there is no other way out three stalkers are moving to cut them off while two more stalkers will kite the golems. After the chain devils unsummon in an hour the two wounded stalkers will start tracking the party while leading the golems along by carrying and throwing rocks at them. I don't know what the party intends to do with the bottle and the demon lord inside of it, they don't seem to realize that carrying an active demon around in your pocket tends to make you a social pariah. Plus if they take too long the imps all get Commune once a week, and there are still about a hundred imps scattered across Exile. Most of them are in remote areas but some are familiars to sorcerers.

**Telok** · 2013-11-27, 02:27 AM (ISO 8601)

Chapter: Are you a bunch of idiots!?!

The party got back to Skarragath in half an hour and promptly set up camp in the very first room. Naturally the five surviving Invisible Stalkers who are bound to defend the Black Tower and/or kill Grah-Hoth are, in the eyes of the players, not a threat because there is a closed door between them. So the cleric was down to three first level spells, the druid flew off to commune with nature (OK, he's working a job in Deadhorse this week), the soulknife was taking a rest, when the goliath psychic warrior and stonechild warblade decided to open the bottle. They had gotten the bottle off of the druid before he left and went into the next room to "prepare." This consisted of going into the next room where the warblade became large and the psi-war, using the last of his power points, got huge and gained fifty hit points. Then they called the soulknife into the room and shut the door behind her while simultaneously cutting the top off of the bottle.

Half the group, absolutely unprepared, freed a Pit Fiend (standard except that two feats were traded to get the maneuvers Wall of Blades and Iron Heart Surge and I let him summon less powerful devils than he is supposed to) from an Iron Flask. Later they will complain about it being an un-winnable fight. I gave them a surprise round and then they beat Grah-Hoth on initiative, which meant that they actually knocked off about a third of his hit points (White Raven Tactics helped). Then Mr. Big dropped Blasphemy, and a quickened Fireball for giggles. At this point I pulled in the Invisible Stalkers who were trying to kite the Iron Golems over the party. Since even a Pit Fiend will have serious problems with multiple Iron Golems in a no-teleport confined space he opted to retreat. The polymorphed drake in the central room died, the guys sucked two more free action Fireballs, and the cleric played dead and prayed while the golems and stalkers followed Grah-Hoth outside.

The cleric and soulknife yelled at the guys, they whined about impossible fights, I'm just glad that they never thought to Identify the bottle, and the plot has advanced. Then they walked back to the Tower of the Magi to raise the warmage from death. Ten more flipping days of walking. Past Spire and Blosk where they could have scored enough diamond dust for the party cleric to raise him. Past Dharmon where there is a temple and priest who can raise. Past Fort Emerald and the Castle where there are people who can raise. Past Almaria where they could score more diamond dust. To the Tower of the Magi, because there they didn't have to talk to any NPCs except the ten percent markup gem dealer in the Tower. Since they technically "cleared" a dungeon and definitely advanced the plot they all leveled up to 12.

Since the soulknife had a Winged Shield she sold her old +2 shield for diamond dust, she's apparently been carrying two shields for a month or so now. Then they argued a bit (the psi-war sulked a lot) and decided to go explore the Waterfall Warrens. They immediately dismissed the possibility that anyone in the Tower of the Magi could help them in any way. The cleric did demand that they at least check the libraries for better maps. While there are no maps of that area, asking the staff about that area made an NPC ask them if they were looking for Thralni's Orb. Of course none of them have any idea about Thralni or the Orb despite him being mentioned before (I can accept that since it was months ago on the first couple of trips to the Tower) and there being libraries and sages all over Exile just waiting to drop hints of the lost First Expedition and it's treasures. With a (very little) information they left, no asking about Thralni of what sort of caster he was or what his position in the Empire was or, well, anything other than that the Orb lets you avoid the random time limit on flying magic.

They hiked back up to Fort Emerald, past the trenches and the Slith Fort trying to be at least a little stealthy, and headed north. They hit the Foul Cavern (I made a mistake long ago and had to switch the location of the Crypt of Drath and the Foul Cavern, but it doesn't really make any difference in the long run) and smooshed two behir pretty easily. One was encased in a huge paper bag for a bit due to the warmage's Rod of Wonder, odd and amusing. Then it took several tries to figure out that there was a secret door somewhere, unsurprisingly the cleric figured it out using, surprisingly, Kn:Dungeoneering to notice the perfectly straight wall running along one side of the cavern. The ghasts on the outer rim/ledges I just hand-waved, 12th level adventurers are too high a level for them to threaten in groups of three. The inner lair is just four rooms of a necromancy lab. The vampire spawn were offed by Evard's Black Tentacles and a turn undead that annihilated them but during that the psi-war opened both of the other doors. With everyone distracted by three Wyvern Zombies in one room he then entered the other and was surprised by three Mhorgs. He backed off and closed the door while the warmage came over to help him. When the Mhorgs opened the door they found the warmage standing in front of it, so one paralyzed and grabbed him while the other closed the door. This isn't the first time the guy playing the psi-war has done this sort of thing to a party member. It also happened in Erika's Tower with a Behir swallowing someone who was shut out on the wrong side of a door. Luckily several people came to the rescue and the cleric had Remove Paralysis prepared. Eventually the Mhorgs died while the door to the final room was opened. There were supposed to be a Dark Naga, a Rakshasa, and a Mummy Lord in there but I hadn't expected they party to go this way and didn't have the stats for the Mummy Lord in my beastiary (and our Monster Manual is in Deadhorse to boot). So I subbed in an undead Slith Chieftain, I've later realized that a Slith High Priest would have been better. A Sleet Storm from the warmage slowed the baddies down a bit but didn't stop them from buffing more and setting up some stunts. The naga almost escaped with Invisibility, Displacement, and sneaking skills but the warblade was standing in front of the outer most door and stopped her. The slith thing was simply killed by the soulknife and psi-war hammering it (he kept bemoaning that nothing was vulnerable to Hostile Empathic Transfer too). The Rakshasa had turned into a nubile young lady and thrown up an illusion of itself sacrificing her on the altar, he kept screaming to be "saved" for three rounds and finally just decided to fake being dead when the "heroes" wouldn't enter the room with their own Sleet Storm going on. The warmage Disintegrated the illusion and the Rakshasa made the Spellcraft rolls to have the illusion react realistically. The facts that the illusionary Rakshasa never moved, failed to take an AoO, and didn't leave any dust after being Disintegrated didn't tip anyone off.

It's July 9th now. The party is looting the place (silver, two piercing crystals, four death sticks, Green Crystal Mace, useless magic chitin armor) while the cleric prepares to defile the evil altar and <something?> the poor dead sacrificial victim. The Rakshasa is reading thoughts and shape-changed so it's Bluff and Disguise rolls punched in at over 40, if it gets a good opportunity it may "revive" and charm/suggest. Otherwise it will play dead until the danger has passed and go live in a human town being wicked and spreading evil. For next week: Climbing up waterfalls from below, with no pitons or climbing gear.

**Telok** · 2013-12-03, 11:44 PM (ISO 8601)

Nukes and lawn gnomes! I'm-a make me a statue garden/graveyard!

Well, we missed out on the stonechild warblade but everyone else was there although the cleric was a little late. They pitched the "dead girl" rakshasa into a vat of necromantic corpse crafter embalming fluid and left before the cleric's player arrived, so that monster survived. It's poorer but wiser now and nothing is stopping it from restarting "production" since the PCs left the altar and corpses intact. They hiked to the river and spent a couple days resting and making a raft. They keep calling them boats and I think they assume that they can make a nice rowboat or skiff with no skills, no tools (weapons yes, tools no), and using none of their rope. What I (who has helped make strip wood canoes from scratch) know is possible is a rough hewn, long and plank raft, held together with wooden dowels or stakes and propelled with poles and crude oars. We'll have to clear that up next session. They spent the next ten days exploring the southern half of the Waterfall Warren by sending the druid/warshaper/scout out on hours long flying tips. They used Air Walk on the goliath psychic warrior to have him carry (when he's huge from a power) the raft up one waterfall.

They were heading towards land several hours after that when I finally rolled a giant carp attack random encounter. Over the course of the game I've made about twelve or thirteen encounter rolls on the water, this is the first time a 1 has shown up on the d6. I use large shark stats with an added chance to swallow whole (win a grapple) a single medium or smaller creature. These shouldn't be dangerous to 12th level adventurers but they did manage to take off half the HP from the front half of the boat. Six fish chewed off five inches of wood from the underside of the front half of a 10' x 15' raft. If this was a rowboat instead of a ten inch thick log raft it would have sank under them. Eventually they got to land, the druid and soulknife flew the 100' to the beach with a rope and pulled them in while everyone else was waiting for the fish to jump out of the water and do flying leap attacks. Well, not totally. The warmage cast Light on the front of the boat and kept zapping at fish with his Rod of Wonder (he did get two, one petrified and another swallowed a lemure that got summoned) while the goliath jumped out of the boat to attack. Annoyingly the goliath kept claiming that he couldn't fail a swimming check. Eventually we worked it out that he had a Ring of Floating and couldn't sink underwater, which isn't the same thing. And he couldn't figure out how to subtract his armor check penalty from his swim rolls, since he wears battle plate he really only has a +3 bonus to swim checks after we did the math for him. Plus he was huge (Expansion), holding onto the back of the boat (like a sea anchor), and one-handing his greathammer to "attack the fish"... No, I don't know why he thought this would work. The carp were busy at the other end of the boat and don't naturally attack things bigger than themselves. Eventually they sorted themselves out, it took an ECL 12 party eleven rounds to kill two CR 3 fish and move a raft 100 feet.

I think I'm whining. I'm whining aren't I? I should stop that.

A couple days later while repairing the raft and adding pontoons and log railings they almost wiped the party. See, the druid was out spending hours flying around looking for anything interesting and they got bored. They started to play with the Rod of Wonder. The warmage/wildmage (who can double roll on the Rod and choose which roll to use) let the others play with it. I had added saves or durations to some of the things on the list that hadn't had them before, but I had not checked everything out. I immediately came up with a random duration system, d100 = 01-05; one round duration, 06-50; the roll in minutes, 51-95; the roll in hours, 96-00; permanent. They opened a portal to the Plane of Shadow (25 minutes, no encounters). The goliath turned traffic-cone orange (permanent) and grew two arms from his right hip (45 minutes). And they got hit by a meteor. A 10d10*1d10 damage (untyped) meteor with a 1d6*10 yards blast radius. Luckily they rolled near minimum on the damage, only 54 and Reflex 23 for half. They did have to rebuild most of the raft though. The druid chastised them.

Eventually they found Thralni's Doom. From the very first area of the cave they saw the statues, they knew there was a basilisk. They have no mirrors, no darkness, no gaze reflection, and they've sold off items that specifically protect from petrification or gaze attacks. Eventually they met the (large, 12 HD) basilisk and in four rounds it turned the druid and warmage to stone. The soulknife and cleric killed it the next round. The goliath was off in another section spending power points to kill three 7 HD lizards.

It's July 20th. Half the party is KO'ed and the Fireballs alerted the ju-ju zombies in the next area. I'm starting to think that Thralni, a mummy wizard 11 with 16 Int (buffed) is possibly too strong for them using Widened Grease, Solid Fog, and Cloudkill. He has some other spells but that's his favorite combo, he's an air mage after all.

P.S. Here is the current player map.

**Donox** · 2013-12-05, 09:30 PM (ISO 8601)

This is an awesome campaign log. Its highly readable not to mention thoroughly enjoyable. Personally I've always preferred stories where the PCs fail horribly. It makes things much more entertaining.

Definitely keep up writing this. I'm looking forward to the next update.

**Telok** · 2013-12-10, 06:45 PM (ISO 8601)

Originally Posted by Donox

This is an awesome campaign log. Its highly readable not to mention thoroughly enjoyable. Personally I've always preferred stories where the PCs fail horribly. It makes things much more entertaining.

Definitely keep up writing this. I'm looking forward to the next update.

Thanks man. I've been posting these walls of text without any response for so long that I was beginning to think that the thread view count was just web spiders or something.

Part of what I'm doing here is trying to keep track of what's going on and identify the mistakes that I've made both in world building and in GM-ing. Attack and AC dichotomies are somehting I'm noticing right now. I have combat people throwing 30+ attacks, AC, and damage on average rolls while the casters are limping around in the mid-high teens on the same rolls. Some of this is expected but a 15 point difference is rough. Anything that's a fight to the melees needs 30 to 34 AC, a +20 attack bonus, and ~25 damage per hit. But those values will crush the casters completely. Likewise the party's saves range from +8 (psy-war will, cleric ref, mage fort) to +18 (melee forts) so many effects are just not threats unless they are almost unsaveable to someone in the party. Eh, it's a pretty well known issue, I'm just having a little struggle with it. I need to use more minions and Aid Another or other teamwork bonuses.

Well things didn't turn out badly at all.
The cleric burned over half of her piety to get her 5th and 6th level domain spells converted into Commune and Planar Ally. She cast the Commune, asked one question in Celestial (which she doesn't speak), and received a name in response. So she cast Planar Ally using the name and a 12HD Couatl appeared. Couatl cast as sorcerers of a level equal to their hit die and this exact Couatl knew Stone to Flesh as it's 6th level spell. They traded two death sticks for the castings and the Couatl went home while they explored more of the cave.

Eventually they realized that the place I said was another cavern across the large stream in the back of the cave was, in fact, another cavern. I think they realized that because I had drawn another statue on that side of the stream, not because I told them that it was there. Anyways the druid turned into a bird and flew over, when he wasn't immediately attacked the stonechild warblade swam over. He was immediately attacked. The ju-ju zombies had moved out of their original positions and waited under the dark, silty water to attack anyone who swam past. Half the zombies got wreaked pretty fast from melee damage and a Cone of Cold: Energy Substitution: Acid. Then the Widened Grease and Solid Fog were laid down and the two melee guys started to worry. The cleric saved them from danger, almost totally, with a Dispel Magic that got the grease, fog, and Thralni's Greater Invisibility. He lasted long enough to get off Cloudkill (warmage: Gust of Wind the next round), Baleful Polymorph: Skunk, Flesh to Stone, and Eyebite (everyone saved against everything, bah!) and had just cast his Stilled Dimension Door when they ate through the last of his hit points. He was less of a danger than I had hoped but that was due to a really good Dispel shot from the cleric so I'm not upset. Oh, the soulknife was throwing mind blades the whole time for OK damage to Thralni and the ju-ju zombies while the psychic warrior spent five rounds buffing and ten more rounds failing to swim across the stream.

They looted (Green Crystal Mace, Thralni's Orb, books, spellbook, Chitin Armor of Commander, Light Fortification, and Fearsome for a 18kgp book value) and left, taking Thralni's body with them for the mummy dust. Of course they also said that they just had someone carry the mummy while swimming across the two streams, so it was a very waterlogged mummy. They got back to their raft and sent the druid out scouting while they played with the Rod of Wonder again. Dread Wraith (turned by the cleric untill it un-summoned), wall of cheese (Limburger, 10'x10'x1' and half demolished by the psi-war rolling in it), the mummy reanimated (bashed into pudding and splattered on some of the cheese), a couple saves were made, the soulknife got her body hair replaced with palm fronds...

The druid came back to people trying to stuff 400 lbs. of salvaged Limburger into sacks. He had found a small obelisk with a "Thralni was here" carving in it and the party decided to go there after resting for the night. So the party rafter six miles, went down one waterfall, which got the cheese wet and broke the raft apart, and camped for two days to rebuild the raft. Then they rafted seven miles, Air Walked the huge psychic warrior to carry everything up a waterfall, and rowed two more miles to the little island with the obelisk. They then rested two more days, the first for the psychic warrior to regain all his power points because he hadn't bothered to since they defeated Thralni, and another for him to manifest Psychic Identify on the loot. The only loot they do anything with is identified loot and the only attempt to identify loot is via the Identify spell or power. Frankly the easy access and success of Identify makes unknown magic items boring because nobody ever does anything until stuff is identified. Too easy, too boring, /mini-rant.

We left off there. Its the 27th of July and the druid is out scouting again. I don't know where the party will go from here and the next plot items on my list won't happen until mid-August and mid-September. For some reason the psy-war is still lugging around the rotting cheese sacks. Ah, the books they got were: 1) a necromantic research book detailing how to make ju-ju zombies, 2) "The d18 Die: Theory and Application", 3) "Now We Are Tree: A Druidic Primer", 4) "Captain Wembley's Monster Atlas", 5) "Naked Elf Women and Where to Find Them" the illustrated edition, 6) "The Big Little Book of Leprechauns", 7) Thralni's spellbook, with notes in the margins. Of course they haven't done anything but skim the first few pages of any of them except the elf women one. The fact that the spellbook is a historic document and has notes on magical flight research and the Orb is completely lost on them. Likewise the d18 book is itself another magical research text that can give a permanent +2 in Spellcraft ranks is completely unexplored.

Och, I found this tidbit in the Couatl monster entry "choose its spells known from the sorcerer list, the cleric list, and from the lists for the Air, Good, and Law domains. The cleric spells and domain spells are considered arcane spells for a couatl." So if you call up and bind/dominate a Couatl you can Psychic Reformation it to gain (eventually) all cleric, and listed domain spells as arcane spells/scrolls. By RAW you need to find a couatl with Sorcerer levels instead of racial HD, but that should be doable with some good divination use.

Now I'm not able to play next week, my wife has a violin part in a recital, and several people will be unavailable on our regular game days. So we're taking the rest of December off. But we may play a few Paranoia missions. Maybe.

I hope.

**Frozen_Feet** · 2013-12-15, 07:18 PM (ISO 8601)

The questions that have been bugging me for a while are: where did you find these amateurs, and have they ever played a Vogel game in their lives?

As someone who pretty much got to RPGs (computer and tabletop both) through the Exile series, their clueless stumbling has been a hilarious read. Reminds me of how I managed to get several parties killed due to starvation and not thinking to ask equipment from the starting fort's quartermaster...

*sniff* Sweet tears of nostalgia.

**Telok** · 2013-12-16, 06:08 PM (ISO 8601)

Originally Posted by Frozen_Feet

The questions that have been bugging me for a while are: where did you find these amateurs, and have they ever played a Vogel game in their lives? :smallbiggrin: As someone who pretty much got to RPGs (computer and tabletop both) through the Exile series, their clueless stumbling has been a hilarious read. Reminds me of how I managed to get several parties killed due to starvation and not thinking to ask equipment from the starting fort's quartermaster...

*sniff* Sweet tears of nostalgia.

They haven't played Spiderweb Software games, they generally play brand name titles. Everquest (Neverquest), WoW, World of Tanks, I think a couple of them did short pulls of Skyrim. But that's the electronic stuff which doesn't directly translate to TTRPGs.

The guy playing the dwarf druid/scout/warshaper is a ex-Marine, he first started playing in the Marines and he's the other person in our games who DMs regularly. He's run long playing D&D 3.5 and Shadowrun games and has a very good grasp of the game, he also ran our year of D&D 4e and is running a Monday night 5e trial (I'm not in that because I'm busy on Mon/Tue but I understand there's lots of death and maiming). He is the person who ran that first psychic warrior with the huge pile of loot who died to the vampire octopus, although he fully admits that the character was an overconfidant jackass. That was just the character's personality. His only real roleplaying 'weakness' is in interacting with NPCs, it's just something he isn't really good at so you cut him a little slack there as long as his character isn't going out of his way to insult the NPC.

Our "That Guy" is the one playing the goliath psychic warrior right now. He previously played the dread necromancer, ninja (short short life), and sorcerer with a flaming hippogriff. He originally came into our group as someone's friend who wanted to try D&D, his background is entirely computer games. As such he vacillates between actual roleplaying with NPCs he takes a liking to and playing the game like a video game. Unfortunately this means that outside of combat and one or two NPCs he's completely bored and uninterested. Plus he treats his character as a camputer game toon, everything on the sheet (spells, weapons, class abilities, and maxxed skills) is a button to push for an action and anything not on the sheet or not maxxed out is something that his character "can't do." This leads to him saying that he takes ten in all his un-maxxed skills and failing anything with a DC over 15. He's... ineffective outside of simple melee combat or blowing stuff up with magic. His characters tend to only have about two tricks and no backup abilities in case those fail. Currently he can only get big and hammer stuff or Hostile Empathic Transfer. No ranged combat, no one-handed weapons, no problem solving, no backup weapons. Hmm... I need to TK his weapon off of him or give him a bludegoning immune opponent some time.

The other two guys are pretty good. Willing to interact with NPCs if you roadblock them with that NPC, capable of being diplomatic and charming. Quite inventive sometimes, one of them is the warmage/wildmage with the Rod of Wonder and the other was playing the artificer who gave an effigy cat to the cat loving dragon. Again the weak point is interacting with NPCs (and even towns) if they don't know that the NPC has a quest or something to buy and sell.

The lady playing the cleric (formerly the ranger) is a long time gamer, she started back before MMOs were a thing like the ex-Marine and I did. She was out of the gaming scene for a long time and this is her first D&D 3.5 game. She's a little overwhelmed by the option spam, we're helping her with that but it does lead to decision paralysis when confronting her spell list sometimes. Being from the old school of D&D she's doing very well, several NPCs like and respect her and she acts like her character is a real person in a fantasy world. Her character takes baths on a regular basis. We worked at the same company several years ago and I introduced her to the group when we were down to three players at one point. She is a stabilizing influence on the guys but she won't take up a leadership role, instead preferring to remain a support character.

The girl playing the soulknife never played an MMO or TTRPG before. Never. Yes, such people do exist. And she's doing well for the same reson that the cleric is doing well, she acts like her character is a real person in a fantasy world. She's in the game because That Guy is her cousin and she's trading child care and cooking for room and board while she goes to college.

**Telok** · 2013-12-29, 12:22 AM (ISO 8601)

The Paranoia game I ran is here, over in the Other Games section.

Most people were pretty new to Paranoia, they'd heard of it but never seen the books or played it. Perfect victims for an introduction to Alpha Complex. The only real issue was that they completely ignored their secret societies and only one person consciously used their mutant power, something I will try to remedy in the next game.

**Telok** · 2014-01-15, 01:48 AM (ISO 8601)

We're back!
I ran a second Paranoia game that I didn't do a write-up for, but if the PCs in D&D showed as much cooperation, planning, and mutual support as the Paranoia PCs they'd steamroll this setting. It was a seriously weird game, nobody even accused anyone of treason the whole time, not even the propaganda inflicting commie. For this session we only had the dwarf scout/warshaper/druid, the soulknife, the war/wild mage, and the goliath psychic warrior.

So they started off back on that dinky little island and spent another two days having the dwarf fly scouting missions while they dinked off the Rod of Wonder. Then they went north up to giant territory and wandered around to the east a bit. They found a day old fishing camp (giants fish for chuul with live bait like lizards and humans) and followed the tracks to the south and a semi-hidden mine/quarry. There they almost parleyed by having the goliath size up and go talk to the giants while everyone else hid in the darkness. Which worked OK until the goliath realized he didn't speak giantish (the shaman cast Comprehend Languages) and the wild mage lit up everything within three hundred feet with sunlight by playing with his Rod of Wonder. The goliath started yelling death threats and the fight started.

They began by offing the five giants and one shaman in the forge area (actually one escaped wounded). Then the remaining giants from the mines formed up and attacked, the players waited for this. Six giants and three shaman attacked them while ten others stood off two hundred feet away and threw boulders. Seven rounds later those giants were dead (another wounded escapee), two Shatter spells and a Sunder attempt had been made on Smite by a shaman who recognized it, and the dwarf and goliath were bloodied (the warmage took some boulders and a club but managed to stay out of trouble). The dwarf flew over to attack the last ten giants and the goliath started doing full runs towards them, it would take the goliath three rounds to reach the last giants. Now remember, for seven rounds we had ten giants throwing boulders at the party. Due to range, shooting into melee, and really bad giant Dex they only hit on 20s. During that whole time I rolled three 20s (and six ones, and 2/3 of the rolls were under 10). When the dwarf got to the giants the wildmage pulled another meteor strike out of the Rod of Wonder, cutting the HP of the giants in half and leaving the dwarf with 30 HP. Half the giants were miners and armed with picks, three went for the dwarf and two hit. The pick got the natural 20 and confirmed. He was at -40ish before he remembered that he was immune to criticals, which only left him at -9. It's good for him that he has fast healing. When the goliath reached the group they mobbed him and over the next three rounds there were three more natural 20s, two picks and a club, but no confirmed criticals. The goliath had used his last power points on Vampritic Weapon and was trying to use that to "heal" apparently wanting to rely on his own critical hits for survival. In the end he had seven hit points left.

We left off there, on the 4th of August with the party having destroyed twenty five peaceful giants (CR 7, 10 for the shaman) in three encounters. Which was fine, in a week the entire giant population will be attacking humans and enlarged goliaths on sight because news of the slaughter will spread. But we got back into the swing of D&D and the guys had fun being murder hobos. Available loot is going to be four silver holy symbols (2 lbs. each), a dozen gold nuggets (16 lbs. total), and if they check the forges up to 50 forty pound iron ingots (4000 gp if they can transport it).

**Donox** · 2014-02-09, 10:17 PM (ISO 8601)

Heh. Brutal violence solves any problem.

Side note: what table are you using for the rod of wonder?

**Telok** · 2014-02-12, 08:43 PM (ISO 8601)

Originally Posted by Donox

Heh. Brutal violence solves any problem.

Side note: what table are you using for the rod of wonder?

Ah, I googled around and found one that I liked. The file name is "DMG-A1_Wand of Wonder" and it's a pdf. I chose it because it's only about four pages instead of the d10,000 tables I also found. Find it here.

On with the show!

Triple update! Sorry I missed some, life and stuff and my computer's power supply dying and... Anyways.

Our heroes ignored everything that wasn't actually on the giants and ran off into the darkness to lick their wounds. After a day of rest it was time to trek back north to the lake and go fishing. They set up camp a couple miles up-lake from the giant's fishing camp and started hunting giant lobster things with face tentacles. Now because I've moved knowing combat stats of monsters into the Monster Lore skill (not on any class list but just another knowledge skill other than that, plus there's a masterwork book that lets you count as trained but takes 10 minutes to use) the players have totally stopped trying to identify what they fight. Never mind that the regular knowledge skills will still get you it's name, ecology, and if it's a person who will talk to you. The fact that it's not absolutely trivial to ID monsters and get combat stats for them anymore makes it "too hard" to bother figuring out what they're fighting. Oh well. The bird shaped druid went out as bait and a few Arc Lightnings and Blasts of Flame out across the lake and they had six dead Chuul. They then hung around in that spot for another day and a half cooking and smoking the meat of sentient creatures.

During that time two interesting things happened, they played with the Rod of Wonder and someone snuck up and spied on them. The druid and soulknife noticed the spy but lost him when the Rod of Wonder party threw an illusionary army over several acres. There were recriminations and paranoia, double watches and trip wires set, but they never saw him/it again. After they finished smoking the meat the druid tracked the intruder. This led them north to the cavern wall, then east across the rivers to a small hideout cave in the wall. They waited there in ambush but gave up after nothing happened for 20 hours. They followed the trail further east to Lost Bahssikava.

Lost Bahssikava is a little flavor dungeon. There are a bunch of friendly slitherazi who are dedicated to non-violence, prayer, healing, and trying to go home. The slith in Exile are themselves exiles, their ancestors were kicked out of deeper caverns via a magic gate for the crime of demon worship. Apparently normal slith worship Elyvilon, the Light and Order goddess of healing. These slith, like the ones in Gnass, have gone back to worshiping Elyvilon and want to go home. The PCs just saw slitherazi and went in for the kill.

Actually there wasn't a horrific slaughter of "lawful good" monks, clerics, and beguilers (with a Vow of NonViolence feat). But it was a close thing. Anyways the spy had been one of the monks out scouting to keep tabs on the giants, he had seen the magic boom boom and investigated. Then the party decided to help the slith by recovering the sacred stone that had been lost in the caves underneath Bahssikava while exploring. There was mention of little metal triangles with runes on them (not valuable and therefore not-loot and therefore ignored) and two monks were sent with the party to show them the way. The actual computer version of the dungeon is an annoying sort of maze with levels, stairs, and bits of treasure and monsters stuck in all sorts of dead ends and blind corners. I didn't want to screw with that and streamlined it, hard.

Three Ropers are not a challenge, but I could have hid a $100,000 diamond in them and the PCs would have ignored it. The slith monks helped a bit in the fight (and broke their vows about not hurting people because the PCs called the Ropers out as unintelligent monsters) and checked the gullets for treasure, finding some more runed metal triangles. Three Remorhaz are not a challenge, although they let the one with another triangle and a magic weapon sink in it's gut sink in a river without checking for treasure. Four Elder Black Puddings were a threat, although it was just some HP damage and eating the goliath psychic warrior's magic greathammer. He was whiny about it and complained that there had never been another magic large goliath greathammer in any of the "magic shops". He shut up when it was pointed out that there had never been any cloaks of invisibility or rods of wonder in those shops either.

They found the magic gate, it was just a stone arch with a place for the metal triangles and some carvings nearby. While they sent the druid back up to fish out and gut the Remorhaz corpses they fooled with the Rod again. A cart, horse, and carter were transported down from the surface and remained for a bit before the duration expired and they returned, although the horse died from other effects during the time. It's sort of like a modern day trucker being suddenly transported to a prison island, discovering that the inmates are fooling with some sort of quantum randomizer technology, had the front half of his truck disintegrated, and was suddenly transported back. It causes talk.

When the druid returned he had the metal triangle and a large warmace, the last of the over valued magic trash that I had written up at the beginning of the campaign. They placed the assembled triangles in the gate and a portal started to form. Then a telepathic voice denied them access due to violence and cannibalism. The triangles started to teleport away and six Sacred Watchers showed up, they were slith chiefs with a template I found that turned them into ghost like incorporeal deathless with a damaging positive energy touch. The warmage pulled out a scroll of Dimensional Lock, a Watcher Iron Heart Surged it, and the beat down began. In the end the party lived (some severely beaten up), the NPCs died, the gate is still closed, and the triangles have been teleported about the countryside and will require another generation of searching to reassemble. Our heroes left the slith in peace, mostly by lying about what happened down at the gate.

They traveled north to explore and the encounter table went from 1/6 every twelve hours to 1/6 every four hours, the possible encounters being huge slugs, gargantuan scorpions, and colossal spiders or centipedes. There were two attacks during the first night and another two the next day, all in relatively open terrain so the party saw the bugs coming at 200+ foot ranges. Everyone contributed except the goliath because he was slow and had no ranged capabilities. At the end of the day they can around a bend and into sight of a dead 600' long spider surrounded by giant giant mushrooms and more giant bugs.

Now what's supposed to be up here is some monks and herbs, but that's boring so I made it the source of greymold. The mold, once properly processed by a DC 25 alchemy check, can cure disease, poisoning, and substitute for the material components for Raise Dead and similar spells. But it's really rare, growing only on living matter in areas of great magical radiation. There were several ley lines converging on (or possibly radiating from) the dead god-spider, someone had asked about that sort of thing in conjunction with how the local fauna was getting so big. When they arrived at the god-spider (actually at the joint of one of it's legs which was a good 40 or 50 feet across) I planned on giving them a scorpion, a spider with babies (spider swarms), another scorpion, and a centipede with babies all one at a time and entering the area from different directions. It worked quite well. Mushrooms ten to twenty feet across and up to forty feet high worked as decent cover and terrain for everyone and the critters were dangerous enough to be threatening and tough enough to last three or four rounds each. The goliath however continued to be a problem, he sat out the first three fights because he was slow and didn't have any ranged weapons. Never mind that two double moves would have put him in the middle of the melee, it was too far and he couldn't be bothered. When he finally got to the third bug he missed it (natural 1) and then it fell dead because three other people had been attacking it for three rounds already. So while everyone else fought the last bug he yelled and flailed about trying to attract more attention and bugs. Ignore the fact that the warmage was down his high level spells and could die in two or three hits, that the stonechild warblade and dwarf warshaper were both at the same level of health as the warmage, or the soulknife who had been whacked down to single digits by a centipede critical hit and the warmage Flamestriking the area (they fear swarms). No, he thought it was too easy and wanted more bugs to fight. So I gave him some.

After the party beat off another enormous spider and rescued the goliath from the grappling scorpion that was dragging him off they decided they need to rest. In fact they decided to rest right there in the middle of the carnage. The stonechild quickly hollowed out a section of a giant mushroom for most people to sleep in but the druid/warshaper and the goliath decided to sleep on top of two of the mushrooms. I rolled and rolled and rolled, ten hours later there were five giant scorpions in the area tearing at carrion and hungering for PC flesh. If I'd rolled anything with a climb speed it would have been midnight attacks for everyone. As it was they all got mobbed when they got out of or down from the mushrooms. Overruling the goliath's wishes the warmage popped a scroll of Mass Fly and they left as quickly as they could.

They alighted on top of the greymold covered god-spider, well away from any immediate threats and got confused. Not spell confused, but "lack of information, planning, and ideas" confused. After a few minutes they hacked through several feet of carapace and extracted twenty pounds of living spider meat. Which added to the confusion because they thought the thing was dead. They failed some Dungeoneering, History, Local, Nature, Religion, and Alchemy skill checks (they dwarf druid/scout/warshaper had not maxed Nature, nobody had any others) and ignored the greymold. I know that I've mentioned it before, once at Patrick's Tower and once at Silverlocke's Hut, as a substitute for material components of resurrection magics and with reference to it's curative properties. They left the area when some of the giant spiders started showing an interest in them.

I should note here that while the do have Thralni's Orb, and they did identify it, they didn't listen or write down what it did. So they didn't use it because they don't know what it dies or how to activate it anymore. After a few minutes they fell out of the sky and just hiked away.

Four days later they were at Pyrog's Lair talking to Lucky Lucy on her throne made out of the bones of a greater dragon (it could have been them with the throne and the dragon hoard if they'd tried). They talked, she sold them an unidentified elixir of a 7th level spell (later it turned out to be an elixer of resurrection), they heard the rumor of pretty women disappearing from some of the towns a couple weeks ago (Grah-Hoth has called all the demons in Exile to his new fortress, the ladies were succubi in deep cover). And I found out what they wanted the god-spider meat for, the goliath ate it all hoping for some sort of growth spurt to make him bigger. Since I had previously decided that it was the magical radiation of living of the god-spider making everything that was born and grew up in the area bigger... He didn't get anything but sick from eating half rotten meat.

After that they spent three days walking back to the big river, the one just east of the middle of the map that passes Fort Dranlon, the slith, and Almaria. At that point, in the middle of an uninhabited swamp, they "steal a boat from the giants." Failing that they built another raft (should they have Craft: Raft ranks as a bonus by now?) and rafted downstream. The only excitement on the trip was spotting a slith scouting party near Dranlon, the warmage marked off some Fireballs and they went past without stopping. Four days later they were at Almaria.

Before they could pull up to the docks the warmage sank the raft with the Rod of Wonder (Wall of Iron). When they made it to shore he used the rod again and turned half the dock ethereal. A couple guards started yelling and running towards them so he used his last scroll of Mass Fly to escape a $500 fine by flying into town. On the NPC side of things the local constabulary was alerted and started making Gather Information checks to find the A) mage with a rod and a fancy hat, B) bright orange goliath wearing battle plate, C) a large bird, D) a female adventurer, E) a male adventurer with a grayish cast to his skin. On the PC side the warshaper transformed from a bird back into a dwarf and got himself a nice room at the best inn, a hot meal, some good wine, and a bath. The soulknife traded some naga and behir bits to Julio (ex-adventurer and wizard/sage) for money and a few potions before joining the dwarf. The stonechild sold a bit of giant spider venom and bought a masterwork poison kit from Dexter, then he too joind the others at the inn. The warmage and goliath both visited Dexter (I don't remember what they wanted but he didn't have it) and then went to the weapon dealer's shop on the main square in the center of town. There they paid $950 for the dealer to order a large goliath greathammer from a smith in Blosk, they paid cash up front and agreed to come back in three weeks to pick it up. Never mind that they could always walk to Blosk, hire a smith to make it for 1/4th the cost, and walk back in less than half the time. Then they rejoined everyone at the inn (skipping the meal, bath, and wine because it would cost them $30) and went straight to separate rooms. The soulknife did not sleep in her room at the inn, she snuck into an abandoned house nearby and slept there.

Two hours later the police showed up. Fifteen level 5 gnome monks (Swarm Fighting), six level 5 barbarians (Reckless Rage and Offense), one level 5 psychic warrior (Psychic Talent*5), and a 6th level diviner wizard (Sudden Maximize, and Shivering Touch), none of them had magic or masterwork stuff. They had tracked down the warmage, goliath (there's a bonus for that roll) and the soulknife. The soulknife wasn't there, warmage gave up peacefully, and the huge goliath opened the door and smacked a police-gnome for 35 points of damage. I know why he did it, there hadn't been a fight all session and he was bored, so he attacked the first thing that wasn't another PC or a vendor. The gnomes beat him down to half health and he used the area augment of Hostile Empathic Transfer (they made the save and nobody died, although two barbarians went unconscious after their rage wore off). The warmage talked him down eventually and they got carted off to jail before they killed any police, which would have resulted in them being hunted outlaws being tracked by Scrying/Sending mages. So they spent the night in jail and had to cough up a $4000 fine instead of a $500 one, plus the cops and most locals don't like them now. For some reason they kept trying to barter the fine down. No, I don't know. They stopped that when I said that if they wanted to contest the fines they could wait a few weeks in jail for the magistrate to hold a hearing.

Leaving Almaria (swimming because $5 is too much for adventurers to use a toll bridge) the headed towards the Tower of the Magi. Halfway there the warmage and goliath were playing with the Rod of Wonder and dropped a meteor on themselves. 240ish damage with a Reflex 21 for half and a 200 foot radius. The druid/warshaper/dwarf/scout was out scouting, goliath failed his save, and everyone else made it. Piety brought back the stonechild, the soulknife was stable at -5 (Autohypnosis), and the two idiots were dead at -60ish for the warmage and -120ish for the goliath. I fished out the magic item saving throws and made them roll to see what gear was destroyed, alas the Rod made it's save. A little healing was pushed around, the warmage was resurrected, and we ended the night with them arriving at the Tower of the Magi.

It's now August 29th, our resident fool is making a new character and the warmage is wishing that he could replace the two thirds of his gear that got nuked. They did sell all of the goliath's stuff. I think that I'll move up the dates for the two final quests that will be offed to them, those are the end quests to kill either Grah-Hoth or Emperor Hawthorn. The party isn't any good at deciding on what to do on their own and all the easily found dungeons are pretty well used up.

**Frozen_Feet** · 2014-02-16, 02:25 PM (ISO 8601)

... why do they keep using that rod? Why? Why? Do they just love playing this bizarre version of Russian Roulette amongs themselves?

**Telok** · 2014-02-16, 05:54 PM (ISO 8601)

Originally Posted by Frozen_Feet

... why do they keep using that rod? Why? Why? Do they just love playing this bizarre version of Russian Roulette amongs themselves?

Some of them get bored when there isn't fighting or shopping being done and the excitement sort of sweeps up the others.

In other words my group consists of psychopathic adrenaline junkie murder hobos. You know, like 90% of WotC D&D games.

**The Glyphstone** · 2014-02-16, 05:55 PM (ISO 8601)

I wondered if the Goliath would actually end up suffering for his actions. Random chance counts.

**Telok** · 2014-02-23, 02:08 AM (ISO 8601)

We're off to kill the Emperor, The Emperor of the Empire
We hear he is a wimp of a Emp, if ever a Emp there was
If ever, oh ever a Emp there was, The Emperor of the Empire is one because
Because, because, because, because, because
Because of the imperial things he does
We're off to kill the Emperor, The Emperor of the Empire

This week out guy who tried to drop a TPK on his party rerolled a ninja. He wanted to be some sort of poison master but he was worried that he wouldn't have access to poisons despite something like 3/4 of the towns in Exile having alchemists who sell it, and the giant poisonous bugs, and the two species of intelligent spiders, and and and... So he wanted to take Wild Cohort or something similar to get some sort of giant poisonous animal follower. That was fine, I had no problem with that and offered to add the SRD huge venomous bugs at level-9 or to let him take Leadership and get an intelligent poisonous cohort with class levels. I thought that was pretty cool, give him a Pseudodragon, Ettercap, GIFTS, or Spider Eater and throw on levels or HD until it was a decent cohort. Nah, he went with a huge scorpion Wild Cohort on a straight Ninja with some poison feats. And here I thought that a ninja with an wise-cracking extra-poisonous tiny dragon bard cohort would be awesome. I didn't look closely at his character beyond the class and feats because he's actually half decent at building characters even if he plays them foolishly.

The party diddled around the Tower of the Magi for a week and argued over what to do while some potions and gear were made for them. Since that was kind of boring I decided to have Rone contact the Soulknife with an offer to kill Grah-Hoth (he offered a quarter million dollars plus magical support) and Erika Redmark contact the dwarf wildshaper with an offer to kill her former lover (she offered no reward), Emperor Hawthorn. You get two guesses as to which they took and the first three guesses don't count. On the way to Erika's Tower they swam the river at Almaria again and stopped at the Castle to pick up the last Top Secret Imperial Clearance that they had left in storage. While they were there Rone approached the soulknife about selling Demonslayer, for $600,000. She agreed. When offered a choice between Exile dollars, letters of credit, and gold she took the gold. Which meant that she got eight Bags of Holding Type IV with 520,000 coins in them, and a wheelbarrow (they threw that in for free). She split it; three bags for her, two each for the wildshaper and warmage, one for the ninja. They were ecstatic about their new wealth for all of thirty seconds, which was when they realized that the most expensive things for sale on the open market in Exile topped out at around $12,000 and they hadn't bought any of the stuff currently on offer. They've forgotten about Shaynee's Bazaar and Silverlocke.

Disappointed that they had outgrown the local cash/magic economy (which only exists due to government support anyways) our heroes cadged a Mass Phantom Steed spell off of Rone and zoomed to meet Erika. At Miss Redmark's they were a bit weirded out to discover that they couldn't tell the difference between her and her two Simulacrum copies, plus she's definitely over age 60 but looks like she's 30 and tried to hit on the dwarf with a 'stamina' comment. Seriously, what's the point of massive magical power if you can't enjoy stuff? Anyhow she wasn't expecting them for another week and wasn't quite ready to send them off, one of her magic tools that she wanted to give them hadn't arrived yet (there really are things that she can't do, like cast 9th level spells). They hung around for a few days (the warmage got a Permanent Phantom Stag spell during this) and Erika gifted them with what they needed to get to the Emperor.

2 scrolls of Find the Path
1 one use wondrous item of Teleport from the basement of the Imperial Secret Police to the Antechamber of the Royal Living Apartments
1 one use wondrous item of limited Disjunction (limited to disjoining effects affecting the area that it is in)
1 scroll of Greater Teleport
9 potions (shield of faith +3, barkskin +3, magic vestment +3)

Erika told them that there were defenses between Exile and the teleporter, the Find the Path scrolls were to get past those. The other end of the teleporter was in the Imperial Secret Police complex, the wondrous teleport item was to get them from the teleporter room (the rest of the complex is teleport and scrying blocked) and across two miles to a receiving room in the Imperial Palace (mostly TP and scry blocked like the police complex) near the Emperor's apartments. The potions are obviously just assistance although I do have an ulterior motive for including them and there will be several more sets of potions throughout the area. The remaining items are to break the teleport blocks on the throne room and escape after they kill the Emperor. Of course sine the scroll is just a standard scroll the maximum safe distance is 920' which won't even get them out of the palace. They never did ask about that.

They left Erika's and traveled north along the river to the hidden entrance to the last set of dungeons, the ninja left his scorpion with Erika (no, I don't understand) and they arrived at the first dungeon without incident. The first scroll of Find the Path took them through the Black Spire without fighting any of the eight or ten huge elementals that were there by the simple expedient of waving the Imperial Clearance around and not fooling with a rather obvious trap. Twenty miles of windy caverns and tunnels later they arrived at the Barrier Tower. For some reason they didn't want to use the second scroll so they ran past an Abyssal Basilisk chained in the entryway, fought six Chaos Beasts (only dangerous if they hit, of course they didn't), and then tussled with the Thought Slayer. The warshaper fought the Thought Slayer tooth and claw and pimpin' Fort save vs. death gaze. The ninja took one look at the picture and declared it undead therefore immune to his sudden strike and poisons (didn't he build to get around that sort of thing? No?), so he went into the room to close the door and dropped dead from the death gaze. The warmage and soulknife closed their eyes and shot blindly into the melee, the dwarf was only hit by a third of those attacks.

With the psychic aberration dead they were stumped. There was no obvious exit and nothing that they did produced one. They deduced that the fountain in the room was magic, that none of the statues were mechanical, that this was not the teleport gate, and that throwing dispelling mindblades at the walls had no effect and couldn't get through the hardness of the stone. I think they spend twenty minutes wandering around and arguing over whether or not to go back to Erika and ask for some scroll or something to get past this. Eventually they decided to try the final scroll of Find the Path. So the Imperial Clearance got them out again (the pool cast Passwall, a spell nobody ever uses anymore because low level teleportation is much more abundant now as opposed to when Passwall was first written) and they resumed their trek.

Sixty miles and a quarter mile canyon later they were at the teleporter itself. We left off there for the night, next time we'll see if they do or don't go through with what they were "planning."

Here's the last three dungeons.

Spoiler

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Black Spire
2 huge earth elementals are guarding the exterior of this obsidian obstruction in the passage, they attack anyone not wearing an Imperial uniform or displaying an Imperial clearance pass (red, blue, or black). Enchanted hewn stone obsidian walls 3' thick (hardness 16, 1080 hp, climb dc DC, break DC 70, saves +9). Forbiddance inside and within 10' of the walls, so no teleportation, plane shifting, or summoning. Permanent False Vision shows the tower simply not there to all scrying attempts. There's an iron door in the wall SE of the pond with statues, inside are 3 huge air elementals and 1 huge water elemental disguised as a bathing pool. Flash your Imperial clearance around and put a Royal Seal/Black Clearance in the mural on the N wall, this unlocks the wheel on the S wall. If you fool with the "pool" or touch the wheel without doing the N wall mural everything attacks. When you exit you need to flash your clearance again or a spell trap on the bridge will summon a 1 huge fire elemental and 1 huge water elemental when you cross the stream.

Barrier Tower
The secret passage on the N wall has 1 abyssal greater basilisk in it. Stone Shape/ Wall of Stone/ Hardening(Eb p112)/ Stone Metamorphosis(Und p61) granite walls (hardness 21, 1500hp/5', climb DC 25). Forbiddance inside and within 10' of the exterior walls, so no teleportation, plane shifting, or summoning. The outer ring has 20 statues, each set of 4 (N & S) holds a brass key, both keys are needed to open the locks on the secret doors (DC 21) to the inner area. If nobody stays to hold the statue's hand (needs a living hand) it releases 3 chaos beasts from under the other three statues. While opening the secret doors to the inner sanctum hold up your Imperial Clearance or the Though Slayer (psychic monster) will manifest an look at you. Touch your Clearance to the pool of water to activate a Passwall spell that lets you out.

Hawthorn's Palace
The teleporter takes you to the Imperial High Guard and Secret Police Headquarters three miles from the palace unless Eriks helped you with a mutate teleporter spell/scroll. Enter at lower left, a fountain and statue garden. From here on in there is a modified Forbiddance spell that shunts teleportation into the area into a 10x10x10 Force Walled hole with two inches of Green Slime in it, this is to the immediate E of the double statue in the E most hallway. First bend, 2 Royal Guards. Rooms, misc. silverware, fine wine, stationary and light reading. Second bend, 4 Royal Guards and a Mage come from behind. NE corner bend, 4 Royal Guards and 1 Priest, plus 4 Royal Guards from behind. Rooms, toilet, clerk's office, meeting room, asst. jewelry. N hallway, stairs up with 2 Royal Guards, 3 Assassins in the rooms (kitchens, noms). NW corner, food staging area and servant waiting area (deserted but for two non-combatants). W Grand Hall, 4 Royal Guards and 2 Mages. Inner Circle Guard Cubby, 4 Royal Guards and 1 Priest (asst. non-magic weapons). Corner to throne room, 2 Throne Room Guards concealed behind magic-ed up suits of armor, open with 5 charge wands of Reciprocal Gyre, scrolls of Solid Fog and Cloud Kill. Loot (+10 UMD skill rings). Throne Room, Hawthorn, 4 Nobles, 2 Royal Guards, 1 Mage, 1 Priest.

And the important people.

Spoiler

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1st Aristocrat
Aristo6/Rogue6 hp:80, ac:31[35] t:21 f:25 s:15, F11 R14 W14, B/A/G 8/10/10, mv30, init+4, Unarmed Strike +10 1d8+2, +3d6 sneak attack, +Fneg13 paralysis, Stats14, feat: Open Mind*4, IUS, Deflect Arrow, skills: appraise+12, bluff+17, diplo+11, forgery+17, info+17, intimidate+17, motive+17, tumble+11, knowledge+11, UMD+17, spot+17
gloves dex+4, cloak resist+5, vest ac+5, necklace NAC+5, ring prot+5, eternal wand of shield, crystal great arrow deflect(+5ac vs range, deflect 1/rnd), ghoul gauntlet(melee hit/touch Fneg13 paralysis 1d6+2rnd), monk belt

2nd Aristocrat
Aristo6/Fighter6 hp:92, ac:28[31] t:18[21] f:25 s:15, F17 R11 W17, B/A/G 10/14/14, mv30, init+2
cursed lightning sword -2 sword +15 1d8+4+4d6 electric 19x2 (great lifedrinking crystal, heal 5/hit, max 50)
Stats14, feat: Open Mind*4, Shield Spec&Ward, WF&Spec:longsword, MWM:slash, skills: appraise+11, bluff+11, diplo+17, forgery+11, info+11, intimidate+17, motive+11, listen+11, knowledge+11, UMD+9, belt str+4, gloves dex+4, cloak resist+5, vest ac+5, necklace NAC+5, ring prot+5, great iron ward crystal(DR 5/-, 50pt/day), reciprical bracers(2/day IMMED, when crit/SA, next atk=auto-threat), boots of speed(10rnd haste), ring force shield(free act)

3rd Aristocrat
Aristo6/Beguiler6 hp:80, ac:25[29] t:18 f:23 s:14, F11 R11 W17, B/A/G 7/9/9, mv30, init+2, fist +9 1d3+2, Feint as move(melee), Stats14, feat: Open Mind*4, Silent spell, GSF(ench), skills: appraise+11, bluff+11, diplo+11, forgery+11, info+11, intimidate+11, motive+11, spot+11, knowledge+17, UMD+17, spellcraft+13, concentrate+13, sleighthand+14, gloves dex+4, cloak resist+5, vest ac+4, necklace NAC+4, ring prot+4, eternal wand of shield, crystal great mind cloak(+5 vs [mind], reroll 1/day), ring wizardry2, ##1*6:color spray(15'cone Wneg13[mind\illus] 1rnd \stun), exped retreat(+30'mv 6min), mage AC, obscure mist(pbaoe 20' radius \mist), silent image(10 of 10'cube@640' Wneg13[illus] concentration), whelm(1@40' 3d6stun Wneg15[mind]) ##2*11:glitterdust(10'radius@160' Wneg14 \blind 6rnd), invis(6min), mirror image(1d4+2 6min), see invis, silence(20'radius@640' Wneg14 6min), touch idiocy(60min \1d6 penalty all mind stats) ##3*3(dc15+2):dispel magic(640' @+6 vs 11+CL), displacement(50%miss 6rnd), halt(IMMED 1@40' Wneg14 1rnd \feet stick to floor \lose move act), haste(6ally in 30'dia@40' 6rnd \+1ac&hit&ref \+30mv \+1full atk), hesitate(IMMED 1@40' Wneg17[mind] 6rnd \only 1 move \save as swift each rnd \break on caster atk), hold person(1@160' 6rnd Wneg17[mind] \paralysis \save each rnd), slow(6enemy in 30'dia@40' Wneg15 6rnd \-1ac&hit&ref \0.5mv \single act)

4th Aristocrat
Aristo6/Expert6 hp:80, ac:25[32] t:17 f:23 s:14, F11 R11 W17, B/A/G 8/10/10, mv30, init+2, fist +10 1d3+2,
Stats14, feat: Open Mind*6, skills: appraise+11, bluff+11, diplo+11, forgery+11, info+11, intimidate+11, motive+16, perform+11, knowledge+17, UMD+17(+21 scroll), spellcraft+13, decipher+17, tumble+15
gloves dex+4, cloak resist+5, vest ac+4, necklace NAC+4, ring prot+4, eternal wand of shield,
crystal great glancing blows(+10 vs grapple), ring of EVASION, headband int+3
SCROLLS (dc20+SL): 27=Forcecage(@55' 26hr nosave SRno), PW:Blind(1 targ@55' \blind 1d4*[51-100hp=min, 101-200hp=rnd]), Dispelling Screen(13 10x10 @55' 13min nosave SRno \pass thru=Dispel@+13), Greater Ironguard(touch 13rnd \ignore metal less than +3), Energy Immunity(Fire 24hr), Spell Turning(130min \1d4+6 spell levels reflected \targeted only noAoE or Touch \%chance reflect saveNeg & %dmg/eff saveHalf), 26=Flesh to Stone(1@230' Fneg19), Tensor Transform(13rnd \+4body&AC \+5fort \bab=12), Globe Invulnerability(immobile 10r 13rnd \deny upto 4th magic incoming), Greater Dispel(230' \dispel+13), 25=Baleful Polymorph(1 targ@230' Fneg18), Wall of Force(13 10x10 @55' 13rnd),

Hawthorn
Aristo14, SDC=12,IWC=15: hp:105, AC:31(33) t:18 f:28 s:15 & DR 5/-, F12 R12 W19, B/A/G 10/13/13, mv30, init+3, +5 keen double collision scimitar +18 1d6+18 15x2
feats: non-combat, skills:+22 [bluff, diplo, intim, motive, prof(rule the world), craft(edict)]
gloves dex+5, headband int+5, necklace wis +5, bracer NAC +4, cloak chr+5, torso save+5, mithril chainshirt +5, ring protect +5, belt str +5, boots con +4, ring force shield(free act)

THRONE ROOM DOOR GUARDS
RogSlayer3[9] hp: 55, ac:17 BP t:13 f:15 s:10, F7 R11 W6, B/A/G +8/+11/+11 mv20, init+3
rapier +11 1d6+2 18x2, dagger +11(10) 1d4+2 19x2, 4d6 sneak attk on crit, Assassin death attk DC19
s16 d16 c14 i14 w12 c12, WF:ranged touch spell, precise shot, telling blow, SF:UMD, imp.tou, poison use
escape hide sneak+12-4, tumble+15-4, decipher forgery+8, search+11, bluff disguise info+12, UMD+16, listen+13
Ring +5 UMD skill, Amulet Immune Daze 1min 3/day, Special Staff(15 charge), as Staff of Swarming Insects (CL9, $25k*15/50=$7500) but Reciprocal Gyre(3)[190' SRno 1d12[max25]per spell level Whalf17 if Will=fail Fneg17 Daze 1d6rnd] & Born of Three Thunders Consecrated Lesser Orb of Electricity(1)[45'@+12touch 5d8 1/4*elec+1/4*sonic+1/2*untyped[good] Fneg13 Stun 1rnd then Rneg13 Prone]
1) Obedience: May ready an action to "Do what the commander orders"
2) Formation: +1 formation bonus to adjacent allies AC and saves
3) Coordinate: Aid another and flanking give allies +4 instead of +2
Empire license [It is by my order and for the good of the state that the bearer of this has done
what he has done. “Hawthorne”], trapfind, EVASION

**The Glyphstone** · 2014-02-23, 02:55 AM (ISO 8601)

I dunno, when you're a ninja based around stealth and poisoning your enemies, a thirty-foot-long, ten-ton scorpion seems like the perfect companion. But he's dead now anyways, so problem solved.

It looks like you're giving them a teleport into Hawthorne's bedroom area, instead of making them run a gauntlet of respawning mooks like in the game?

(and I gotta wonder how long Erika kept that Booty Talisman in case a situation like this came up. Talk about a crazy ex.

)

**Agent 451** · 2014-02-23, 03:12 PM (ISO 8601)

So after all the trouble to actually get and keep the pieces, they sell off Demonslayer just like that? After being offered a hefty chunk of cash to go kill a towering nigh unstoppable demon? I have no words.

**Telok** · 2014-02-23, 05:38 PM (ISO 8601)

Originally Posted by The Glyphstone

I dunno, when you're a ninja based around stealth and poisoning your enemies, a thirty-foot-long, ten-ton scorpion seems like the perfect companion. But he's dead now anyways, so problem solved.

It looks like you're giving them a teleport into Hawthorne's bedroom area, instead of making them run a gauntlet of respawning mooks like in the game?

(and I gotta wonder how long Erika kept that Booty Talisman in case a situation like this came up. Talk about a crazy ex.:smallbiggrin:)

Ah, I forgot to tell you what the ninja turned out to have as loot. It seems that without hard limits on how he spent his starting cash (60,000) he bought about thirty poisons, ten potions, and a magic sword. So he had a ~40k sword and no defenses beyond his class abilities to go invisible or etherial. Interestinly he had no mundane gear beyond a belt for his potions/poisons and a single set of clothing.

Anyhow I am going to run them through the gauntlet to the throne room, the TP is to get them to the start of that. The gate is a locked in point-to-point teleport and it makes no sense to keep a secret military teleporter in the Emperor's apartments. So I have the gate in a logical place and Erika has a plot token (one that is reasonable for her to possess) to get them close enough to the Emperor that they can have an adventure killing him. If the TP gate can be redirected anywhere then we start going all tippyverse and the setting and plot both begin imploding.

As for Demonslayer, it's just a +3d6 fire sword against anything but demons. Exile needs the sword because they now face a very real threat of demon attacks. Plus Akronath still exists, if Grah-Hoth gets control of that he woll rule and enslave all of Exile. The soulknife is going to a place with few demons and can always turn her mindblade into a holy demonbane magebane weapon.

What was really funny was seeing them realize that they did not have the patience or the will to comission expensive magic items. They really can't do anything that requires planning a week in advance.

**Telok** · 2014-02-27, 01:17 AM (ISO 8601)

Ring-a-round the rosie,
A pocket full of posies,
Ashes! Ashes!
We all fall down.

The stonechild warblade rejoined us this week. This brought our hero count back up to four so I reverted to an earlier version of the Hawthorn encounter with 4 guards and two greater stone golems. Since those golems are too much for this group I ran them under severe restrictions; limited mobility (will only move when ordered to), limited attacks (one slam and no Slow effect), no autonomy (may only attack someone who has attacked a noble or the emperor previously). It worked, the golems were more like damage zones that punished the unwary and unready. But that comes later, right now they were still in Exile. They buffed, nothing much really just a couple potions and first level spells and the warmage spending four high levels slots on Fire Seeds (acorns), suborned the teleporter and jumped through.

They wasted no time in the teleporter room and skipped straight to the palace where the bear/dwarf immediately ravaged the fruit and cheese plate in the waiting room. They powered through the hallways. Surprisingly stealthy and quick they skipped all the rooms and between surprise rounds and winning initiatives they made it to the big feast hall on the west side. There the warmage unleashed his permanent Phantom Stag's trample attack and combined it with a Blast of Flame spell. This killed everything in the hall, including four thirteen year old pages. "They were imperial scum anyways" and the bear/dwarf rushed the tables over to block the doors. The warmage advanced.

The priest in the guard cubby was the first NPC to get a spell off, and the first time I rolled over a 4 on initiative. The warmage sucked a Greater Command (fall down) and ended up blocking the hallway with a Wall of Iron to buy time. Unfortunately for him the bear/dwarf was on his side of the wall. Four rounds later the bear had torn through the guards and priest, the party breached the wall, and there was a ruckus and banging on the feast hall doors. The warmage was put back on his steed but didn't wait around to be tied to it, he was just scraped off when he told it to go through the hole in the iron wall.

The bear took two shots of Reciprocal Gyre and two meta-ed electric orbs missed him before he destroyed the throne room guards. By then the rest of the party caught up and, feeling pressured by the incoming reinforcements, quaffed one or two potions and kicked in the gem-studded gold-plated throne room doors. The throne room was ready and waiting for them.

Four guards in front, the golems anchoring the ends, and everyone else spread out against AoE effects. One acorn hit the emperor, a burst of mindblades rattled off his AC, one of the guards got mauled and replaced by the fighter aristocrat, and the warmage went to trample again. But this time he hadn't won initiative, his trample went over the aristocrat and guards before the golems took AoOs. One was a critical. I rolled a random 50/50 for the golems to attack him or his steed and both of them went for him, ninety damage to his sixty hit points downed him. Over the next few rounds the aristos attacked (the rogue guy missed everything but deflected two mindblades, the fighter guy hit twice but went down quickly) or cast spells (defensive with some Glitterdust spam and a scrolled Wall of Force blocking the escape), the imperial mage and priest were both hit with critical Knife to the Soul mindblades which turned off their casting, and the guards went down. The bear/druid cornered the emperor but was taken down by him and the golem, the now-a-dwarf was restored to life by piety and Shadow Jaunted away (I forgot about the teleport block that time) before being Forcecaged. The stonechild sucked fire damage to make a melee attack with an acorn and got a critical on the emperor that put him down. The mage, priest, and thief aristocrat were put down quickly while the golems hit people and the stonechild used the limited Disjunction item before (use a wand) swapping places with the dwarf.

About this time the Wall of Force went down and essentially unlimited numbers of soldiers began to pour in. In desperation the stonechild shoved one extra-dimensional space inside another and took a quick trip to formless infinity (with the bodies of the emperor and the warmage that he had grabbed before swapping with the dwarf) while the dwarf jumped in one of the soulknife's hastile emptied Bags of Holding and she activated her Dimension Jump boots. Unfortunately her boots can only go 60 feet and the direction she chose was not simply out of the throne room, but directly towards the teleport trap room. The one with the permanent Forcecage and the Green Slime in it.

The emperor is dead and his murderers are dissolved or stuck in a timeless infinity with no way out.

Game over man, game over.

Thread: Exile: World as Dungeon [3.5]

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