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July 16July 10 was Tim's anniversary, so he was out for our Monday game. We had a new player, though: Peter Kim, a recent hire at Wizards (on the brand team, I think...). I didn't want to continue our Aquela adventure minus a character, so Ted Stark (back from vacation) ran us on a very entertaining one-shot adventure involving going into a thane's tomb to retrieve his sword so it could be given to his son. (The politics are somewhat confusing... he died before officially naming his son as heir, so he was buried with his sword. When his son returned from his diplomatic sojourn in the south, he and the other thanes agreed to send us into the tomb to get the sword, if we could. If the dead thane allowed us to have it, the reasoning went, that would indicate his desire to have his son succeed him. If not, the council of thanes would elect a new one. Got that?) We made 6th-level characters, which I enjoyed. I made Sanaril, as you perhaps noticed last week: a 6th-level cleric of Wee Jas, generic Greyhawk deity of death and magic. I considered being a multiclass necromancer/cleric or even cleric/monk, but decided I really wanted all 6 levels of cleric. That's the key thing about multiclassing in the new rules—you can get some cool stuff by taking some levels in other classes, but the price you pay is always the levels in your other class, and the benefits that come with those levels. Sanaril is Lawful Neutral, as is his goddess, but he's definitely on the darker side of that line (as is Wee Jas). For example, where undead and spontaneous casting are concerned, I'm just the same as an evil cleric—no free healing spells here! That made both Dave and Daneen yell at me, but my order provided me with a staff of healing that probably saved our lives (I used most of its charges). Unlike Dave's adventure, this was not particularly combat-heavy. We did a lot of roleplaying in the town before going in, getting tangled up in all the politics and enjoying it quite a bit. Dave played Kawika, a grizzled old veteran fighter, Daneen played Dexter, a halfling wizard (no rogue levels, but lots of roguish skills), and Peter played Manci, an elf rogue who nearly got us in a lot of trouble... I shouldn't say it wasn't combat-heavy, now that I think more about it. The thane's tomb was protected by very powerful magical wards that summoned creatures from the dead thane's past to block our path into the tomb. We destroyed a frost elemental (Ted's creation), and Kawika got eaten by sharks (then mysteriously reappeared). We roasted some shocker lizards, too, then we had to fight the golem-like shield guardian in the heart of the tomb—and that was almost the end of us all. We couldn't hit the darn thing to save our lives (literally), and only managed to sneak past it thanks to Daneen's obscuring mist and some strategic invisibility potions. We couldn't leave the tomb with the sword unless we talked to the spirit of the dead thane first. He explained that we owed him three tasks before we could leave with the sword: He needed something to replace the sword, which means retrieving an older ancestral weapon from the frost giants. He needed something to destroy the shield guardian, which means finding the Book of True Knowledge (on another plane) to find out how it's done. And we need a way to keep Kawika alive once he leaves the tomb, which means tracking down the recently-murdered high priest. Each of these tasks will be the focus of later one-shot adventures, to be played at other times when we don't have a full group... including this coming Monday, when Dave will be off backpacking. September 7, 2000So an impatient message on my 3e message board jolted me to the realization that I haven't been good about describing our Monday night adventures lately. Partly, I guess, that's because we haven't been playing regularly. That's not anyone's fault, though, least of all Dave Noonan's! (Well, maybe his in part... he specifically has flaked out on us a couple of times this summer. But that's all in the past...) Anyway, the last two weeks we've continued the "one-shot" that T'ed started back in July (see my July 16 entry), with me playing Sanaril, cleric of Wee Jas. Last week, we went after a lost ancestral sword to replace the dead thane's sword that we were going to take back to his son and heir. The dead thane teleported us into a frost giant lair—us being Sanaril, Dexter (Daneen's roguish wizard), and Kawika (Dave's dead barbarian/rogue). (Peter couldn't make it.) There we met up with two new PCs, played by Rich Baker and Warren Wyman. Warren's fighter/rogue (maybe) is named Lohr; I can't remember the name of Rich's paladin... but I remember that he's really good with a spiked chain! Kawika, being out of the tomb, was a ghost on this adventure, which was very interesting. He tried several times to possess our opponents' bodies, with no success. The best part of that was that, after taking a lot of flak for playing a cleric of Wee Jas (not being able to spontaneously cast cure wounds spells), Dave came to appreciate my ability to spontaneously cast inflict wounds spells, since inflict spells heal undead! I was vindicated. To some extent. Though that staff of healing is down to one charge by now... So in the frost giant lair, we fought a couple of winter wolves, then found our way to where two frost giants were apparently torturing a bound pseudodragon. We fought the giants on the staircase. Rich's paladin fell into a pit in the landing of the stairs, and got himself out with his spiked chain, which was pretty cool. He made a Jump check to get the most height he could, swung the chain to embed the points into the rock at the top of the pit, rolled some really good Jump checks and attack rolls, and clambered out of the pit. That was a good story to tell the next day. The giants were tough. Fortunately, we were able to take them one at a time. As the second one made its way out to the stairs (Kawika had been distracting it), Dexter got the pseudodragon free, and it zoomed over to sting the frost giant. It didn't have much chance of failing its Fortitude save against the pseudodragon's sleep poison—+14 Fort save against a DC of 12!—but the poor sod rolled a 1 and toppled face-first down the stairs. Then we all circled it for a simultaneous coup de grace. The way the coup de grace rules work, it's possible that even taking a full-round action to do the helpless opponent in, you won't kill it. Frost giants have enough hit points (133 on average!) that it's quite possible to just hurt it when you're trying to deal a killing blow. Fortunately, it tanked another Fort save and died. We found a bunch of prisoners, somehow held in a frozen stasis sort of thing. We intend to rescue them later, with the dead thane's help, but at the time there was little we could do. We instead went downstairs, into a large cavern that held the giants' heaped treasure. As we made our way through the snow and ice in the cavern, a white dragon burst through the wall opposite us. It was a pretty small dragon, but more than a match for us. Most of us fought the thing—spread out to avoid its breath—while Dexter and the pseudodragon looked for the ancestral sword. They found it, and I scored a pretty impressive critical hit on the dragon—all of 16 points with my +1 ghost touch spiked gauntlet! Then I clasped the bracer the dead thane (Aelric is his name) gave us and called for him to bring us back to his tomb ("Beam us up, Aelric!"). We escaped, actually with two similar-looking swords, one of which was the one Aelric wanted. And reached 7th level, ending for the week. We did the same sort of picnic on Labor Day that we did on Memorial Day, and I managed to play despite the fact that my wife was in California. My son played with Rich's kids for a while, then hung out with T'ed's wife watching videos until I finally had to tear myself away and get him home. So this time our mission was to find the shade of the recently-murdered high priest, McAngus. Still no Peter, but Tim made it back with us this week, playing a rogue/wizard/cleric of Heironeous. Only slightly weirder than my rogue/paladin, I guess... His quote: "I wasn't always a cleric." And our mission took us to the pits of hell, apparently. Only en route through the ethereal plane, we encountered two ethereal marauders... a red herring encounter, I think. See, in the middle of the combat, after Kawika took out one of the marauders, he turned on Sanaril, deep in his barbarian rage. Knocking Kawika out was much more difficult than taking out the second ethereal marauder. We KO'd him, got out of the ethereal and into hell, and he seemed fine when he woke up. Corporeal, even. Then we made our way through the lava-strewn caverns and tunnels until we reached a cavern piled high with elven corpses. Plucking our way gingerly through this charnel, we were a bit surprised by a mohrg—an undead thing with a long, cartilaginous tongue—rising up to attack Kawika. He lapsed into an uncontrollable rage again, which fortunately (?) was stopped when the thing grabbed him, hit him with its tongue, and paralyzed him. He then ended up in a lava pool... ooh. That's gotta hurt. Meanwhile, Dexter and Tim's character (I'm terrible with names...) made their way to the other end of the cavern, but encountered a second mohrg. Unfortunately, this is where I had to leave. As I understand it, we managed to take care of both mohrgs and get Kawika out of that lava alive. I left Sanaril in Dave's care, and came out of it alive. We figured out that Kawika had been using a +2 cursed berserking sword... the one that I carried out of the frost giants' lair. So that's why he was attacking us! And we got enough experience to get close to 8th level. Close, but not quite... So that's our Monday night gaming of late... I know we'll play T'ed's campaign at least one more week, maybe more after that. We're enjoying it, and frankly I'm not in a hurry to start DMing again... it's just too much time commitment, when I've got a lot going on already. (I owe Dave Gross an article for Dragon, and I'm about to be late getting the manuscript for "The Altar of Sacrifice" to Dungeon... in addition to my job at Wizards, my family, my web site...) September 18, 2000Tonight Sanaril and company continued our adventure in Hell (or someplace rather like it). Dexter (Daneen's halfling wizard) died painfully at the hands... er, probosci of some undead stirges. Well, he was helped along by Arzimon's (Rich's paladin) attempt to shoot one of the stirges off her. Kawika (Dave's barbarian) had picked two of them off, so Arzimon figured he could do the same. Well, luck was against him... and Dexter. Arzimon rolled a crit and socked 18 points of damage on top of the incredible Constitution loss Dexter had already taken. The next slurp from the vampire stirges (or whatever they were) did in poor Dexter. (For clarity: Arzimon and Kawika were firing arrows at a grappling opponent. Dexter had taken a potion of fly and was hovering 30 feet above us. When firing into a grapple, you've got an even chance of hitting any combatant. When Kawika picked off two of the beasties, he actually skewed the odds against Dexter for Arzimon's shot. It was just ugly. We're all looking forward to hearing Arzimon explain what happened to Heironeous someday...) Well, my brief moment of glory for the evening came when I got up to the stirge nest and successfully commanded two more of the beasties (after killing one with my ghost touch gauntlet). I was all ready to have two little bloodsucking familiars, until that goody-goody Arzimon tried to use positive energy to open the mysterious chain doorway at the back of the stirge cave. He turned my stirges! And I didn't wait around for them to come back. His pitiful attempt to channel positive energy had some effect on the doorway, though, so I used up the rest of my daily turning attempts channeling negative energy into the door so the party could make their way through. On the other side, we found a grid of heavy iron chains forming a floor, of sorts, above a pit of bubbling lava. Across this lattice was a hut which, we soon discovered, held the shade of McAngus—just the sod we came looking for. However, in stark contrast to Osuno, Sanaril has a Balance of –7 (–1 Dex, –6 armor check penalty), and a Climb of –4 (+2 Str, –6 armor). He was very reluctant to make his way across this lattice. Everyone else went across (Daneen by this point was playing the pseudodragon, since Dexter was still dead) and started talking to McAngus, and learned that he had gotten himself trapped while trying to use a deck of many things to help get us out of the thane's tomb. Oy! Whenever he tried to leave the hut, he found himself under attack by a kyton—a rather nasty devil with a serious chain fetish. Rather than mess with the deck ourselves, we—well, they—started to make their way out of the hut, facing the angry kyton. That sucker has damage reduction 20/+2, and the only +2 weapons in the whole party were four arrows carried by Arzimon (good thing, too, since the kyton took control of Arzimon's trademark spiked chain). I sent four vials of holy water over to the melee in the claws of the pseudodragon, then watched helplessly for a while. I finally decided to start making my way across the chains, getting ready to lay a can of inflict critical wounds on that bugger. With my Balance score, though, it was slow going, and I actually had to leave before I could see the combat through. I guess I'll find out tomorrow whether the party survived... When I left, Kawika had the thing grappled, and was getting ready to try to throw it into the lava below. Hope that worked... September 24, 2000Sorry about that long cliffhanger! It worked, more or less... we all survived—better, Dexter and Kawika are fully alive again, and we all (or at least, Dexter, Kawika, and Sanaril) went up to 8th level. I already posted Sanaril's revised character sheet. Here's what happened, as I was told the story... Kawika, with Arzimon and Lohr pitching in, did manage to throw the kyton down into the lava. Now, T'ed wasn't actually playing the kyton straight out of the Monster Manual—he made it totally immune to fire (like all baatezu), which it is specifically not in the MM. In fact, fire is one of the things that does real damage to a kyton (which is a devil but not a baatezu), while most attacks do subdual damage that it quickly regenerates. (That's how regeneration works, in case you haven't got that yet.) So the kyton was pretty well swimming in the lava below the party. And Sanaril blew one too many Balance checks making his way across the chains. Fortunately, Sanaril had an endure elements spell (fire) going, so he didn't disappear in a puff of steam. Instead, he made his way over to the kyton—much more quickly than he had been able to up on the chains!—and laid an unholy smackdown on its chains... inflict critical wounds. Bye-bye, kyton. I never heard how they got me up out of the lava, but they did. I took a lot of damage down there—something like 21 points—but survived just fine. With the kyton defeated, we could escort Angus from the premises and use Aelric's magic bracers to get ourselves back to the dead thane's tomb. There, Angus did true resurrections to get Dexter and Kawika back to life, so they're still up at 8th level with me. Eighth level... I considered doing some kind of multiclass, but decided that another 4th level spell was nothing to sneeze at. Then Dave pointed out to me that next level I can start doing more with dead bodies than make them stand up and walk around under my control. (More? What more could I ask for? ahem.) Raise dead is coming up, in other words. Not to mention slay living, which will be one of my domain spells... circle of doom, the ever-popular flame strike, and commune. Should be fun. I haven't played much at this level: our old Imperium Romanum game topped out around 7th level (see Jannes and Chala), and we've done a lot of playtests at 10th level and up, so this 8th-9th range is interesting to me. Well, as far as I know we're playing tomorrow, so I'll try to update soon. October 14, 2000We played 9/25, I missed 10/2 (but the group went on without me), and we played again 10/9. So I have a lot to write about Sanaril's adventures! 9/25: This was a total change of pace for this group—a session completely focused on roleplaying and interaction. We returned to Forghul, with the dead thane's sword, and gave it to Malcolm to support his claim to the position of Great Thane. Then we spent a long time dealing with the council of thanes, guessing at who opposed Malcolm's claim, trying to figure out what went on with MacAngus' faked death and real consignation to Hell, and observing the wreckage of the town in the wake of the recent frost giant attack. Confused? Me too. Let me try to sort this out in a way that you can understand it: Aelric was the Great Thane—the member of the council of thanes elected by the thanes to be their leader. It is customary for a Great Thane to designate his heir before he dies, and pass on his sword to that heir. In Aelric's case, that did not happen. His son Malcolm ("the Dancer") was off in the civilized southlands doing diplomatic work when his father died, and for whatever reason, Aelric did not officially name his heir. So his sword was buried with him, and the thanes were faced with the prospect of electing a new thane. When Malcolm returned, he and Kharguth (Aelric's most trusted adviser) and MacAngus (the high priest) sent us into the tomb to ask the thane's spirit to name his heir and give us the sword to give to Malcolm. Eventually, that's what we accomplished. But on the night before we ventured into the tomb, MacAngus was found dead—or so we believed. His apparent murder served as an excuse to hurry us into the tomb. Apparently, near as we can figure, MacAngus actually left that night to go retrieve his deck of many things from the place he had stored it, figuring that it might come in handy if we did not meet with success in the tomb. After he left, someone made it look like he was dead. (This part is not very clear in my head, either, and I'm not convinced it's 100% clear in T'ed's head, either.) At any rate, Tim's character, Valentain, was a disciple of MacAngus, and ventured into the tomb after the rest of us, looking for the missing high priest. So we eventually found MacAngus in hell, where he had ended up as a result of trying to use that deck of many things. I guess he'd been hoping for the Moon (1d4 wishes), but got something like the Donjon (imprisonment—hence his little place in Hell with the kyton guardian). Why a high priest capable of casting true resurrection (and, hence, miracle) would be using a deck in hopes of getting a wish is beyond my powers of reasoning. Lastly, while we were in the tomb, the frost giants of the eastern mountains were mustering an attack on Forghul. When we went to retrieve the other ancestral sword from the frost giant headquarters, we found it almost deserted, because most of the giants were off sacking the city. (We only had to fight two of them... two CR 9 monsters... EL 11...) So there was much discussion in town, amidst the wreckage and rebuilding, about why the giants attacked, and in particular the fact that this seemed like a particularly well-organized attack. For one thing, the frost giants formed sort of a wall that prevented the humanoids (orcs? I can't remember) from turning tail when the battle was going against them, which is apparently unusual. A little more politics: There are a number of thanes who make up the council of thanes, bound by an agreement to obey the great thane, let him collect the taxes, that sort of thing. Each thane rules a geographically distinct region, however. And then there are two more thanes who are independent from the council—two half-orcs, brothers I believe, whose domains lie off to the west near frost giant country. We got to wondering whether they were somehow involved in the frost giant attack, or had some other involvement in the confusing politics of the council. But the next plot thread surfaced while we were in town: Malcolm rewarded us all with lesser knighthoods (we are "Knights of the Towers")... all except for Daneen's halfling, Dexter. Dexter drew the Throne card from the deck after we rescued MacAngus. (Arzimon did too, but followed it up with the Ruin card, which cost him that small keep.) Without knowing why, Malcolm named Dexter Knight of Shining Stones... an abandoned keep near a gemstone mine out eastward. We finally decided to go claim Dexter's keep, and the next adventure began. 10/2: I missed this session, but it was pretty straightforward. The group traveled to Dexter's keep. What made it interesting/amusing is that Dexter had also drawn the Comet card... twice. If he had been able to single-handedly defeat the next two monsters encountered, he'd have gone up two levels. Unfortunately, Dexter is not a combat mage. He's a specialist Transmuter (I think), with no access to Evocation spells at all. Very little in the way of useful combat spells. We love him for his Leomund's secure shelter, fly, and invisibility spells, and we wisely don't expect him to take out our enemies in combat. Leave that to Sanaril. :) (Oh, wait, that's next week...) So when the winter wolves attacked in the middle of the night, Arzimon took a whale of damage while restraining himself from attacking so that Dexter could have a chance. Not a chance. Dexter gave up, and the rest of the party managed to bring the beasties down—but not without some heavy damage. 4d6 on that cone of cold... wow. That hurts. And when the snow leopard showed up a little later the same night, sniffing at the corpse of the mule killed by one of the wolves, it was the same story. Between the two encounters, the group used up more than half of the charges of the wand of cure light wounds we'd just bought. Then they arrived at Dexter's keep, and did some recon. (That's what Dexter is good at!) They observed a number of zombies—including two frost giant zombies—and some trolls doing repair work on the keep. When one of the trolls caught Dexter's scent, it made its report through a gate leading down into the mines. And that's where that session broke off. 10/9: Sanaril showed up the next day, and we made another "recon" probe... that ended in the demise of one zombie (in a ray of searing light) as well as Dexter and his pseudodragon buddy (in a flame strike cast from within the mine). Lohr, still under the influence of Dexter's fly spell, flew the two back to town and secured another true resurrection for Dex, but the pseudodragon is history. Then we decided to make an attack probe, just to see what we could accomplish. And that was fun. I stocked up on searing lights, having discovered that, against undead, that 4th-level spell is better than the 5th-level cure critical wounds (8d6 compared to 4d8+8). We flew over a wall of the keep, and I started off by commanding four of the six medium-size zombies (a fifth was rebuked). If the frost giant zombies had been by-the-book Large zombies (4-HD), I'd've been able to command one of them, which is what I was hoping for. But T'ed was testing out some work he and Jonathan Tweet and someone else (Skip or Monte, I think) had done in creating a template for zombies and skeletons, that lets a zombie keep its own Hit Dice. So these buggers had 14d12 HD! I had no hope of rebuking them, let alone commanding them. But my work on the little zombies kept them out of the way while I turned my searing lights on the big guys. That was pretty devastating, and I'll happily claim a lot of the credit for that fight. Arzimon was absent, Lohr felt useless so he went and scouted toward the mine (he did intercept a zombie that was presumably going to warn whatever lives in the mine that we were attacking), Dexter ended up in a tower with two trolls, so Kawika and I pretty much took care of those 14d12 HD bad boys all by our lonesomes. Kawika took a lot of damage in the process. I was only hit once, after my searing lights were used up, when I closed to deal the killing blow to the second giant zombie with my morningstar. @*&% monsters with reach! It whacked me with the attack of opportunity before I whacked it. But I survived, and it did not. To his credit, Dexter did cast an obscuring mist that effectively kept one of the giant zombies out of our hair for a while, and also stopped whatever was behind the nearby door from shooting crossbow bolts at us while we fought. I will miss this next Monday's session, since my wife is flying to California on Monday evening. But I'll update when I can. January 7, 2001I'll be playing Sanaril again on Monday! He's 9th level now, and I think (with T'ed's permission) I'm going to fiddle with his skill ranks a little bit so that he'll soon qualify for a prestige class in Defenders of the Faith. For now, I'm going to enjoy having flame strike and slay living at my disposal... I finally took the time to generate some background for Sanaril tonight, since I've been having such a hard time getting into character while playing him. You can read it all on his updated character sheet, if you like.
January 26, 2001"My, how time flies when one is thoroughly enjoying oneself." — W.S. Gilbert, The Mikado Let's see... since my last update on the 7th, I think we've had two Monday night sessions and three Friday playtests. First off, though: If you haven't already, go read T'ed's discussion of the Forghul campaign in the making in the Wizards of the Coast celebrity gaming table feature. I believe Daneen is working on writing up Dave's Sumberton campaign (better known, of course, as the Fik campaign) for the same feature... which reminds me, I owe her a character sheet. Oops. So let's see... two sessions on Forghul madness. In the first one (1/8), we returned to Brightstone Keep (Dexter's inherited castle far to the east of the civilized regions of Forghul, near frost giant territory). We had already killed the clerical lich that laired deep in the mine—though we never found its phylactery, so I'm sure we'll have to deal with it again someday. After that, we did a brief mission back in civilized land (the adventure Warren ran), which helped to get Malcolm elected as Great Thane. Now our session begins. En route back to the keep, while "camping" (that seems an inappropriate word for sleeping in a Leomund's secure shelter) for the night, we had to fight off a gray render that wore a mysterious metal armband. When we arrived at the keep, we spotted a broken chain attached to the wall, with blood and bones on the snow nearby, which, I reasoned, must have been where the gray render had been chained up (by that armband). For some reason, I'm the only one who seems sold on that conclusion, but whatever. I don't think it was too important. "Have fun storming the castle!" That's pretty much what we did. Dexter had cast fly on all of us (that spell changes the game—not least for the incredible speed it gives you), and we soared up onto the towers to smack the hobgoblin guards. Out came a couple of trolls and two winter wolves (T'ed said the winter wolves were there just so we'd stop being scared of them—Arzimon had had a tough time with winter wolves at 5th or 6th level, but T'ed was right—they were no match for us at 9th. We hardly even needed the endure/resist/protection from elements spells we had up.), as well as a big troll in armor and carrying a magic greatsword (no, it wasn't Skurge). Kawika had his sights set on the big one, Lohr messed around with a tanglefoot-bag-throwing hobgoblin, Dexter nearly got flattened by a troll who grappled him and then jumped off one of the towers (I think I'm remembering this right—Lohr may have suffered the same fate), but soon the trolls were turning tail and running into one of the towers. Sanaril was doing pretty well in the fight, though I don't remember the details well. I know I hit the big troll with a slay living, but even with Spell Focus (necromancy) the Fort save was a cinch for the troll (DC 21, while a basic troll has a +11 Fort save), so that was just a pretty good damaging spell. The flame strike was half real damage, though. Heck, two trolls are only EL 7. They weren't too tough... despite a serious shortage of significant fire damage capability. We just subdued them into unconsciousness long enough to burn them. Session two (1/15): With Brightstone Keep under our control and a team of engineers from the Great Thane heading out to restore it, Malcolm sent us as diplomatic envoys to the half-orc "thanes"—the rulers of two petty kingdoms out our way (eastward, toward frost giant land) who refuse membership on the council of thanes. They hadn't been heard from in some time, and Malcolm wanted to know what was up. Well, we got a little distracted on the way out there. We were attacked by a remorhaz, which swallowed both Lohr and Arzimon and killed Dexter at the same time he killed it... by delivering a touch spell. Fortunately, I had a scroll of raise dead handy, so we lost no time in getting him back to life, albeit at one level lower. *sigh* On their way out of the beast's fiery innards, Lohr and Arzimon found a heatproof metal tube inside... apparently the last relic of a recent meal. Inside was a map to a nearby mountain, and a riddle that explained (in a roundabout way) how to open the door to a treasure vault. Being so close to the mountain, and always treasure-hungry, we decided to have a stab at solving the puzzle and opening the door. It took us all night. The door had seven icons of the moon engraved on it, showing the moon in different phases (new, waxing crescent, first quarter, full, last quarter, waning crescent, and new again). The trick was figuring out in what order to press the icons, and pressing one out of order triggered a trap. We had several missteps, but were never so stuck that I felt the need to use my commune spell to help us out. The funny one was the one we figured we weren't supposed to touch with our bare hands—pressing it out of order caused the person who pressed it to fly into a berserk rage and attack the rest of the party. We pressed it out of order, the first time, with Dexter using a mage hand—so we didn't realize that it was wrong. The next time through, Val forgot our theory that we weren't supposed to touch it with our hands, pressed it, and flew into us. I was unsuccessful at dispelling the effect or causing fear, so we had to take him down the old fashioned way... Finally, we got the door open, and called it a night. Our Monday night game will be a Wednesday night game starting next week. We weren't able to play at all this week, since Monday was my son's birthday and T'ed has been off at Winter Fantasy since Wednesday. Next week we should enter the treasure vault... we'll see what's inside. That's it for now! Next Wednesday, we're back to the Forghul campaign. February 21, 2001More of that time flying thing... sheesh. Well, for the last couple of weeks I've been working pretty much night and day... first to finish up the Dragon and web articles I had committed to, then working on finishing up the big project that's consumed my last eight months. Coming into the home stretch now, and making more regular updates to this site is high on my list of things to do once I finally have nights to myself again. I've only played in two sessions of the Forghul campaign since I last wrote—I had to miss two weeks, first because of a scheduling messup with my wife, and second because she was in California and I was busy being Papa. So... we played on the 12th and the 19th. In my absence, Kawika and Dexter had explored deep into the vaults below the door with all the moons on it. A somewhat larger group had attempted to deal with the pit fiend bound to the place, but it was just the two of them when they discovered the strange portal device. So I joined the group again when it was time to see what was on the other side of that portal. Near as we could figure, gripping the rods of this device made us incorporeal and whizzed us through maybe a hundred miles of rock and caverns into another cavern complex. Once through, we had to figure out how to open a huge iron door. We picked a lock to open a little control panel, and found a bell inside. Ringing the bell, we heard a loud, echoing tolling inside the door. Hm... Thinking a little harder, Sanaril pulled on the hook the little bell was attached to, and the door unlatched. We ended up at the top of a cliff overlooking a dark lake. There was a basket-like thing up with us, which we figured would probably float and carry us. Dexter cast fly on Arzimon and we all lowered the basket down to the water. Then we got in, and Arzimon held a rope and started towing us across the lake. A brief moment later, we were attacked by 6 lacedons. Sanaril rubbed his hands with glee. Val (Tim's shadowdancer) was paralyzed during the lacedons' action, then it was my turn... I bent the six of them to my will, and in fact some more lacedon heads popped up out of the nearby water to seek my bidding. I commanded them to push our boat across the water, which turned out to be really helpful when Arzimon entered the no-fly zone (an anti-magic field in the middle of the dark lake). I made a second check to get several more of them under my command, in order to keep us safe from the rest of the lacedons... apparently the lake actually consisted of lacedons with just enough water around them for them to swim in... Once we reached the opposite shore (after a quick detour to observe the sacrificial stake where some unfortunate victims had been chained out as lacedon food), I commanded my loyal lacedons to go back and fight their companions. The water started churning like a shark feeding frenzy... We have yet to observe the ultimate effects of that command. Making our way up the passage beyond the lake, we were suddenly attacked by gooey tendrils apparently extending through the wall—then the illusion disappeared and we saw the roper behind the false wall. Big deal, I thought, tossing a flame strike its way... and watching it fizzle, despite the 18 (+9 = 27) I rolled on my spell penetration check! A roper's SR makes it an unusually tough opponent! Dexter lost all her strength, and was saved only by Val's quick-thinking bull's strength. (Lesser restoration has a casting time of 3 rounds, unfortunately.) Arzimon scored a crit on the thing with his +1 flaming holy war chain, dishing out something obscene like 59 points of damage. That's about when the archers appeared at the portcullis down the hall, ordering our surrender. Being in the midst of deadly combat with the roper, we didn't pay them much attention at first, and took the roper out shortly thereafter. Then we turned our attention to the archers, who turned out to be pureblood yuan-ti. Fortunately, we all made our Fort saves when they tried to turn us into aardvarks with their polymorph other spell-like ability! That battle ended with something of a draw, as they dropped a darkness on us and retreated, leaving us in the dark on the far side of the portcullis from them. Arzimon and Val got the portcullis up while I mustered a lesser restoration for Dexter, and we broke for the night when we came to the door just outside the darkness. On the 19th, we... well, I'll have to get back to that a little later on. March 31, 2001Yes, it's that time of the month... the time when I usually get around to updating my site. Thanks for the nudge, Masked! I'm not even sure I can remember what we did way back on February 19. Well, this much I do remember: We proceeded through the portcullis behind the guards who had fled, though we were in no shape to continue fighting. (Big Mistake #1). Exploring their guardpost, we soon heard a pounding on the door, and it shattered in to reveal... nothing. I cast a quick invisibility purge (much to Dexter's chagrin), and we all got a good look at the monster that had bashed in the door. T'ed apparently created this monster to define the miniatures he'd bought and painted recently. I don't remember now what the yuan-ti called it, but it was giant-sized and giant-strong, and about giant-dumb as well. With it were the four yuan-ti guards who had retreated from us earlier, as well as another pureblood who turned out to be a sorcerer of no small ability. We took one of the guards down, and were pretty close to dropping the giant-thing, but at the point when the sorcerer was holding his dagger to the throat of a dying Sanaril, urging us to "negotiate," we finally realized that the combat was not, in fact, going in our favor. We "agreed to negotiate" (we never admitted it was surrender...), and had a lot of interesting conversation with the yuan-ti sorcerer (whose name escapes me, and I'm working without notes here... sorry!). We learned from the sorcerer that the high wizard of Forghul may have been trying to forge an alliance between the yuan-ti, the frost giants, and herself... against Forghul. I gather that later evidence contradicted that information, but I wasn't at that session (nor any session since!), so I can't say for sure. But we sent that information back to Malcolm (the Great Thane) right away. We also agreed, rather uncomfortably, to "test the defenses" of a nearby yuan-ti lordling, in exchange for payment from the sorcerer... Well, Sanaril didn't have much ethical conflict at the idea of serving as a hired assassin for a yuan-ti, and Arzimon rationalized it by saying that the end result was still less evil in the world, right? Interesting negotations, at any rate. We finally made our way toward that other yuan-ti's domain, still spell-depleted. Looking at the calendar, I think this was the 26th—the day I turned over Oriental Adventures to the editors. Making our way around a large cavern, we came to another of the transportation devices like the one that had brought us to the yuan-ti caverns in the first place. Thinking, in our infinite wisdom, that the other side might be a safer place to rest up than the wide-open cavern where we were, we transported ourselves... into the middle of a frost giant lair. The two guards on duty weren't too tough, but the two backups were nasty. Being trapped inside a bead of force did not make Sanaril happy, and greatly reduced his ability to make a meaningful contribution to the battle. At the end, Arzimon was dead, Lohr was unconscious, Sanaril was trapped in the bead, and Dexter stood alone against the two frost giants. Dexter, the halfling wizard (transmuter?) with no access to evocation spells. Alone. Against two frost giants. He pulled out his staff of charming and made friends with the giant bad guys. And saved the day. Or at least, allowed us to get back to the cavern. I missed the next... several sessions. I had a sick wife on the 5th; an absent wife on the 12th; no DM on the 19th (T'ed was at GAMA so we didn't play), and this last week we switched to Wednesdays, I had a conflict, then we ended up not playing at all. On the 5th, the group (with Kawika, anyway) performed the assassination of the half-blood yuan-ti guy, took over control of one of those big giant things (thanks to that staff of charming), and freed a bunch of slaves. I believe the last session ended with some open questions, particularly, how are we going to get these slaves back to civilization without passing through the way we came in, with the other yuan-ti? So I guess that's all the news to report on Forghul for now. We should be playing again on Wednesday 4/4. I'll try to do another update before the end of April. April 5, 2001Yep, we played last night. And what a night! At the end of the last session I missed, the group had made its way out past the yuan-ti (Dexter teleported most of the slaves back to Forghul), and stood outside the moon-puzzle door on Mossy Peak (which I wrote about in my January 26 entry). Starting our session last night, we briefly considered a few options, like going back in and trying to get rid of the pit fiend, Scar. Arzimon the paladin summed it up like this: "I'm not too bright. I'm not stupid, but I'm no genius. I'm tired of dealing with evil geniuses. I figure, the more we deal with evil geniuses, the more likely we're going to end up doing something we're going to regret." No more evil geniuses, then. Bye-bye, Scar. Bye-bye, yuan-ti. Off to Highcliff! We set out to complete our original mission—a diplomatic envoy to the half-orc "independent thanes" of the distant, frigid east. A half-elf ranger named Trane, one of the slaves we liberated from the nasty yuan-ti, remained with us to serve as a guide and extra party member. Trane and Val managed to get us to Highcliff. We arrived at a bowl-shaped valley with a few deserted-looking houses in the bottom. On the far side of the valley, a mountain rose steeply up, and a couple of the better-eyed among us (Arzimon kept rolling 19s and 20s on his Spot checks!) noticed a path winding up the side of the mountain to a doorway. The really keen-eyed Dexter and Val noticed something red moving on the left side of the mountain, and a flash of something blue. We decided to make our way around the left side of the valley, toward the mountain, to investigate. I immediately started thinking that something red that we could see at that distance did not bode well, and I started reviewing what I knew about dragons... (and wishing I'd had a protection from elements prepared!). When we reached the mountain, we realized that there was another hole in the side of the mountain, where Dex and Val had seen that movement. Val scouted up the mountain (aided by a fly spell), peered into that open cave (which turned out to be a smashed-in doorway), and heard sounds suggesting it was, indeed, a dragon. Without lingering to make sure, he made his way around the mountain to the pathway leading to the main doors. He found a scene of carnage, indicating that Highcliff had endured an assault by orcs and giants. We really had no way of determining the outcome. He looked around the front door area, discovered an arrow slit cloaked behind an illusionary wall, and had his hand grabbed, hard, by something inside. Slipping away, he zoomed back to make his report. We started thinking about making camp for the night, while I was quietly hoping our secure shelter would lure the dragon out into the open for a fight. Instead, Trane piped up and suggested that we were still jumping at shadows—we didn't know it was a dragon in there. So Dexter polymorphed into a pixie, reduced himself to a Tiny pixie, and flew quietly into the cave. Yep, sure enough, it was a little (Large) red dragon. And, as might be expected, its keen senses picked up signs of Dex's presence, and it chased him out of the cave. He teleported back to our location, and I had my wish: the dragon was zooming toward us. Have I mentioned before one of my favorite things about 3rd edition D&D? In 1st edition, the dragons were really pretty woosy. In 2nd edition, they were a lot tougher—so tough that I don't think I ever fought a dragon in 2nd edition. Now, there's a dragon at just about every CR. It will always be a tough fight, but you're never too weak (or too strong) to at least think about fighting a dragon. And really, there's just nothing more exhilarating. Did I say a red dragon? Well, when Arzimon got his first hit with his +1 (enhanced to +3 with my greater magic weapon) holy flaming war chain, he didn't even bother rolling the fire damage. But then T'ed told him to roll it... twice. "It's a white dragon painted red!" I yelled in outrage. Then we noticed the collar, and the torn ear. It was not only a white dragon, it was the same white dragon that we fought in the frost giant lair back at 6th level (August 28; see my September 7 entry). I only vaguely remember, now that I've been reminded, that when we encountered it before it appeared red rather than white. It creamed us before (rightly so, as the toughest CR 9 monster in the book), and we escaped only by having Aelric beam us up once we found the sword we were looking for. But I still have written on Sanaril's character sheet, with pride, that his +1 ghost touch spiked gauntlet dealt 16 points of damage on a crit against that dragon. Well, this time was a little more satisfying. Basically, Arzimon and I were the heavy-hitters in the battle, each of us dishing out about 25 points of damage a round. Well, my first flame strike fizzled against its spell resistance. My second didn't but it made its save. Still, I rolled well for damage, and got about 25 in that round. Then I hit it with searing light for 28 points. (SR check: made it. Ranged touch attack roll: oh no, a natural 3 makes... a 10! Oh wait... it's Large and has no Dex bonus... yeah, that'll do it! Damage: 28. All right.) Rich did about 75 points in those three rounds, while the others were nickling and diming it as well. The next round I figured I'd better do a cure critical on someone—Arzimon, Lohr, and I had all been breathed on, as well as bitten and/or clawed. Then the damn thing took off... ... and Tim had to, as well. We stopped on Lohr's action, with the dragon back in its cave (probably digging out its healing potions) and most of us about 200 feet back, at the base of the mountain. I hope we can finish this thing off next week! I may be reduced to either inflicting wounds or swinging my morningstar at it, at this point, and I don't think I'll feel quite as on top of the world as I did with those spells. For the record, Arzimon would have dealt it a lot more damage, but Rich apparently used up all of his 19s and 20s rolling Spot checks earlier in the evening. *sigh* He sure tanked a lot of attack rolls. But he still managed to get in about one good swing each round. April 12, 2001The dragon is dead! We picked up last night right where we left off, at Lohr's action in the initiative order. Val was the only one who could fly, and Dexter was all out of fly spells. So Arzimon bravely volunteered to have Val carry him up into the dragon's cave where he could stand alone against the thing, at least until the rest of us made our way up. Val cast a bull's strength on himself and flew over to Arzimon while I cast a cure serious on Arzimon. Unfortunately, even with the extra Strength, Val couldn't lift the beefy Arzimon off the ground—all 250 pounds of him (including gear). But Sanaril is a gaunt, skeletal mortician... even in plate mail. I dropped my morningstar and staff of healing, and fell under the 200 pound mark. Val could lift me. Dexter had already slapped a haste on Arzimon, and then threw one on me. Val came and picked me up, and I started beefing myself up for the fight: divine favor, divine power, cure serious wounds, cure moderate wounds... I was ready to go, but hoping that my death touch would be enough. We stopped halfway up the mountain towards the dragon's cave in order to pass off Val's ring of climbing to Arzimon, who was struggling up on his own. That's when the dragon came out... or should I say the dragons? There seemed to be four of them, but we quickly figured out that it had a mirror image on itself. I got an attack of opportunity as it did its flyby attack, and dispelled one of the images. Lohr and Trane shot arrows and dispelled two more images, leaving just the one that mattered. Arzimon socked it for another 20 hit points or so, then I stepped up to the plate. Spell penetration... check. Melee touch attack... is a 27 good enough? (I was rolling at +17, thanks to all the magical enhancements.) Nothing corporeal is going to dodge that. So, if its current hit points are less than I get on 10d6, it dies. I rolled a 34. T'ed showed me the paper. It had 33 hit points left. Good thing it was behind us on the hill. I just reached out and snuffed its life force. And there was much rejoicing. We got its loot—6 mithril bars worth 2,000 gp each, and a wand I'm guessing is a wand of mirror image, since I don't think it could cast that on its own. We found some evidence that it had consumed some of its potion treasure (probably cures), and we camped out in its cave for the night. On his watch, Lohr spotted a lone scout down at the base of the mountain, near the dragon's corpse. He threw a torch down to get a better look, and the scout ran away. When Lohr woke Trane for his watch, they both heard a scrabbling sound from the back of the cave. In a few minutes, once we were all awake, a secret door opened and a mantlet appeared, advancing menacingly. We told the people behind the mantlet that we were on a diplomatic mission from the Great Thane of Forghul to the thane of Highcliff, and they emerged to talk with us. An ugly dwarf called Grimstooth (and yes, he makes traps) and two big half-orcs (bodyguards of the thane), with two more human soldiers. They led us to speak to the thane, Forbren. And more on that later. My current plan is to take a couple of days and make use of my new-found loot (and my Craft Wondrous Item feat) to make myself a periapt of Wisdom +2. That will make my Wisdom 20, giving me an extra bonus 1st-level spell and, more importantly, abonus 5th-level spell (three flame strikes in a day? *grin*). I'd say that's worth 2,000 gp. May 17, 2001Well, it's been a while again. My playing has been erratic this month, so it's been hard to catch up. But here's the pieces I can put together: We talked to the Thane of Highcliff, Forbren. Highcliff was in a pretty bad situation, emerging from a long state of siege. Val and Sanaril spent some time curing the sick and injured. Some weird political stuff was going on, probably involving Juryen's scheming. We had been told that the thanes of Highcliff and Dwarfwatch didn't want membership on the council of thanes, instead offering a trade agreement of sorts. That appears not to be true; Forbren expressed concern that he'd never heard a response to his petition to join the council. We suspect that Juryen (Forghûl's high wizard) may have intercepted and altered the messages coming from the east, for whatever reason. As planned, we spent a couple of days in Highcliff so I could make my periapt of Wisdom and we could recover some strength. Then we set off toward Dwarfwatch, armed with the knowledge of the secret escape route (which we planned to use to enter the stronghold, bypassing any besieging armies that might be there). As we traveled north, actually during the night while we were resting along the road in a Leomund's secure shelter, we got involved in a melee with some orcs, frost giants, and another old friend: the lich-cleric of Wee Jas whose corporeal form we destroyed once before (see the brief mention on January 26). He pretty well smeared the ground with us, thanks to his wand of fireball and his wand of invisibility (not to mention his haste spell), though we took out the giants and orcs. But we hit him hard enough (once we could see him) that he took off running. I think that's when I hit 11th level, adopting the spiffy contemplative prestige class from Defenders of the Faith (I wrote that one). Then we finally made it up to the secret entrace to the escape route from Dwarfwatch. There was a watch post, two orcs and a worg, set up near it, though I don't think they knew it was there (they were just watching the road). We killed one orc, tried to extract some information from the other, and then entered the secret entrance. We made our way in a little bit, fought some pretty nasty golems, and then... Well, here's where I had to miss a week. That session, our old friend Aelric (the dead thane of Forghûl) yanked us (well, not me) out of the place we were exploring and sent us off to ask some questions from the Book of True Knowledge (see July 16), which he had finally managed to learn the location of. The reason he didn't send me was that the Book was in the possession of some Wee Jas worshipers, and he was concerned about a conflict of interest. Well, I guess the group didn't do too well without me. Val sat down on a magic chair and had his brain extracted, while his corpse was animated (as a construct, not a zombie) and started trying to shelve his brain in the library where the chair was located. The rest of the party killed a mind flayer, and that was the end of the session I missed. That was also Daneen's last session with our group, as she has moved to Rochester, NY, to work for Fisher-Price. She and Dexter are missed. Last week we played on Friday so that my schedule wouldn't conflict. Aelric got Sanaril in there (figuring the help I'd provide the party would outweigh the risk of a conflict of interest), but snatched Dexter out for reasons our characters can't understand. We wandered into a maze and killed some minotaurs, then found our way to a big (too big for the space it inhabited, I think) room with a series of levitating disks. Kawika started jumping around on the disks, while I (with my Jump –4 and my Balance –6) hung back. Then the beholder appeared and nearly killed Kawika. Kawika started talking to the beholder, and I guess their negotations were going along OK. Then I opened the door and put a flame strike down on the thing's head, hurting it badly and bringing the negotations to an unfortunate close. I cast an antimagic field around myself, but the beholder just flew off, too hurt to risk drawing our missile fire. Eventually, Arzimon managed to negotiate our approach to the Book of True Knowledge, which was located in the same room... despite my earlier bad faith gesture. Well, most folks asked the questions they needed to ask: what's keeping Aelric imprisoned in the tomb, how to get rid of the shield guardian, and the questions we promised to ask on the beholder's behalf. (We were each allowed one question, by the book, not the beholder.) With Aelric's questions answered, however, he opened the gate to bring us back... and Lohr and I were still on the far side of the room, with all those floating disks and Jump checks between us and it. We made our way slowly across, but too slowly—Aelric's gate closed, leaving Lohr, Arzimon, and myself behind. With the beholder. And my question left. I still don't know what my question is going to be. Or how we're going to get out of there. Or what to do with the beholder. We sorely missed Dexter in that room in particular, as some fly spells would have been handy. Partly in response to that, and partly just in general acknowledgement of the fact that we need a wizard, David Noonan has made up an elf wizard (Sanaril's older brother, or so he claims) to replace Kawika in the party. Unlike Dexter, this guy knows all about evocations, and should change the course of things pretty significantly once he joins up. We've just got a few hurdles we need to cross between now and then... June 30, 2001I missed the next session after the Beholder Incident, but we got out OK. As I understand it, Aelric used Kawika's life energy to open another portal and rescue Lohr, Arzimon, and Sanaril. I never did get a question out of the book. I think that's OK. As a cleric (and now a contemplative), I've got to pretty much assume, "Hey, that's what the commune spell is for!" With Kawika out of order, Dave's new wizard, Oriel, joined the party for that session I missed. Described by Dave as "not evil, but evil-curious," Oriel tilts the balance of the party just a little farther from Arzimon's supposedly rigid lawful good. Oriel's familiar... well, I won't go into that here. I think that much of that session I missed was occupied by (a) finally destroying the shield guardian that was somehow imprisoning Aelric, and (b) trying to decide what to do next. The group finally decided to go kick some frost giant butt in the distant northeast, which meant, first of all, returning to Mossy Peak. (I guess we had some indication that things in Dwarfwatch were going to be OK without our presence there, and we figured we might as well go deal with the problem at its source: in the glacial rift of the frost giant jarl. (Whoops, different adventure. I think.) Oriel conjured us up some phantom steeds, and we were on our way. I rejoined the party at Mossy Peak two weeks later (June 6). We descended into the depths to discover that Scar, the pit fiend (see brief mention on 2/21) who had previously been bound there, was gone, and there were signs of significant combat around. There was also a symbol of discord inscribed on what looked like a yuan-ti hide stretched across the doorway to that room. Even though I rarely fail a Will save, I got involved in the bickering. Lohr angrily hit me with a dispel magic arrow, which actually removed the effect on me. Oriel put Arzimon in an Otiluke's resilient sphere before he could hurt anyone, and then webbed us all to keep us out of trouble. *sigh* We're our own worst enemies... Oriel's familiar scouted down the vertical drop leading to the transport devices that take us to yuan-ti land (all described in that same 2/21 entry) and discovered another symbol stretched across it. The familiar dealt with that one, and we made our way down. The lacedons in Lake Placedon seemed to all have been killed. A yuan-ti was chained to the black pillars on the edge of the lake, turned into a ghoul by the pillars' evil magic. I easily commanded it and questioned it, and learned that it had been killed and staked out as punishment, but it couldn't remember what for. I commanded it to kneel and worship me, then told Arzimon and Lohr to go ahead and slaughter it. That was sort of fun... perhaps a little too fun... Then Arzimon set about destroying the evil pillars whose magic created the ghoul, whacking them with his spiked chain. I guess the holy damage counted, because he got through them pretty quickly. But pretty loudly. Two yuan-ti purebloods emerged from their tunnels to see what all the noise was about, and we lay into them (despite having thought that perhaps we would make all nice-nice with the yuan-ti in order to get through to the frost giants... well, we pretty much abandoned that plan when we saw what had happened in Scar's chamber). Once past those two guards (both of whom had black gemstones embedded in their foreheads... but I don't think they were animated dead; in fact, I'm almost sure they weren't), we found the rest of the place a wreck... and continued in our next session. So with this entry cavern area apparently abandoned except for a few guards, we started formulating theories. Perhaps with his half-blood rival out of the way (you know, the one we assassinated for him), this yuan-ti sorcerer had moved up in the world, staking his claim to a higher position and wreaking some havoc along the way. Maybe he had Scar's help. At any rate, he started looking worse and worse to us, and we considered taking a side track to figure out what was going on with the yuan-ti. Making our way toward the large cavern (the one that contains both the entrance to the next yuan-ti area and the portal device to the frost giant domain), we encountered a pair of vampire spawn that may once have been somewhat reptilian. I started to wonder if our yuan-ti sorcerer had somehow ended up a vampire, and around that time I guess we decided to pursue frost giants instead of yuan-ti, according to our original plan. So that's what we did. Back through the portal device and into the same frost giant guard room, where two guards met us. We took them out fairly easily, then the next two came down the stairs. Oriel charmed one of them right away, and essentially kept him out of the whole fight thereby. But things really got interesting when the side door opened and the captain of the guard led out his pet... medusa. The medusa looked none to happy to be there (and chained to the giant's belt), but Oriel looked even less happy to see her... until we realized that he was outside the range of her gaze attack. *phew!* The rest of us made our saves and kept our distance. The guard captain pulled out a device that summoned a Huge earth elemental, complicating the combat significantly. I got hit pretty hard a couple of times, but Oriel caught the guard captain in a web. Arzimon, after finishing up the uncharmed guard from the last wave, came up to fight the captain... and was the unfortunate recipient of a crit with the captain's axe. Arzimon died... again... in the same room where he died last time. Rich was pretty pissed off. Despite the loss of Arzimon, we took care of the elemental and the guard captain. The medusa turned out to be easy (the captain moved farther than the length of its chain, pulling it prone and dragging it along a little way, where it got trapped in the web and remained helpless until Val's spiritual weapon beat it senseless). When all was said and done, we carted off a heft amount of loot (it came out to over 8,000 gp each), and enough XP to bring Sanaril close to 12th level. Probably next session... whenever that is. T'ed and Dave are both on vacation for a while, and I think T'ed is going pretty much straight to Origins after his vacation, so we may not play again for a while. But that gives us plenty of time to think about how we're going to spend our loot. :) July 19, 2001Well, I made 12th level last night. Or I will make 12th level, as soon as I get that true resurrection spell cast on me... Yep, Sanaril died. But let me start at the beginning. We managed to get together last night for the first time in several weeks. Justin Ziran, a project manager here at Wizards, joined our group for the first time last night, bringing his monk, Iago. We started the session after teleporting back to Forghul (courtesy of Oriel; with Dave still on vacation, that's all Oriel could do last night except take Arzimon's body to MacAngus for a true resurrection), dropping in on our old friend Malcolm. Malcolm introduced us to his old friend from the southern lands, Iago, and then explained the troubled look on his face. Seems Malcolm got engaged—he was going to marry the daughter of Ossiric the Old, Thane of Bergenstrohm. A political marriage, to be sure, but also one about which both parties were apparently pleased. Then the bride-to-be went missing, and that's where we came in. I was still trying to get my spell sheet in order while Val, Lohr, and Iago were talking to Malcolm about this for a while, but then I looked up and said, "Have you had MacAngus cast discern location yet?" Funny how magic changes mystery stories... Well, Malcolm had not yet told MacAngus about his fiancée's disappearance, so we took on that responsibility. Trying always to remain unobtrusive, we visited MacAngus and secured two scrolls of discern location for me to use to try to find the bride-to-be (I had seen her before, during the early politicking to try to win Malcolm his position as Great Thane). We took the scrolls into a secluded room, tried to make sure we weren't being scryed upon (but my Scry check wasn't good enough to say), and I cast the spell. In a jiffy, I learned that the woman was in Oak House, in the thanedom of Parcel & Block. So it turns out our villain is Lady Erda Winser, thane of Parcel & Block, the thanedom that produces nearly half of Forghul's domestic agricultural product. Lady Erda had opposed Malcolm's ascension to Great Thane for reasons we still don't know, and it seems now that she is unwilling to admit defeat. Trying very hard to play the Lawful Neutral alignment recorded on my character sheet, I insisted that we tell Malcolm what we had discovered before making a raid on the Lady's estate (that's Oak House, by the way), in case Malcolm had any diplomatic avenues he wanted to pursue before sending in the strike force. He did not, so we spent entirely too much time trying to decide how to travel there. We finally decided to ride to Oak House, but secure a teleport scroll I could use to get myself and the bride-to-be out of Oak House if trouble erupted. I managed to get such a scroll from the temple of Wee Jas (who does, after all, have many arcane worshipers), and Lohr and Val commandeered some horses from the Great Thane's stables for us to use. We met up outside the temple. We stood in the street outside the temple for a moment, discussing whether to ask a high-level sorcerer (another devotee of Wee Jas) to teleport us to Oak House, when the assassin struck. Fortunately, T'ed's die roll had him shoot his first arrow at Val, his second at Lohr, and his third at me, so he missed me. Val and Lohr can't be caught flat-footed, while I can—so if he'd taken a better attack at me instead of a –10 attack, he might have hit me and done sneak-attack damage. As it was, he hit Val but not seriously (Val had spotted him before he fired), and combat began in earnest. So this assassin was sniping at us from a second-story window. Iago climbed the wall to get in through the window, Val stepped through the shadows to get in, and I cast air walk as my first action to get up there. Inside, we found the assassin with two buddies—a large displacer beast and a hideous spectre. (I think both of them were advanced.) Once I got in the room, I hit the spectre with a searing light for 43 points of damage, and next round (after the assassin turned invisible) got the spectre and the displacer beast with a pretty meaty flame strike (51 points). The spectre went up in smoke at that point. Then I put a blade barrier down in most of the room, hoping to get the assassin, but without success. (Quote from earlier in the evening, while I was still working on my spell list: "Why am I not carrying blade barriers?") Lohr, Iago, and Val were doing fine against the displacer beast, so I started to look for the assassin. I took a single move farther into the room and made a really good Spot check—and noticed something invisible right next to me! Next round, he got a death attack against me, and I tanked my save. (I'm pretty good at Fort saves—+10—but I rolled a 5. When I learned later that the assassin was a 15th-level character, I didn't feel quite so bad. After all, turnabout is fair play.) Lohr almost got him before he escaped out the window, but not quite. Grrr... Well, maybe next week we'll use the second discern location scroll to track down that assassin! In the meantime, that 15th-level assassin scored us some serious XP (total was 5,125 each), so Sanaril hit 12th level (Clr 10/contemplative 2). Best thing about 12th level: all the spells that are +1/3 levels go up to +4. There are a surprisingly large number of those spells: divine favor, magic vestment, greater magic weapon... Plus, shield of faith is 2 + 1/6 levels, so that also goes up to +4. And, I got a 6 on my (d6) Hit Die for this level! We think, but none of us are sure, that Dave will be back (with Oriel) next week. Rich is still gone, so Arzimon will have to lie on the slab in the temple of Heironeous a little longer. The week after next, most of us will be at GenCon, and I don't think we'll play this particular game there... September 24, 2001Boy howdy, I have gotten delinquent, haven't I? Blame Buffy the Vampire Slayer—I got hooked on the show near the end of the last season, and I've been spending most of my free evenings watching tapes of the first four seasons to catch up. This from a total non-TV watcher—I only discovered last week, trying to catch some news on the TV, that we actually do get some TV stations without cable. But I only watch it because I can fast-forward through the commercials... Anyway, there's no way I'm going to be able to recap events in a session-by-session manner, especially since I think I missed a lot of sessions in the last couple of months. I'll try to outline what we did in general terms, though. So we went to Oak House, and found it infested with undead. We entered the place ethereal, and fought a couple of ghosts who were much less tough that way than they might have been otherwise. Near as we could tell, the entire population of Oak House had been killed and most of them returned as undead in one fell swoop—not just ghosts, but vampires and wights and whatever else. It was pretty ugly. In one upstairs room, we found a corpse with no visible ghost nearby, its throat ripped out as if by a vampire. That was what we call foreshadowing. Eventually, we found the cell where not only Malcolm's beloved, Lady Brigid, was held, but also Lady Erda (thane of Parcel & Block, lady of Oak House) and her seneschal, Sir Ver. We disposed of the vampire spawn outside the room (thanks in large part to Oriel's web spell, which held most of the coffin lids closed. We got the cell door open, and planned our escape. What we finally decided was that Sanaril, Lohr, Lady Brigid, and Lady Erda (wasn't there one more PC with us? I don't remember) would go ethereal and get out the same way we got in, while Oriel would teleport with Sir Ver. Just at the moment he was about to do the teleport, though, Oriel recognized Sir Ver as the corpse we had seen upstairs. Oops. Sir Ver attacked. Sanaril and the others stayed ethereal the whole time, trusting that Oriel could make his escape without our help. Lohr tried to break my ethereal jaunt spell by shooting himself in the foot with a dispel magic arrow, but failed—and good thing, too, because I don't know how we would then have gotten him out of there. Oriel polymorphed into a gold dragon, but "Sir Ver" (or whatever was impersonating him) dispelled that. Oriel tried some spell on the creature, but it failed—without T'Ed even asking for a spell penetration roll, which made us all quite nervous. Eventually, I think Oriel just took off on foot, which worked OK. We never did figure out what that creature was. Well, we found out some, thanks to a commune I cast: it was a vampire (a vampire what, is what I want to know), it shared similar aims to Lady Juryen (the High Wizard of Forghul who seems to be plotting against Malcolm), and... well, that may be about all we learned. We got Lady Brigid and Lady Erda safely to Forghul, where Malcolm and his cronies tried to determine what had happened and what charges to press against Lady Erda for apparently kidnapping his fiancée. We stayed out of all that, and took a few days to try to make some magic items. Then we testified in the hearing of Lady Erda, but I know I missed that session and I don't remember what happened. One strange thing we decided to investigate: The vampire impersonating Sir Ver had apparently been asking Lady Brigid a lot of questions about the mines around Black Mountain, which were closed many years ago after some creatures came up from the depths. We decided to head up north toward Black Mountain to see if we could find out why he might be so interested. Along the way, I guess we stopped to talk to old dead Aelric, who was little help. And Oriel tried to teleport the party and landed them (I wasn't there) in the middle of the bay. After swimming to shore, though, they saw the floating palace of Thane Hurgrid Seawin—also apparently affected by the same magic that turned Oak House into a haunted mortuary. A little unnerving that two of the thanes who most vociferously opposed Malcolm's ascension were targeted by this death cult—oh yes, back in Forghul Sanaril learned that the symbol we found in Oak House and had seen before in the tunnels of the yuan-ti was connected to a long-dead death cult. Not the kind of death cult I belong to, mind you, but the kind that believes the inevitable death of all living things should be hurried along as quickly as possible. At Black Mountain, we met with the Thane... and our old friend Scar, the pit fiend, in half-elven guise. Seems Scar has taken a position as advisor to Thane Phelan, and helped him negotiate an alliance with the yuan-ti that will allow him to reopen the long-closed mines by keeping the drow and duergar down. Also unnerving. We thought hard about just throwing down with Scar right then and there, but thought better of it. We find ourselves looking at a whole long to-do list:
In the last couple of sessions, we decided to pick one thing and try to follow it through all the way to its conclusion. We chose the yuan-ti, and reentered their caverns (finding a bunch more symbols, including one that killed Lohr). Last week, while I was gone, the party found a couple of hill giant barbarians and got whaled on. Apparently these hill giants also have a deal with the yuan-ti. This week, I'm not sure what the plan is. I'll try to update before another two months go by. February 15, 2003Well, looks like the plan was to run City of the Spider Queen for several months rather than waiting to bring Forghul to any kind of temporary conclusion. We've been back to it for three sessions since then. The first was a sort of crazy night, when we hunted down a black dragon who had been terrorizing some ships coming in to Forghul. Ted wasn't happy about how the adventure fit in to the ongoing campaign, so we called it non-canon (though we kept our experience for it) and carried on with something new. That something new was a little 8-page adventure from AEG, "The Last Gods." Ed made enough modifications to the adventure to make it playable (we didn't have to play each other's characters, and nobody died without a chance of survival), and the setup he created for the adventure was rather interesting. He had Wee Jas appear to Sanaril in a dream and send us to prevent a usurper from ascending to godhood. We had to find a deserted island and shatter a diamond in a flame made of ice in order to conjure a ghostly boat to convey us through the Astral Plane to our destination. That was cool. The rest of the adventure, well, not so much. A completely linear dungeon design, puzzles that ranged from interesting to mind-numbingly frustrating, and way too many phrases like, "The XXX is completely immune to mortal magic." But it all turned out OK. Can you tell I'm maybe a little bewildered at the idea that a self-respecting reviewer rated this adventure as high as he did The Speaker in Dreams? Contrary to what's written in the adventure, Ted let us actually fight in the climactic encounter. I'm not sure how it was written, but we ended up fighting a nightwalker. Ironically, Sanaril died—not at the hands of a mighty nightwalker, but from one too many hits from a measly little shadow I should have been able to rebuke. My strength was already low from something else (I can't remember what at this point), and two lucky hits took me down... temporarily. Soon I got up and started attacking my buddies. :) So once the nightwalker was vanquished and said buddies were trying to figure out what to do with my stiff corpse, Wee Jas showed up. She offered me a choice: come back as a lich, rest with her faithful in the afterlife, or have the taint of undeath removed from me so I could be brought back with a mere raise dead. I was seriously tempted by the lich option (and Ted keeps saying he can't believe I didn't choose it), but I didn't like the way Arzimon fiddled with his war chain when we talked about it. I was also tempted by the option of staying dead and bringing a new character into the campaign, but I've been playing Sanaril for a long time, and I'm pretty attached to him. So I got raised, level loss and all. *sigh* Then after that, Arzimon started talking about creating a paladin-like prestige class for LN champions of Wee Jas and adopting that. I'm trying to remember the very cool name we came up with for that class... it may yet show up in a future WotC product! When we did the adventure with the dragon, Ted gave us a state-of-the-union sort of update on how things had been going in Forghul since we played last. It looks like some things have settled down somewhat. But Ted has also hinted that things starting getting bad again while we were off traipsing around the Astral Plane. (And hey, if we were on the Astral Plane, how come we fell off the bridge, and couldn't cast quickened spells?? Oh, I guess Manual of the Planes isn't in the SRD yet...) So it should be interesting to see what happens next, whenever it is that Ted finds enough time to prepare more adventures for us. So in the meantime I've been running that wacky Savage Species game. As with all our Monday night games, my wife Amy joined us in time for the second session of The Last Gods. She made up an elve rogue, Valia, scary with a bow. Warren also brought a new character to the table with the dragon adventure, an arcane archer with really good ability scores, whose name might be Hector. And Dale is playing a sorcerer whose name I can't remember. I seem to be having a lot of trouble with names tonight. Oh, well. That'll teach me to go so long between updates. Yeah, right. :) |
