Who endedup at -7 and -3??? O_o
Just some dudes.
Vrai’s minons.
Jenks and Khel, respectively. They’re both stable, but still KOed.
Yeah, but “time passes, the party rests” should have occurred by the next session.
Anything else happened? I noticed Jenks used a fear scroll.
Oh, yeah. That’s about all that happened. One fear scroll, I forget if someone used a potion. Nothing major. lizards are dead, we leveled, we’ll be back at the village next session so we can plan our next move.
Phaistos kicked ass and survived again. He even made a risky move to help the party, which had the fortunate effect of putting him out of range for Vrai’s negative nuke (as it would have killed Phaistos outright had he been in range).
Phaistos is pretty badass. Calven was puppeted for most of the encounter and/or was face-grabbed and pulled under the water by a lizard, but I’m curious as to how the combat skills of the two chars would stack up especially now that we’re hitting the beginning of being actual badass adventurers. Hell, Vrai will actually be able to cast 3rd level spells in… two more class levels. Welp.
But yah, long live the fighters!
I have some goođ news and some bad news. The good news is, I finished up Oxyman’s tower! It’s going to be very fun. The bad news is, I may haveade it a little too tough. Which leads to the other good news: since we all want to move the plot along and get to the actual campaign, you will all be getting XP a bit faster temporarily!
Wall of Text Attack!
TLDR: Party leveled to 5, seeds of the rebellion planted, party reaches the tower and has made their way in and will be facing many diabolical challenges of fiendish lethality and twisted logic.
[spoiler]
The Sunset Order with two members still unconscious and recuperating , Meep, filthy filthy slavegirl force mage (Klara) and a couple dozen freed slaves make their way back to the village, where they settle in and begin recovering. Vrai takes the opportunity to meet with the de facto chieftain of the village, the no-nonsense matron of the tribe. Unopposed by the other members of the Order, Vrai persuades the chieftain to begin expanding the village and cultivating new land for crops, in order to accommodate the slave population that we’ll be sending in to start the nucleus of an insurgency. More importantly (to Vrai), he persuades the chieftain to allow and encourage the spread of necromantic magic among the village. Unfortunately the cost of the bargain requires Vrai to temporarily part with three members of his brute squad, which are ordered to stay behind and get the fields ready 24/7, as zombies are wont to do without complain or slacking.
Once Khel and Jenks recover, the Order sets out to find Oxyman’s tower. Due to the Magical Charm of DMdoesn’tgiveafuck, all random encounters along the way are dealt with via a short blurb (we won 'em) and the party levels up to 5 after we add on some experience from the blackscale encounter.
The Order eventually reaches Oxyman’s tower and finds that there is no visible entrance, and indeed no visibile windows or openings of any sort in the massive tower; the tower is hundreds of feet of solid sandstone encased in an Epic level force shield. Unable to find an entrance, and not helped by Jenks or Khel’s vague information and recollections, respectively, the party agrees to set camp for the night and allow the party members with better night vision to search when the desert isn’t quite so hot.
[del]The filthy, filthy slavegirl[/del] Klara, upset at being called slavegirl once too many times, decides to cast Grease at Vrai for a bit of humor. Naturally she miscalculate when she decided to play a rousing game of ‘taunt the insane, homicidal, sociopathic, power mad necromancer’. Vrai informs her that he will kill her, Animate her corpse and set it to cleaning sewers with its tongue if she casts at him again. To drive home the point, he gives his remaining two Blackscale zombies standing orders to smear Klara if she casts any offensive magic at him. This disturbs Calven more than a little. However, it evidently doesn’t disturb Calven enough to put him off his feed, as shortly thereafter he accompanies Klara to the river in order to see her na…er, get clean.
While skinnydipping, the two may-yet-be-lovers are sucked down into a long stone pipe, and deposited into the basement level (we think) of Oxyman’s tower. Khel, who was close by to them, hears their shouts and runs to help them. Phaistos and Vrai, busily arguing the finer points of philosophy, while Vrai hints at deicide and tries to sway Jenks to his dark agenda, wonder what’s to be done to save the lost party members.
Of course, Vrai manages to convince Phaitos and Jenks to let him slit the throats of all the remaining mounts (they can’t wander away that way) and Vrai can Animate them once he returns from the tower. After the butchery is finished, Phaistos, Vrai and Jenks head down into the tunnel where they find a near-dead Yuan-Ti and discover that clever Khel convinced a decimated party of Yuan-Ti adventurers to give up some info about the tower and its defenses. Vrai, naturally, coup de graces a dazed and strength-drained Yuan-Ti which had survived an encounter with Shadows.
The party is soon greeted by the Jarvis of the tower, an Epic level version of the Magic Mouth spell who is pretty much an AI double of Oxyman. The Mouth reveals that filthyslaveKlara is a distant relative of his, takes a liking to Vrai as Vrai seems to grok the lunacy of Oxyman’s mind, and sets the party to a series of challenges required to deactivate a modified Prismatic Wall that blocks their way. Up next week, the Arena of Nine Alignments. Woot. [/spoiler]
Ah, what a glorious session. Adventure! Plot! Nudity! Clearly, a great session.
Calven is totally not getting laid any time soon, though.
Took out real members name per member’s request.
What Finn didn’t mention is the greatest exchange ever.
Calven: I turn around and look at the pipe I fell out off.
Me: What about it?
Calven: Is the pipe vertical?
Party: Snicker
Calven: Huh?
Finn: Yes. The pipe is very vertical.
I don’t remember that happening.
I’m sure many of you are wondering about a very important question that so far we have failed to address: What happened to Sir Mule?
Well, when the party left the first dungeon and went back to town, they took Sir Mule with them. While they were staying in town, they soon forgot about him, and he chewed through his ropes and escaped. He ran away to the north, where he was ambushed by a tribe of Ogres. Luckily, the last quest leveled him up, and Sir Mule became a Paladin. He easily defeated the Ogre tribe, earning enough experience to level up, and carried on his adventures. Sir Mule took on a pair of troll brothers, a dragon who had captured a beautiful mare, and a dire wolf pack that terrorized a small village. Then, one day, he met a fiendish mule girl. He fell in love with her, and then proceeded to Fall as a Paladin. He is now a Blackguard, and plotting revenge on the party.
This is why we never let Babs have drugs.
I would love to face off one day against the big bad… that reveals that they have secretly been working with Sir Mule, and has sent him out against us.
Pseudonatural mule.
Teal Deer: Babs thought we’d be done with Oxyman’s tower soon. I told him that, nah, it’d probably take us at least a month just to get done with the 5 challenges and that we’d probably finish only 4 or 5 of the bouts in the Arena Challenge on this session. Sure enough, we got done with 5. We’re also not dead yet.
[spoiler]**
Round 1: Is that an implant attack in your pocket or are you happy to see me? **
The party faces off against a being of pure chaos, a red slaad. The Librarchivist lands a natural 20 on his Dark Knowledge check and grants the part a +3 bonus to smack the slaad around. Although the slaad manages to implant an egg into the blackscale zombie (which, we think, may hatch), the party manages to beat the slaad down with little loss of hit points and vrai slaps it to death with a charnel touch delivered by spectral hand.
**Round 2: That was a bad idea, and I aint lion. **
A totally good creature, a celestial lion, is the party’s next opponent. Calven, thinking that the party hasn’t been blasted by a random magical effect in far too long, whips out his wand of (wonder?) and activates it. The roll is for Cat’s Grace and is cast, naturally, on the lion which wants to murder us all. The Librarchivist’s response, the wisest of all the party’s, is “DON’T DO THAT!” Luckily, Vrai comes to the rescue and blasts the lion with a blindness spell, negating its new found dexterity bonus and giving it a 50% chance to miss everything. Starting a pattern, the blackscale zombie charges and crushes the lion with a single swipe of its greatclub.
Round 3: Now I know how a picnic feels.
A team of formarians, ant-like exemplars of pure law, come pouring out of the portal. Our filthy slavegirl casts Grease at them (after the Librarchivist asks for them to be “greased up” for him) and then the Librarchivist sets the Grease alight… which is when we discover that the formarians have fire resistance 10. OOC, we also know that they have a pretty high spell resistance of 18, but IC Vrai doesn’t know that. Still, his Bane spell manages to penetrate the SR of 4 of the formarians. Meanwhile, the blackscale zombie, fresh from splattering the clestial lion, goes on a goddamn rampage. Every single attack it makes, round after round, hits. And with 2d8+9 damage, those hits mean that a formarian dies pretty much every round to the zombie’s club.
About half way through that fight, Jenks realizes that he’s become pretty much useless, without a weapon that can do any damage and with spells that the monsters are either immune to or have high SR for. So he decides to use his nonlethal whip. Babs takes note:
Babs: Hey, where did you get that whip>
Did you happen to get it in the library?
from a display case?
R00sh: …
Babs: an ornate one?
R00sh: YES.
Babs: hint hint nudge nudge
OK
R00sh: Of course i did.
<_<
Ron: Your whip now does lethal damage, not just nonlethal
And it’s a +1 whip
The benefit added by some magic Devo isn’t all that potent though, especially with Lizard Hulk decimating the ranks of the formians with each passing round.
More importantly, however, I point out in OOC chat that it’s a good thing that we have a magical weapon, since we’re going to have a fight a pack of shadows in order to finish out the challenges, and they can only be hit by magic weapons, and then only 50% of the time. At that point, the totally scripted and definitely planned-ahead response by Babs is to drop a ‘care package’ in to the party, consisting of a set of magical weapons for everybody but Vrai, who gets a metamagic ring which allows him to empower only those spells that do direct damage with negative energy.
Round 4: Fiendish lion, we hardly knew you
Round four is a fiendish lion. Calven is up early in the order and decides that he’d like to cause more magical chaos. This time the wand casts an illusory wall, and the lion is confused by it and just sits there, doing nothing. Oxymouth/Babs, deciding that the fight will be too boring with the lion just sitting there waiting for the wall to vanish, ends the fight early as the lion goes home.
**Round 5: Home is where they want to cut your heart out **
Drow renegade Phaistos (somehow missing a pair of matches scimitars), gets a special treat as Oxymouth summons the sorceress who’d been in charge of sacrificing him as a child. Obviously, she messed up and now she’s a nasty drider as punishment. She quickly leads off the combat by casting Web and nailing most of the party, and the blackscale engine of devastation. Phaistos, however, who’s been rolling awfully and missing just about everything all night, suddenly explodes with awesomeness. Even after Khel, the druid, is Suggested into fighting against an Owlbear skeleton that Vrai summons, Phaistos goes toe to toe with the drider solo and pretty much pwn3s her right in the face.
The session ends with Khel still under the Suggestion and eager to fight Vrai’s owlbear, the drider dead and vanished, and the rest of the part charged up and ready to get some murdering done. Next week, fights 6-9 and hopefully at least one or two more of the challenge rooms. [/spoiler]