Morghen's Monday Night HackMaster Log

[Morghen]

I should have everything finished up tomorrow or maybe Friday. Once I've done that, the GM told me he's going to pop in and throw down some commentary on the Tomb.

Remember this?:
I'm setting the over/under for PC deaths at 2.5.Yeah, that was for Acererac's fake tomb, but there's no way we're going over two deaths, and I'll even count our "Brunt is dead! Long live Brunt!" situation as a PC death.

Did the Seuss thing work? I'm not going to make it a regular part of the log or anything, it just struck me when I typed that first sentence about the key in the vat.

[Morghen]

1/23 Game

Characters present: Vilano (Cleric/Mage), Brunt (Tank), Sheba (Monk/Mage), Vagodra (Mage/Cleric)

If you look above, you'll notice a distinct lack of thieving skills. This would be an ongoing theme for the evening, but not one that affected us in any meaningful way.

Vilano cast Find Traps. Oh. I should mention that the room had two doors that appeared to lead out. His spell revealed that the right-most door (the one not behind a tapestry) was trapped, and it revealed that the tapestries themselves were trapped. Using Manor's Mindsight, I looked above the room to see if the trap pulled the ceiling down, and instead I discovered that the tapestries were the trigger that would open doors to release either Green Slime or Brown Mold into the room, depending on which tapestry got pulled. So we'd definitely be avoiding yanking on the tapestries. Basically, it looked like a make-the-floor-shake-and-give-the-PCs-something-to-hold-on-to-but-trap-that-and-then-lulz kind of trap.

We moved on to looking at the 24 coffers and six trunks. I used an 8th-level Telekinesis variant called Haarpang's Magnificent Sphere of Telekinesis that drops a sphere anywhere you designate. The sphere negates the first 5,000 pounds of weight and cuts anything above that to 1/16th its actual weight. I tried to look inside the coffers and trunks, but apparently, they were lined with lead. I was pulling the coffers out and we were debating what to do about opening them when Brunt's crazy hearing caught the sound of coins clinking inside the coffers. We had Brunt grab one and open it pointing away from his face. Inside: loots. Gold and gems. We moved our attention to the trunks. I tried to pull them out but they were bolted to the floor. Also, they were locked. Shallyn's player (who is married-ish to the GM) was around (but not playing because of illness), so we yelled at her that we were going to steal her Dagger of Blahblah because it's so great at cutting hinges and locks and whatnot. She gave us the go-ahead and Sheba cut the lock off the closest chest. Brunt (Levitated) pulled the chest open. A scary-looking skeletal snake-thing with a human head (also skeletal) popped out and Brunt killed it. He's got this thing called a Flat of Speed (the weapon he uses is called a flat. I've mentioned these before.) that lets him go first in any combat round. Doesn't matter how fast you are; your first action of any round that you're fighting Brunt is dealing with 40ish points of damage.

We figured that, even though the things weren't hiding any loots, more XP are a good thing, so we repeated the process for the other five chests.

Ready to move on, I looked at our options with MM. As it turned out, the trapped door was a fake trapped door. Oh, the trap was real, but it wasn't really a door. Scratch that. It WAS a door, it just didn't open or lead anywhere. Our other option was the secret door behind the left tapestry. Sheba had her Unseen Servant gently lift the tapestry out of the way and we continued.

Past the door, we found a 10' hallway that ran for more than 100'. It had a short dead-end hallway on the left, a big four-way intersection, another short dead-end hallway on the left, and then it turned right into a medium-sized circular chamber full of glowing silver mist. Because I was looking at all this through MM, though, we had more business to take care of before we got to the chamber.

At the four-way intersection were five 10'x10' floor traps (one in the center and each of the four immediately adjacent spaces) that we ignored. To the North (I don't actually know IRL what the compass direction was (even though my character would), but this gives you some way to orient yourself a little bit) was a 30' hallway that ended in a another one of those fake doors we kept finding. To the South was another one of those fake doors we kept finding. Except that something about this one seemed... off to my character. I couldn't see past it with MM, but something about it drew my attention (and I can't remember now how the GM phrased the thing that made me investigate it further. Maybe a roll was involved?). At about this point, Vilano re-cast Find Traps so we knew that the maybe-fake door was definitely not trapped, but it wouldn't open.

With some rolls, I had gathered that the door was definitely a fake-fake-door, and with further rolls I deduced that we were about to enter Lead-Lined City, the least-scryable place on Earth!

I was not amused.

At that point, I think Vilano just Disintegrated the door so we could move on.

Ahead, the tunnel continued, with a branch to the right. Straight ahead past the right-hand branch, we saw a door to the right and a stairway going up. Inside the doorway to the right, I saw a frickin' huge dinosaur skeleton monster. It was just sort of standing around. Guarding nothing. There was literally nothing inside this room except a monster. Gah.

Instead of bypassing, Vilano decided he wanted to keep it.

We opened the door and waited for Vilano's action. In the meantime, the dinosaur monster used some kind of stomp attack that required us to save with pretty huge penalties. Brunt and Sheba failed theirs and fell asleep. Then Vilano's action came around and he Commanded the thing. We woke up the other two and continued. We'd have taken the undead skeleton monster (which had been guarding nothing) with us, except that it didn't fit through the door.

Oh. I should re-mention the stairs from a second ago. They lead to a dead-end. We used Shallyn's super-stone-and-metal-cutting dagger to carve a hole in the stone to see if there was anything past the lead lining. Nope. Just more stone. We went back to the branch to the right from three paragraphs up.

We followed it around a couple of turns and came to a spot where I could see a humongous (100'x100') pillared chamber with a big dais on one wall. Again, this was through my Manor's Mindsight. Whoo! We continued and came to a spot where we had a choice of a door to our right or a stairway leading up directly ahead. We went for the door first, as it was the door to the biggest room in the whole joint.

It was a big adamantium door with a raised heart in the middle. In the heart were three horizontal slits that seemed to be about the size/shape of a blade. Crossed through the heart were three raised swords with the hilts pointing at about 10, 12, and 2. We discussed for a bit.

Then we had Sheba's Unseen Servant put three non-magical daggers into the three slots. Nothing happened. I cast Wall Passage (which opens a 10'x20' passage through stone) and the GM laughed at me. Finally, Sheba had her Unseen Servant knock on the door. We got no response, so we moved on to start a ****ing side-quest for door-opening swords. (Before we left the area, we carved a hole in the wall at the top of the stairs to make sure that there wasn't anything past the wall.)

We started our side-quest with the mist chamber from a bit earlier.

Using MM, I looked in the chamber again and saw a smokin'-hot woman standing in the middle of the chamber and a couple of feet of water standing on the floor. The whole room was pretty round, so the water was in no danger of running out. I rolled a skill check and recognized her as a Sirine, a water-based nymph-y kind of critter. They tend to use singing as a weapon against those who attack them. Vilano cast Detect Evil and determined that she was not. She had two bags on her waist. I looked inside them (MM) and saw some low-level loots and some "Huh, I wonder what that's for" stuff as well.

Vilano called out to the woman and she was silent. I cast my 8th-level Telekinesis variant and tried to just pull her out. I succeeded. No, not really. She moved about 10 feet through the mist before she ran into some kind of invisible barrier/forcefield deal and she started to get kinda squished. I stopped squishing her and tried to grab the bags from her waist. As soon as they started moving, she grabbed them and refused to let go, even though she started to squish against the forcefield again. I let go of the bags.

Working under the theory that the forcefield may have been a simple two-dimensional wall, Sheba dug out our Spade of Colossal Excavation and tunneled through the stone to a point right below the Sirine. The tunnel flooded, but Sheba was wearing her Necklace of Adaptation. Sheba grabbed the Sirine by the ankle to pull her out of the room, but the Sirine hit that barrier again and couldn't go any farther. On the bright side, we learned that the forcefield didn't affect us.

More discussion was had. Our frustration with this room and the Tomb in general was kind of high.

Vilano and Sheba decided to just walk into the mist and see if they could talk to the woman or... ANYthing. Vilano was fine, but Sheba (who was having a make-up session for avoiding death by nuclear staff during the fight against Ourselves) failed and was stricken with profound stupidity. We all recognized Feeblemind and were not particularly pleased.

Vilano reached the Sirine and tried talking to her. She did not respond verbally, but kind of pointed at her throat and shrugged. Vilano whipped out his Crystal Ball and used the ESP function to have a chat. Interesting thing: the module assumes the PCs will figure out a way to communicate with the Sirine and gives some things for her to say, but does not give her a name. The GM rolled up "Afaria" and she and Vilano had a little chat.

She told him that the forcefield was just for her and that she was trapped here and that her voice had been stolen by a curse. I haven't mentioned it yet, but she had red hair. I feel that's kind of pertinent (http://images.wikia.com/disney/images/b/bc/Littlemermaid.jpg).

Vilano didn't have a Remove Curse prepped for the day, so he yelled for me to come in and do my "any-divine-spell-we-need" schtick. I walked through the mist, made my save, and hit her with Remove Curse.

And she still couldn't talk. Our frustration hit it's peak.

Nothing we'd done had any discernible effect on the stolen-voiced, red-headed, water-based woman. So Vilano resorted to our old standby (http://fc03.deviantart.net/fs70/i/2010/015/b/b/Alex_de_Large__Ultra_Violence_by_AngryDogDesigns.p ng).

He hit her with a Magic Missile and made her dead.

Yes. We killed the little mermaid and took her ****.


She had a Bag of Holding and some gems.

Vilano put a Cure-All on Sheba and we called game 10 minutes early.

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Like I said at some point earlier, we're all kind of non-plussed about the Tomb. We're literally walking through it until we get to something that the GM has thrown extra stuff at. Then we circumvent that and keep going.

The Tomb of Horrors has put us back on our game and we're going to abandon it because it's boring. We might kill Acererac before we go, but I don't know. We'll decide Monday night.

Questions? Comments?

[Grendus]

I'd definitely suggest killing Acererak and anyone who might lay claim to the room of fast time. Incredibly useful tool, and might solve your Rybax problem. Copy the library at Alexandria in the room and give those as a show of good faith, then you have all the time in the world (almost literally) to do your own research and such.

[TopherKersting]

They really don't have to worry about Acererac. If they get to that point, that final battle maybe lasts a combat round. Yeah, there's a chance one of them actually fails a save, but given their phenomenal saving throws and HackMaster's mulligan, coupon, and honor purge rules, they likely get through it without a scratch.

My last two kills were a freakish critical hit by a clone of one of their PCs and a dueling kill by a goddess. I have a few things I can throw at them, but since getting the haircuts they've mostly walked through this module.

I just need to get back to writing my own material.

Topher

[Morghen]

This next update is going to be huge. We started late last night, but once we did we just FLEW through the thing.

We did finish the Tomb of Unspeakable Horrors. We did encounter Acererac.

And now a note that may or may not be greeted with sadness:


We're putting this high-level game on the shelf.

I've been able to see this coming for several months and started calling for it maybe six weeks ago. People just aren't showing up, and they've been not showing up for a LONG time. Something our GM said about another situation one time struck me: "If people are having fun, they'll make excuses to get to the game. If they're not having fun, they'll make excuses to not get to the game."

So here's what's going to happen:
Next week, we're going to do HackFighter training for Brunt. After that, a new campaign.

We're going to start at 1st level (i.e., the correct way) and we're all going to play the same class. In HackMaster, there's a class called the Charlatan. In a nutshell, this class can learn 75% of the things that ALL of the other classes can do, but the charlatan has to buy those things with experience points and schooling. So the idea is AWESOME, but they're a pain to have around in a regular adventuring company because they're spending so much time in training... unless the whole adventuring company is a bunch of kids who spend Monday-Friday in school and earn XP on the weekends. Which is what we're going to be doing.

And another new campaign. I'm going to be running a HackMaster game in a world of my creation that has a touch of homebrewiness to it. They're going to be starting at 1st level. I'm kind of terrified.

And another new campaign. Okay, this one isn't our regular Monday night group. The GM and I both have kids who are four years old. They're going to start a campaign. The GM's daughter is playing a pixie spellcaster and my son will be playing a lizardman fighter. They'll be playing a couple Saturdays a month.

I'll be starting a log for all three of those, but I don't know if I should start a new thread or what.


Yeah, I'll probably start a new thread. So... yeah.

[Doorhandle]

Well, crap.

Killing your game has made it multiply!

[Orran]

Please post a link to the new thread here so us subscribers see it, these write-ups are fantastic. Looking forward to the conclusion.

[Morghen]

My last two kills were a freakish critical hit by a clone of one of their PCs and a dueling kill by a goddess.True, but there have been a number of kills in the last year. I got hit with that sick 8th-level no-save kill spell that costs a level to cast (but I purged), and then Brunt got hit with it some time later. Vilano's dumb "I'm gonna fly into a crowd of Drow" trick resulted in a purge-or-die situation. Did that Samurai ever kill Brunt or did he just beat him down each time?

@Everybody else: Thanks for the love.

[TopherKersting]

The samurai thing were just duels to unconscious/submit. No actual killing.

Topher

[Zephyros]

I hope this is not dead (bumpity bump!). I am still expecting the final session(s). :smallbiggrin:

[Morghen]

1/30 Game

Characters Present
Shallyn (Thief), Vagodra (Mage/Cleric), Vilano (Cleric/Mage), Sheba (Monk/Mage), Brunt (Tank)

We decided to go for completing this damn thing. We also decided to NOT kill Acererac.

We started with Shallyn wanting to go back to the three-sword-slots-and-a-heart door. We went there. She retrieved three magical swords from among our loots and put one of them in each slot. The door opened.

To the south, we saw three vestibules along the wall and two big demon-y faces about 20' up the wall (one in each corner). We flew toward the east-most vestibule. As we flew (with Shallyn in the lead), we hit an area where things got all topsy-turvy and disorienting. We quickly realized that it was a patch of Reverse Gravity which would have sucked (given the 50'-ceiling) had we not all been flying. When I got closer to the demon-y face in the SE corner of the room, I tossed a coin into the mouth. The GM asked how I threw it and I told him that I tossed it in an arc (underhand style). He told me that the coin approached the mouth in an arc but when it got to within three feet of the mouth it stopped arcing, sped up, and moved in a straight line directly into the mouth. To put it plainly, the SE demon mouth contained a black hole. We moved on.

To the East-most vestibule. Using Manor's Mindsight and True Seeing, I looked in the room. I saw a wooden sarcophagus and saw that the room had been pretty thoroughly looted. Somebody (Shallyn or Vilano) made sure that the room was trap-free and we entered to check it out. We re-looted and found a large amethyst and a ring that glowed with magic. Shallyn promptly smashed the amethyst and Vilano's Detect Magic told us that it was a protective ring of some kind. We moved on.

To the middle vestibule. Using Manor's Mindsight and True Seeing, I looked in the room. The room had 16 swords of varying types hanging from the walls in pairs. Also, a door leading to the south. Inside that room was a small fountain, a medium amount of rotting equipment (leather, clothing, etc.), a couple of skeletons, and our missing calliope. Also, on the wall, I saw a message carved into the stone. I didn't write down the specifics, but it basically said "You can either starve in this room or leave the room and die." And it signed off with something along the lines of "HaHaHa Go **** Yourselves".

From that message and the presence of the swords and calliope, I deduced (Induced? I can never keep them straight.) that the second room was the destination for one or several of the teleport-traps we'd found scattered around the Tomb and that the swords would animate and murder anything that entered the first room. We definitely wanted to get into the second room, but didn't want to burn a bunch of our Dimension Doors to do it. So we opened the door to the first room and I had Shallyn use her Ring of Telekinesis to grab a sword and bring it in to the main chamber. We slammed the door to make sure none of the other swords would follow, but as soon as the sword entered the main chamber it started fighting to break loose of the TK. Sure enough, it did after some kind of mental strength check and swooped to attack us. But Brunt hammered the bejesus out of it and somebody else hit it for a couple of points and it stopped flying. Hey, look! A magic sword!

We debated doing the same thing with the other 15 swords before Vilano decided that a Fireballing was in order. So we opened the door and backed up and Vilano tossed a medium-sized FB in there (remember that in HM, Fireball scales with spell level.). Hey, look! 15 magical swords!

We proceeded to the second room. After a thorough search, we found a magical flail and a vial full of something interesting and a bunch of garbage. Also, our calliope. I think we may have just left the calliope. We moved on.

To the West-most vestibule. Inside, I saw a ton of dust and a cylindrical key. Shallyn retrieved the key with her Ring of TK and we moved on.

To the NW corner of the room. We could see a medium-sized orange gem floating there. As we got closer, we saw that there was a considerable amount of burned... stuff on the ground near the gem. It looked like the gem had been lighting stuff on fire if said stuff got too close.

We made some skill checks and came to the realization that the gem was in fact an efreet. And since we just happened to have an empty Efreeti Bottle on hand, we endeavored to fill it with the Polymorphed efreet. Before we got to forcing the thing, though, Vilano decided he wanted to have a quick chat with the thing and pinged it with his ESP-equipped Crystal Ball. To cut a short story even shorter: "**** no, I don't want to go back in a bottle."

And then the efreet tossed out a big explosion that meant we all took fire damage.

Specifically, 2d8 points of damage.


We were pretty disappointed. I mean, seriously. We felt like the Tomb of Unspeakable Horrors should contain things that, you know, actually have a chance of hurting you. 2d8 just felt really unsatisfying. And if I'm not mistaken, that was the only damage we took inside the whole place.

Vilano told the efreet that we all thought he was kind of a ****. I cast Enlarge on our Efreeti Bottle, Shallyn used her ring to stuff the gem/efreet in the humongous bottle, Vilano Dispelled the Polymorph, and I dismissed my Enlarge. Voila! One filled Efreeti Bottle!

We moved on to the center of the North wall. It was dominated by a very black throne on a large dais. On the throne was a crown and a scepter. Find Traps told us we wanted to leave them the hell alone. With my standard "See Everything" cocktail of spells, I saw that the throne had a panel in the base that concealed a small hidey-hole containing a badass item called a Helm of Brilliance. A Helm of Brilliance has a ton of gems on it, with each gem capable of being used one time each for some moderately spectacular results. We retrieved the HoB.

I also saw that a large open-mouthed skull on the top of the throne had a keyhole in the mouth. I eyeballed it, we pawed through our collection of Found-In-The-Tomb Keys, and the joined key(s) from the vats appeared to fit the bill. Shallyn used her Ring of TK to put said key in said lock and a door opened in the wall behind the throne. BTW, the throne was about five feet from the wall.

We entered. The passage took a left and a right and ended in six magnificent steps, each bearing a different color than the others. The stairs led to a large pair of doors. Find Traps told us that we wanted nothing to do with those stairs. Some skill checks told us that each step would have the same effect as the corresponding color from any of the Prismatic X spells. To explain for those not familiar with the AD&D-based games: Prismatic Spray and Prismatic Sphere are high-level spells (the first offensive, the second defensive) that affect a victim with six different effects. None of them are good, and several of them are pretty disastrous.

Shallyn used her Ring of TK to put the previous key in this new lock and opened the door. Then we flew right over the stairs. Incidentally, Brunt was Levitated this whole time. He can fly because of those honking big wings he's got, but those are kind of useless in hallways.

The next room got swept with Find Traps and my spells. Inside, I saw four big statues of demons in the corners and a big-ass Prismatic Sphere blocking a big chunk of the North wall. A further word on PS: It's an excellent defensive spell, but it can be defeated if you've got the appropriate arcane spells on hand to counter each individual color/layer. Oh. Before we entered the room, Vilano checked his Bracers of Mapsense to see if the statues were creatures posing as statues or really statues. It turns out they really were statues. We were disappointed again.

Some skill checks told us what we needed to hit the PS with and the three casters immediately started checking our spell lists. We actually had all of the required spells memorized... except for the second one required, Gust of Wind. We were sort of irritated, until we remembered Vilano's Endless Loot Pile (which looks about like this (http://www.robotviking.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/08/rb03.jpg), minus the dude and dragon). His loot stretches back to before this group was even assembled and contains dozens of spell scrolls and spell books containing lots and lots of spells we'd never taken the time to roll up. We did that, and sure enough we came across a copy of Gust of Wind. Instead of casting it straight off the scroll and losing it forever, I argued that I should learn the spell so that we'd have access to it again if necessary. So I went and learned it. "But wait!", I can hear you saying. "Doesn't learning a spell in HackMaster take one day per spell level?" To you, I say: "Time Room." (http://i1.kym-cdn.com/entries/icons/original/000/002/686/Deal_with_it_dog_gif.gif)

So we cast all the spells and got rid of the Prismatic Sphere and where it had been we found a big bronze urn radiating magic, a big granite sarcophagus and two iron chests with mechanical traps on them. The sarcophagus had "Acererac" carved into the side. We ignored it for now. The two iron chests had their silly non-magical traps stripped right out by our 21st-level thief. Inside, we found 10,000 1gp gems and a big pile of copper and silver coins. We weren't terribly thrilled about either, but dumped all of it into a Bag of Holding. We examined the urn. My spells were blocked and Vilano's FT told him that the urn was NOT trapped, so we started looking at ways to get in without breaking the thing. Lots of options were floated, but finally we settled on using Pool Gold to remove the fill on the stopper (it took us a minute to ask about the stopper, and we were fortunate that the fill was made of gold). PG takes all of the valuable metal in the area of effect and collects it into a neat little pile. So Vilano cast that and Shallyn used her ring to pull the stopper out, and we found that the urn contained a djinn.

We talked to it for a bit (it was definitely in no hurry to attack half-a-dozen powerful-enough-to-be-HERE adventurers) and he told us that he hadn't ever actually seen Acererac even though he (the djinn) had been there for several hundred years. We talked the djinn into accompanying us through the rest of the Tomb and told him that we'd release him once we were done.

Sadly, the walls here were lead-lined so I couldn't scout our route using magic. We did more searching, though, and I found that the sarcophagus (empty) contained a door to another hallway. It was not trapped, so we continued through it.

We entered into a 30'-long L-shaped hallway that ended at a revolving door. We ignored that for now because we found a spot in the corner of the L that looked like it was meant for two keys. We used the cylindrical key and the joined key and a door opened to a narrow 10'-long hallway. The hallway ended at a 10' wide by 30' long room.

In the floor in front of us (maybe five feet from the door) was a small indentation with two keyholes. Unfortunately, both were magically trapped (Find Traps said so). And not nice traps, either. More like "Roll against 1/3 of your Remove Traps skill." But our 21st-level thief was up to the task again. She knocked both of them down and used TK to put the two keys in their proper holes. When she did, the last 20' of the room shot straight up into the air to reveal that it was actually a sunken chamber (10' wide by 20' long) hidden beneath the floor.

The entire front of the chamber was one enormous mithril door with an enormous pull-ring.

We felt this probably indicated something momentous.


Shallyn used her Ring of Telekinesis to pull the door open. Inside, we saw a pile of gear, equipment, maybe clothing?, gems, and coins. We also saw a pile of dust in the shape of a humanoid body.

As we looked (careful not to enter), the dust began to rise into the air.

It coalesced into a human-shaped cloud of dust and hung motionless for a moment.

Vilano called out, "Hail, mighty Acererac!"

Nothing happened.


Vilano said, "We have come to speak with you."

The dust began to settle back to the ground.


We looked at it for a second.

It finished settling to the ground. Still nothing.


Since talking didn't seem to work, Vilano pulled out his Crystal Ball and tried using ESP. He pinged Acererac, and got a "somebody is definitely listening" kind of feel. He addressed Acererac mentally and Acererac broke the connection.


We all helped ourselves to an extra-large dose of WHAT THE **** IS GOING ON?

We exited Acererac's little hidey-hole and Vilano pinged Dugord. Dugord answered back and Vilano gave a hearty "WHAT THE **** IS THE DEAL WITH YOUR BOY ACERERAC?"

Dugord told us that Acererac had been in that exact spot for the last eleventy-kabillion years and basically spent most of his time in a lichy hibernation. Acererac had been alive for so long that he'd experienced all the things and had just stopped caring about anything. The only thing that got him excited anymore was getting to kill things. When we'd tried to talk to him and DIDN'T attack, he just went, "Oh, **** it." and went back to sleep.

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This is 99% of the session. I'll wrap up this evening.

[Morghen]

And here's the wrap-up for the 1/30 game:

We talked to Dugord for a little bit and we hit a couple of the unexplored areas and then we told Dugord that we'd be popping in and out from time to time. He told us that our presence would barely register as long as we didn't go blowing things up or inviting powerful bad guys to come and blow us up.

And that was the end of our time in the Tomb of Unspeakable Horrors. I'm pretty sure I speak for the whole group when I say that we were wildly underwhelmed.

But here's the thing: I don't feel like it was a case of GREATEST ADVENTURERS ALIVE!!1!! as much as it was a case of "One high-level Thief with a Ring of Telekinesis, Boots of Flying, some scrolls, and a healthy dose of self-preservation can solo this thing."

And honestly, a mid-level (6-9) party with those items would do the same. The hardest parts would be the Prismatic Sphere, the Gargoyle Lord, and the Wights clear back at the entrance.


Bleh.


Anyway. The next session was Brunt's HackFighter testing. It'll be pretty brief, because it mostly consisted of Brunt clubbing an increasingly ludicrous array of baddies.

And at the end of that, I'll give an update of what's going on with our group and why I haven't been posting about those new games.

Hint: It's kind of not awesome. But not in a "We're disbanding" kind of way. More of a "Holy Personal Issues, Batman!" kind of way.


So there. Questions? Comments?

[Doorhandle]

Personal issues?


...oh, here we go.

Also, looking at this picture, (http://www.robotviking.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/08/rb03.jpg) I never realised how badass it was untill now, seeing as the dragon seems to be gigantic and they seem to be fighting over what amounts to the entire elemental plane of gold.

[Malek]

I think part of the problem here is the playstyle of your group. Half your party is spellobbers, those that aren't are loaded up with magical items up to their nostrils, you're personally talking to gods when you need to, you've no concern for transport between those flying carpets and well of worlds or whatever... you've got so used to defaulting to magic when things get nasty you take it for granted. You assume people facing ToUH to have "Ring of Telekinesis, Boots of Flying, some scrolls", while a GM planning ahead could simply not give troublesome items in the loot before the module.

Of course the fact that you're: a) several levels above the level for adventure and b) tournament trained for adventure solving probably made it easier for you also :P

[TopherKersting]

Short version of the personal issues: The GM (me) and the player of Shallyn have split up. As a result, I'm in the process of moving to a new house and need another week or two off before the place will be ready for gaming--mostly because I don't own a table!

The good (bad?) news is that I tend to be very creative when I'm angry with the world...

Topher

[Morghen]

Half your party is spellobbers,No disagreement there. We're CRAZY heavy on spellcasters. But we're also very niche-y. Vilano handles the blasting and I do... well, as an Alteration specialist, I kind of do almost everything else. I can't do any Necromancy, Abjuration, or Summoning but Alteration is so broad and Vilano so adept at the "d6 damage/level" stuff that I can't even remember the last time I hit anybody with a straight-forward attack spell. Sheba's schtick is the personal-interaction stuff, but because 1) We've been in the Tomb for the last few months, and 2) There are XP penalties for using class abilities of your old class when you switch to a new class (and she's leveling as a Monk now (again)) she hasn't been able to really shine at that for a while.

Um. But yes, we're heavy on the casters.


those that aren't are loaded up with magical items up to their nostrils,Sheba's player and I have talked about that a couple of times. This is a problem with high-level play. If you've got inexperienced (or dumb) players at high level, they're going to want armor +10 and swords +20. Experience players at high level are going to use the wealth they've accumulated to buy gear that is useful and solve all the problems with it. A Spade of Colossal Excavation, a Ring of Telekinesis, a Ring of X-Ray Vision, Decanter of Endless Water, that kind of stuff. Here are the magic items I have:

Eyes of the Eagle - Lets me see crazy-far away.
Boots of Flying
Ring of Free Action - I'm a caster. Being held immobile would suck.
Necklace of Adaptation - Not being able to breathe would suck.
A couple of AC-enhancing items
Ring of Fire Resistance - Now and then, dropping a Fireball on ourselves is the only viable option for success.
Rod of Absorption - Absorbs 48 spell levels (over the life of the item) and lets you use that energy to cast your own spells.
Staff of Power - This is the only unnecessary thing I have. I really only have this thing because my character is kind of insanely jealous of all the attention Vilano gets. Vilano's got a powerful staff? Well, ****. I guess I should have a powerful staff.


you're personally talking to gods when you need to,General high-level play combined with the fact that we're almost certainly in the top 10 of highest-level individuals on this particular world. We weren't talking to Hecate or any other gods before the world got blown up.

you've no concern for transport between those flying carpets and well of worlds or whatever...True. But I'll go back to the High-Level-Play Well again. By the time I hit 15th level I'm going to want to be able to get places quickly and stop running into random encounters no matter what my class is.


you've got so used to defaulting to magic when things get nasty you take it for granted.It's funny that you mention this. My character literally had ONE magic item when he joined this campaign at 8th level and it's such a dopey, low-powered thing that I didn't even list it above. AND I HAD TO BUY IT. This character came from a campaign that was so low in loot (and by loot I mean money, gems, or magic items) that I'm pretty sure the entire table of six had about six magic items. I learned to solve all our problems with ingenuity instead of gear because we just didn't have any gear. Two anecdotes: 1) The spell Bash Door just says that it applies a force to a door. It never says anything about whether the door has to be closed or not. I used BD to slam a door into a bunch of baddies to keep them from overwhelming the party. 2) I was at a tournament with a group that I'd never played with and they were all 6th-8th level but had more gear than my current high-level group. The group of five 6th-8th-level characters had TWO Rods of Lordly Might (if you're not familiar, it's probably the Fighter equivalent of a Staff of Power). One of the functions of a RoLM is that it can telescope up to something like 20' and it has rungs that you can climb. At one point during the tournament we were in a small room after getting completely mauled by Drow and instead of trying to just hold a door shut against an unknown number of reinforcements I used one of their RoLM. I turned it parallel to the floor and extended it so that it was braced against the door and the wall opposite the door. The group looked at me like I'd just walked on water.

Have we gotten soft? Possibly. But it's tough to keep an edge when your "pretty sharp" is good enough to handle most everything.


You assume people facing ToUH to have "Ring of Telekinesis, Boots of Flying, some scrolls", while a GM planning ahead could simply not give troublesome items in the loot before the module.If she didn't have that Ring, I'd have cast it. If we didn't have the boots, we would have bought them. Or I'd have cast it. Or we'd have bought scrolls. We knew we were going up against the Tomb of Unspeakable Horrors and we never took that lightly.

After the haircuts, anyway.


Of course the fact that you're: a) several levels above the level for adventure and b) tournament trained for adventure solving probably made it easier for you also :PThis.

[TopherKersting]

A couple of notes:


I did significantly increase the severity of the module as written. Didn't make much of a difference, as they successfully avoided most of the things that would have given them trouble. Most of the poisons were changed to save at -5 or die, I set all monsters to max possible hp (sometimes well over the standard max) and gave them huge AC bumps (like +8). One thing emphasized in tournament play is that parties can get points for "skillfully avoiding" encounters. They do this extremely well.
One area where they failed--consistently--was dispelling magical effects. Unfortunately, they did very well at detecting them, so avoiding bad stuff was fairly easy.


Topher

[Morghen]

2/6 Game

Characters Present
Sheba, Vagodra, Vilano, Brunt, Shallyn

This took place maybe a week after we'd finished the Tomb. In the meantime we'd been staying in Monaco with Shallyn's family.

Everybody but Brunt woke up to discover that we were in pajamas. Not our pajamas. Just... pajamas. We further discovered that we were in a 15'x15' translucent box in a cave hanging in midair above a huge pool of lava. We all woke up in comfortable beds but had no idea where we were and we'd been completely stripped of any personal equipment.

We looked around the cavern and spotted our equipment sitting in neat piles on a cliff about 50 feet below us. Also, Hades. Not the place. The being. He was standing near our stuff. He waved and said something along the lines of "Enjoy your breakfast and hope your friend succeeds in his test." and walked off through a hole in the side of the cavern.

We looked around the inside of the tiny prison and saw a table with breakfast. Also a note. It was from Rybax. He wanted us to know that he was behind our current situation and that things could go bad for us if Brunt shat the bed on his HackFighter test.

We switch now to Brunt's point of view.

He woke up with his gear nearby. He gathered it and finished gearing up just as Hades walked into the room.

A note about Brunt's gear: Probably the most important piece of magical gear that Brunt has is called a Ring of Vampiric Regeneration. It regenerates precisely zero hit points per round. Instead, it returns 50% of the hit point damage that the wearer does in combat.

Hades spent (less than) a minute telling Brunt about the conditions of the test. They were basically these: "If you don't rescue your friends, I'ma toss 'em in the lava. The end."


So Brunt grabbed his flats and headed out the door to make his way through whatever this place was to find us.

He headed out the door and saw that he was in a fairly huge stronghold of some kind with big stone walls and towers everywhere. He found himself on a walkway that passed between two of those towers. About 10 seconds after he hit the walkway he got poked by an archer at the top of the opposite tower. Fortunately, Stoneskin. He kept heading that way and got poked from the top of the tower he'd just left. Seeing that he had no discernible way to reach the archers, Brunt decided a "**** you guys. I'm out." was in order and just hustled across the walkway.

He passed under the tower and the walkway curved around behind the next building. Fortunately, there weren't any more snipers here because the first two took quite a few of Brunt's Stoneskins.

Brunt reached the back of whatever building this was and found a door. Through the door, Brunt found a scary-looking low-level demon-type creature. They fought and Brunt killed him good. Brunt continued on his way, completely out of Stoneskin protection now. It should be noted that the demon did have Stoneskin on.

Brunt continued through the fortress. At one point he looked through a window into a chapel and saw another variation of the "Hell's Footsoldier" type standing inside. The critter saw him and gave him a "Come at me" sort of gesture. Brunt ignored it and kept his eye on the ball.

Moving on, he came to a mess hall. Inside he found another, bigger mook. The mook said to Brunt, "I can't let you through" and Brunt told him, "I know" and kept coming. This guy also had Stoneskin on. Brunt beat his way through those and beat the mook to death.

Brunt continued his "Taken" reenactment and came to another, bigger (Stoneskin-bearing) Hellish minion. This one didn't talk. He just came straight at Brunt and got killed for his trouble. This one was much tougher than the previous guardians, but died just the same.

At this point, Brunt had been out of Stoneskin protection for a while and had been fighting these scary Demonic servants for the last 10 minutes of game time (interspersed with awesome tracking shots (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tracking_shot) of Brunt walking through this alien fortress covered in other people's gore) and he was running low on hit points.

After that last combat, Brunt found himself facing a staircase leading down. The stairs were the only obvious way to continue and Brunt could see that whatever was below was glowing intensely.

And Brunt simply walked into Mordor.



But to be fair he totally looks like he belongs, given that he's an 8' tall, 450 lb killing machine with bat wings, black skin, and glowing red eyes.

But whatever. He went.

Dude descended the staircase and came to a huge room with an enormous pool of lava at the bottom. Halfway down the left side was a broad walkway/cliff that ran the length of the chamber. Hades was standing on the walkway about 50' from the stairs. Oh. Also, his companions were hanging in midair in a translucent box. He gave us some **** about having to do everything for us and then went to talk to Hades.

Brunt reached Hades and Hades told him that he'd done well so far but that he had one remaining challenge. Brunt asked Hades if Hades was next on the list and Hades gave him a raised eyebrow and a "No, but your balls are impressive."

And then a dozen Grixies jumped up out of nowhere and started stabbing the hell out of Brunt. (Too much background for a full explanation. So here's a short version: A Grixie is a small flying Grel/Pixie cross. And they're bastards.)

Brunt and the dozen Grixies commenced to brawl.

There weren't any tactics, they didn't do any fancy maneuvers or tricks. They just went straight at each other and Brunt killed a dozen 8th-level barbarians.

And just like that it was done.

Brunt finished the challenge and gained HackFighter status. Hades unlocked the box and we went back to Monaco.



And then we all got frozen in carbonite until we resume the campaign.


--------------------------------------------------------------------

So. Game has gone on hiatus. We're on hiatus because of the aformentioned personal issues, but I also would have been skipping the games even if we had been meeting. See, I (and Sheba's player) am in the middle of a production of MacBeth and that **** is taking all of my free time. I'll be back in the game at the beginning of May.

I'll see about having the GM of the HP-ripoff game (see above) start a new thread for the beginning of that campaign (and yes, I'll link to it here). Last I heard that was going to start tonight, so hopefully we'll see some action on that soon.

In the meantime, here's a commercial I was in: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=27jA31fBNLM
Don't believe anything you see in that. Not my wife, kid, or house.

[TopherKersting]

Tonight should mostly be character creation, with the addition of a bit of board gaming. This is partly because I'm unprepared, but partly because I really need character backgrounds to get prepared.

I'll start an intro thread next week.

Topher

[Morghen]

Please post a link to the new thread here so us subscribers see it, these write-ups are fantastic. Looking forward to the conclusion.I hope all you subscribers didn't give up. We're back.

We're going to school at Warthog's. (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?p=13359334)

[Morghen]

Sorry for the Double, but this has had something like 130 views since I bumped it the other day.

I just wanted to say this: If any of you new readers have questions about this campaign, ask 'em over in the new thread.