Nibbens
2015-02-13, 03:24 PM
For those of you just tuning in – get acquainted with the game here (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?330770-City-of-Progress-Campaign-Journal).
For those of you who missed the last session – click here (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?383217-City-of-Progress-Campaign-Journal-Chapter-12-(Updates-upgrades-and-grave-robbery))
Joining us at the table were the usuals:
Beable Bamford - Halfling siege mage and Golem Lord for Rab's Progress, and his trusty Golem "Mouse 2.0" which is a cannon golem
http://paizo.com/pathfinderRPG/prd/bestiary3/golem.html#golem,-cannon
in the general shape of a giant Foo Dog. One of the cannons is decked out with plenty of enchantments and the other is just normal.
Galarend - Human Shining Knight Paladin of Iomedae and General of Rab's Progress' standing army. He is never far away from his trusty steed "Bolba" (A huge flying Triceratops decked out in spiked full-plate armor. (yes, it flies. I approved a permanency of a Fly spell in his case due to particular circumstances.))
Lady Wisteria - Human verdant Sorcerer who is the Rab's Progress' herbalist and "tea-master." (In the front yard of her home stands the only tree in the entire city - a huge oak tree)
Dr. Jarvius Havishim Worcestershire – (Yes, he “invented” Worcestershire sauce in the game) Dr. W. is a paraplegic cleric and surgeon of Cayden Cailean. He built a small golem by the name of Sprocket to be his legs. (Using a de-netted Clockwork Servant
http://paizo.com/pathfinderRPG/prd/bestiary3/clockwork.html#clockwork-servant
to carry him) The good doctor may be solemn and serious, Sprocket, on the other hand, is annoying and serves as comical relief (as well as a foil to Dr. Worcestershire’s stern attitude).
They kick in the door.
Easy enough, they come to Nith’s bedchamber and are instead greeted by a woman, lying in his disheveled bed. Galarend makes one detect evil check and when it goes off ringing like a bell, he walks in. He names the devil “Irixia,” he says.
She stands, and as she does, her form shifts to that of her devil form, complete with her fallen idol armor. She makes some standard comment villains normally make and attempts to summon her Horned Devil, and wastes a turn doing so because of the forbiddance which Dr. Worcestershire had cast over the entire house earlier.
Battle ensues – Bolba and Beable (who are circling outside the mansion, are called to charge/shoot a hole in the wall of the Nith Mansion outside the room where the battle is under way. The party buffs and gets ready for an onslaught.
Irixia, however casts harm on Galarend – making his life miserable – and attempting to move to the back of the room, allowing the party to pile in.
Beable and Lady Wisteria fire off all manner of elemental attacks – scorching ray, acid cloud, Storm Bolts, Hail Storm – only to find that Irixia has immunity to fire acid, electricity, and cold. Their collective eyes widen. Dr. Worcestershire heals the 1 hp’d and retreating Galarend.
Bolba and Mouse shoot and crash through the wall and appear behind Irixia.
Irixia assults Galarend again with a scorching ray of her own and gets closer to the hole which Mouse and Bolba just made – retreating.
Now that the Golem and Mount are in the room, things got dangerous, real fast. Mouse did his usual 2 blast combo, and Bolba does an attack and passes through on his charge picking up Galarend. Attacks go out and players heal up.
Irixia casts Blasphemy – dazing everyone, and jumps out the hole trying to escape because she can’t teleport out. She takes a bit of damage from the fall.
The players follow her out riding on bolba and mouse.
Irixia goes into gaseous form and begins to float away, trying to get out of range of the zone of forbiddance.
Bolba flies above the gas cloud and Lady Wisteria jumps off casting anti-magic field as she fell, passing through the gas cloud. It disrupts the spell, and Irixia falls to her death 20 feet below. She died from the 2d6 damage fall… exactly the number of hp to end her.
The players rejoice and head back to the room they just came from to search for loot before going to the basement of the mansion.
Bob the Bag
After searching through the loot, the players are greeted with a strange scene. A brown burlap sack comes “crawling” around the corner and begins speaking to them about the “crazy lady” which kept him in there and that he was going hungry in there. He finishes by saying, “so… where we going?” as the “mouth” of the burlap bag turns up into a smile.
The players argue about not bringing an intelligent magic item with them for a while before Dr. Worcestershire picks up the bag, accepting it to the group. The players are none too happy about this, but the new cleric doesn't care.
The Wizards Basement
The players go back through the house, and this time they go down into the basement. This time, things a just a little different than the way Beable remembers them from a few days before. This time, there’s arcane scribbling on the walls – trapped arcane scribbling – just waiting for the players to pass by them.
The players explore the area carefully, resisting the first few attacks by an imprisonment (http://www.d20pfsrd.com/magic/all-spells/i/imprisonment)spell. They found a strange plain gold ring which was quite worn on the desk which Beable and Nith had discussed the wood golem a few days earlier.
They continued on, this time turning the corner to be targeted by another imprisonment spell – this one took hold and Beable was whisked off. The players posted to some forums about the interactions between forbiddance and imprisonment and it was decided that the trapping ability of imprisonment gets around the forbiddance.
With a player trapped, they contacted the duke via sending and asked for a scroll of freedom (http://www.d20pfsrd.com/magic/all-spells/f/freedom). After a few minutes, a messenger golem stumbling down the stairs, crashing the entire way down. The players collected the scroll, and the golem crept its broken way back up and out of sight.
The players examined the spell, only to realize that casting it would be exceedingly difficult considering the spell level was above theirs – a chance they weren’t willing to take. So they decided to continue on, without Beable there to control his mighty golem.
Lady Wisteria cast arcane eye to determine all the locations where the traps were located and they were shocked to discover that the entire area was covered in a massive amount of spells – to which they began devising how to shut down, but not before accidentally wandering into a transmute blood to acid (http://www.d20pfsrd.com/magic/all-spells/t/transmute-blood-to-acid) spell.
Galarend made his save, thankfully, because just the name was enough to make them suck air through their teeth.
At the location of the transmute blood spell, was several tanks. The cursory description I gave them was that the liquid floating in the tanks (after a really high arcane check) refills spell levels. This made the Lady Wisteria’s eyes go wide, but they would have to deal with it later.
They dealt with a few of the other traps by getting Lady Wisteria to transmute the rock walls into mud (http://www.d20pfsrd.com/magic/all-spells/t/transmute-rock-to-mud) and slagging them into mush – destroying the arcane energy in the trap.
They continued to the doorway of the inner chamber only to step on magical trap they didn’t see. The spell Clashing Rocks (http://www.d20pfsrd.com/magic/all-spells/c/clashing-rocks) rolled over everyone from one end of the chamber to the other. It was a catastrophe. Yet, after Dr. Worcestershire pumped a few rounds of cure spells into them, they were ready to go through the door…
Inner Chamber
The door wasn’t locked, and they walked in only to be greeted with a floor to ceiling prismatic wall (http://www.d20pfsrd.com/magic/all-spells/p/prismatic-wall). A quick arcane check and a quick spell list check determined that no one even had access to cone of cold – the first spell needed to disarm the prismatic wall.
They started thing about getting the duke to send them another messenger golem with the scrolls they needed, but when they heard choking sounds from behind the barrier, they flew into action.
They exited the room, looking at the layout of the basement and got lady wisteria to cast Rock to Mud on the wall which would end up behind the prismatic barrier.
What they encountered was a horrifying sight. A woman, composed of several body parts but had the face of Nith’s late wife was holding Nith by the throat, choking him. Between the seams of the sewn together parts black negative energy flowed freely and the party members could even see the darkness flowing from her like a black halo. At their feet was a crumpled piece of paper and several bodyparts which seem like they were deliberately cut and removed.
Initiative was rolled, and the creature “Was – Serena” moves toward them, holding onto Niths throat like he was nothing more than a doll, and I promptly explained that she brandished him like a shield as she attacked with her open hand – her fingernails like the claws of a derange madman fueled by the darkens to necrotic energy.
This changed the tactic of the fight, They no longer could blast her, but the focused on getting Nith from her grip and getting him away from her. Eventually they succeeded, and Nith huddled into a corner sobbing his eyes out.
Lady Wisteria snuck past the chaos to grab the paper, and I promptly gave the player a piece of paper that says this:
Read me first: Any good character that touches the parchment which contains this spell is wracked with unholy pain. He or she must make a Will save DC28. Failure means a character takes 108 points of Unholy Damage. Success results in 54 points of Unholy Damage. Regardless of the outcome, any player has the option to accept an alignment shift from Good to Neutral, and doing so halves the damage taken (54 or 27, respectively). Choosing to accept this alignment shift is considered a “deliberate misdeed” with regards to atonement spells, and an “intentional violation of code of conduct” for paladins ;)
**Success or failure means that an individual may now handle the document for 24 hours without suffering ill effects from it. If copied in a spellbook, good characters must make the same save each time they attempt to read it.
FORCED RESURRECTION
School Necromancy; Level Wizard/Sorcerer/Witch/Etc 9 Requirements Heal 10 skill ranks.
Casting Time: 10 minutes
Components V, S, M, DF (diamond worth 75,000 gp, 4 dead bodies of the same type of creature you’re attempting to resurrect.
This spell functions like raise dead, except that the spell has no limit on the amount of time the creature spent dead. This spell can even bring back creatures whose bodies have been destroyed. The dead bodies of the same type of the creature trying to be brought back must be within 10 feet within the time of casting for the soul to inhabit. (An elf soul can be Force-Resurrected into any humanoid body, but not into a Dragon’s body.) The organism must contain all the organs needed for life to be sustained. Upon completion of the spell, the creature is immediately restored to full hit points, vigor, and health, with no negative levels (or Constitution points) and all of the prepared spells possessed by the creature when it died.
You can revive someone killed by a death effect or someone who has been turned into an undead creature and then destroyed. This spell can also resurrect elementals or outsiders, but it can't resurrect constructs or non-intelligent undead creatures.
This spell can resurrect a person who died of old age into a new (and hopefully younger) body.
The 4 bodies used in the casting of this spell can be only 10 days old per caster’s spell level – bodies older than that are not viable and cause the spell to fail if used. Gentle Repose spells function normally on the bodies which are used as components of this spell.
The 4 additional bodies required for the casting of the spell are used up during casting, replacing organs and parts to make sure the soul has a functional body to return to. The soul is allowed a saving throw if the body is not entirely its own. However, if the original body is used and has all of its limbs and organs that it naturally had in life, it gets no saving throw to resist the resurrection.
If the creature fails his save by 10 or more, the body reanimates, instead housing an entity of pure negative energy. The soul is instead used as fuel to keep the entity in the plane which it was brought to. Such a victim-body rises up and lashes out at whatever is around it – possibly threatening the caster in the process. The DM uses his discretion on the type of monster actually created.
Casting this spell is always an evil act – defying the laws of nature in such a manner often attracts the attention of good and evil deities alike.
Of course, she quickly decided that she would 1) take the damage – which knocked her unconscious and bleeding, and 2) destroy that spell as soon as possible.
After a quick heal from the Doctor and Sprocket, lady Wisteria retreated as Galarend grappled with Was-Serena. She was quickly handled and while every turn her negative energy halo tore at him, and her claws ripped and shredded at his body, he held her fast – and moved her directly into the Prismatic Wall.
She struggled to regain control, but failed every time and it took 3 rounds of Galarend holding her in the wall to finally kill her. Lady Wisteria destroyed the parchment - lighting it on fire even before giving Beable's player a chance to say anything about it... Nevertheless, Galarend approved.
After it was all said and done, Lady Wisteria screamed at Nith telling him that his deranged spell caused her soul to be destroyed. Galarend remained resolute and said nothing, while Dr Worcestershire simply placed the single gold band they found previously into his hand and told him “This was the only thing you ever should have wished for.”
The adventure ended on a down note, as I told them that Amiel Netherwalk, a noble in Rab’s Progress, who runs the Eagle’s Reach Institute (an asylum for the insane) took Nith into his care.
And it was here that the adventure ended.
The following adventure occurs here (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?424993-City-of-Progress-Campaign-Journal-Chapter-14-(Sidequests-schmidequests)&p=19472649#post19472649).
For those of you who missed the last session – click here (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?383217-City-of-Progress-Campaign-Journal-Chapter-12-(Updates-upgrades-and-grave-robbery))
Joining us at the table were the usuals:
Beable Bamford - Halfling siege mage and Golem Lord for Rab's Progress, and his trusty Golem "Mouse 2.0" which is a cannon golem
http://paizo.com/pathfinderRPG/prd/bestiary3/golem.html#golem,-cannon
in the general shape of a giant Foo Dog. One of the cannons is decked out with plenty of enchantments and the other is just normal.
Galarend - Human Shining Knight Paladin of Iomedae and General of Rab's Progress' standing army. He is never far away from his trusty steed "Bolba" (A huge flying Triceratops decked out in spiked full-plate armor. (yes, it flies. I approved a permanency of a Fly spell in his case due to particular circumstances.))
Lady Wisteria - Human verdant Sorcerer who is the Rab's Progress' herbalist and "tea-master." (In the front yard of her home stands the only tree in the entire city - a huge oak tree)
Dr. Jarvius Havishim Worcestershire – (Yes, he “invented” Worcestershire sauce in the game) Dr. W. is a paraplegic cleric and surgeon of Cayden Cailean. He built a small golem by the name of Sprocket to be his legs. (Using a de-netted Clockwork Servant
http://paizo.com/pathfinderRPG/prd/bestiary3/clockwork.html#clockwork-servant
to carry him) The good doctor may be solemn and serious, Sprocket, on the other hand, is annoying and serves as comical relief (as well as a foil to Dr. Worcestershire’s stern attitude).
They kick in the door.
Easy enough, they come to Nith’s bedchamber and are instead greeted by a woman, lying in his disheveled bed. Galarend makes one detect evil check and when it goes off ringing like a bell, he walks in. He names the devil “Irixia,” he says.
She stands, and as she does, her form shifts to that of her devil form, complete with her fallen idol armor. She makes some standard comment villains normally make and attempts to summon her Horned Devil, and wastes a turn doing so because of the forbiddance which Dr. Worcestershire had cast over the entire house earlier.
Battle ensues – Bolba and Beable (who are circling outside the mansion, are called to charge/shoot a hole in the wall of the Nith Mansion outside the room where the battle is under way. The party buffs and gets ready for an onslaught.
Irixia, however casts harm on Galarend – making his life miserable – and attempting to move to the back of the room, allowing the party to pile in.
Beable and Lady Wisteria fire off all manner of elemental attacks – scorching ray, acid cloud, Storm Bolts, Hail Storm – only to find that Irixia has immunity to fire acid, electricity, and cold. Their collective eyes widen. Dr. Worcestershire heals the 1 hp’d and retreating Galarend.
Bolba and Mouse shoot and crash through the wall and appear behind Irixia.
Irixia assults Galarend again with a scorching ray of her own and gets closer to the hole which Mouse and Bolba just made – retreating.
Now that the Golem and Mount are in the room, things got dangerous, real fast. Mouse did his usual 2 blast combo, and Bolba does an attack and passes through on his charge picking up Galarend. Attacks go out and players heal up.
Irixia casts Blasphemy – dazing everyone, and jumps out the hole trying to escape because she can’t teleport out. She takes a bit of damage from the fall.
The players follow her out riding on bolba and mouse.
Irixia goes into gaseous form and begins to float away, trying to get out of range of the zone of forbiddance.
Bolba flies above the gas cloud and Lady Wisteria jumps off casting anti-magic field as she fell, passing through the gas cloud. It disrupts the spell, and Irixia falls to her death 20 feet below. She died from the 2d6 damage fall… exactly the number of hp to end her.
The players rejoice and head back to the room they just came from to search for loot before going to the basement of the mansion.
Bob the Bag
After searching through the loot, the players are greeted with a strange scene. A brown burlap sack comes “crawling” around the corner and begins speaking to them about the “crazy lady” which kept him in there and that he was going hungry in there. He finishes by saying, “so… where we going?” as the “mouth” of the burlap bag turns up into a smile.
The players argue about not bringing an intelligent magic item with them for a while before Dr. Worcestershire picks up the bag, accepting it to the group. The players are none too happy about this, but the new cleric doesn't care.
The Wizards Basement
The players go back through the house, and this time they go down into the basement. This time, things a just a little different than the way Beable remembers them from a few days before. This time, there’s arcane scribbling on the walls – trapped arcane scribbling – just waiting for the players to pass by them.
The players explore the area carefully, resisting the first few attacks by an imprisonment (http://www.d20pfsrd.com/magic/all-spells/i/imprisonment)spell. They found a strange plain gold ring which was quite worn on the desk which Beable and Nith had discussed the wood golem a few days earlier.
They continued on, this time turning the corner to be targeted by another imprisonment spell – this one took hold and Beable was whisked off. The players posted to some forums about the interactions between forbiddance and imprisonment and it was decided that the trapping ability of imprisonment gets around the forbiddance.
With a player trapped, they contacted the duke via sending and asked for a scroll of freedom (http://www.d20pfsrd.com/magic/all-spells/f/freedom). After a few minutes, a messenger golem stumbling down the stairs, crashing the entire way down. The players collected the scroll, and the golem crept its broken way back up and out of sight.
The players examined the spell, only to realize that casting it would be exceedingly difficult considering the spell level was above theirs – a chance they weren’t willing to take. So they decided to continue on, without Beable there to control his mighty golem.
Lady Wisteria cast arcane eye to determine all the locations where the traps were located and they were shocked to discover that the entire area was covered in a massive amount of spells – to which they began devising how to shut down, but not before accidentally wandering into a transmute blood to acid (http://www.d20pfsrd.com/magic/all-spells/t/transmute-blood-to-acid) spell.
Galarend made his save, thankfully, because just the name was enough to make them suck air through their teeth.
At the location of the transmute blood spell, was several tanks. The cursory description I gave them was that the liquid floating in the tanks (after a really high arcane check) refills spell levels. This made the Lady Wisteria’s eyes go wide, but they would have to deal with it later.
They dealt with a few of the other traps by getting Lady Wisteria to transmute the rock walls into mud (http://www.d20pfsrd.com/magic/all-spells/t/transmute-rock-to-mud) and slagging them into mush – destroying the arcane energy in the trap.
They continued to the doorway of the inner chamber only to step on magical trap they didn’t see. The spell Clashing Rocks (http://www.d20pfsrd.com/magic/all-spells/c/clashing-rocks) rolled over everyone from one end of the chamber to the other. It was a catastrophe. Yet, after Dr. Worcestershire pumped a few rounds of cure spells into them, they were ready to go through the door…
Inner Chamber
The door wasn’t locked, and they walked in only to be greeted with a floor to ceiling prismatic wall (http://www.d20pfsrd.com/magic/all-spells/p/prismatic-wall). A quick arcane check and a quick spell list check determined that no one even had access to cone of cold – the first spell needed to disarm the prismatic wall.
They started thing about getting the duke to send them another messenger golem with the scrolls they needed, but when they heard choking sounds from behind the barrier, they flew into action.
They exited the room, looking at the layout of the basement and got lady wisteria to cast Rock to Mud on the wall which would end up behind the prismatic barrier.
What they encountered was a horrifying sight. A woman, composed of several body parts but had the face of Nith’s late wife was holding Nith by the throat, choking him. Between the seams of the sewn together parts black negative energy flowed freely and the party members could even see the darkness flowing from her like a black halo. At their feet was a crumpled piece of paper and several bodyparts which seem like they were deliberately cut and removed.
Initiative was rolled, and the creature “Was – Serena” moves toward them, holding onto Niths throat like he was nothing more than a doll, and I promptly explained that she brandished him like a shield as she attacked with her open hand – her fingernails like the claws of a derange madman fueled by the darkens to necrotic energy.
This changed the tactic of the fight, They no longer could blast her, but the focused on getting Nith from her grip and getting him away from her. Eventually they succeeded, and Nith huddled into a corner sobbing his eyes out.
Lady Wisteria snuck past the chaos to grab the paper, and I promptly gave the player a piece of paper that says this:
Read me first: Any good character that touches the parchment which contains this spell is wracked with unholy pain. He or she must make a Will save DC28. Failure means a character takes 108 points of Unholy Damage. Success results in 54 points of Unholy Damage. Regardless of the outcome, any player has the option to accept an alignment shift from Good to Neutral, and doing so halves the damage taken (54 or 27, respectively). Choosing to accept this alignment shift is considered a “deliberate misdeed” with regards to atonement spells, and an “intentional violation of code of conduct” for paladins ;)
**Success or failure means that an individual may now handle the document for 24 hours without suffering ill effects from it. If copied in a spellbook, good characters must make the same save each time they attempt to read it.
FORCED RESURRECTION
School Necromancy; Level Wizard/Sorcerer/Witch/Etc 9 Requirements Heal 10 skill ranks.
Casting Time: 10 minutes
Components V, S, M, DF (diamond worth 75,000 gp, 4 dead bodies of the same type of creature you’re attempting to resurrect.
This spell functions like raise dead, except that the spell has no limit on the amount of time the creature spent dead. This spell can even bring back creatures whose bodies have been destroyed. The dead bodies of the same type of the creature trying to be brought back must be within 10 feet within the time of casting for the soul to inhabit. (An elf soul can be Force-Resurrected into any humanoid body, but not into a Dragon’s body.) The organism must contain all the organs needed for life to be sustained. Upon completion of the spell, the creature is immediately restored to full hit points, vigor, and health, with no negative levels (or Constitution points) and all of the prepared spells possessed by the creature when it died.
You can revive someone killed by a death effect or someone who has been turned into an undead creature and then destroyed. This spell can also resurrect elementals or outsiders, but it can't resurrect constructs or non-intelligent undead creatures.
This spell can resurrect a person who died of old age into a new (and hopefully younger) body.
The 4 bodies used in the casting of this spell can be only 10 days old per caster’s spell level – bodies older than that are not viable and cause the spell to fail if used. Gentle Repose spells function normally on the bodies which are used as components of this spell.
The 4 additional bodies required for the casting of the spell are used up during casting, replacing organs and parts to make sure the soul has a functional body to return to. The soul is allowed a saving throw if the body is not entirely its own. However, if the original body is used and has all of its limbs and organs that it naturally had in life, it gets no saving throw to resist the resurrection.
If the creature fails his save by 10 or more, the body reanimates, instead housing an entity of pure negative energy. The soul is instead used as fuel to keep the entity in the plane which it was brought to. Such a victim-body rises up and lashes out at whatever is around it – possibly threatening the caster in the process. The DM uses his discretion on the type of monster actually created.
Casting this spell is always an evil act – defying the laws of nature in such a manner often attracts the attention of good and evil deities alike.
Of course, she quickly decided that she would 1) take the damage – which knocked her unconscious and bleeding, and 2) destroy that spell as soon as possible.
After a quick heal from the Doctor and Sprocket, lady Wisteria retreated as Galarend grappled with Was-Serena. She was quickly handled and while every turn her negative energy halo tore at him, and her claws ripped and shredded at his body, he held her fast – and moved her directly into the Prismatic Wall.
She struggled to regain control, but failed every time and it took 3 rounds of Galarend holding her in the wall to finally kill her. Lady Wisteria destroyed the parchment - lighting it on fire even before giving Beable's player a chance to say anything about it... Nevertheless, Galarend approved.
After it was all said and done, Lady Wisteria screamed at Nith telling him that his deranged spell caused her soul to be destroyed. Galarend remained resolute and said nothing, while Dr Worcestershire simply placed the single gold band they found previously into his hand and told him “This was the only thing you ever should have wished for.”
The adventure ended on a down note, as I told them that Amiel Netherwalk, a noble in Rab’s Progress, who runs the Eagle’s Reach Institute (an asylum for the insane) took Nith into his care.
And it was here that the adventure ended.
The following adventure occurs here (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?424993-City-of-Progress-Campaign-Journal-Chapter-14-(Sidequests-schmidequests)&p=19472649#post19472649).