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SleepyShadow
2017-06-16, 01:44 PM
My D&D group is starting a fresh campaign tonight, and I have once again taken up the mantle of DM. It's been quite a while since I've posted here, even longer since I posted a campaign journal, but with the start of a new game, I thought it might be the right time to shake off the digital dust. I recently picked up the complete 700 page War of the Burning Sky campaign book, so this will be a new experience for both the players and myself. In addition, we're adding a little spice to our campaign by throwing in Big Eyes Small Mouths d20 into the mix. So, naturally, I expect things to get over the top and silly very quickly. Our group plays every Wednesday, so I'll be updating this campaign journal every week until its conclusion.

I hope people will enjoy reading about our antics almost as much as we had played through them! Feel free to comment; I'm always happy to get feedback.



Silver (Sorcerer 2/Warlock 2) - A slightly ditzy dark elf who functions as the party's main source of arcane spellcasting. Damage output promises to be good later, but right now she is a marshmallow machine gun.
Douglas Wolfram (Cleric 4) - He is the party's main healer, and does as much as he can to get the rest of the group into trouble via botched diplomacy. The aasimar is the tiefling's older brother. Not sure how that works.
Jet Van Lee (Monk 2/Druid 2) - Living proof that monks require more optimization than should be necessary, and that druid can't fix everything. He is the weakest party member by a wide margin.
Temmy (Fighter 3/Wizard 1) - A goliath refluffed as an earth elemental. He does his best to soak up damage for the rest of the team, and has a couple of utility spells on the side. Nominally the team leader, but only because Jet won't shut up about it.
Piper Wolfram (Paladin 4) - A tiefling that leans on the good half of her alignment. She's respectable damage dealer, since she can dump what few spell slots she has into extra d8s of damage. I'm fully expecting her to shriek "Onii-Chan!!!" if something bad ever happens to Douglas.
Elora Zerfallen (Paladin 4) - This guy leans hard on the lawful half of his alignment. He comes across as a Warhammer 40k guy, since in his own words "Everything is heresy!"
Jakolot (Rogue 4) - A wood elf that fancies himself a detective, and is actually good at it ... mechanically. Sometimes struggles in combat, but still more helpful than Jet.



Torrent (Dynamic Sorcerer 3) - An NPC the party made contact with at the start of the adventure. She acts as a healer and a source of information, as well as helping the party get into the good graces of the Gate Pass Resistance.
Crystin Ja-Nafeel (Magical Girl 1) - The second NPC to join the party. She is a neophyte Sailor Moon with module scripted visions and prophecies. Also comes with a tiny luck dragon as her servant.



All of the players decided to take the Nemesis defect, and all of them took it at Rank 3 no less. Only one person has a nemesis, but since I did a soft reset of the campaign, these baddies might be around at some point.


Jasmine "Jazz" Fandango - An idol and mecha pilot with a fondness for blaring music, she is after Segata and wants him to return the stolen suit of power armor he swiped from her locker during character creation.
Selket, the Shining Magician - She is angered by the destruction of her home and concerned by the explosions Mato causes. She'll stop at nothing to bring the destructive android to justice!
Nuriel Pele - He is a roaming monster hunter and a stand user. He wants to fight Sen because he thinks it will be a good challenge ... but only when Sen is expanded to giant size.
Rajani Lilith - Perhaps the most dangerous member of Team Nemesis, Rajani is a deceitful witch able to copy the PCs' abilities and become immune to the effects of whatever ability she's copying ... but only after telling a lie.
Imiza Irmentrude - A knight of Ragesia with some severe anger issues. She is convinced that Tiyana murdered her family and won't rest until she has had her revenge.
Grinman - A gnoll that acts like Mark Hamill's Joker, and has a real deep-seeded hatred for Jakolot.

SleepyShadow
2017-06-17, 12:17 PM
Session One
Our party started off in the city-state of Gate Pass, a strategically placed border town sandwiched between several countries hostile toward one another. The PCs were asked to meet Torrent in the abandoned pub called The Poison Apple. After some introductions and friendly banter, Torrent asked the PCs to help her meet with her contact across town: Rivereye Badgerface, a gnome who had been spying on the evil Ragesian Empire and had recently acquired some sensitive information that needed to by taken to the wizard academy on the other side of the Fire Forest. The PCs agreed to help her just before the door got blown open by The Black Horse Bounty Hunters.

"We're here to collect the girl," said one bounty hunter as he gestured toward Torrent. "We want her alive, so if you could just ha-"
"Over my dead sax!" Segata shouted as he busted out the music. (http://youtu.be/mD2xXNg_Vy8)

Things went mostly as expected for the first couple of rounds. The bounty hunters got a couple lucky shots, but basically got blown away by the party's overwhelming offense. Reinforcements came in from upstairs, but most of them died when the ceiling caved in, and those who lived were stuck behind the fiery rubble due to a well-placed grease spell. The PCs headed outside to escape the fire, only to be met by the readied action of Kathor Danava. He rode down with his lance (already prepped with true strike) and tagged Mato for 63 damage. Her force field blocked 50 of it, and her DR stopped another 8. :smallannoyed:

He won initiative and got off another Ride-By Attack, tagging Mato again for 60 damage, but only 12 of it actually got through. He then got one-shot by Mato's cannon. However, the cannon's AoE backlash killed Al's familiar raven, instantly creating more than a little friction within the party. Before they could come to blows over it, Segata's nemesis (literally) dropped in to stir things up. Jazz's colossal mecha, named Big Band and built to look like several giant amplifiers stacked on top of each other, was more than enough to get the party's attention.

"Give me back my uniform!" Jazz shrieked.
"Ex-girlfriend, Segata?" Tiyana asked.
Segata groaned. "She wishes."

Unfortunately, combat with Jazz was very anticlimactic, as she blew the Fort save on a flashbang grenade and the party ran away.

Having cleared their initial combats, the party waded through the city as it was being fire-bombed by wyvern knights from Ragesia. The PCs made a brief detour to rescue a woman from a burning building, then headed to the vault tower where they needed to meet Rivereye. Unbeknownst to them, a group of elves from Shahalesti had already caught Rivereye and left one of their members behind disguised as the gnome, a ninja/sorcerer named Larion. Things did not go according to plan for either the PCs or Larion.

"Hey there, Peppin!" Larion said cheerfully.
"I'm not Peppin," Sen replied.
"Oh, uh, nevermind then."
"We're here for the information," Segata said.
"Right, the intel ..." Larion said. "I just need the password."
"What password?" Mato whispered to Torrent.
"There isn't any password," Torrent replied.
"We don't have a password," Segata told Larion.
"How do I know you're not Ragesian spies?!" the 'gnome' shrieked.
"Aren't you a spy?" Segata asked.

At this point, Larion dropped his disguise self spell and bolted for the roof of the tower. He was exceptionally quick (55 ft. move speed), but sprinting up the spiral stairs meant that he was still slower on the ascent than the half of the party that could fly. They proceeded to battle Larion and his lantern archon companion on the fourth floor of the tower, their various shockwaves and AoE attacks blowing out all the windows and sending giant shards of glass down onto the poor guards out in the yard 80 ft. down. All of these explosions naturally got the attention of the second nemesis introduced this session: Selket, the Shining Magician!

"Mato!" Selket shouted as she flew outside the tower. "Prepare for a phantasmagoria of magical powers! Justice will be mine!"
"You're still mad about the house?!" Mato yelled back.

A ray of clumsiness from Selket immediately took Mato out of the fight. Sen finally managed to catch up to Larion and (with Segata's buffs) get the squishy elf in a grapple and beat him down. After unsuccessfully returning spell fire toward Selket and nearly getting dropped by a scorching ray, Al and the others pulled back into the tower interior to force Selket to fight them on even ground. Since she's not the brightest of mages, she landed in the tower and prepared for the party to come back out. Sen was the first one back out onto the platform, and he ate another scorching ray for his trouble, but he scored a critical on her and sent her crashing through a wall, knocking her out in a single hit.

The PCs left Larion and Selket unconscious and tied up at the top of the tower, presuming the guards would come fetch them later. They found the locker that Rivereye had been stuffed in, and once they got him out they were told that the leader of the elf team had gone to the local wizarding academy in Gate Pass. Rivereye also told the party that she had taken the scroll case of information with her, but the clever gnome had tricked the elves into thinking they needed a password to open the scroll case.

Since the party was low on hit points and all but out of spells, Torrent led them to a nearby temple that secretly operated as a Resistance safehouse. The party was able to rest in the basement of the temple, and the session ended with banter and jokes.

TL;DR: Everybody had a good time. Nobody died. The BESM stuff is really well balanced amidst its own material, but characters not utilizing the book might struggle to keep up.

Miltonian
2017-06-17, 04:38 PM
This was good for a laugh. Sounds like a fun group.

SleepyShadow
2017-06-24, 02:15 PM
This was good for a laugh. Sounds like a fun group.

Glad you enjoyed the group's antics. :smallsmile:

Session Two
The evening started off with the party heading out of the temple to go see about collecting the Ragesian data from the elven spymaster at the local wizard academy. They hadn't even gotten off the temple steps before they saw a warrior clad in red and black leaned up against one of the pillars outside. He looked up at them and flashed a lopsided grin.

"Sen, I finally tracked you down," Nuriel said. "I saw what you did to that poor witch over at the bank. It's not very nice to hit a lady."
"What the %&$@ is your problem?!" Sen shouted. "She shot at us first!"
Segata clapped his hands. "Yay! A new nemesis!"

Nuriel summoned his Jojo stand, Dusana, and the battle was on. He performed against the party better than I had expected him to. He managed to take down Sen in the first round, and Dusana scored a lucky critical on Tiyana and one-shot her. He got healed a bit when Dusana went down, and he even managed to reflect Mato's cannon shot back at her, nearly taking her down in the process. Even so, the party eventually overwhelmed him with action economy and battered him down. The final blow sent him spinning off into the sky as he went blasting off.

Torrent and Segata got the party back on their feet, and the PCs headed out to Gate Pass Academy. Once again, the party's own defects came to bite them. This time it was the hordes of raving fanboys/fangirls due to over half the party having multiple ranks of the Guy/Girl Magnet defect. Diogenes, the academy's gate guard, was nearly crushed by the screaming crowd. The party managed to convince the fan horde that they would be hosting a concert in Seaquin in a few days' time. The horde squealed with collective delight and tore off for the city gates, piling up and spilling over the wall like zombies (http://youtu.be/uU0DNCV22dU).

Torrent shook her head. "You know that's where we're going, right?"
"Yeah, but now it's a later problem for future us," Segata replied.

Apologies were made to Diogenes, and the party learned from him that there was only one elf woman still at the academy. Her name was Shealis, and Diogenes knew that she was apparently waiting for her "boyfriend" to leave the city together. The gate wizard let the party into the academy to search for her, since he did not like her at all. Much to my surprise, the party decided to split up into pairs to search the area more quickly. Segata and Sen went to the dormitory, Mato and Al went to the burned out tower ruins, and Torrent followed Tiyana into the main tower.

My group has played D&D before. I swear.

Segata and Sen didn't learn much at the dorms other than Shealis wasn't in her room at the time. For some reason Segata wanted to pull the fire alarm, so I cut over to Tiyana just before he did.
She flirted with a mage on the ground floor of the tower for a bit, learning that Shealis was on the third floor doing "some meditation or something". Tiyana and Torrent headed up to the third floor and confronted the elf about the intel. Just before the situation broke into combat, I cut over to Mato and Al as they were prowling around the ruined tower. They found a young woman dressed in black, presumably a student, loitering about and doodling on the wall with chalk. She smiled at them, and neither of them got high enough on their spot checks to notice her shark teeth.

"You two aren't students here," the girl said.
"We're looking for an elf named Shealis," Mato replied. "Have you seen her around?"
"Ooh! What kind of robot are you?" the girl squealed excitedly, drawing uncomfortably close to Al.
"Um, a magic one I guess," Al answered.
"I'm Rajani. What's your name?" she asked.
Al backed up against the wall. "Uh, it's Al."
Mato grumbled. "Hey, focus please. Where's Shealis?"
Rajani smiled and rolled a bluff check. "She likes horses. She could be in the stables. There's lots of horse apples in there."
"Okay, thanks," Mato said, failing her sense motive. "I'll be right back, Al."
"Uh, can't I come with you?" Al asked.
"That girl has a custom mini. She's plot relevant," Mato replied as she ran off.
"Want to make some art?" Rajani asked Al, smiling.

At this point, Segata pulled the fire alarm and initiative was required. Tiyana and Torrent attacked first, doing their best but being unable to bring down Shealis (a 7th level dynamic sorcerer). Rajani showed her teeth and cut Al across the throat, bypassing his force field entirely and dropping him in a single hit. Since neither he nor Mato had made their sense motive checks, she had been free to Mimic his force field and negate it. Segata and Sen moved out into the yard, and heard the sounds of gunfire going off in the tower. Sen and Mato hurried up the tower to see what was going on, and Segata went over to the ruins under the premise of needing to get Al for the fight upstairs. I'm guessing this was also because Segata's player didn't want his IRL little brother to have to roll up a new character so soon.

"What did you do to Al?!" Segata shouted as he caught sight of what had occurred.
Rajani smiled at him. "Nice mecha suit, but why are you wearing a girl's uniform?"
Segata drew his fullblade. "Shut up and get away from Al!"
"This doesn't seem very fair," Rajani pouted. "Wouldn't it be funny if I had that suit instead of you?"

The fight upstairs went about as I expected. Shealis dropped Sen and Torrent with a well-placed fireball, but the concentrated gunfire of Tiyana and Mato dropped her to single digit hp and she quickly surrendered. Segata did not have as much luck trying to 1v1 Rajani. She succeeded on bluffing him, then held her action until he went to attack. At that point she copied his Personal Gear attribute (the source of his mecha suit) and simultaneously gained the suit's stats while completely negating Segata's damage. She then proceeded to kick him around the schoolyard like a soccer ball for a couple of rounds until the rest of the party showed up, and then she flew away laughing thanks to the mech suit.

After the less than stellar battle, the party intimidated Shealis until she told them the location of her hideout down in the elf ghetto. The PCs cajoled her into taking them there, and she didn't have much of a choice. The party certainly didn't make any friends dragging Shealis, badly wounded and hands tied behind her back, through the elven neighborhood. She made quite the show of limping around and gasping in pain every time one of the PCs yanked on her leash. Eventually she took them to the secret door that led to the spy's hideout, but the party couldn't figure out the puzzle to unlock the door.

"Why don't we just make Shealis do it?" Al suggested.
"I can't with my hands tied like this," Shealis wimpered.
"I'll untie you, then," Sen offered.

He cut her loose, she cast swift invisibility and ran out of there as fast as possible. At that point, Mato just blew a hole in the wall with her cannon. The elves had a last ditch defense of two archers and three celestial dire badgers, but they put up a pretty pathetic fight against the PCs. The party had a bit of an "are we the bad guys?" moment when they came to the conclusion that the celestial badgers were not summons. They were willingly helping the elves. Of course, that didn't stop the party from looting the place and securing the sealed Ragesian case that had the intel they were after. At that point, it was just a matter of getting out of the city and hitting the road for Seaquin.

"The city is on lockdown," Tiyana said. "How do we do that?"
"Without killing all the guards?" Mato asked.
"Preferably, yes," Tiyana sighed.
"Can't one of the wizards just teleport us there?" Sen asked.
"Last week, Torrent said that people trying to teleport were just disappearing," Segata replied. "No idea what that means but I'd rather not find out."
"Maybe we can bribe a city official," Al said.
Torrent piped up. "One of the city councilmen is on good terms with the Gate Pass Resistance. I don't know him personally, but my boss trusts him. He might help us."
"Why didn't you mention that earlier?" Al asked.
"Because she's an NPC. She's only allowed to offer advice when prompted," Segata replied.
"Or when scripted by the module to do so," Torrent said, folding her arms over her chest.

The party headed to Erdan Menash's home, and learned that the module continued to be hilariously self aware. In addition to offering the party letters of passage through the gate, Erdan offered them light riding horses for free without expecting them to be returned. ("You're adventurers. The horses won't survive anyway.") He also offered each party member a free masterwork exotic weapon of their choice ... except for spiked chains. ("Too trite.") Torrent selected a dolphin shaped falchion to give to a friend of hers in Seaquin. The party joked about how stuck to her theme she was, then headed out for the gate. About halfway there, a dashing figure in a long cloak suddenly swung down from a nearby rooftop, grabbed Torrent around the waist, and swung up to the rooftop of the building across the street.

"Fear not, Miss Torrent, I'll save you from these vile bounders!" he cried in a jaunty British voice.
"Is that Batman?" Al asked.
"I think he's closer to Robin Hood," Segata replied.
Tiyana busted up laughing. "Oh my god, Torrent, you're a damsel in distress!"
"I am not!" Torrent shrieked.

After a brief exchange, the party had the stranger convinced that they weren't the bad guys. They learned that his name was Rantle, and that he was a local hero in Gate Pass. He was head of the thieves' guild and second-in-command of Gate Pass Resistance, though he was acting as head officer now that the resistance leader had disappeared.

"I guess that makes me top banana," Rantle said with a shrug.
Sen shrieked. "It's ba-na-na! Say it right, oh my god!"
"Bah-nah-nah," Rantle replied with a smirk.

Rantle asked them to deliver a message to his little sister Katrina, since he knew Torrent was heading to Lyceum anyway. The party quickly agreed to take a sidequest in the same place they were headed, then offered for Rantle to join the party. He politely declined, saying that he needed to remain here to "help those who cannot help themselves". He then used animate rope to pull himself back up to the rooftop and swing away dramatically. The general consensus was that he would've been a cool comedic relief character to have around.

The party showed the letters of passage to the gate guards and headed out of Gate Pass. They were finally on the road! Unfortunately, things went sour almost immediately. The road passed through a narrow rocky canyon. Since Segata was the only one that could fly, the party only had two options: go through the canyon and trigger the obvious ambush waiting for them, or spend a week trekking through winter terrain to go around the canyon. Opting for speed and trusting in their combat abilities, the party headed through the canyon. To the surprise of nobody, the Black Horse Bounty Hunters had an ambush prepared for them. Four snipers (two on each canyon wall), a flying mecha pilot, and a pair of light cavalry led by Kathor Danava.

Initiative went poorly for the party, and only Tiyana went before the baddies. She got off a flurry of shots against the mecha, then went down from the return fire of the clifftop snipers. Kathor's cavalry unity charged in and took out Sen and Torrent in the first attack. Al was on the receiving end of Kathor's personal attack and went from full health to completely dead in a single hit.
The mecha pilot blasted Segata down to about half health. Segata clocked Kathor down to single digit hp, and Mato nearly one-shot the mecha with her full powered special attack. Unfortunately,
she did not check her battlefield position; the backlash from her attack killed Torrent.

The rest of the battle was pretty routine. The baddies put up a good showing, but without room to use ride-by-attack, the cavalry team never got to be as devastating as they were in round 1.
The mecha went down on the second round, and the mecha pilot (Renard Woodsman) was pretty pathetic outside of the mech. The snipers couldn't even deal enough damage to punch through Mato's or Segata's DR. Once Renard and Kathor's cavalry unit went down, the snipers at the top of the cliffs bailed.

After the battle, Segata brought unconscious people back up while Mato gathered up the party member corpses. The remainder of the party continued on through the canyon, alternating between congratulation Mato on taking down the mecha and blaming her for killing Torrent. At the end of the day, the party got out of the canyon and found a farmhouse at about a quarter-mile from the Fire Forest that they would have to pass through in order to get to Seaquin. Standing outside of the farmstead, staring off into the distance, was Crystin Ja-Nafeel. She greeted the party in a spacy sort of way, then invited them inside. The PCs followed her without much suspicion, and met with her father (Haddin) inside the house. It didn't take long for the party to figure out that the old enchanter had ensorcelled his own daughter into obedience. Just as the party started to confront him about it, there was a knock at the door. None of the PCs moved to open it, so Haddin got up and went to answer the knock. As soon as he did, he received a crossbow bolt to the chest and died.

"Oh come on, I wanted to kill him!" Mato grumbled.

A Ragesian inquisitor and his crew had come calling. The inquisitor announced that he was here to collect Crystin, and that if the party handed her over they would be free to go. The party's answer came in the form of blowing up the inquisitor's skeletons. The fight was made difficult for the party not because of the strength of the enemy, but rather because they were forced to puppy-guard Crystin in order to prevent the baddies from grappling her and carrying her off. Mechanically, the only real threats were the inquisitor (dynamic sorcerer 6) and his personal bodyguard (samurai 4).
I was impressed that the baddies lived past turn two.

Before the party had a chance to recover from the fight, however, a thunderous voice outside the farmhouse announced the presence of another newcomer. Heading outside to see what the commotion was, the party was met with the sight of a fierce looking warrior woman riding upon a hippogriff. She aimed her lance at Tiyana and glared.

"I am Imiza Irmentrude, paladin of Ragesia!" she bellowed. "I've come for your head, honorless murderer!"
"I've killed a lot of people," Tiyana replied with a shrug. "Can you be a little more specific?"
"You murdered my family!" Imiza shouted down at her.
Tiyana tilted her head to the side. "Say what now?"

TL;DR: Multiple party deaths in the only encounter not involving a nemesis.

SleepyShadow
2017-07-02, 05:31 AM
Sorry for the delay. It was a crazy weekend.

Session Three
The evening began with the party fleeing from Imiza as fast as possible and running off into the Fire Forest. I imagine this is because two of the group members were missing that week,
and the rest of the group wasn't feeling keen on fighting her without them. Imiza only pursued a short distance before breaking off the chase. Along the road, the party met Afu Petrogov, a warmage that Al's player had rolled up to replace his dead character. Introductions were ... brief.

"Hey, are you guys headed to Seaquin?" Afu asked.
"Yeah," Segata replied. "Want to travel there with us?"
"Sure. Safety in numbers," Afu said.
"Just as a heads-up, we have a bunch of crazy weirdos after us," Mato said.
"I'm pretty sure there's only one crazy one," Segata said.
"Mine's a stalker!" Mato argued.
"Dude, the magician girl was a cop," Segata sighed.

They had a few casts of endure elements at the ready, so travel through the Fire Forest was not terribly problematic at first. A quarter mile into the woods they encountered a small group of dead bodies that were burnt to a crisp and partially devoured. The PCs immediately began to loot the corpses, while Crystin looked on in horror. Suddenly, one of the bodies proved to be slightly less dead than the others. At least the party had the decency to make sure he wasn't undead. Turns out that the survivor was an apprentice mage named Durval who had sought to flee through the woods with his wife and child. While he had been able to protect his family from the ambient damage of the woods, it had left him drained of magic and so he was unable to fight off the monsters they encountered. After a bit of cajoling, the party convinced Durval to accompany them through the Fire Forest.

He wouldn't make it very far.

About a mile farther in, the party came across a hellhound carrying a leg bone in its mouth. Much to my surprise the party didn't blow it to bits and instead allowed it to approach. It dropped the bone off with the party, then cautiously backed away. A message was carved into it, demanding that the party carry the bone with them in order to negotiate a peaceful surrender. The group immediately assumed the bone was a tracking device of some sort; they went so far as to hike back up the trail, bury the bone, and circle back to where they had met the hell hound to avoid being scryed upon.
Little did they know that the guy who wrote the message was just hanging out a couple miles farther down the road. The PCs eventually reached the spot where the ambush was set to take place. In a blossoming flower of fire, a strong bodied and well equipped bearded devil appeared before them. He politely introduced himself as Kazyk...

"Wait, like the bug guy?" Mato asked.
Segata was puzzled. "What bug guy?"
"You know," Mato said, "he turns invisible and jumps at you with his huge scythe arms."
Kazyk face-palmed. "I am not a damned 'League of Legends' reference!"

The battle actually went better than I had expected. Due to some bad rolls on Segata's part, he got grappled and pinned down by the pack of summoned lemures, while Kazyk was able to kill Durval and use him as cleave food to take down Crystin. Afu proved that warmage is a bad choice in any setting by being almost completely unable to hurt stock devils. Between the DR and energy resistance the monsters had, he was basically a non-entity throughout the fight. That didn't stop Kazyk from tagging him once and letting the infernal wound ability tick for a few rounds. Mato fired multiple rounds at the (upgunned) bearded devil, but only succeeded in dropping him to badly wounded by round three, at which point Kazyk simply teleported away and let the PCs clean up the lemures.

After the fight, Segata had to blow the last of his spells to keep Afu and Crystin from dying to the infernal wounds. I was beginning to understand why the module wanted to include a babysitter NPC so early on in the campaign. Now, however, the PCs were the ones having to do the babysitting. Segata picked up the unconscious magical gear and the party proceeded onward in search of a place to rest.
They were soundly denied.

About six miles into the woods the party was suddenly set upon by deer-shaped fire elementals, backed up by a moving wall of fire and random fireballs dropping down on their heads from out of nowhere. It was a rough fight, and Afu went down in the first round, but after a few rounds Mato and Segata were able to kill the fire elementals just before the wall of fire was going to roll over the unconscious warmage. They weren't out of trouble yet, though. They had used so many abilities with the detectable defect that two of the party's nemeses were able to find them. The enemy team's arrival was heralded by heavy metal music.

"SEGATA!" Jazz screeched out of her mecha's speakers as she crashed on the road in front of the PCs.
Selket perched on the shoulder of the colossal mech and pointed her wand at Mato. "There you are! I've got some double trouble brewed up just for you!"
"Oh, come on!" Segata and Mato groaned.

Unfortunately we had to wrap up the session there :smallfrown:

TL;DR: Short session due to late start and missing players.

SleepyShadow
2017-07-10, 01:26 PM
Sorry, no session to report on. I was sick all weekend, so we didn't play.

dysprosium
2017-07-10, 01:53 PM
Posting to let you know I subscribed to the thread. War of the Burning Sky is one of my favorite campaigns and I am enjoying this unique take on the story.

Hope you feel better.

SleepyShadow
2017-07-24, 09:14 AM
Posting to let you know I subscribed to the thread. War of the Burning Sky is one of my favorite campaigns and I am enjoying this unique take on the story.

Hope you feel better.

Glad to hear you've enjoyed it! The campaign story does seem like it'll be a lot of fun to go through ... assuming my group can get its act together :smallsigh:

Session Four
With Sen's and Mato's players gone this week, Selket had no reason to be there anymore and so Imiza was quietly substituted in at the start of the session as Jazz's partner for the fight. In addition, we had a guest player that week who (thankfully already had their character rolled up) played as none other than cyber popstar Hatsune Miku {Dynamic Sorcerer 4} :smallannoyed:. These two things would prove to be far more disastrous than I had initially thought it would be.

The battle commenced with Tiyana getting off a few good shots against Imiza and Segata firing off his grossly overclocked dragonfire inspiration. Imiza retaliated with a barrage of lasers from her magic gauntlet, but Tiyana's high AC against ranged attacks saved her bacon. Segata fared less well when he and Crystin Ja-Nafeel got caught in Big Band's sonic cannon attack (keyed, of course, to Beethoven's 5th (http://youtu.be/_4IRMYuE1hI)). Unfortunately, the damage was enough to kill Crystin. Afu then continued to prove that warmages are bad and they should feel bad by continuing to have the lowest damage output in the party ... until Miku's turn rolled around ...

"Alright, you're up," I said. "You're full up on energy and you've got three spell lists to cast from. The world is your oyster."
"I'm texting," Miku replied, clacking away on her cell phone.
"I don't care. It's your turn," I said dryly.
"There's ... a lot of stuff going on," Miku sighed. "Who's got the most damage on them?"
"Other than the dead girl?" Afu asked. "That'd be me. I'm basically bleeding out of every orifice."
"Cure spell on him," Miku said quickly as she threw a d8 at him and resumed texting.

The battle proceeded to go south for the party from that point onward. Imiza's hippogriff did more damage to Tiyana than Imiza, but Tiyana and Afu couldn't manage to bring her down. Segata was left to try to 1v1 his nemesis which, not surprisingly, did not work too well for him. All the while, Miku threw healing dice at party members in between text messages. Unfortunately, with only Tiyana contributing meaningful damage to the fight, once Imiza was finally able to drop her the knight made short work of Afu and Miku. In the final round of combat, Segata's mech suit had finally taken enough damage to be shut down, and Imiza fired off the last charge of her magical gauntlet.

"Does a thirty hit?" I asked.
"Crap, yeah," Segata sighed.
"By how much?"
"Uh, by eleven. Why?"
"Her Raging Dragon Storm attack gets an extra 6d8 of damage for every five points that she beats your AC. So that brings her total 18d8 damage."
"Ex-squeeze me?!!"

The attack blew through Segata like wet tissue paper, and with that the last of the party was killed. Miku's player went home at some point, and the rest of the group spent the rest of the evening rolling up new characters in the hopes of tackling the campaign again next week. I was just as unhappy about the results of the fight as they were.

TL;DR: Nobody likes a TPK.

SleepyShadow
2017-12-22, 03:02 PM
Good news, everyone! The campaign will be starting up again soon, and with it more journal entries.

normal name
2017-12-31, 05:15 PM
Glad to hear it's starting back up! hope it goes better for you/them this time :)

SleepyShadow
2018-01-03, 01:26 PM
Glad to hear it's starting back up! hope it goes better for you/them this time :)

Thanks! I hope so too. I'll just be touching on the highlights of the campaign until the party catches up to where the last team died off, then I'll go into more lengthy descriptions again.


The party met with Torrent and showed themselves to be comically bad at dealing with people thanks to chronic foot-in-mouth syndrome. She's starting to wish that she'll be able to hire another group.

The first fight with Kathor Danovar was just as unimpressive the second time around. He got off one good hit at the start of the fight, but Temmy has the defenses to handle some pretty big hits. Danovar's henchmen stooged around for a couple of rounds while Danovar himself had to full retreat in the second round of combat. I guess casters just don't make great mounted combat characters at such early levels. :smallsigh:

The party ignored all of the side ops between the tavern and the bank. Oh well. Less xp for them.

I replaced the incredibly underwhelming lantern archon that backs up Larion with an elf martial artist of the same CR. The elves still got clowned in two rounds. The party stuck Larion's head inside Jet's mouth while he was wildshaped into a wildcat and screamed at the elf until he told them where Rivereye Badgerface was. Great way to start off relations with the elves.

The party picked a fight with a couple of teenagers at the temple safehouse. The high priest had to break it up. Torrent is very disappointed with them.

normal name
2018-01-04, 02:23 PM
Oh boy, sounds like they're off to a worse start than before haha! Hopefully they can pull it together long enough to make it further than the first try, but I won't hold my breath.:smallwink:

SleepyShadow
2018-01-25, 12:06 PM
Update: They TPK'd in the fight with Danovar and the Black Horse bounty hunters. I think this adventure path is cursed. :smallsigh: