Geek Related

Fourth Session (13 page pdf) – Trolls, ninjas, necromancers, statues – they all fall before our righteous wrath. We kill, and loot!  And kill and kill and loot!  Kill kill kill, loot loot loot…

Most of the Paizo APs, I’ll be honest, give you crap treasure.  This one is different!  Besides my new intelligent katana Suishen, we’ve found a lot of unique and cool magic items.

The most enjoyable fight was with the three monks then the lady ninja.  It was a big “you can’t see them” fest – I took care of the shadows and all with a daylight from Suishen and then I figured the See Invisible would take me the rest of the way – but that ninja chick, even when sniping and taking a -20 to her Stealth check, was totally staying hidden and owning us with sneak attacks.  Three shuriken are a joke unless they’re each coming with a many-d6 sneak attack attached.

The toughest fight was with those stupid statues.  Super high DR, immune to all magic, break  your weapons when you hit them – and they were like CR4 or something, what a hose job. We had to stop after to recover to hit Thorborg.

This weekend, we’ll fight the oni posing as Thorborg Silverscore!  I best log off now because there’s a hell of a thunderstorm brewing here in central Texas, but more soon!

Third Session (14 page pdf) – We assault Ravenscraeg, Thorborg’s hideout. It is full of ravens, and ninjas, and raven-ninjas.  And we totally find the intelligent ancestral sword of the Amatatsu family in a hole!

Our plan to sneak around like ninjas is largely busted by a raven swarm attack. Our disguises do let us get the drop on a room of ninjas, though, so we fight them then a squad of Vikings pretty well.

Our Viking prisoner gives up some intel. Being Combat as War fans, we set up an ambush for their werebear leader and took him down with extreme prejudice.

Some DVD extras – Bjorn snatched all the money from the Murder God’s offering bowl, I hope it’ll come back to haunt him.  And the inside joke of “Eye Ape, Ear Ape, Ear Ape” is because I figure the blind Gobo, mute V’lk, and just-doesn’t listen Harwynian are like the hear no evil, see no evil, speak no evil monkeys. And in some anime, Paul had seen that subtitled as “Eye Ape, Ear Ape, Ear Ape,” which amused all of us.

We also liked going into the kitchen. The Vikings were like “You pesky ninjas, get out of the food!” Then we killed them.  Except for the baker, we commanded him to continue baking the tasty bread.

It turns out the most vicious sub-boss in the place was a raven! We had quite a time fighting it. And of course Bjorn’s anti-animal abilities don’t work on it.  “It’s a magical animal!”

In the end, we found the intelligent katana, and learned Thorborg is really an oni!  We had been half considering leaving and letting Asvig Longthews and his Vikings clear the place, but that convinced us we need to sweep and clear – next time!

Second Session (11 page pdf) – We head out to Asvig Longthews’ house to kill us some Vikings. We end up saving some Vikings but killing some ninjas!  Once we hear a chick named “Thorborg” is behind this unholy genre mash-up, we head right out to kill her.

We snuck up on a Viking wake. After V’lk annoyed me by setting off the obvious lion-summoning trap, we got control of the place without a lot of trouble. Asvig Longthews as our prisoner was being intractable, but we knew that a lot of these guys have some kind of head-exploding curse on them for if they talk.  In what seemed to be quite against GM expectations, we managed to dispel the curse and get the Ulfen on our side!

Alas, the ninja ambush that was probably going to be waiting for us at the funeral boats just came to the longhouse instead. And they took me out fast.  With my character, sometimes I end up leading the battle to victory, sometimes I get dropped in two rounds. Not too much in between. Finally, we kill them and head off to find the person behind this, a woman named Thorborg (this made us giggle).

So we argue about plans – draw her to town, ambush her on the road… No, we’ll just go right up to the front door of her keep. Our attempt to bluff our way past the door guards goes badly and we get to fight more ninjas.  They are really annoying, because they can go invisible and then sneak attack you.  For a PC it’s less cool because you can only do it a couple times a day, but of course monsters only have to go one combat and get to use all their daily uses on you.

The humorous silver lining, however, is that the kenku ninjas were equipped liberally with blowguns.  Kenku are bird-people with beaks, not lips. This caused a minor riot to break out when we found it out.  They didn’t use them on us, luckily.  We speculated that there’s some ninja union and they make everyone carry blowguns whether or not they are equipped biologically to use them. “Now that’s Lawful!”

The illustrations in the books add a lot to the play experience.  We always show the monster pics to the players (sometimes having to obscure 3/4 of the page in the book to safely do so) and in this one, the spider eater picture really put us off our feed; we had considered killing it just to clear the way and after we saw it we decided “screw that!”