Fourth Session (13 page pdf) – We hit Brinewall Castle and it’s full of dire corbies. As if those aren’t bad enough, then there’s mutant ogrekin and a hellclown! The hellclown that killed V’lk’s family! Run away! Run away!
Here’s his rendition of the hellclown (with the start of Brinewall Castle in the background)…
We’re into the eponymous part of The Brinewall Legacy, the first chapter of the Jade Regent Adventure Path.We start out with a reefclaw fight. I’ve mentioned before how stupid the aberration rules are – basically, since they prescribe certain stats due to universal monster rules, every bottom-dwelling mutated thing – reefclaws, otyughs, etc – all technically have quite good INT scores, like chess-playing level INT scores. But of course they have no civilization and just lurk alone in holes and eat poo. Of course Bjorn especially feels wronged by all this; he took favored enemy: animals as a ranger. And nothing is an animal. Oh, it might look like an animal – but no, it’s an “aberration” or “vermin” or “magical beast…”
Anyway, then we fought some dire corbies! They are like Heckle and Jeckle on steroids. You may remember them from the 1e Fiend Folio. As we fought, I could not help but repeat over and over again to myself…
The raven sings
The raven saw
And in the corn
He sayeth, ‘CAH’
If they get you in the clear they pounce and get like five attacks on you. We learned our lesson from that and never let them get a head start to pounce again!
When we went into the castle, there was “grunting and meaty slapping” from a courtyard. You might imagine what we thought of that. When it turned out it was some mutated ogrekin wrassling, Hiro wanted to beat them down and take them alive. But when V’lk went running up to them he got one-shot KOed! There was a lot of yelling “You just got knocked the fuck out!” as a result. This excited Jacob who just started swinging his two-handed sword. Luckily we managed to take them alive anyway.
After a vicious fight with an ogress, we met the boss – technically a yamabushi tengu, but as we don’t know that term we call him a “hellclown.”
He and his corbies chased us all the way out of the castle and we holed up in a building in town, injured and out of spells, but they found us. I ascribe our survival to me taking a strong hand with tactics – I made Bjorn get in the door with me behind him with my glaive, and used my magical wakizashi to do a shield other on him. Everyone else shot out the windows as we cut them down one by one as they tried to enter; double attacks from us but spread out damage from them. Bruce didn’t really get many of the details in the summary (he Skypes in, so tactical combat is challenging for him). Whoo, it was a real sphincter clenching moment, definitely the fight so far that really could have just killed us all. But we’re not out of the woods yet…
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