Geek Related

Fourth Session (11 page pdf) – Hobgoblins, oni, naga, and gorgons beset our brave adventurers as we grind, grind, grind our way towards the bottom of this dungeon. They are crazy Japanesey hobgoblins, oni, naga, and gorgons though so it’s all good.

Hobs then boss then hobs then boss then, just to mix it up, a boss then hobs. Oni samurai are annoying, those are my (Yoshihiro’s) tricks! But the most challenging fight was with the two naga who totally charmed Jacob.  He spent that entire fight trying to take his armor off (luckily, it takes two minutes) to go skinnydipping with them.

Ninth level is when D&D combat gets spell heavy and is pretty weird and chaotic but hasn’t gotten totally retarded yet (that comes in about another 3 levels).  So we’re all flying around and wall of icing and getting fireballed but healed and spell resistance put on us…  I’m glad we had a whole barrel of hobgoblin arrows up at the entrance to fill my magic quiver with because I was spraying out like 5 a round a lot of the time (rapid shot/manyshot/haste). Once we killed the nagas but Jacob got eaten by a giant gar, that just added insult to injury. Gar, they aren’t even good eatin’.

After that we needed to rest, we had been doing OK but this depleted everyone’s spell reserves totally.

I had to leave at that point, but I don’t regret too much not being there to get turned to stone by the gorgon…

Third Session (14 page pdf) – We continue to hack our way through the hobgoblin troops of the Pouting Pagoda in the House of Withered Blossoms.  It’s like the Hell of Being Cut To Pieces!

We interrogate our hobgoblin prisoners to get intel on the next in the series of hobgoblin-manned strongpoints, the Mockery Pagoda.  This is where very tactical play benefits you a lot.

Bottom level – drawbridge over a river, portcullis, probably murder holes, loads of high level hobgoblins.  Upstairs, parapets with archers, then doors into the pagoda proper.  There’s a lot of whiteboard pics and tactical map pics in the PDF this time.

So here’s how it’s done.  We didn’t want to fight them all at once, or get pinned down under fire, or waste too much magic on what’s essentially the door guards. We dimension door the lot of us up onto the parapet behind the archers but near their arrow barrel. Jacob throws a wall of ice across the stairwell and doors and we totally ambush murder the archers. When the melee hobs bust through the wall of ice (taking damage), Gobo color sprays most of them into comas and we swiftly kill them all.  Three spells, five mostly quiet rounds, and the front part of the fortress is ours.

But then as we go into the pagoda we get ambushed ourselves – by a stone golem!  Golems suck so bad in D&D, they’re basically immune to everything. So we used standard anti-golem tactics, the grease spell.  It took some doing but we pushed it down the stairs and outside the door, but by that time we had hobgoblin woman monks and hobgoblin leper archers all over us. It is a  hard fight to get clear of there.

And then we find a weird pit room where it becomes clear that there’s a gorgon down in it… We kill ogre mage (or “oni,” in Japanland) #1 there and loot.

Gobo’s “moon bridge” oracle power continues to be the best utility magic ever.  Without it we’d be so screwed in so many situations, or at least have to use lots of spells, painful back-and-forth-with-a-passenger fly trips, etc.  Whenever there’s a gap between where we want to go and we are – boop, moon bridge! It sounds so lame in the book but we have gotten so much mileage out of it it’s crazy.

Second Session (12 page pdf) – It’s hardcore hobgoblin warfare time in the earth under the House of Withered Blossoms.  We breach a defended curtain walle, conduct a zippo raid on a ville, and blitzkrieg the keep. And then it was a fight to the death with the Swine Shogun!

Fighting hobgoblins is always pleasingly tactical.  They are very martial and believe in fortifications and preparedness.  At lower levels that’s quite a problem.  At our level, with the flying and invisibility and walls of ice, it’s not so insurmountable.

Our first task was to breach a reinforced gate through an arrow slit and murder hole encrusted kill zone. Then we had to go through a gauntlet.  Then there was a whole underground village of hobs surrounding a keep.

It was some good fighting; the hobs weren’t pushovers but we had enough juice to not get trapped under fire too much.  The gate and gauntlet were dicey, the village was less of a problem – we were up a tall cliff and could see most of the place, so flame arrow plus direct damage spells pretty much chewed up the place.  It’s nice to also be able to cut loose and scrag a village, sometimes the “level appropriate” blinder that 3e+ got into doesn’t allow for you to really go to town on some hapless enemy forces.

We decided to just bypass the keep – going up to the front of it was silly, we just flew up to the bridge it was protecting and made them come to us.  They came to us and they were tough; I had to use samurai resolve to stay standing after a full attack from the guy.  Harwynian wanted to d-door us out of there but Jacob and I got in a lucky combo – the Swine Shaman failed an initial Hold Person save and I lopped his head right off.  Save or die, baby!

We’re over the hump and into the fourth chapter of the Jade Regent Adventure Path, Forest of Spirits.

First Session (18 page pdf) – We go shopping and get ninja’ed, in a bad way.   Then we meet Princess Mononoke and head out into the Forest of Spirits, where the cutest little bonsai kami ever wants us to go into the House of Withered Blossoms. We go in but it’s Mirkwood on crack as the spiders just keep coming!

The Fantasy Korean emperor is helpful but scary.  We used the opportunity of him executing all his guardsmen for letting us be attacked by ninja to sneak out of the city and get on our way.  Man, these ninja, they are always getting billions of sneak attacks on us no matter what we do.

And then it’s off to the House of the Withered Blossoms because the spirits need our help, says some chick with not much personality. We fight a bunch of spiders until we realize they just want to get stoned and be left alone (no, really).  So we generate a truce with the remaining third of them and learn the pagoda’s a megadungeon full of hobgoblins.  Hobgoblin murder next time!