Tag Archives: golarion

Areelu Vorlesh

Fifth Session (14 page pdf) – We thwart the Forces of Evil ™ and destroy their captive wardstone bit, hurling the demonic forces back – for a time.  And we all experience THE QUICKENING!!!

We continue to sweep and clear the Gray Garrison. Many tieflings and cultists meet their end.  “It is thus that the fields of Justice are nourished with the blood of our enemies!” claims the session scribe.

We do get to fight a peryton, which is cool. And a goat-demon.  We hear from prisoners that there’s a minotaur around, leading to the following fun quotes:

“Minotaurs are bad news too,” shares Antonius. “I read a comic back in camp that says they’re more than a little… rapey.” Everyone shuffles uncomfortably at that thought.

Then a bit later,

From up above the minotaur howls.
Trystan tells Rogoff [his mongrelman henchman], “You go first!”
Rogoff looks dubious. “For what it’s worth, boss, I read the same comic book  about minotaurs that Antonius did. And you guys normally go in first – I’m not sure I feel  comfortable about this arrangement.”

For some reason the baddie, Jeslyn, spread all her defenders out into conveniently small packages leading to her, so we kill each group easily and then attack her solo.  Solo casters – why do they even try?  I run over and put her in a grapple and then convert it to the figure four leg lock and then it’s all over. It’s what I do with all solo casters – they just can’t do anything about it.

And then the shit really hits the fan.  Irabeth destroys the last fragment of Kenabres’ Wardstone with a rod of cancellation.  It explodes, it kills every demon in the zip code, we hallucinate for a while. Areelu Vorlesh gates in and sics six babau demons on us.  But we are powered-up with all kinds of special abilities and also she gets blown back through the gate. The baubaus attack and start gating in more babaus. This is quite a fight and we emerge victorious!  I club-dance and we gain… a Mythic Tier!

For those not familiar with it, Mythic Adventures is a cool new Paizo system that, instead of adding levels like Epic, adds a layer of being a kinda demigod type on top of our normal levels. So now we get weird superpowers!  (Go see our character sheets by level on the campaign page for more.)

Fantasy Janitors At Work

Fourth Session (16 page pdf) – We continue to hit demon cultist hardpoints in the ruins of Kenabres with the help of mongrelmen and lesbian paladins.

This session is mainly fight after fight with tieflings, dretches, and various other evil varmints of various description. That part wasn’t all that exciting. (Ironically fights in Pathfinder, while supposed to be scenes of high action like in a movie, are sometimes boring… Like Peter Jackson and Michael Bay are managing to do with their big action scenes.) The interesting things that came up were:

Mongrelman rangers! We got a squad of mongrelman helpers and they were very helpful. We named them, and everyone ran one. Antonius had some soul-searching to do though – the faith of Irori advocates physical and mental perfection but mongrelmen are the ultimate in mutated – it just kinda bothered him.

Janitorial work!  So we find a ruined shrine to Iomedae in the Grey Garrison and it’s pretty clear we “should” clean it up. Will all the monsters just go into stasis for a couple hours while we do so? Well sure, no problem. This will come up again, by the way. We are told we get a “devotion point” for that, a fact that Chris and I try to erase from our brains – we’ve had about enough of Pathfinder APs giving us something-or-other points and driving our party-mates into fits of bizarre behavior (like gift-buying in Jade Regent) because they see a new rules system than needs manipulation.  If we’re going to start getting Divine Janitor Points for clearing poo from every shrine we enter I’d rather the mechanics be obscured from me.

But, we level and get some phat lewt.

Ruined Kenabres

Third Session (17 page pdf) – It’s all Mogadishu style combat in the streets of Kenabres as we try to get back to base. We fight cultists and cavaliers and carrion-eaters and cosplayers.

We kick off with a more in-character discussion of the captive Uziel’s fate.  In the wake of last session, Chris and I spoke and agreed to try to push the group to do better on discussing that stuff really in character and not meta, so we spurred that to set the tone a little.

And finally we emerge into a totally destroyed Kenabres. Not just mostly messed up, like “there are small pockets of survivors, occasionally.” We meet up with refugees and cultists alike.

One of the more stand-out encounters was with a cavalier who was getting set to immolate a bunch of librarians, I guess to show he was all about switching to the winning side now that his insect overlords were in charge. Our train of prisoners and wounded now way outstrips our actual party.

But then in one of those low-level shockers, Calathe gets murdered!  Some junk cultists with scythes that we see way ahead of time and set an ambush for nearly do me in and definitely do her in; a crit at that level is a coffin-nail pounder. Then Tim takes over Horgus Gwerm, who is also summarily murdered by the same group of cultists! Tim plays a librarian for the rest of the session; we discuss how that perhaps “looters” are welcome to it since everyone’s dead really.

OK, so, crap, we are down to like 4 real PCs (Matt didn’t come today), a librarian, two corpses, two cripples, and six captives. We go from place to place trying to find friendlies and fail. We get to Anevia’s house and some invisible caster orc guy attacks. We kill him readily but then get confused; his picture showed all this armor and a big three-horned helmet and a ranseur but then his stats are that he is a sorcerer and has no armor. We decided that he was a cosplayer and that the armor was plaster and fake, just done so the other orcs wouldn’t pick on him for being a big pussy or something.

Finally we meet some surviving defenders including Anevia’s wife, Irabeth the orcish paladin. The GM explains that they’re chicks, and married, and one’s a LG paladin, etc.  Then like somewhat later, Chris says something like “Hey guys… I think she may be a lesbian,” in the tone of “I am just realizing this.” This causes some bafflement and hilarity; he’s tried to explain what he meant several times but we block it out because it’s more entertaining to mentally picture seeing two women talk about being married and having a bystander say “Wait a minute… I think that one lady is a lesbian.” I’m sure he’ll chime in here to defend his honor but my fingers are already in my ears.

They arrange to raise Calanthe from the dead as long as we go hit three cultist hard points; since that’s what we were planning to do anyway that’s fine. I also got lippy with Irabeth, the GM kinda kept rolling on us with “well you’re not actual official Crusaders, just trainees, maybe you can’t decide to execute evil prisoners…” She started to hem and haw about swearing us in as Crusaders and that maybe some grand poobah needed to do it and I told her in no uncertain terms that we’d already killed more cultists than most Crusaders, and that we were six of the something like nine total non-crippled paladin types in the Goddamned county overrun with demons.  She relented, and now we’re Crusaders!

Hosilla

Second Session (13 page pdf) – We go kill naughty cultist mongrelmen and their cultist leader “Hozilla.” No, seriously. “Hozilla.”

One set of “good” mongrelmen tells us we should go genocide some “bad” mongrelmen.  So of course we do.  And then we conduct enhanced interrogations, “Lawful Good style.”

We end up having a bunch of debates about what the right Good response is to a lot of this; our characters worship a variety of gods (Iomedae, Shelyn, Irori, some pagan god) and so there’s an interesting plurality of opinions there. I hate to gripe, but the GM kinda decided anytime we started talking about that he should butt in and tell us what the “right” response is. This totally jammed up any meaningful roleplay around the topic. Matt would basically say “yeah yeah what the GM said” and those of us with different opinions would just hunker down and cast sidelong glances at each other.

That got me in a bit of a bad mood, and then when we had a fight with some mongrelmen and I was told that it was impossible for my monk to jump a 4′ barricade – not “here’s a high Jump DC,” just “you can’t do it,” I pretty much checked out of the rest of the session and just did damage when told to. Normally I would have been jazzed about getting the death blow in on someone named Hozilla but eh.

Then we find a super artifact sword and give it to Shawanda, which is cool.  Her player, Patrick, is somewhat retiring a lot of the time so I like it when he gets an uber plot gizmo or whatever because it gives him more spotlight.

We also took a prisoner, Uziel, after some debate. There’s an unsubtly high premium on redeeming bad folks in this AP so we may as well get started I guess.

So, not the end of the world, just an off session.  It does raise my antennae though about too much railroading in the AP – not just in terms of “now here is your next scene,” but in the “here’s what you are supposed to do in this scene, and think, and feel.” I had some bad-touch experiences with that earlier in my gaming life and I’m touchy about it. (Yeah you, White Wolf staffer.)  There was a little of that with the NPCs in Jade Regent – “these NPCs have the magic hook on them, so you can be friends with them, but not these other people you meet, regardless of whether you find them more interesting.” I’m starting to get the sense of that in the “redeem the enemies” follies as well, and that will be disappointing.

Kenabres

First Session (17 page pdf) – It’s time for a festival in the town of Kenabres when there’s a minor goblin attack.  Oh wait, wrong Adventure Path, instead giant demons blow up the city and toss us into a hole to die.

We are starting with a full roster of characters this AP!  Six players, and they’re playing:

• Antonius (An Tung), a Tien who grew up Chelish. His monk/paladin journey along the path of Irori has led him to the Worldwound. (Ernest)
• Tabregon, a lame half-elven oracle of Iomedae. He loves being a healbot. (Bruce)
• Tsuguri Chiba, a Tien cleric of Tsukiyo. Antonius is a Twinkie but Tsuguri is super Asian in all the scary yelly ways. (Chris)
• Trystan, a half-elven bow-wielding paladin of Shelyn. But don’t call him a cherub, he hates that. (Matt)
• Shawanda, a Mwangi paladin of Iomedae. She’s the main tank. (Patrick)
• Calanthe, an aasimar sorceress of Shelyn. She’s our war leader and is somewhat embarassed when we call her “Khaleesi.” (Tim)

We get started by establishing the basic scene and determining who’s met who already. Then we’re sitting in some bleachers waiting for a festival and speech and stuff and…

Then we’re in the dark, with headaches.  It slowly comes back to us that some kind of massive demon attack happened above while we fight off giant maggots and take stock of who’s here.  Besides the PCs there’s a blind elf (Aravashnial), a lame chick (Anevia Tirablade), and a jerky guy (Horgus Gwerm). I like to say that all three of them are handicapped. We also find leftover scales from the giant silver dragon that was defending the city till it got its head chopped off by a balor or something, and they have kewl powers.

Then we wander around underground – looks like this isn’t going to be brief, looks like we’ll be here for a good number of sessions.  We’re first level so mainly we fight bugs, undead, and other vermin. Finally, we ally with some Mole People (mongrelmen).

Between finishing up character details, some fights and exploration, and madly trying to get to know each other and the three NPCs we don’t really get too many shenanigans in. But we’ll be more on our game next time!