Tag Archives: mendev

Xanthir Vang

Sixth Session (11 page pdf) – We slay Xanthir Vang, and then it’s mostly all over but the looting.  The extensive, extensive looting.

A spellcaster I can’t grapple?  Well that’s a corker.  I use my mythic maneuver power to Dirty Trick him while everyone else tries to figure out how to hurt him.  Sadly, “area effect spells” are what we don’t use, though apparently they would have been great.  After an epic fight, we kill him anyway.

End of battle quote, courtesy Bruce our session scribe, who often lives in a parallel plane of existence:

Calanthe looks at the mass of disintegrating worms. She says, “And thus I am avenged for the deaths of my parents. This is how we treat assassins who have no respect for life.” In saying this, of course, she does not know that she is channeling the only known words of Argrath the Liberator, who uttered a sacred oath to tear the Red Moon from the Middle Air.

An insider note – Xanthir offered a question-for-question info exchange.  We agreed, as long as Tabregon answered the questions.  This is a bit of an inside joke; Bruce, Tabregon’s player, both attends via Skype (and sometimes gets a warped impression of what’s going on as a result) and is somewhat notorious for not being able to explain things in a concise and coherent way.  We all giggled at the thought of this being put to good use against our enemies for once. Xanthir got frustrated fast and just went to combat. Heh heh.

The rest of the time we piled up loot. Next, we’re on to The Midnight Isles!

Jerribeth

Fifth Session (11 page pdf) – After a brief regrouping, we head out to the Ivory Labyrinth where we fight Jerribeth, a fetching looking mythic glabrezu demon, and send her down the dark road to the black mountain from which none ever return. Then we come face to… something squirmy with the worm-man sorcerer Xanthir Vang and, one can only assume, his magical pan flute!

First, though, Trystan convinces Arushalae to give him her magical bow as, you know, part of her repentance. This gives Antonius a very, very poor impression of Trystan. Avarice is non-good in general but Irori teaches separation from all earthly entanglements, so this is double grody to him. If this were a real good story, people’s sins would get used against them at some point during the AP but I’m sure that won’t happen.  It would be boss though.

We get to the Ivory Sanctum and find Jerribeth, who looks fair but is really just a glabrezu.  I grapple her anyway, which hurts a lot but I’m trying to become the ultimate mythic grapple monster so it’s good practice. It doesn’t stop her attacks but it sure stops her spells. I repeat my mocking schtick about “redeeming everyone!” when we defeat Jerribeth…

“OK, now let’s lead her on the road to redemption!” he declares, pausing long enough to see the horrified expressions on his comrades’ faces before snapping the demon’s neck.

Then we kick in a lot of buffs and just rampage through the complex. “Don’t stop to loot – there’s more kill to be had!” we cry as we sprint past our downed foes to the next room. We only halt once we get to Ol’ Wormy himself… Next time!

Arushalae, Reformed Succubus

Fourth Session (9 page pdf) – We find an allegedly reformed succubus and fight a sea of enemies on her behalf, just like with a normal succubus.

So this reformed succubus sends Tabregon a dream and we go get her and kill her enemies and she’s good and we of course believe her and want her to come join the Crusade because those guys are just poopy-head racists whenever they don’t like anyone with horns.

As you can tell from the tone there I started to get a bad attitude about this time and I’ll explain why.

Here’s the problem I have – it’s partly with this adventure path, and partly with how some of our party is acting around these “redemption” plotlines. We’re just eating the plot-points like so much pablum without any real roleplaying or interesting conflict about what’s supposed to be difficult moral decisions.  I’m not dumb, I’m sure she really is supposed to be good and there’s no “game success” repercussions to blindly trusting her.  That’s par for the course for these Paizo storylines, they usually only have one layer of complexity to them and don’t require you to really think or make hard decisions to succeed. What I do object to is not having any realistic push-back at all.  Succubi, what with the telepathy and dominate person? So we should all automatically back her?  I’m sure the crusaders won’t just throw us in the hole and execute her when we return, but they *should*, or at least there should be the threat of that.  “Detect evil” and metagaming shouldn’t settle every argument and some of these attempted redemptions (we’ve hauled a half dozen high level evil folks back to camp and dumped them there as possible proteges) should bite us in the ass.

I like the idea of a good campaign, and of the possibility of redeeming some foes – I’m usually the only one in most of our games suggesting we don’t just kill all our enemies out of hand. Everyone shouldn’t be unremittingly evil or there’s never any hope or changing people. But the way this is playing out, it just makes it… Cheap. There’s just no drama about it.  So it makes me bored.  As an Irori-ite I find Chaos just about as objectionable as Evil, but I’m sure no one in the group is interested in talking about that philosophical point so bah.

I understand some people like their games like this, but to me this kind of thing is the interesting crux of roleplaying so when it gets short shrift it drains most of the enjoyment for me – I could give a shit about killing more monzterz for their XPz. Story shouldn’t be video game cutscenes inflicted on you… I am trying to push more real in-character discussion on this stuff but we don’t have all of the group IC at the same moment pretty much ever so it’s hard to get going.

Vrock

Third Session (7 page pdf) – a Woundwyrm and mythic vrocks decide to challenge our Mythic Bullshit ™ but are thwarted! And we thaw out some new friends.

We prepped heavily for the fight with the Woundwyrm and it ended up being quite mobile and complex. Tsuguri’s aura of madness ability is the real star here, causing the beast to lose several rational moves.

“I know, let’s redeem it!” exclaims Antonius! Before everyone is done with their expressions of shock and horror,  he finishes it a swat from his weapon.

After we kill it we bust out some guys who got turned into statues, and one, Trevor, is Sosiel’s lost brother and has written a long sad letter to him.  We joke about delivering the letter and then trotting his brother out 30 seconds later. He’s pretty buff, so I try flirting with Trevor but to little effect.

Then we go to my Place of Destiny ™ and kill the mythic vrock that engineered the evil ritual that set me on my path to mythic notability.

This was a pretty tactical session but I was punchy so I got in a lot of little quips.

Second Session (14 page pdf) – Our heroes continue to investigate the Worldwound and slay various beasties found therein.

First up: The Shrine of the Fallen. Interesting note, we were having fun with playing explorer and naming all the terrain features we came across regardless of whether anyone else had named them (natives, what do they know) and I declared this place the Shrine of the Fallen.  And later we found out that was totally its name and the undead that haunt it are called “fallen.” Noice!

Zanedra

Next up: Some half elf chick named Zanedra and some Baphomet cultists. She has a monster with her that turns out to be her eidolon, she’s a summoner! Its name is something like “Spinnarabeth,” which is weird because the suffix -beth is used for a lot of villain names in this AP. I immediately develop a conspiracy theory that this is usual among evil people and resolve to keep a better eye on Irabeth back in Drezen. We take Zanedra captive and send her back for justice, which might be dangerous (won’t her eidolon just come back? Eh, who knows.).

Then it’s bodaks… Shawanda, Trystan, and I pretty much kill whatever we get to hit so it’s just a race to see who goes first.

Antonius steps into the bodak and smites it three times with his three-section staff. He destroys it utterly. Shawanda puts her sacred blade back into the scabbard with an irritated sigh.

But then I fail to kill Skullgrim the nabassu in one attack routine and she gets to kill him, so balance is restored to the force.

Jesker Helton

First Session (11 page pdf) – We fight some random wildlife and then have a brotherly encounter with some barbarians.  Not really.

We are on a quest to find some demented priest of Erastil who has gone all Number 23. We find him and kill the demon he vomits up.  He’s still evil, but then again so is everyone we take on as minons in this AP. The dead Erastilian hero whose tomb we find him in is interred with some super magic bow that Trystan covets.

Trystan recovers his commune spell to ask the burning question, “Would Erastil want us (me) to have Delamar’s bow?”
Shelyn’s reply, “No.”
“What’s that Shelyn? I can’t quite make you out… zzzzCRACKLE,” says Trystan.
The rest of the group stares sternly at him and he sighs.

Retriever

Then, we go on patrol with Jestak our evil barbarian captive.

Trystan raises the alarm, “Evildoers are afoot!” Antonius and Jestak leap to their feet.
Jestak yells, “Evildoers? I have been told we hate evildoers!”
Shawanda stares sternly at Jestak.

I got to try to grapple a retriever, which actually posed a grappling challenge for me which was nice. I talk everyone into bringing the jewel-eyed spider skulls back to complete our dance club in Drezen.

I had to leave before the next part, where the group got to Winter Sun Hall and met up with a barbarian leader who is connected to Shawanda (he calls her “Sister,”), they both were exposed to the same awfulness that started her down her mythic path. He attacks, and Trystan just kills him with an arrow of human slaying. Apparently the keeping everyone evil alive stuff only applies in some cases, when it won’t cause a huge buzzkill for someone else’s plotline. Sad trombone.

Sixth Session (12 page pdf) – And finally we liberate Drezen and retake the Sword of Valor! We relax by going to kill some grandmas.

Deeper in the dungeon, a bunch of Deskari statues do a phantasmal killer on the NPC Sosiel; he lives but is driven insane. I have to choke him out too (I choke out about one person per game session). Then, it’s a Grimtooth’s Traps moment with a pit of green slime that nearly devours Shawanda totally.

Then we find Aron Kir (Sam Winchester) under the thrall of a shadow demon. I KO him, the demon comes out and it gets frisky. It tosses Shawanda all the way back into the green slime pit, which is entertaining in a morbid way. It turns into a festival of me and Shawanda tanking it, the healers pouring healing into us, and Calanthe magic missiling away (sovereign against incorporeal foes!).

We come away with the Sword of Valor.  Huzzah!

Then we get Drezen in order and try to redeem/heal our various evil and/or insane posse.

• Joran Vhane – evil dwarf
• Chaleb – evil homicidal cavalier
• Uziel – evil tiefling rogue
• Sosiel – insane cleric
• Aron – formerly possessed drug addict
• Jestak – evil homicidal barbarian

Yes, these are the understudies for our party of paladins.

Octoeagle

We go out on patrol and find three crazy grandmas who are actually hag cultists of Lamashtu conducting Island of Dr. Moreau experiments and have created a largely-useless “octoeagle” (octopus/eagle hybrid) and “clawyote” (coyote with crab claws). We kill them for crimes against nature. We loot their country-clutter decor with abandon and take the two animals back to be mascots for our two army units.

Fifth Session (13 page pdf) –  Though we’ve killed Staunton Vhane, there’s a lower level that still needs clearing in Drezen. “Someone’s in my root cellar. Someone with a fresh soul!”

First we do loot distribution.  I should do a separate post with our 3l33t loot tracking and distribution spreadsheet format, it makes it easy to keep up with it all. You find literally 100 different things per AP volume and tracking it needs some rigor.

The dumb demonblood addict has run off again. We head into the dungeons of Drezen to find him and the Sword of Valor (really a banner, in a case of false advertising). Vampires and demons and such annoy us until we’re finally at a loss as to where to go, we have to bring in Staunton Vhane’s brother Joran to do the dwarf thing and show us the secret door we can’t find.

Salamander

Inside, we find the Corruption Forge and a bunch of salamanders.  I love salamanders, I don’t know why. Probably the super boss AD&D MM art. Everyone else starts taking the slow way down and I just swashbuckler-swing down there, get in the middle of ’em and start whaling away. It hurts, but a lot of my Iron Mountain and Champion of Irori powers have to do with staying in one place and being surrounded…

Then it’s a priestess and schir demons and crystal widgets. Calathe actually has shatter for some reason (well, there have been a lot of demonic crystals in this campaign) and she brings it down while we destroy them in detail.

Staunton Vhane

Fourth Session (14 page pdf) – We slay and slay and slay until we finally get to the dwarven antipaladin Staunton Vhane. And then we slay some more!

First I choke out another succubus. My new imprinting hand mythic trick is very Irorian.  Then we fight a bunch of insolence demons that make us insolent for a while. The difference is hard to notice.

Then it’s antipaladin time! He has a brother, blood demons, fiendish minotaurs… Finally, a stand-up fight! We get a good tactical exercise and wipe the floor with ’em.  Then it’s all over but the looting and the intel gathering.

Third Session (12 page pdf) – We reduce the remaining demonic armies and lay siege to the fortress of Drezen. The command staff inserts via a poorly defended point and sweeps and clears a good portion of the ground level, allowing the paladin forces into the keep.

First we personally assault the brimorak-manned catapult towers, then we lead our forces against their armies and rout them. That then leaves the citadel buttoned up – time for PC SpecOps strikes!

Here’s an example snippet of purple prose describing how that goes:

Calanthe then peppers the other brimorak with a magic missiles to leave it horribly wounded. Trystan finishes the job with two shots, clean through the creature’s eyes. It falls from the parapet, screaming like a hell-muppet.

We kill constructs and demons and cultists with gimp masks and elementals. We come across another shrine where Iomedae appears to us again.  Oh, as if, we’re LG not Lawful Stupid, we channel some positive energy and when she takes damage we smoke her. She’s a succubus and she enslaves Shawanda but I give her an Egorian style beat down.

They all pause to pray at the altar of Iomedae. “Forgive us our lusty thoughts!” mumbles Shawanda under her breath. The other crusaders try to make sense of her words. “Lusty slots?” thinks Trystan. “Hungry slots?” thinks Tsuguri. “Lusty sluts?” thinks Antonius.

This is real dialogue, Patrick was muttering and we couldn’t hear him, and we all heard variations on dirty things, as we are wont to do. We fight a mimic, during which Tsuguri insists that pee is the only thing that will get the monster’s adhesive excretion off people.

After several rounds of death and Tsuguri attempting to urinate on his party members, they all come unstuck.
They find four suits of masterwork full plate, one of which is magical, mithril, and painted gold and Iomedae-y. Shawanda swoons. Trystan starts to explain how he might benefit from it as well and she yells, “Bling bling honky!” and flees the room with
the armor.

In Aliens fashion, we declare the area “secure” and let in our paladins through the front door to occupy the better part of the first floor.  We go up to one of the parapets and find a crazy barbarian woman that’s decapitated all her tribesmen. Calanthe (Tim) decides to use a spell to impersonate antipaladin Staunton Vhane halfway through this which comes close to ending in fratricide. I choke her out (monk grappling is so great against casters and two-handed weapon users!). We toss her in a tiger cage and wrap up!

This was a fun session, we were a little punchy so it got a little silly but good.  We’re decently overpowered in this AP and it’s a nice change – it’s boring rolling over opposition when it’s meaningless grind like a couple sessions ago, but when it’s interesting stuff it’s as fun as being on the ropes all the time. Plus, it makes us feel more OK with taking prisoners and negotiating and stuff, as opposed to “I MUST USE MY ACTION ECONOMY FOR TOTAL WAR OR WE WILL BE TPKED.” That gets old.

Second Session ( 14 page pdf) – Our army reaches Drezen and we start in on the reduction of its defenses, fighting both armies and monsters with increasingly ridiculous names.

Nabassu

A lot gets done this session!  First, we fight a nabassu in ruins. It’s a lively battle and there’s much loot to be had.  After that, we head towards Drezen with our army.  We are semi thwarted by demonic locusts but get through that.

Then we find out that Aron Kir, aka “Sosiel’s bottom,” has a demon blood addiction problem like Sam from Supernatural. We decide immediately that Sosiel looks like Dean and Aron looks like Sam and it’s all slashfic all the time thereafter.

When we get to Drezen, we reconnoiter and find it’s basically a bunch of zones with armies in it…

Drezen

We take out Southbank first and then try to capture the bridge, but unlucky rolling lets them destroy it before we can secure it. So we clear out the cemetery and Paradise Hill (apparently even crusader citadels have low income housing projects) while we rebuild.  We stretch the mass combat rules to their breaking point with our cunning tactics.

In the cemetery we come across a monster, “Moxaboo the berbalang.” I laughed so hard at his name I nearly peed myself and named him “Riddleyboo” for the couple rounds he lasts against us. Come on Filipinos, you have a perfectly good monster and give it the goofiest ass name ever.

Then a mythic cold chimera thing (I call it a cryo-mera!) attacks us. It’s a brutal fight and I get in my patented backbreaker move! It counts as a mythic trial so we all get a new mythic level and everything goes all Highlander for a minute. Good times!