Tag Archives: reavers

Twenty-first Session (9 page pdf) – “Voodoo Man” – As the party departs the ruins of Viperwall, the voodoo bokor Glapion catches up with them.  He summons forces from the spirit world to destroy them; in an epic battle they defeat him by main force and a little voodoo of their own.  Then it’s back to Magnimar where they meet up with some old friends!

The fight with Glapion took about three hours.  He kept summoning shadows and shadow creatures, and the players fought and fought.  It was an excellent endurance fight.  I did some voodoo research to prepare for the big event; he invoked various Petro loas during the battle (like Kalfou, Samedi, and various Simbi loa) to trigger appropriate powers.

Here’s Glapion’s character sheet.  I wanted him to be able to summon shadow spirits, as that’s one of the themes of the campaign, so I made him an Oracle of Bones (from the Paizo Advanced Player’s Guide preview)  with levels in the 3.5e prestige class “Master of Shrouds.”

I think he came off very well.  Even though the spark of inspiration, I will admit, was from seeing Disney’s “Princess and the Frog” with my daughter, this is how he appeared (the art is from a comic called Doctor Voodoo).  Reskinning foes is so easy, you can find the core of an idea and then hang whatever visuals you want on it.  I made him very exotic, from his hunga munga to his gunpowder-infused bottle of rum.

Once he reached the end of his powers and the shadow demon came into play, things got hairy.  It magic jarred Tommy and started to telekinetically toss around other PCs. That was entertaining.

Then the rest of the session was travel and roleplay.  They went back to the interracial-friendly town of Nybor and interacted with their semi-insane gnomish swamp guide, then went back to Magnimar where they met their good old buddy, Thalios Dondrel, son of Mordekai!

There was also an important development with Sindawe.  He had an Angel Heart-esque sexual encounter (walls bleeding, snakes writhing, etc.) with a kava store clerk who turned out to be Mama Watanna, the “old voodoo mambo” from the ship in the tree at the beginning of their foray into Viperwall.  This is also courtesy of my research; Mama Watanna is effectively a Golarion-ized aspect of Mami Wata, well-known African water deity.  Mami Wata is known to take lovers, and give them good luck in exchange for their fidelity; that’s basically what happened to Sindawe.

Sindawe is Mwangi (Golarion’s Africa) and venerates Shimye-Magalla, a janiform deity that is also partially goddess of the water, but he hasn’t put 2 and 2 together on that yet.

You know, there’s a lot of people out there apparently, grown adults, that don’t do any kind of adult themes or “icky sex” in their games.  And that’s their huge loss.  The vast majority of real world myth, fiction, etc. strongly incorporates sex/love/romance, human frailties, the horrors that men do, etc. – that’s what gives them their impact.  I mean, if you just want to “play casual” and kick down doors and kill orcs, fine, but I got over that after my first ten years of playing RPGs…

Anyway, the session went really well – hardcore combat, hardcore roleplay.  Can you believe it’s 21 sessions?  We’re nearly at a year.  As I keep telling them, “you’ll be done with the first chapter of Second Darkness any session now…”

Twentieth Session (10 page pdf) – “The Lower Temple” – As the party continues to wind deeper into the ancient serpentfolk temple beneath Viperwall, there’s investigation, puzzles, and loads of undead threat.  Then the group faces the avatar of the semi-dead god Ydersius.  Death looms near for our favorite Ulfen snake lover…  All in the latest installment of Reavers on the Seas of Fate!

Beware, there are plenty of spoilers for Green Ronin’s Madness in Freeport adventure, from which the serpent temple was taken.  And you may want to brush up on the previous couple summaries; there’s a lot in here that ties in with previous events but it’s not expanded on in the summary all the time.

After many levels of the “Upper Temple,” what was the human area of Viperwall, the Reavers have made it down into the “Lower Temple,” of ancient serpentfolk provenance.  And it’s big.  Last time they hit four of its levels, and each one gets larger as they descend. This time, it’s levels five and six.

I think it was a bit unexpected to the PCs that the shadows (which usually attack them) of the serpent men (which usually attack them) were only sometimes hostile; mostly they were caught in their own mildly crazed, shade-trapped existence and the group talked with some of them, ignored some of them, and fought some of them. It was a lot more interesting than a “kill a billion shadows” dungeon crawl.

Here’s one weakness I have though – I’m terrible at riddles.  I knew the riddle in the scenario sucked, but I couldn’t think a better one up (and had been off the plane from California for only like 8 hours when I had to run the session and hadn’t had prep time to search something out).  And it was made worse by Wogan legitimately guessing “egg!” even before Sseth spouted his riddle (fricking Gollum…).  Ah well, an easy win for Wogan.

The group finally released the high priestess trapped in the mirror.  She’s from thousands of years ago.  In traditional adventurer style they went through fits of just wanting to kill her and take her stuff despite her not being overly hostile (she wasn’t overly friendly either – last time she knew she was high priestess of a huge civilization, and now suddenly she’s among a bunch of scruffy nerf herders in skull makeup looting the place).  They settled for beating her down and taking her stuff.  Things were going OK with only threats of violence until Serpent rolled a 1 on his Diplomacy roll trying to convince her of the situation; that made her decide they were just tomb robbers.  Her high level spells are gone since her god is mostly-dead (they nearly crapped themselves when they realized she tried to cast dictum on them) but her low-level ones and her serpent style kung fu made a decent showing of it.

I am up for suggestions here actually – so far she’s still with them, and I’d like to depict well someone who is from a wildly different, ancient culture.  She only speaks Aklo of course, so communication is only via Samaritha (and Serpent, in this chapter) – I’m trying to come up with less verbal stuff for her to do – I don’t know, weird habits, eating rituals, smacking people for weird stuff – to help depict that she’s very different.

The snake fight is short in the summary but the thing did horrific amounts of damage to people – bite, grab, and constrict and away go the hit points.  Serpent had to spend an Infamy Point to not die (he wanted to get a lot more out of it, but he waited until he had taken enough damage to go past -10, so an emergency save is all it got him). I think Sindawe might have spent one too.  Well, that’s what they’re for.

In the end, they broke the curse, freed the shades of the serpent priests, collapsed the temple, and got the idol!  Wictory!  So now with idol and priestess in tow, and a delay poison wand to get them safely past the poison gas the ruin weeps outside, they’re heading out to return to Riddleport and prevent the arcane nastiness!  But it’s not going to be that simple…

Nineteenth Session (10 page pdf) – “Viperwall” – The ancient human ruins of Viperwall give way to even more ancient serpentfolk ruins beneath.  And a shadow-cursed high priest of that race asks Serpent for help!   Traps, shadows, demons, and ancient artifacts abound, but there is nothing more dangerous than another PC.  Check out the hot PvP action in this installment.

This episode is a good example of how to successfully weave together published scenarios into a campaign.  I combined two adventures as part of the dungeon – Beyond the Towers, a Green Ronin adventure, which served as the layout for the swamp and the human temple of Viperwall, and Madness in Freeport, which gave us the subterranean serpent temple.

Where they have elements that support your themes – like the shadows in the serpent temple – you keep it.  Where they have elements that don’t – like the lizardy guys BtT placed in the swamp – you change it (to boggards, the classic Varisian swamp threat, in my case).  The players were surprised to find out that the upper/human temple and the lower/serpent temple were taken from completely different adventures, and that’s the way you want it.

The PCs faced some decent fights this session, but the biggest one was when Wogan got dominated by a statue magic trap thingy and unloaded on the party.  He wasn’t going to kill anyone, but they had to be careful with hurting their priest, and he was blowing valuable spells and channels on them.

Next time, the dungeon crawl reaches its conclusion!  I am not really a huge dungeon fan, truth be told, but they’re good as one element in a complete mix.

Seventeenth and Eighteenth Sessions (14 page pdf) – “Fleeing Riddleport” and “Beyond the Towers” – In this special double summary, the PCs flee Riddleport with shadows, gendarmes, and half-orc enforcers on their heels.  Samaritha suddenly comes out with a whole bunch of information about how they need to go to an ancient ruin deep inland in Varisia called Viperwall.  They are suspicious, but go anyway.  The trip is pleasant, and an old voodoo mambo living in the swamp gives them some aid.  Then, it’s into the ancient trap-infested ruins of a lost culture!

Seventeen

Sadly, Session Seventeen’s original writeup was lost in an untoward laptop OS reinstall incident.  We put it back together as best as we could, but of course it is a bit more brief.  The PCs fled Riddleport after discovering all the crime lords voted to have them whacked.  The group disagreed as to how guilty Saul was in all this.  Some felt that he had betrayed them and should die; others felt that he was stuck in a situation where he had no choice and did the best he could.

The trip, though reasonably uneventful, was fun.  There are two things that PCs can’t get enough of – shopping and goblins.  I had the new Adventurer’s Armory book and threw in some random weird stuff for them to find – naturally, they bought about everything.  I think their favorite was Sindawe’s purchase of a set of cold iron brass knuckles crudely engraved with “Elf Puncher” – ELFPU on one hand and NCHER on the other.

I don’t let PCs buy just anything they want; common equipment is readily available but if you’re looking for people to have unusual stuff (especially magic) “on hand” then there’s a lot of random chance involved.  You can commission things, if you plan to be around and not be dead or in jail in a week or so, which is a sadly uncommon state for player characters.

They then had a pretty calm trip upriver. So calm that they were getting a little stir crazy, when a batch of goblins appeared.  They were all stuffed into a washtub they were using as a boat to tow a bloated cow corpse somewhere.  There was a fire going in the tub for unspecified reasons.  This captured the PCs’ imagination like no one’s business, and they ended up betting on who could shoot the most goblins.  There was zero danger in this encounter; goblins are incompetent in general and they only had a couple bows between the lot of them.  Good old redneck style fun.

Everyone really enjoyed the session.  I find that to often be the case – shopping and travel and the other “mundane” parts of life bring out the role-playing and world immersion in folks, and they really get into it.  It never fails to surprise me, but in previous campaigns as well I’ve had PCs have a great time going through bazaars and shops finding random stuff to buy.  It’s a popular recreation in real life too, I reckon.

Eighteen

I had a little fun with this one.  After the previous session, I remembered the other thing besides shopping and goblin abuse that groups always love – and that’s hating gnomes.  Nilbog the trapper is the typical crazy gnome, and I borrowed liberally from various movies to spice it up.

Nilbog’s Trapper Song was taken from the awesome Cannibal: The Musical (Trey Parker’s first feature length film).  Watch it to get the full experience!  (I replaced “Eskimo” with “Wendigo” to make it more Golarion friendly but otherwise it was usable as written!)

And his crazed raccoon and trunk full of rabbits in his boat was taken from another great movie, Thunderbolt and Lightfoot (Clint Eastwood, Jeff Bridges).  Start watching about 4 minutes in:

And to be honest some of this adventure was inspired by the Disney movie “The Princess and the Frog.”  The voodoo mambo who was living in the boat in the tree was inspired by Mama Odie,

and Glapion is inspired by Doctor Faciler (at least in part).

As you can see, the cinematic inspirations you use can be pretty far flung…

More next time!

Sixteenth Session (13 page pdf) – “The Sitdown” – A meeting of all Riddleport’s crimelords is held and Saul and the PCs are invited.  Saul is given Avery Slyeg’s empty seat at the table and they engage in negotiations with Riddleport’s other “serious people” and their demented minions.  It seems like things go well, except when they get sent on a simple message-delivery mission afterward, it’s a trap!  Business as usual in this sixteenth game session of Reavers on the Seas of Fate!

This was a role-play heavy session, which I enjoy.  The big crime lord sit-down was inspired by like very Mafia movie ever made.  It was an adaptation of the opening scene of Madness in Freeport, the third module in the Freeport Trilogy – but in that one, the Freeport Captain’s Council holds a ball.  A ball?  Jeez, this is Riddleport.  So instead we have a standard “goons around a table” meeting.  It served a couple purposes.  One was to give the PCs a glimpse into the larger power dynamics of Riddleport and also to meet personally all the movers and shakers now that they’re a respectable level (character level and level of Infamy they’ve gained).  Another is to help set up explanations for what’s about to happen.  In the Second Darkness Adventure Path as written, there’s this whole ‘the drow are behind it’ subplot that I’m not using a bit of, instead going for more of a motivation/plot from Freeport using the location and NPCs of Riddleport – although the perceptive will notice some Freeport originals making their way in (Milos, Anton Mescher, Karl the Kraken…) .

Running it all this way has let me use recurring characters a lot more.  If you just run Freeport as written, there’s a lot of “who the heck is this new guy” syndrome.  But here, when Avery Slyeg (Riddleport’s answer to Councilor Verlaine) is assassinated, it’s two people the PCs are familiar with doing it.  When they go to this crime lord sitdown, some of the people are new to them, but they know a lot of them.  In fact the PCs were gratified to see that Clegg Zincher had to fill his third accompanying-minion slot with some low level goon since they took out his capp Braddikar Faje earlier.  I worked in people they knew from earlier and tried to throw in other NPCs they’ll be dealing with in the future like Captain Grudge.

One of my general rules of GMing is “use the same NPC when you can!”  It’s analagous to the theory of Chekov’s Gun.  That’s the one place where I felt like the original Freeport trilogy kinda fell down – it kept putting in new hapless guys to rescue (Lucius, Egil, Thuron) and so I’ve collapsed all three of them into one character (Samaritha).  Well, I had Vincenz standing on for Lucius but he got offed.

So now the PCs realize they’re Marked for Death ™!  They’re not sure what to do.  “Bust in and kill Saul” is one of the leading options under discussion, but I’m worried that’s because two of the players know “that’s what’s supposed to happen next” in Second Darkness.  Like I said, I’m using NPCs and encounters from SD but have pretty much already totally left its plot behind.  But I guess we’ll find out – tomorrow!

Fifteenth Session (10 page pdf), “Terror in Riddleport” – The PCs get led into a deathtrap, the serpent temple is back in business, Avery Slyeg gets assassinated, the PCs get framed for it, the Gold Goblin is attacked, and Sindawe beats up Bojask for kicks!  It’s an action packed session where death lurks around every corner.

My mashing up of the classic Freeport Trilogy and the first chapters of the Second Darkness Adventure Path hits full stride in this session.  I was somewhat surprised, but my old gaming group in Memphis cited the deathtrap in Terror in Freeport (the second Freeport adventure) as one of their most vivid memories.  I had been tempted to ax it, as I’m not a big trap guy, but I ran it pretty much as written instead, and had the assassination they happen upon afterwards be crimelord Avery Slyeg’s.  Jesswin (the assassin who tried to kill Saul, and then got tortured by Tommy) is both the lure to the trap and the hitter, and the Splithog Pauper in there too!

Then, both in Terror and in Shadow in the Sky (the first adventure in Second Darkness), the next part is defending a friendly building against a large scale assault – in this case the Gold Goblin.  A whole load more of previously-encountered NPCs show up for the fight –  Braddikar Faje, Angvar, and Thuvalia.  Probably the most entertaining part of the assault was the hard fight against the raging orc barbarian, who got greased and reduced and otherwise tampered with for a long time before he went down.  Anyway, they give them all a good killing.

Warning – Sensitive Topic!  Don’t proceed if you’re not comfortable with the topic of rape in a RPG.

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Fourteenth Session (11 page pdf), “Booty in Riddleport” – Naval combat!  The PCs’ pirate ship takes on a Chelish navy vessel.  They escape, and take a nice plump merchant ship as a prize, and make their way back to Riddleport.  The next couple weeks are a blur of loot, booze, hookers, drugs, and recreational violence.

It wouldn’t be a pirate outing without some naval combat.  The Chelaxian ship from Session Summary 3, the Raptor (Captain Vix Charlo, commanding), appeared as the PCs’ ship, the Wandering Dagger, was leaving the sacked Staufendorf Island.  Wogan immediately had the brilliant idea of loosing their new eversmoking bottle on the stern, which combined with clever maneuvering kept them almost unharmed by the navy ship’s chase gun.  It was back and forth – the Raptor nearly overtook them before they got up to speed, but then they got a lead, but then the Chelish nearly caught up, but in the end they escaped without a full battle.  And that darn Thalios Dondrel made his Will save.

I won’t post my naval rules here yet because I submitted them for the Fire As She Bears competition from Lou Agresta and Sinister Adventures, but they’ll be OGL so you’ll get your paws on them one way or another soon enough.  Hint, I combined my already field-tested OGL cannon rules, chase rules, and mass combat rules (along with a bunch of new stuff) to put it together.

Then they get to be predator, not prey, when they take a merchant ship.  The PCs were initally concerned about the ten gun-ports on the thing, but Captain Clap just roared, “I said, RUN OUT THE GUNS!!!!”  Turns out the gunports were fake and he knew about it.  Being a pirate isn’t all about kicking ass; living long is about being wily is the lesson to take away.

Then back to Riddleport and a taste of the rock star lifestyle that pirates flush with loot enjoy there!  The PCs entertained themselves for the rest of their session, with such stirring quotes as “Hey let’s go double up on a tiefling hooker,” “I can milk anything with nipples,” and “Now we’ll rip off the local drug suppliers and go into the narcotics business!”  I don’t know, I think I might should change their alignments from Lawful Good, what do you think?

By the way, here’s where an iPhone with Google access is bad ass.  The PCs say, “We want to go kidnap some spiders!  What can we get that’ll keep spiders off us?”  Rather than say “No!” or “Uh, anti-spider herbs?” I did a quick search and BAM!  Hedge apples! (aka horse apples, aka osage-oranges.)  I know some people have given up on the roots of D&D as a vector to research weird information, but not me baby!

Thirteenth Session (16 page pdf), “Mansion of Shadows, Part III” – The inevitable holocaust of violence descends on Staufen Manor.  At the Asmodean funeral for the eldest son, the PCs decide it’s time to wipe out the whole family – but the priest is ready for them with summoned devils.  Simultaneously, the pirates assault the island!  The fledgling pirates carefully decide who to rape and kill and who to protect from the raping and killing.  Who gets it?  Read and find out!

This was a super-sized session, we went for about 8 hours, which was good because the players just had so much fun intriguing with the Staufens that it took us a while to get to the violence.  Every time I’d try to advance the timeline they’d run off and do something else in some dark corner of the keep.  Fair enough!

Then the fight in the chapel went pretty fast.  The priest was 7th level but Sindawe used an Infamy Point to do him in – he pulled the mirror down on him and spent a point and we decided that it happened just as he was channeling to summon more critters and he went through the gate the other way, ending up in Hell!  And there was much chortling.

They were happy to see most of the Staufens meet their brutal ends.  Then, they kept complaining that I wouldn’t let them loot all the bodies with a bunch of Staufen guards standing around.  “Surely they will leave us alone to molest the body of their dead lord soon!”  Sigh.

We used my new Quickie Mass Combat Rules to handle the pirate attack. It went pretty fast and smooth.  It seems like it lends itself well to handing out index cards with units on them to the players to have them pick  up some of the slack too.  The PCs were thinking fast, I was proud.  Wogan laid a fog cloud on the parapet to disrupt the orc crossbowmen, which was good because they were going to get free attacks on the pirates till that gate got open.  Then once the battle was joined, they even remembered about the other door in the inner wall and used it to flank the guards – that’s the kind of things PCs love to just forget about.  And then Wogan used one of his Infamy Points to bullseye Jack from across the battle.  “Yo ho ho, bitch!”  he shouted as Jack crumpled.  The other players really liked that.

I’m going to have to tighten up on the use of Infamy Points to autokill enemy leaders once I start getting some I want to stay around longer.  These guys are just mooks so if they die, great; if they live I’ll level them and bring them back for later torment.

The looting sequence was fun; the PCs got to run rampant over all the color text they had seen before.  They were sad that a) they weren’t supposed to keep whatever they looted, the pirates do fair shares and b) that the halfling alchemist wasn’t retarded, and when pirates attacked right after weirdo visitors paid her about a thousand gold for every weaponizable product she had, she took the money and ran.  They were bemused but entertained by the huge pumpkin that they took as loot.  My personal theory is that pirate (and orc) looting pretty much operates according to the Redneck Principle, which is that things are taken based on how good it feels to hold them up and scream “WOOOOOOOO!!!!!” at the top of your lungs.  Some of that is gold and jewels – and in this case, some of it is 70 pound pumpkins and inn signs.

Next time, back to Riddleport.  But first… <cue Mars, the Bringer of War>

Twelfth Session (12 page pdf), “Mansion of Shadows, Part II” – The PCs hang out with a Chelish noble family for a while, and witness depths of degeneration that make even hardened criminals from Riddleport uncomfortable.  After a long night of sneaking around the mansion and fleeing from horrid things, they lure the eldest son out to the forest and whack him.

[Note: spoilers for Mansion of Shadows, a Green Ronin d20 adventure]

Our Pathfinder campaign, Reavers on the Seas of Fate, continues in good spirits as our fledgling pirates continue their infiltration of the Staufen family manor.  I haven’t had to change the adventure a whole lot from the Green Ronin original; “demented devil worshipping noble family” drops right into Golarion’s Cheliax without a second thought.  In fact, the players are already speculating on both the Asmodeus worship and “seven sins” ancient Thassilonian elements, both of which came along in the original!

The players definitely found the mansion super creepy.  The best parts were:

• The hugely fat naked freak eating nonstop in the kitchen.  My impression of it picking up its battleaxe and giving them the hairy eyeball even as it continued to munch on a leg of mutton, and that later when it was sleeping it was sleep-gnawing on the same mutton, made quite an impression. But they were most disturbed when they found out it was female (Leanor Staufen).
• Serpent being too nosy and ending up running around Three Stooges style fleeing from one devil after another in the mansion at night, even tossing himself down a staircase to escape more quickly.  “Woowoowoowoowoo!”
• Sindawe seducing Amalinda Staufen in the catacombs under the temple to Asmodeus, and after she put out the candle, he started to realize that her cadaverous body was horribly similar to a lot of the preserved corpses in the room.  He got so nervous that he lit a sunrod and passed it off as “Oh, I just wanted to be able to look at you.”

Rules note, Serpent had to spend an Infamy Point to stop Jack from getting away.  The PCs didn’t really coordinate ahead of time and so when Serpent decided to attack Erich it caused enough confusion that Jack rode off on his horse, which would have been pretty much a scenario-derailer – if they couldn’t find a way back into the mansion then the pirate attack would pretty much be a non-starter.  But Serpent coughed up an Infamy Point so I rolled a random encounter and said “His horse got disabled by a… dire badger… so you’re able to catch up to him.”  So in the end it worked out fine.

Next time in Mansion of Shadows, Part III – both a mass combat and a naval battle!  I’m working on rules for both to make them fun and not onerous.

Eleventh Session (10 page pdf), “Mansion of Shadows, Part I” – After the PCs kill Jasker Gant, one of crime lord Boss Croat’s lieutenants, they decide to go on the lam for a while.  They get “loaned out” by Saul to Captain Clap of the pirate ship Wandering Dagger, who has a little job for them.  Also, the triumphal return of Thalios Dondrel, son of Mordekai!  [Reavers on the Seas of Fate Home]

Thanks to Paul (Serpent Johansson) who has taken on session scribe duties.  You’ll notice I included some pics in this session summary – for the sessions, I Google for random images and pull images from the adventure PDFs as props.  The players said that for their use at least, it would be a lot more helpful to have the NPC pics in the session summaries for their reference.  I hope no one objects to me using them in this way; if you have a beef just let me know.

Mansion of Shadows is a Green Ronin “Bleeding Edge” adventure from back in the day.  I liked the line, they were all pretty good.

Using this adventure illustrates two important principles useful for everyone running a pirate campaign (the best kind of campaign).

1.  It’s easy to take any adventure location and make it an island.  When 3e was new, my gaming group and I (rotating DMs) ran a pirate campaign.  I bought all the initial wave of third party d20 adventures and handed them out.  Since most of them try to be “generic” by placing themselves in some semi isolated location that doesn’t have too much relation to the surrounding world,  you can usually wave your magic wand and call it an island with zero additional work.   One of them I remember had a map that was a huge field of mountains, with one road leading in, and the town/adventure location right there in the middle of it!  Might as well have been an island in the first place.  This one is no exception – the town of Staufendorf is largely encircled by rivers.  A wave of my lasso tool in GIMP and oh look it’s an island.

2.  It’s easy to take any adventure and make it suitable for evil (or neutral-piratey) characters.  A lot of adventures – and Paizo and Green Ronin’s are frequently examples – have several factions of bad guys for you to play off each other.  Paladin-heavy parties have angst about that but piratey parties sure don’t.  Frankly most adventures have a fairly simplistic view of good – “go kill the bad guys and take their stuff!”  Well, that’s as rousing a battle cry for bad PCs – good sticks together, but evil is happy to cannibalize itself.

Behind the Scenes

The party totally did not want to go help the slaves, but Ox (now in NPC form since Bruce moved) wasn’t to be persuaded to leave them behind.  So it was the worst of all worlds, in that only Ox and Sindawe were there for the fight!  No worries, however – Jasker Gant rolled totally crappy and Ox got a megacrit on him and then on one of the goons in short order.  The party’s general conclusion was “Oh sure, now he becomes effective!”

I knew they wouldn’t be able to resist killing another crime lord’s capp (“made man”/lieutenant) for long.  They barely refrained from killing Braddikar Faje earlier, and this time they didn’t even worry about it.  (Tommy’s player Kevin was playing Ox for the encounter).

Anyway, they went and wangled themselves a gig with a pirate ship to go raid a Chelaxian manor house.  After the pirates put them on board a pleasure yacht, I rolled two random encounters.  The first, a wyvern, was pretty tough.  The second was a dire shark!!!  I’m not a big believer in “level appropriate” when it comes to wilderness encounters.  But I had mercy – they killed the wyvern and had it on a tow rope, so when the shark showed up it just ate the wyvern.  Seeing a 60 foot shark go by caused a real brown pants moment.

Then they wandered around Staufendorf a while.  Everyone they talked to, they tried to get at “why are there crucified commoners about?” but everyone would just say in a loud voice, pretty much verbatim, “Staufendorf is a lovely place to live, full of honest and hard-working folk.  It’s a great place to raise a family!”  It got the point across, heh heh heh.

So now they’re infiltrating the nobles’ mansion, trying to figure out how to weaken it enough that 30 pirates can take the place.  They’re kinda worried about it since it’s very well defended.  I’m not sure how they’re going to do it, but I’m sure they’ll figure it out.

Tenth Session (11 page pdf), “Death in Riddleport, Part III” – Samaritha’s gone missing, and the PCs track her to – yes, you guessed it – the serpent temple.  Along with a new friend, they hit the place hard, and there’s no retreating this time.

Sadly, Bruce (Ox), our usual session scribe, moved to Dallas and no one else brought a laptop, so this isn’t one of our traditional session summaries.  I took some notes while running the session and have written it up in a more short story kind of format.  I think it turned out pretty well, and hope you all enjoy it.

As a bonus, I’ve started a “Monsters and NPCs” page where you can check out the full character sheets for Salvadora Beckett and Milos the cultist.  Salvadora was an example of a new class, the Inquisitor, that Paizo is having an open playtest for as part of their upcoming Advanced Player’s Guide.   There’s also updated character sheets for many of the PCs on the Characters page.

The session went really well.  We finally finished Death in Freeport!  Now that they’re third level, the serpentfolk weren’t an insurmountable obstacle, though even when the PCs prepared with antitoxins they definitely took some damage at their hands.

There were a bunch of really great moments this session.  My favorites:

• When Lixy asked Wogan, the chaste cleric of Gozreh, “exactly” what his religion prohibits as she cozied up to him.  I could virtually see the word balloon with “Gulp!” in it appear over Patrick’s head.
• When Wogan went to pull his pistol in the ensuing combat and it wasn’t there.  That’s one of those moments GMs live for.  “What do you mean it’s not…  Oh…  Crap.” <sound of weapon cocking behind him>  I wanted to giggle and hop up and down clapping my hands like a little girl.  Then her tossing it towards the latrine as a diversion rather than trying to shoot him – what can I say, I was very proud of myself.  The possibility of getting shot didn’t scare the player, but the thought of his 500 gp masterwork pistol getting flushed- that got to him.  That whole scene was totally movie-worthy.
• When Milos created his fast zombies!  I was reading the new Bestiary and it not only detailed some variant zombies but was specific about how to create them – in this case, remove paralysis as part of the animate dead makes “28 Days Later” style fast zombies.  Wogan was actually using Spellcraft to figure out what was being cast and the remove paralysis really confused him, he figured he had some big paralyzed monster he was letting loose or something.
• When Sindawe broke through all the undead blockers and dealt out double crits to Milos.  We are using the Paizo “Critical Hit Cards” and they said he busted his kneecap and then spun him around, rendering him flat-footed.  It let Tommy get in a sneak attack sling stone shot that put him down (while standing upside down on the ceiling, thanks to spider climb) – a three hit boss kill!
• When Sindawe hugged Salvadora unexpectedly after they cleared the serpent temple.  The rest of the players really did give him the hairy eyeball, and he really did say “What?!?  She saved my life like twice!”

There were fun little bits besides that, like trying to convince the apothecary they really needed something to counteract snake poison and not VD, and carrying out that big teak desk past the crowd of gendarmes.  I think the party started to really fire on all cylinders this session, and everyone got a chance to really pitch in.