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Jade Regent – The Empty Throne, Session Four

Posted on May 16, 2013 | Leave a comment

Fourth Session (12 page pdf) – We go on a hostage rescue raid and kill a good bit of the palace’s defenders in the bargain. And then the propaganda war begins! Plus, we set up V’lk in a deadly one-on-one with the Raven Prince, the Regent’s pet ninja master.

This was a lively time.  First, we went to rescue the captured women of Kasai from the Imperial Palace.  Our usual scry, teleport, kill strategy is tried and true, but we sure get some resistance this time. The three spider woman wardens in there with them are tough, and then a mess of Typhoon Guards join them.

We get in a tight spot when the Typhoons kill one of the women and threaten to kill them all if we don’t surrender.  In an inspired bit of mayhem, V’lk uses a Major Image (illusion) to show Harwynian breathing fire on all the hostages, “killing” them. That got a big “holy shit!” from friends and foes alike.

The second tight spot was when we saw more women across the courtyard in another building and more Typhoon Guards coming.  Harwynian scooted over there and teleported out that contingent while we Wall of Iced inside our room and mopped up. Tactics FTW! I was really pleased with the whole group’s performance.

Speaking of performances, we’re not to the most awesome part yet. We start in with some standard insurgency work and decide to lure out the Jade Regent’s pet ninja, the Raven Prince. V’lk challenges him to a ninja showdown and then we put on a performance of The Cuckolded Cuckoo, the play we took (and Yoshihiro adapted) from the crazy tengu we killed in Brinewall. V’lk was working backstage… But not really V’lk, another Major Image.  His Hide outstripped the Raven Prince’s Perception, and the ninja appeared and stabbed the illusion.  The illusory V’lk pled for his life and dragged himself from the gloating tengu ninja – he went for the death strike just to have the illusion disappear as he got helle-backstabbed by V’lk. And down he goes!  Clean kill Naruto style! Ninja style chest bumps all around, after the curtain fell on our play ended – with the death of the Cuckolded Cuckoo. Literary irony FTW!

A little hooker negotiation, and we’re set up for the finale next time on Jade Regent!

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Jade Regent – The Empty Throne, Session Three

Posted on May 14, 2013 | Leave a comment

Third Session (12 page pdf) – We continue to kill already-dead emperors in the Well of Demons.  They’re livelier than you’d think. There’s devils and demons and daemons and whatever else they could think of.  And then we fight Lo Pan!

First, after a conversation with the totally worthless kami who guards the holy waters (his main superpower appears to be “tastes good in butter”), we go back into the rift and fight stuff.  First up are giant spellcasting boggards!  Or hydrodaemons, as it turns out. With summoned water elementals and spell-likes and them being in the water it takes a really long time. Then, an undead samurai. And a nightwing. And a lich. Finally we get the dead Emperor’s body and finish up this big ol’ vision quest! And level to 13.

Not too much else to tell about this one – we basically grinded the heck out of a bunch of high-CR baddies!

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Jade Regent – The Empty Throne, Session Two

Posted on April 19, 2013 | Leave a comment

Second Session (16 page pdf) – It’s down into the demon rift under the Shrine Island for us. We don’t mind the normal Type III  and IV demons so much but when I spend half a combat in a demon’s vajayjay – that’s a little extreme.

My character Yoshihiro meets a good angel type ancestor of his – but discovers he has to kill a weird twisted one.  Check out this puppy:

Venedaemon

The Gylou, or Handmaiden Devil – but the name on the image is “Venedaemon.” She pulls you up into her… “Tentacle cage” in her nether regions. Guess where I end up.

We headed down into the Well of Demons and every encounter there was hardcore.  They mixed demons and devils and daemons and undead and whatever they could think of that was high CR. We cut our way through erinyes and a masked devil before we get tentacle girl.  Luckily my buddies killed her fast when she “enveloped” me.

Then we had a funny time with the fish-men.  They were sitting there talking about “killing that Commie.”  It took us a minute of scratching our heads to realize that they meant kami, a Japanese nature spirit. We determined they were “Republicans” and tried to negotiate with them, but with a large group someone or other is going to initiate combat within a round of contact, so we just kill them too.

These combats are a big game of rocket tag.  I can’t take a big boss down in one round but pretty much can in two.  So a lot of the time I run up, hit them once and hurt them, they full attack me for most of my hit points, then I hit them for all their hit points. I really don’t like the damage inflation in Pathfinder and 3.5e in general. These critters had enough weird abilities that it was a little more interesting, but even so, a lot of it is exchange of “here’s 100 points of damage, enjoy!”

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Jade Regent – The Empty Throne, Session One

Posted on April 14, 2013 | 4 comments

First Session (11 page pdf) – We teleport into the capital city, Kasai, to free our thick-necked ally Hatsue and link up with the resistance. We fight the Typhoon Commander, stone tigers, long-necked freaks…  Then it goes all Japanese horror movie on us!

In D&D 3.X fashion, we glom onto the ‘scry and teleport in’ tactic as a winning combo. We port in, waste some guards, grab Hatsue, port out. They didn’t even disguise some oni as her or mentally dominate her or anything, which is pretty softball we thought. I gave her the Thundering Blade of Sugimatu so she could kick some butt, we all kinda like her.

Then we go on a rice-liberation run and fight big stone tigers with dimensional gates in their stomachs, or “tao tieh.”  I (Yoshihiro) have a pet bag of devouring. Like really – it was a cursed item I got a long time ago, I discovered it wasn’t a bag of holding when it tried to eat my arm. Since then I’ve kept it as a weird pet (Yoshihiro’s Japanese, so weird pets are de rigeur). I feed it odd pieces of loot we don’t want and talk to it. The party tolerates that well enough. But I had to sacrifice it in this fight – I was being attacked by two of these things and knew I couldn’t take all their attacks, so fed it to one of them. I reckoned that it would go bang just like when you mix bags of holding and portable holes and stuff, and I was right. But I did give a good long scream of grief and rage when it happened.  “SACKY! NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!” And thus did my pet bag of devouring save me from evisceration by a big stone tiger.

Then we head off to the sacred island of the emperors, which is nice and Asian fantasy chic.  We fight a freaky long-necked hag woman thing what like they have over there.

My favorite part was when we found magical instruments on a little stage on a mini-island in a decorative pond.  I proposed we all play the instruments to soothe the spirits.  We played well; it didn’t have any game effect but I could picture us all sitting there, in a pagoda with the leaves falling, playing a tune while the many spirits of the imperial island looked on…

At the end we met the ghost of Emperor Shigure, who was hard to deal with, he kept going all shaky-face-staticy on us like ghosts do in modern Japanese horror movies, which was cool. Now we’re off to recover his body from some demon chasm.

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Jade Regent – Tide of Honor, Session 6

Posted on February 17, 2013 | Leave a comment

master ninjaSixth Session (10 page pdf) – The Master Ninja comes for us but goes down fast. Then our armies go to confront the Jade Regents’ and we defend a fortress from an oni attack.  Now to the offensive!

Well, the master ninja with the ninja artifact coin that’s hunting us showed up. He was clever in posing as a normal commoner and got in his death attack on me, but I made the save and then, somewhat regrettably, as he leapt away V’lk hit him with a flask of burning oil as a target designator and I put one full attack worth of arrows with my samurai challenge into him and that was it.  With this magical bow that lets me put my challenge on arrow damage I do an embarrassing amount of DPR; I actually feel a bit bad about it as I try to avoid min-maxing. Some of this is just normal higher level Pathfinder “glass cannon” syndrome though.

Then it’s shopping and crafting and planning, leading up to our armies intercepting the Jade Regent’s army and us teleporting to the fortress to fight some oni! It was a tougher fight than the ninja but not too bad, most of the damage was from people hitting guys with fire shield on them 😛

Next we hit Chapter Six; we’re taking Ameiko to a shrine in the capital to get blessed (and ideally rescuing our helpful farmer lady spy in the bargain).

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Jade Regent – Tide of Honor, Session 5

Posted on February 10, 2013 | Leave a comment

Fifth Session (15 page pdf) – It’s time to fight a whole mess of samurai! We go to Shirio Onsen, a hot spring lodge, to kill Daimyo Sikutsu Sennaka. It’s pretty much one big ol’ tactical combat, battle mat pictures are in the summary!

13-assassins-movie-image-03First we head out to the lodge and get the “Nine Pawns,” a bunch of ronin, to go hold off the mass of the daimyo’s retainers while we bust in on him and his elite bodyguard. Despite our attempt at stealthily infiltrating the onsen, they bum rush us. You know, when you have six characters all of which have to roll Stealth or else you’re detected, you may as well not bother rolling; the laws of probability indicate someone’s going to bork the roll.

13-assassins-movie-image-01Then we fight our way through a bunch of tengu samurai and normal samurai with some snappy tactics. They got us in a pincer. Gobo and Jacob got caught on the end of the left flank and I figured our little blind gnome oracle was toast, but he has a nice sparkly 30 AC from his magics so he tanked better than the rest of us. I protected Harwynian and shot the samurai up while he fended them off with a Forceful Hand and crowd control including a Persistent Slow. V’lk cast an illusion of the Nine Pawns and that kept the right flank partially protected for a long time. Gobo got a little lucky, but we really clicked tactically and did a great job IMHO.

13-assassins-movie-image-02And finally I got to duel the Daimyo, glass cannon on glass cannon. I almost murderized him in one round (only his samurai resolve saved him – in fact, the GM thought he was dead outright until he realized he was looking at the wrong guy’s hp total), and a dragon breath from Jacob finished him off. His plump ogre mage buddy wasn’t much work. Then it’s all over but the looting.  We even raised the two dead Nine Pawns and gave them all magical katanas.

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Jade Regent – Tide of Honor, Session 4

Posted on February 7, 2013 | Leave a comment

ManananggalFourth Session (9 page pdf) – Special musical episode! Minkaian pop punk samisen-playing band “Hi Hi Puffy Osayumi” is briefly in effect. And when we’re attacked by manananggals, every time the GM says the word “manananggal” we are all compelled to respond “Do doo, do doo doo!” Then we drink tea and hang out with ninjas.

The helpful housekeepers from the manor house were actually horrid undead called manananggals, which are like the penanggalan all us 1e’ers are familiar with but instead of just a woman with a detachable head it’s a woman with a whole detachable torso. They definitely got their surprise licks in before we overcame them. V’lk went to loot their chambers, and we speculated that the real treasure he was looking for (and found) was four womens’ bodies only intact from the waist down. What he also found was that they had mended his pants before coming to kill us! “That’s the best treasure I’ve gotten in a long time,” he noted. We speculated that they are of the obsessive-compulsive sort of undead and they can’t help finishing their domestic tasks before trying to feed on the – whatever – of the living. Subsequent research revealed they mostly attack pregnant women, which led to a bit of a witch hunt among the group to determine if any of us were indeed a pregnant woman.  My money was on Harwynian.

We then got a couple more semi-artifact magic items, a samisen that casts divinations and a tea set that basically lets us put greater heroism on ourselves before a mission!

Then we go to meet with the “Three Monkeys,” the heads of various ninja clans. After some folderol we have a sitdown with them and they tell us they can’t help us because there’s a contract out on us – luckily, not with them. “A problem murder can solve!” we exult. As the meeting wound up I realized I still had one of the ninja fugitive grenades (smoke bombs with a rope trick in it) and it struck me how hilarious it would be to end a meeting with three ninja clan leaders by tossing down a smoke bomb and disappearing ourselves. So hilarious, I had to exercise all of my self control not to do it. We imagined it would go something like this…

“Peace out!” <BAM!>
“this way guys…” <shuffle, shuffle>
<bonk>  “Ow!”
<door slams>
<heard clearly through the paper wall> “Woot! Who’s the ninjas now!” <high fiving all around>

And now, we’re all level 12!

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Jade Regent – Tide of Honor, Session 3

Posted on February 5, 2013 | 3 comments

geishaThird Session (12 page pdf) – Ah, home invasion, the bread and butter of adventuring parties everywhere.  We look to liberate a captured psychic geisha from a big freak, and our Aliens-driven policy of “nobody touch nothing” pays off!

Much of the session was navigating the shadow maze under the mansion, which was pretty cool. We had one false start on the premise that maybe the geisha’s clues were approximate and not super specific – turns out they were super specific. We kill the wizard, free the geisha.  Details in the summary!

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Jade Regent – Tide of Honor, Session 2

Posted on February 2, 2013 | Leave a comment

Second Session (11 page pdf) – Murder spree number one garners us our first set of allies, a batch of ronin, so we set about murder spree number two. This one promises to get us a batch of geishas. We’re business in the front, party in the back!

Yes, we’re still playing, I’m just a little behind on posting the summaries. I missed this session due to holiday plans. But the guys finish off a druid and a weretiger to put the kibosh on the bandit threat, and then get a weird riddle-filled quest to go save a kidnapped geisha, upon which they embark with a startling dearth of “love you long time” jokes. Other than that, you’ll just have to read the summary!

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Jade Regent – Tide of Honor, Session 1

Posted on November 12, 2012 | Leave a comment

First Session (11 page pdf) – Finally, civilization!  Well, at least the rice paddy and hamlet intensive outskirts of civilization. We roleplay our attempt to recruit allies, but nothing gets you allies like murdering a lot of people.  So we do that.

The first part of the session was more treasure distribution, getting faction points from the named NPCs, giving them presents, etc. Many of the Paizo APs have been anemic in the treasure department in the past.  Not so this one!  Check out the current incarnation of our patented treasure spreadsheet – we have pulled in a lot of loot and stand to see more once we get to a place with walls where we can sell off.

Then we headed like a thousand miles through the Forest of Spirits.  Miyaro and the kami kept us largely safe.  There was a big storm, though, and I finally got to use my Order of the Dragon samurai power to add a big Survival bonus on inclement weather into the mix.  The GM calculated the storm would about wipe out the caravan, but once we pulled out the sashimono of comfort and all our Survival skills, it was only mildly banged up. Once we hit the grasslands I had to take a RP moment to gallop about on my mount Akumu with Miyaro.  Poor mount, he gets so little opportunity to be around in this AP.

Then we went and bantered with a ronin who will aid us against the Jade Regent.  Yoshihiro rolled pretty hard on him; the adventure seems to want you to suck up to him but I was just like, “So how would you like a chance to regain your honor?”

And then we do what we do best – hit a fortress and kill bandits.  Our quick recon set us up great, we d-doored into a storage room next to the main dormitory at night and V’lk murdered most of them including a sub-boss in their sleep.  We fought a couple and then another group with their leader Gangasum (which immediately led us to Gangnam Style references) and put him down without much fuss.  Yay planning.  But then a druid and weretiger bust out!  More next time…

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Jade Regent – Forest of Spirits, Session 6

Posted on November 11, 2012 | Leave a comment

Sixth Session (7 page pdf) – At the heart of the House of the Withered Blossoms, we find the oni Munascuru, and fight her and her children for the kami and for glory!

The first fight took a long time – I arrowed the hell out of the oni and Bjorn dropped her, but the chain devils up near the ceiling were like AC 31 or something once the cover’s figured in, and they have DR.  Took Gobo putting an align weapon on my bow to finally dispense with it. Everyone else was occupied trying to kill a mostly dead but regenerating oni the whole time – by the rules it’s remarkably hard to finish them off while you’re still in combat.

My favorite part of that fight was us trying to cover up for the fact that we have an invisible rogue around.

V’lk casts greater invisibility and runs over to help Bjorn with the archers. Bjorn lands a flurry of blows on an archer, wounding him, and suddenly a bunch more wounds appear, spraying blood, and the archer falls. “Sword of the North Star style!” Bjorn yells and runs after another archer. This one obtains an array of wounds from the invisible V’lk before Bjorn even gets there. “Precognitive Sword Strike!” he yells as he hacks away at him.

As most final boss fights are, the fight with Munascuru was short but brutal.  We almost misjudged badly, we buffed up and busted into her lair based on intel from the prisoners – to find out her lair is a whole sub-dungeon, we ran to and fro trying to find her before our 1/round buffs expired!

Once we busted in on her it was a true team effort.  I charge her and smite her badly, Jacob flies up and breathes a line of fire on her, Bjorn comes in with a full attack routine, and V’lk stab-murders her invisibly from behind.  She got in one shot – a crit with a naginata which probably would have killed me outright. However, one of my newest samurai tricks is to throw off a critical hit using my resolve!

The rest is all wrapup.  The spirit possessing V’lk leaves and gives him a free weapon proficiency.  He takes wakizashi as it fits his two-weapon fighting style so I gave him my magical one, Whispering Shrike, to commemorate the occasion (he got the kill shot in on Munascuru). Hiro is moving from his “glory for me!” origins into a “all for one, one for all” guy along the lines of what the Order of the Dragon dictates.

Now, it’s on to the penultimate chapter, Tide of Honor, where we recruit help to take back Minkai!

 

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Jade Regent – Forest of Spirits, Session 5

Posted on October 27, 2012 | Leave a comment

Fifth Session (9 page pdf) – We do just fine against the real encounters of hobgoblins and oni, but the BS nuisance wandering monstery group of four destrachans nearly TPKs us.

I was grumpy about this session.  We had a couple things go wrong that made it not-so-fun for me.

The first was purely interpersonal. People were just super distracted.  Bruce was Skyping in but the connection and mike were awful and so he couldn’t hear us, we heard him but also got weird noises and feedback. People were making comical amounts of noise on both ends of the line, too, and just not really bothering to not interrupt the GM or other players, or pay attention in general.  There was one time during a combat round that I was trying to announce my damage to the GM and got interrupted before I could get it out 5 times from people on both sides of the call.  I really was one more away from just saying “fuck it, I’m leaving.” It’s not really even about the game, if I get interrupted 5 times in any other situation I tend to assume my contribution is clearly not valued.

The second was the setup.  I don’t really like three month long dungeon crawls, but Paizo insists on inflicting them on us.  This one was nicely tactical so far, and we have gotten our enjoyment out of plying tactics vs our opponents.  Well, this time, despite having our rogue scout ahead and being wary, we just got plopped on the battlemat pretty much surrounded by four destrachans. The positioning seemed to be more of a function of “well you can only be 20′ away and still fit on the map tile.” And of course they about killed us.  8d6 sonic at will overlapping all of us, plus in this situation it caused a cave-in. In a cave-in, you can do nothing. Most of us spent the encounter buried in rocks. Boring and deadly, yay. And it’s not clear how that makes sense or how they got here.

These two fed on each other – we only did 3 encounters the whole day because of the disarray, and one of them being a suckburger made the session overall not great.

There were some high points.  We found the cute little kami’s bonsai tree.  And we found statues we could stone to flesh and talk to; the one we destoned seems to be Harwynian’s soul mate.

We play again tomorrow, I’m sure it was just a one time “bad day” thing and the next one will be fine. Even with a good group and good material, not every session’s a winner! You just have to get back in the saddle.

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