Tag Archives: story hour

Eighth Session (12 page pdf) – More psychos and worms await as we dungeon-crawl the Rift of Niltak. And Shoanti. And mimics and executioner’s hoods and cursed items!  Wackiness results.

First, here’s our whiteboard pics trying to explain the Rift of Niltak in side and front view.

You’ll have to check out the session summary for the artist’s rendition of a seguathi brain-enslaving worm, however. We come across another one of those things, but now that we know what to expect it didn’t go so badly for us.  We tossed in a Web, summoned an earth elemental, and came in after it had been reduced to worm slurry.

My favorite excerpt, with some interplay between my character Yoshihiro and Tim’s character Bjorn:

After some investigation a weak section of wall is found in the wall to the right of the altar.

Bjorn posits, “Maybe this is where the dwarves dug too deep. Then they covered it up!”

Hiro retorts, “Oh, yeah, they stacked up some bricks and covered it with dirt. Real dwarven craftsmanship there.”

Pushing down the wall reveals a large square room with a stone dais in the midst of a sand floor. Two chests of gold and big frog-god statue adorn the dais and two braziers on the ceiling cast a hellish red glow. A large twisted dwarf in heavy armor kisses his gore-smeared axe and waggles his bloody tongue, pointing one of his exposed finger-bones at us.

“Let’s not try talking,” says Bjorn.

This was an old school mini-dungeon crawl, complete with a mimic, an executioner’s hood, and even a bag of devouring! But possibly the most time was spent with the inexplicable homunculus in a box. I had to totally insist that we return it to the old hermit, too, not that we got much out of it.

Our side trek is over; next time we hit chapter 2 of the AP, the Night of Frozen Shadows!

Seventh Session (12 page pdf) – Bonus episode! The main plot can wait as we go to try to pry some loot out of the worm and psycho-haunted Rift of Niltak. Complete with dwarven pleasure mouth!

A dirty hermit gave us a map alleging to show the location of treasure in the weird Rift of Niltak. To quote the Pathfinder Wiki:

The Rift of Niltak is a mist-shrouded canyon found in the Red Mountains of north-eastern Varisia. No one knows what the origins of the rift are, but all agree that it is filled with all manner of strange flora and fauna. Gigantic insects can be seen crawling over plants found in no other place, and the echoes of shrieking bat-like creatures reverberate off the walls of the glen. An accurate description of the rift has not come to light, as those who enter either never return, or go insane shortly after emerging from it.

Since we are already insane (and blind, and mute) we figured, “What the hell.”

After a fight with some insane bears, we have a heck of a time with a batch of gimp psychos and a tentacled worm thing that is their slave boss.  It emanates confusion with a high DC will save, and farts out a fog that provides a -10 to Will saves against it, and dominates… We had a lot of Protection from Evils but that only helps against the direct control, not the confusion and all, and there was literally no way any of us could make the save. And of course on top of that it has wands and swords and a really high AC. I charged through the line of mooks to try to keep it busy; it pretty much took me out fast while the rest of the party was worrying about the minions.I guess next time we should use bows from a distance, but its high AC and fog made most of our missile attacks miss (and it has a 3-magic-missile wand…). Oh and it has SR. And DR.  Did I mention that?  Good lord.

Besides the confusion and control stuff, I was happy to get to fight astride my mount. It’s tough to be a mounted character because you can never take your mount anywhere important in these APs – bad guys can never be in a forest, they have to be in an inaccessible dungeon. (And don’t say be a halfling cavalier on a dog, how would I ever respect myself again…) Akumu does a good job of improved-overrunning people and just generally kicking and biting at them.

We made our way into a dwarven tomb or something on the wall of the Rift, and fought more psychos and Cenobites (you know, from Hellraiser). And that’s where we left it.

Sixth Session (18 page pdf) – We overcome the dangers of Brinewall Castle with flair and savoir faire!  As is so often the case, love of the booty ends up being the downfall of Kikkonu the tengu. Read on as we uncover the secrets of the Brinewall Legacy.

First, while fighting some more of those dang dire corbies, we make a new “ally,” a harpy. Bruce (Harwynian) has a long standing bird fetish and so he wasted no time befriending her.

We also discovered how weird and dumb all the illumination rules are. We had a lot of darkness on light on sunrod interaction questions.  Paul the GM’s interpretation was light inside the darkness does nothing, but light right outside the darkness gives dim light…

Anyway, the harpy is apparently Kikkonu’s on again, off again girlfriend. We devised a plan – apparently she has falsely tried to make peace with him before five times, but only attacked him three of those.  We interpreted that as “the other two ended up in make-up sex” and a quick guy calculation assured us that a 2/5 chance of booty and 3/5 chance of being attacked means that he for sure would show up for time #6.

Have you heard of the excellent “Combat as Sport vs. Combat as War” essay? Well, we’re firm believers in combat as war. As a result no one was disappointed when our well executed ambush killed us a hellclown in 2 rounds.

That mostly cleared the castle. We then wandered around investigating and running afoul of haunts and random animals. The fact that the ballroom was completed but the defensive works were not earned our scorn.  “What, was this place built by elves or something?”

Bjorn about dies by going and poking every damn critter in the place, mainly as an excuse to exercise his poorly chosen Favored Enemy: Animals.  Of course it turns out nothing is an animal.  That giant killer water bug? Vermin.  Ha ha ha ha urg.

Finally, we get several pages of story development. We discover how Brinewall fell! And find the ghost of my grandpa! And we find out Ameiko is next in line to be Empress! And that we have to go to the Lands of the Linnorm Kings to seek our ancestral katana! And when we pull out, not-fairy Spivey comes with us!  BADGE HOLOCAUST!

Next time, we take a side trek to the Rift of Niltak hoping for gold and glory.

Fifth Session (14 page pdf) – We decide to sneak into Brinewall Castle the back way and as a result get the dubious reward of hitting the boss monster first, a hideous tentacle god. There is much probing. Then we rescue a barbarian chick from some holding cells. And there is much probing.

When we got back to the caravan to rest, we got a kick out of trying to explain what was going on to the NPCs.  “The place is full of humanoids that are like Heckle and Jeckle meet Bullhead and they’re lead by a hellclown who loves live theater! But the fairy who’s not a fairy helps us.” I think they assumed we had been spending our time smoking crack in an abandoned ruin.

Them we did something either clever or stupid, we’re still not really sure in retrospect.  We reasoned there certainly had to be some kind of secret tunnel exit and we searched around for it and found one!  But it led us right to the entire castle’s boss monster – some kind of demonic flying decapus that farted on us and just about killed us all in one go.  Being tactics guy, I got us to fall back into a more constrained space where it couldn’t fly, and Harwynian really came through by Webbing it.  The endgame was really intricate – it was still getting spells in on us and we couldn’t really hurt it.  But then it Scorching Rayed at us burning a tunnel through the Web.  V’lk shot it and got a critical; Paizo crit cards (in the form of the iCrit iPad app) said “nerve center!” and it was stunned for the rest of the combat.  And I got to finish it with a Fist of the North Star quote. Then we pulled the hell out of there because we were really messed up.

Once we’re not bleeding so much, we reinsert and free an Ulfen woman from an ogre jailer. I tried to make Viking-nice with her and it seems like it worked, she joined our caravan, and it got us a badge!

Then it was just freeform dungeoneering in the castle.  Some high points:

Gobo finds a secret door that leads out into a maze of tunnels leading deeper down. Hiro says, “Must lead to the Darklands! Hey wait… I hope that “third vault” prophecy doesn’t mean, like, the third vault of Orv because that would be f*cked up.”

“Shut the door!” cries Hiro.
“He chopped it down!” replies Jacob.

Bjorn vomits helpfully on a troglodyte.

Bjorn goes first, singing the battle-song of his people (“I saw the sign, and it opened up my eyes; I saw the sign”).

Stairs continue up. Jacob says, “The hellclown is probably up there!”
Gobo replies, “But it was downstairs last time.”
V’lk signs “two.”
“Oh, you think there‟s two of them?” V’lk nods.
“Makes sense – it takes two tengu to tango!” says Hiro. He holds out his fist to V‟lk. “Blow it up!” V’lk declines grumpily.

We end with a nice cliffhanger – upstairs in a study we find the hellclown’s play, and Jacob just knocks it off the desk and bellows a challenge, much to our horror. Next time, we’ll find out what all responds!

Fourth Session (13 page pdf) – We hit Brinewall Castle and it’s full of dire corbies. As if those aren’t bad enough, then there’s mutant ogrekin and a hellclown! The hellclown that killed V’lk’s family! Run away! Run away!

Here’s his rendition of the hellclown (with the start of Brinewall Castle in the background)…

We’re into the eponymous part of The Brinewall Legacy, the first chapter of the Jade Regent Adventure Path.We start out with a reefclaw fight. I’ve mentioned before how stupid the aberration rules are – basically, since they prescribe certain stats due to universal monster rules, every bottom-dwelling mutated thing – reefclaws, otyughs, etc – all technically have quite good INT scores, like chess-playing level INT scores.  But of course they have no civilization and just lurk alone in holes and eat poo. Of course Bjorn especially feels wronged by all this; he took favored enemy: animals as a ranger.  And nothing is an animal. Oh, it might look like an animal – but no, it’s an “aberration” or “vermin” or “magical beast…”

Anyway, then we fought some dire corbies!  They are like Heckle and Jeckle on steroids. You may remember them from the 1e Fiend Folio. As we fought, I could not help but repeat over and over again to myself…

The raven sings
The raven saw
And in the corn
He sayeth, ‘CAH’

If they get you in the clear they pounce and get like five attacks on you. We learned our lesson from that and never let them get a head start to pounce again!

When we went into the castle, there was “grunting and meaty slapping” from a courtyard.  You might imagine what we thought of that.  When it turned out it was some mutated ogrekin wrassling, Hiro wanted to beat them down and take them alive. But when V’lk went running up to them he got one-shot KOed! There was a lot of yelling “You just got knocked the fuck out!” as a result. This excited Jacob who just started swinging his two-handed sword.  Luckily we managed to take them alive anyway.

After a vicious fight with an ogress, we met the boss – technically a yamabushi tengu, but as we don’t know that term we call him a “hellclown.”

He and his corbies chased us all the way out of the castle and we holed up in a building in town, injured and out of spells, but they found us.  I ascribe our survival to me taking a strong hand with tactics – I made Bjorn get in the door with me behind him with my glaive, and used my magical wakizashi to do a shield other on him. Everyone else shot out the windows as we cut them down one by one as they tried to enter; double attacks from us but spread out damage from them. Bruce didn’t really get many of the details in the summary (he Skypes in, so tactical combat is challenging for him). Whoo, it was a real sphincter clenching moment, definitely the fight so far that really could have just killed us all. But we’re not out of the woods yet…