As far as linking background with added players; Fukushu would work very well as a contact, because no one suspects the blind musician. He could easily have worked as a point of contact with the rebel group.
Having the blind musician connected to the face-changer is pretty amusing to me. Want to come up with a past connection for our characters?
That sounds great. I think it would be delightful if Fukushu always knew who Mask was regardless of rhe face he was wearing
GM: Officially the spell scarify is not on the bard list, but since bards can cast cure light wounds I would think it is functionally similar. I think this would be a cool type of healing for a Shoanti tribesman... especially if I have some control over what the scars end up looking like.
Do you feel like allowing it? If so I'd like to take it as a spell known.
Also my gear is still based on level 1 so I need to update.
Sheltering Bakuno of Fiarra for a night would have been a possibility.
Blackspire: This works for me.
I am also thinking that Bakuno's escape was the result of some deliberate sabotage on the part of the "revolution." Perhaps Arael and/or Janiven arranged for a riot in the gladiator barracks as either a cover for something else or in the hopes that some gladiators would escape and turn into recruits.
Bakuno has recently learned how to cast disguise self and used it in his escape. But he can't keep it up forever, and would need a place to "lie low."
That sounds great. I think it would be delightful if Fukushu always knew who Mask was regardless of rhe face he was wearing
Mask's voice changes too, but I would be fine with Fukushu somehow still knowing that it's Mask.
Sia is a daughter of a noble family that's known for their scandals. She's mostly along for the ride in the rebellion, and for the chance to thumb her nose at the establishment.
She's currently still welcome at fancy parties just in case she does something scandalous.
I've just updated Malqazar to level two. I love the idea of Fukushu always knowing who Mask is. Maybe it's the smell?
I've just updated Malqazar to level two. I love the idea of Fukushu always knowing who Mask is. Maybe it's the smell?
I like it. Mask always smells faintly like a freshly washed dog. :)
GM: Officially the spell scarify is not on the bard list, but since bards can cast cure light wounds I would think it is functionally similar. I think this would be a cool type of healing for a Shoanti tribesman... especially if I have some control over what the scars end up looking like.
Do you feel like allowing it? If so I'd like to take it as a spell known.
Also my gear is still based on level 1 so I need to update.
I'll allow it.
Great RP folks!
Updating now, sorry for the delay there, RL woes continue for me and the boards being down last night was not exactly helpful.
I really do feel like I am missing something here.
In both fiction and IRL, totalitarian regimes respond to the murder of their soldiers VERY harshly. And often indiscriminately. I wouldn't be surprised if the punishment for a single Hellknight killed was 10 random Westcrown civilians killed. Or maybe one every day until Arael surrenders. And naturally increasing his bounty by a lot, so somebody rats us out. That's not even considering bringing in magical support to find us.
Is this encounter supposed to be the start of a rebellion, where the people rally behind Arael and throw off Chelish rule? Nothing we've seen to date indicates he has that much support.
Or is there some reason Thrune would just shrug off the murder of many of its soldiers in broad daylight, outside one of Cheliax's major cities? Again, not in keeping with how they've been portrayed.
I've played RPGs for a long time. Sometimes "kill the bad guys" is fine and it isn't any more complicated than that. But in urban intrigue campaigns you can't do that. And it seemed up until this point that the AP was closer to the latter.
My thought was that if we merely embarrassed the patrol and freed Arael, we'd remain the problem of those (hopefully) low-ranking soldiers on escort duty.
Is there some clue I've missed? Because the dire consequences that Blackspire fears don't seem like a stretch to me. At all.
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Well I mean that's a bit of a philosophical debate.
On one hand, you're probably right. There is a chance that the ruling class might take it out on the citizenry and kill random people to try to prove a point.
But on the other hand, getting caught or killed ourselves because we held back means that the city suffers longer without the rebellion working against the man.
The reason we were sent to attempt this mission where we're doing it, is it is outside the city. Since it's not in the city no law was broken (it's an odd loophole but in Cheliax loophole exploitation is essential.) Attacking outside the city not only is the best chance to get away but it's also the only excuse to say it was an outside source or bandits.
That's at least what I got as an understanding of why we're doing what we're doing where we are doing it and when.
I think leaving them alive and killing them both have advantages and disadvantages.
Freeing Arael will likely carry the death penalty whether we kill Hellknights or not.
In the end, whatever we do, we should do it all one way or all the other way. Killing some and leaving some alive will incur the problems that both solutions offer and the benefits of neither.
I built Bakuno as a hard-hitting two-handed melee fighter because I expected there were going to be a lot of high-charisma "face" types and some DEX-based guys in an all-bard game. Bakuno can try to strike doing nonlethal damage at a -4 to hit. But I'm guessing that our opponents will have very good ACs and this doesn't sound like a winning strategy to me.
Bakuno also has Shoanti bolas and can try to do trip attacks at range.
It's possible I'm overthinking this -- that it's a just a plot hole I should ignore.
But reading back through the gameplay thread, maybe the clue is the relationship between the Hellknights and the Westcrown government. They seem to have separate jurisdictions, so that is a fault line we can exploit as Jing suggests.
Freeing Arael (outside the city) wouldn't result in the death penalty from city authorities. If the Hellknights don't actually rule Westcrown -- they had some sort of bureaucratic battle to get Arael in the first place -- they might not be able to enforce any sort of reprisals. And the city government (whatever it is) might not be interested in keeping this drama going or making Arael into a hero; hopefully they will tell the Hellknights to just drop it.
I'm still concerned that wiping them all out will bring much higher-level Hellknights in to deal with us (the Order of the Rack definitely has access to Speak with Dead), and I don't think the goal of Arael's little movement is all-out rebellion (yet). But at least now I think I see how we might get away with this.
It's possible I'm overthinking this -- that it's a just a plot hole I should ignore.
But reading back through the gameplay thread, maybe the clue is the relationship between the Hellknights and the Westcrown government. They seem to have separate jurisdictions, so that is a fault line we can exploit as Jing suggests.
Freeing Arael (outside the city) wouldn't result in the death penalty from city authorities. If the Hellknights don't actually rule Westcrown -- they had some sort of bureaucratic battle to get Arael in the first place -- they might not be able to enforce any sort of reprisals. And the city government (whatever it is) might not be interested in keeping this drama going or making Arael into a hero; hopefully they will tell the Hellknights to just drop it.
I'm still concerned that wiping them all out will bring much higher-level Hellknights in to deal with us (the Order of the Rack definitely has access to Speak with Dead), and I don't think the goal of Arael's little movement is all-out rebellion (yet). But at least now I think I see how we might get away with this.
THIS :-)
Sorry folks, just as I was catching up, I got sick on Sunday. I'll need to post OT the next 3 nights to try and catch up once more. Just can't catch a break these days it seems.
OK, update here tomorrow night, my thanks for your patience.
Should be an interesting ambush scene!
Sorry guys, didn't update for me for some reason. Posting now.
Alright, better than my last stretch but not as good as I want it to be.
Good news is that I'll be filing the final Divorce paperwork tomorrow. Then a meeting with the Judge and that'll be behind me!
Wow man. Sorry to hear you had to go through that but glad it's getting resolved.
Wow man. Sorry to hear you had to go through that but glad it's getting resolved.
Thanks, hopefully by April/May I'll be fully past most nonsense and be able to increase post rates once more.
Great Surprise Round!
Blackspire, I really don't want to seem like a jerk or lecture at you, but it isn't up to you to change another player's actions. Your character can't do it in the heat of battle, and as a player you don't get to decide what anyone else does.
If Fukushu (or anyone else) decides to kill the Hellknights, we can deal with that in game after the fight. If you want to keep the discussion going, let's do it here instead of in Gameplay.
Yes.
It’s pretty late at night as I am writing this. I’ve been through a significant amount of struggles through the past two years (actually through the past 41 but especially the past 2). I’ve had worse stretches of time before but I believe that these past struggles were due to my own lack of maturity and self-awareness at the time those events took place.
Likely those events were necessary for me to experience to survive the events of the past two years and get through them as well as I have. Physical ailments, getting older and requiring more sleep, bankruptcy, and ultimately divorce. You know life is not going swimmingly when going to work feels like a vacation.
Regardless, when I first started getting involved in PbP on the boards it was a chance to play, finally! I’d been DMing for the bulk of the time that I’ve played table top that I was enjoying being able to be a player for once. Then with so many damn flaky GM’s I just started running games and well, things snow balled from there.
Life was fairly stable at the time the normal ups and downs. Then about two years ago, I started getting into PbP as a way to escape reality. Sort of the same ways drugs were casual and enjoyable for me as a teen and ultimately led me as close to suicide as I ever want to get again.
I am not saying that PbP has made me suicidal but I am saying that I recognize that I was using PbP as a coping mechanism to avoid a bad marriage. PbP did NOT lead to the failure of my marriage but it did contribute to my ability to tune it out.
I make a decent living but between bankruptcy and divorce I’ve little to show for it (well except for this killer book and RPG collection ). I could point the finger at my soon to be ex-wife but when you point one finger at a person, three more point back at you. I could have prevented things from becoming this bad and I chose not to. I did it, ironically, because I believed that if I had the marriage would have ended and ended badly, so much for best intentions. I am not going to second guess myself, what happened happened. As divorces go, this one has been rather amicable as we have put our daughter first and ourselves second.
Being married to someone who makes as much if not more money then you (depending on sales that year) places one in a position to “take it easy” when it comes to being aggressive about making money (well it placed me in such a position anyhow perhaps because making money does not move me).
Early on in my career I had an opportunity to become a premiere M&A Financial Services Tax Attorney in a Big 4 Firm. It’s a big deal and potentially a lot of money but I did not really want it because I knew I would be working a lot and traveling a lot. My ex agreed that I should turn it down as she did not want to be married to a workaholic and that was not who I wanted to be anyway. Nor do I want to be that person now. (In yet another twist of irony, she has become a workaholic, funny how things turn out).
I do not regret the decision though I do lament the loss of income that such a decision would have brought to me.
All of this rambling nonsense is leading to the point of this post, I need to work more. Not at my current job nor do I want to get a new job, I actually like being there as odd as that sounds (to me). I need to get a second and perhaps a third job, side gigs. At 41 about to turn 42 with no retirement and no savings for my daughters college, I can no longer hope that the ex’s business will come through as an investment plan. Even if it does, I will not be the beneficiary of that largesse. I need to make up for 11 years of being “comfortable” simply working.
Thus, it is with heavy heart that I am announcing that I will need to close down a number of the threads I run and withdraw from a number of the games I am a PC in.
I suppose this decision will not be a surprise to many of you as my posting rates have been abysmal since these events took a turn for the worse (in some respects the better to be honest) since Thanksgiving of 2017.
I am not generally a person that feels remorse or guilt but I do feel a level of disappointment with having to make this decision. I apologize for disappointing many of you who put work into PCs relying on my consistency as a GM/DM over the course of the past several years.
My plan had always been to run a hardcore dose of RPG’s until my daughter was a teenager and then, spend my free time writing the novel I had been working on since before she was born. I had hoped that over the next 9 years or so I could wrap up most of these campaigns and the few that remained would be more manageable.
Life has not worked out that way.
The good news is that I will still run several games but the current load is too much for me to handle in this transition. The further good news is that I believe this will allow for those games to move along much more quickly.
By tomorrow I will have made my decision as to which games I will keep and which I will shut down.
Thank you all for taking the journeys with me despite the lack of length or resolution of so many of them.
I will still be around just in a diminished capacity so this is not goodbye just a “be seeing less of you”.
I totally understand. It's too bad, but it's only a game here.
Thanks for the support guys.
Unfortunately, this is one of the games that I will need to close.
As this is an AP, you may be able to find a replacement DM. My deepest apologies to those of you who just joined considering how fast things came to and end.
Good luck and good gaming all.