KC's Age of Worms

Game Master Kobold Catgirl

Okay, cool! Updated my gear list.

Astraden's spells for the first day in Alhaster:

• 0-level (4) create water, detect magic, read magic, stabilize
• 1st-level (4+1+D) disguise self, shield of faith, shield of faith, shield of faith, shield of faith, shield of faith
• 2nd-level (4+1+D) bear's endurance, bear's endurance, invisibility, owl's wisdom, spiritual weapon, zone of truth
• 3rd-level (4+1+D) communal resist energy, communal resist energy, dispel magic, magic circle against evil, magic circle against law, stone shape
• 4th-level (3+1+D) - confusion, death ward, death ward, death ward, greater magic weapon
• 5th-level (3+D) - breath of life, communal air walk, dispel law, summon monster v
• 6th-level (2+D) - animate objects, heal, word of recall (centered on All-Seeing Eye)

I'm ready to move on. I don't quite have Eben's new character sheet ready, but I'm nearly there. Pretty sure I don't have anything new to purchase, though, so I'm fine there.

I'm ready to move on. I don't quite have Eben's new character sheet ready, but I'm nearly there. Pretty sure I don't have anything new to purchase, though, so I'm fine there.

Actually, that's a lie! I forgot that I get new spells added to my spell list, so in the interests of being able to use some of them right off the bat, I pick up two pages of spell knowledge before leaving Magepoint- one for gravity bow and one for true strike.

...is she coming on to me?

Carina flinches as Ekaym claps her on the shoulder. "Ow." She bites her lip and leans a bit closer to Tanith.

Seriously, why is it that every other guy I meet promptly starts flirting with me? I'm not THAT attractive... am I?

I'm beginning to suspect "assumes friendly people are into her" is a bit of a habit of Carina's. ;D

Well, she DOES have 16 CHA without any boosts...

By the way, I'll just own this real quick—I think some of the description I gave for entering the city was wrong. Here's a map. You guys entered from the east, not the west.

Don't worry too much about the intricacies of the map just yet—I just wanted to give you an idea of the scope. Later, I'll make a Google Drawing so you can keep track of where you are in town. Welcome to Alhaster!

ALHASTER
LE large town
Population 7,700 (80% human, 8% half-orc, 4% hobgoblin, 4% halfling, 4% other)
Base Value 10,000 gp; Purchase Limit 3,000 gp*; Spellcasting 7th

*Although this limit applies to most locations in Alhaster, there are some locations where the purchase limit goes up quite a lot.

For some reason I expected it to be a lot bigger.

Seems realistic to me. My history major approves.

I kinda expected it to be bigger than Greyhawk, though. (Which I think is a full city?)

Greyhawk is literally the biggest city ever. It's a metropolis, and the whole center of the setting. If I let you guys find a city bigger than the flippin' Free City of Greyhawk, I have to turn in my Greyhawk GM license right now.

Waterdeep. Absalom. Sharn. Sigil.

Oh, you meant in the setting? Well, you should have specified!

So I've uploaded Eben's new character sheet. And I have to learn my way around Hero Lab this month anyhow, so I made him my first ever HL build, so it all seems accurate. Aside from all the powers and archetype abilities I've traded out, which we'll all get to discover together in weeks to come, a couple of other things changed:

Feat-wise, since the Arrowsong Minstrel gets Precise Shot as a bonus feat, that freed up one feat slot. And I retrained out of Requiem, since I no longer have any performances that would affect undead anyway. So, to fill in those two gaps I took Deadly Aim and Weapon Focus (longbow).

Spell-wise, I've added true strike, gravity bow, greater magic weapon, flame arrow, and acid arrow to Eben's spell list. Hero Lab kindly let me know that apparently I neglected to pick a 2nd level spell known at some point, so I added acid arrow to my spells known. True strike and gravity bow I picked up pages of spell knowledge for, greater magic weapon I have a scroll of so can cast once a day using my mnemonic vestment, and the others will come in time.

Even the City of Brass is smaller? :v

. . . Huh. Am I reading it right that Farrukh hasn't posted in 3 weeks? (Okay, and Sundakan hasn't posted anywhere in 10 days . . .)

Oh. Huh. I guess one side effect of posting during downtime is that you don't immediately notice when someone isn't posting alongside.

Anyone have any other means of contacting him, see if he's OK?

I can usually get a hold of him on Steam.

Edit: He's offline now but it looks like he was online earlier today.

OK, did a little more research (a word which in this case means 'reading some of his other PbP's') and got the following:

However, if that doesn't work, he also totally understands.

Given that he's been previously banned for whatever reason and immediately came back under the new ID, and that he hasn't done so here, it's possible he's just done with the Paizo forums? Maybe Feral can get more on his plans.

I spoke to him on Steam.

He's alive and well. He's in communication with KC but it sounds like he's making arrangements to rejoin us in the near future.

Go to know he's okay.

I received his message yesterday, but Friday is generally a non-posting day for me. As I said in Gameplay, I'm occupied for the next couple hours, and I don't want to say what we're doing here since I haven't sent him a proper answer in private yet.

Good, even. Don't know why I typed go above.

Alright, I finally got some time to respond, so here's what's going on.

I'm not comfortable with the two suggested solutions (for a few reasons—not just the work involved, though these days, that sort of thing presses on my brain more than I'd like). It wasn't an easy decision for me to make, and I doubt it'll be an easy decision for anyone to hear. I know we will all seriously miss Farrukh's flawless Straight Man banter, as well as the fantastic rules-savvy and reliable posting we'd come to expect from his player. I've been an Eben/Farrukh shipper ever since Hall of Harsh Reflections. Farrukh was an integral member of the party—in fact, one of the two co-founders of the literal original party, alongside Erip—and his exit from the PbP will have to honor that.

A lot depends on what Rynjin is comfortable with, though. It is unlikely, of course, that Farrukh will say, "Y'know, guys, I just don't think this is for me," and ride off into the sunset like Robin O'Haranson or Rodrigo. He'll need a plausible reason—likely one intrinsically linked to the storyline. In the meantime, we might try a sort of vicarious pseudo-NPCing where I receive input from Rynjin via other channels—which could be as precise or as general as Rynjin himself is comfortable with. That really is the big decider. I'd understand if, receiving my answer, he just wants to wash his hands of the whole thing.

If we're definitely losing Rynjin my suggestion would be something along the lines of Farrukh leaving the party to assist Tenser directly in smaller scale tasks related to the Age of Worms.

It will stink not only to lose Farrukh, but to lose the power his PC brought the team. What about recruiting someone new so we're not down a member? There are probably plenty of people who would be interested in this game...

That's unfortunate. Send him our best. (Well, OK, it's not like he's suddenly denied internet access and he can still view the Paizo forums even without an active account so: in case you're reading this at some point, our best, Rynjin!)

I agree we need to fill the slot at some point, but if we have Farrukh as a temporary NPC we can wait on a recruitment drive. (I don't suppose any other of the original unselected applicants pulled a me and have been lurking for the past three years?)

And lastly:

I've been an Eben/Farrukh shipper ever since Hall of Harsh Reflections.

And then I started dating Lowri. Sorry to crush your dreams, man. I know the feeling. (I know Amos and Alex will never happen on The Expanse, but it would be so awesome!)

Sorry to see you go, Rynjin. I've enjoyed our games together and it's gonna be hard for us to replace Farrukh.

Power-wise, it might actually be better not to immediately fill the 6th slot - that way Kc doesn't have to amp up the encounters quite as much.

Also, unless there is someone like DankeSean who's read the whole thread and is just waiting for an opening, anyone joining is going to have to deal with a group that has been playing together for 3 years and nearly 20k posts. I'd be glad to have a new face, but it might not be fair to them.

I'm going to miss Farrukh. :(

I agree with Gark that it might be better to not replace Farrukh. In addition to dropping us down to a healthier 5-man party, he was leaps and bounds the most optimized character in the party. Without him KC might be able to run encounters straight out of the book.

I'm at that point in the RotR game I'm running and as a GM it's fantastic.

Of course, there's always the chance that he'll come back as an antagonist...

Oh, that could be fun. Farrukh, Spiny, and Other Carina all forming the core of a Spiny's Six-specific Legion of Doom.

Well, it's been fun everybody. Anybody that wants to talk to me can add me on Steam (Rynjin), Discord (Rynjin), or talk to me on Giant in the Playground (you get the pattern). Really, if you see a Rynjin anywhere there's a 90% chance it's me and a 10% chance it's that Chinese guy who stole my name for Google and Youtube.

It was a good run, but I figured this might be the outcome, unfortunately. I'll keep following along on the thread, and KC and I plan to work out a good (or at least definitive) send-off for Farrukh.

I don't really have any desire to post on this forum any more, I only made this alt so I could PM KC and either say goodbye or just continue in this thread and pretty much this thread only. I'm going to keep reading along, because I'm really invested in seeing how this ends. This is, honestly, the best game I've ever played in. Even when some of us didn't get along or see eye to eye on some things, this felt like a real group of friends. And it honestly still tickles me (with as great a job as he's done) that KC was so reluctant to run a game in the first place.

Have fun, I'll see you around (even if you don't see me), and try not to need so many Reincarnations going forward. =)

-Jeremy, Rynjin, etc.

Sad to see you go, bud. Thanks for all the good gaming over the years. This is definitely the best PBP I've ever been in, and one of the top games I've played in ever as well. 3 years and 20k posts is very impressive.

I have another group who all PBP together. They play in the game I'm running, one of them runs a RotRL and others have run other stuff at other points. I've been playing with them for several years on here as well. If we do decide to grab another PC, I could ask if any of them are interested. Not sure if they'd want to read 20k posts, but I don't really think that would be necessary either. Up to y'all, I'm good either way.

Once again, best of luck Rynjin. Thanks for all the great one liners and optimized destruction.

This game was--or rather, is--the best one I've ever played in, on the tabletop or online. :)

What's your Discord tag? Need the 4 number digits at the end I think.

In addition to dropping us down to a healthier 5-man party, he was leaps and bounds the most optimized character in the party.

You two have always been pretty damn tied on that. :P

One way or another, we probably won't get another player. Having started a new PbP recently* and immediately lost 3-4 players, I've come to realize just how lucky we got with the six-man crew we have. We only lost one player in three years of running, and even he stuck with it for nearly two installments before his out-of-game workload went haywire. Honestly, I don't think we'd be able to replace a player like Rynjin. The most I could see is something more gimmicky, like Rodrigo-/Gattel-/Robin-style guest stars or something.

*Because, y'know, I'm so good at consistently updating one game...

What's your Discord tag? Need the 4 number digits at the end I think.

Rynjin #3713

I realize it was like three years ago but does anyone recall what the ghosts of the dead triad guys said to Tanith in his dream?

I suppose I could do some searches. It shouldn't be too hard to find.

Something about "Beware the silver one", IIRC...

Here it is.

Hey, one thing that occurred to me as far as not replacing Farrukh: none of us are trap disablers, are we?

I don't think post-Warder Farrukh was, either.

He still had Disable Device. No Trapfinding though.

Yeah, plus even if he couldn't disable magic traps anymore he could always spot them courtesy of an insane Perception score. I'm not certain, but it's possible we haven't actually tripped a trap since Zyrxzog's lair.

Anyone have any ideas how to work around this? I mean, we could just accept that we'll blunder through the occasional trap and suck it up via brute force. It might be nice to have another solution, though. :-)

Well, you and Carina have the skill points for it. Or if we replace Zalamandra as a cohort, we could get uh . . . Raddle, maybe?

I can also just start dumping ranks into Perception. I held off because we had Farrukh. I'd have a base +19 next level if I put all my points into it, and then at least we would know when we need to dimension door past something.

We should start by beefing up our perception checks. At higher levels traps become less common but also more deadly. Living Greyhawk was fairly famous for how common maximized/empowered enervation traps were.

As for actually disabling the traps once we've found them, dispel magic will usually work. There's also a spell that grants trapfinding temporarily.

You want to shoot for a +24, trap Perception DCs max at 34.

The ones in the Core Rulebook do. :)

I don't think we should replace Zalamandra, she brings a lot to the table that we lack otherwise. As a remedy, I was vaguely considering taking Leadership at some point to get a rogue cohort. (Raddle would not be my top choice, however...) Still that seems like overkill. I have maximum skill ranks in perception, but I'm still only a +15 modifier because of crap Wisdom and not having bothered to invest in ways to boost it because we always had Farrukh the all-seeing.

That's an interesting spell Tanith pointed out, and either Carina or I could take it. (I'm not certain if I'll have an extra 2nd-level slot, but there's always another page of spell knowledge. On the other hand, if Carina learns it, it's only the cost of a 2nd level scroll and then she can make it an extract so anyone can use it.)

Lacking Disable might be a problem, for those traps that a dispel bomb won't take care of. Pumping up a previously unlearned skill at this late date will take multiple levels of devotion to make work. (Alas that all this happened right after I did a lengthy retraining...) I suppose at some point I could shell out 3,000 gp to add a +2 Intelligence to my circlet and associate it with Disable and boom, I've suddenly got 12 (or however many character levels I have) ranks in a skill.

And yeah, like Feral said, at this level it's just the sheer potential nastiness of traps that has me worrying about this. We're past 'you trigger a couple of magic missiles' and into 'you trigger a horrid wilting/disintegrate combo.' stage of dungeon exploration.

I'm not sure, but I think Celeste becomes a cohort option in a few levels. Seems like she might be a good trapfinder.

We could also just . . . invite her along on one of our adventures, without making her a cohort. It wouldn't have worked for Redhand because they're apparently already on to her, but the next one, maybe. That might be the way to run "guest stars" if we do it - an endless cycle of rogue friends.

The circlet plan sounds the least complicated - we could pay for that out of the party fund, because I know that's not where you were planning to go with the character.

Huh, neat. Johydee could basically pass as Vecna's Good Twin. She works even better as a counter to Norgorber.

Also, you guys could send Zalamandra into Arcane Tricksterdom. ;D