WelbyBumpus's page

So, I had an interesting situation come up when I started this adventure last session, and I could use some advice.

As others have noted, I had a continuity problem with the adventure: at the end of HMM, the party is given a keep near the Storval Plateau and they've gotten the location of Jorgenfist from Barl Breakbones. Although I've stressed that they have months before any invasion will be ready, they insist on being proactive and heading right to Jorgenfist. Even the lure of a festival in their honor in Sandpoint wasn't enough to lure them back--"We have more important things to do right now than attend a party." A good point.

So off goes the party to Jorgenfist. As they are only 8th level, they are being exceedingly cautious, and scouting as best they can. Here comes the trouble.

The party's rogue is willing to scout the area. He is flying for 16 minutes and invisible for 8 minutes. He intends to make a sweep over the area and report back. The first building he checks out is the Black Tower, where two harpies are signing (and I decided the third was asleep). He fails one of the Will saves and is captivated. He flies into the roost atop the tower and just stands, helpless, right in front of the captivating harpy. The harpies don't know he's there...until the invisibility wears off. Suddenly a rogue appears right in their roost. So they attack (consistent with their tactics, they enter melee when they have an opponent alone). Because they are able to stun the rogue every single round, he doesn't even get a chance to flee or respond, and they have him unconscious by the middle of round 3.

What do the harpies do with the rogue? They aren't really allies of Mokmurian--they long predate his arrival at Jorgenfist and it seems that the giants and the harpies enjoy mutual defense, but leave each other alone. So a "march the prisoner to the leader" or even "take the prisoner to the brig" scenarios seem unlikely. They are Intelligence 6, sadistic, carnivorous monsters--I would guess they probably just eat him and divvy up his loot.

I know I've got the ability, as DM, to rule this whichever way I want. If I want the character dead, I can just say, "they kill and eat you." If I want to throw the character some mercy, I could rule that they choose to interrogate him, or turn him over to Mokmurian, or any number of plans in which he could engineer a cunning escape. But I'd like to be true to the intent of the adventure and its creatures, and ask what you guys think is the likeliest result here.

Ricardo Montalban passed away today. Link here.

Happy Birthday and thanks for all you do!

Todd Stewart wrote:

Lord Stewpndous wrote:

I am a little disappointed with some of the grammar on the first page.

1st paragraph, 1st sentence:
"A nation of prideful people who till the current century chafed under the yoke of foreign rule...." {should be until, not till}

It's an older form, and perhaps less common in written form rather than spoken, but till and until have the same usage there.

It was a bit of a head-spinner thought, especially when combined with a bit of agricultural imagery - what kind of plough do you use to till a whole century :D

Ooh, I see my concern has been addressed. However, I don't think that technically-correct obscurity wins the day here; I'm plainly not the only one thrown off by this. I still think it should have read "until".

I just started looking through this yesterday, and settled in for a good read. I was immediately thrown off by the typo in the first line of the first page. I hadn't seen this since the adventure "The Malady of Kings," although that product dropped off in quality while this one picks up. I had a general sense that it could use more tightened editing throughout. I was also dismayed at the lack of useful crunchy information--no traits, not many variants suggested. I think this will be more useful to me than Elves of Golarion, but Elves of Golarion was a better product in this line, I think.

Well, last year was about 850 entries, and this year there's more word of mouth, and interest based on the success of last year's contest. I know I got 2 people to enter this year that didn't last year. If everyone who did enter last year averages 1 recruit, and then some more people enter on their own after simply missing out on it last year, I'm going to guess about 2000, but in honor of the approaching new year I'll make my formal guess 2009.

Ah, but there are some--like me--who entered last year but are not entering this year. So it's not entirely cumulative. Which somehow reminds me of this here.

I've got a friend coming in from out of town for the holidays, and we're getting together a game on the South Side of Chicago on Tuesday, December 23, at about 7 pm. We already have 3-4 folks, and could use another few interested people to round out our table. No specifics as to which adventure we'll play--probably Scenario #7 or later--we'll have to see if one of our group has played something none of the rest of us have.

If interested, please shoot me an email at rules.lawyer.ron@gmail.com

28 JAN - 01 FEB

Fort Wayne, Indiana

I'll be there. Will you?

Oh, goodness no! Last year they gave last-minute cancellations on many of the games my friends and I came halfway across the country specifically to play (the high-level finale for LG, the Living Kalamar finale), slotted in a last-minute LG Core adventure that was, at best, 90 minutes long, and then tried to sell us on 4th edition by running a preview event specifically designed to kill players off in the final battle with the dragon. Any lingering respect I had for the RPGA was slain then (although the RPGA powers that be were very kind in listening to me vent about it), and I'm not going back.

I had never heard of the Psionic stuff from Dreamscarred - I'll definitely be looking out for that. Any other cool Psionic stuff out there?

Dreamscarred Press finally released their all-psionic, no-magic campaign setting, Third Dawn. It's even available in .pdf here at Paizo. I've been looking into just such a campaign for a while, but Dreamscarred did it for me--now, if I can get an adventure path out of them...

Hey, all. Has anyone played or run the DarkStryder campaign for WEG's d6 Star Wars system?

I'm starting a new campaign shortly. I love adventure paths, but want to move away from fantasy for a bit. I've had the DarkStryder books for a while, but my gaming groups have always been turned off of games where you don't make your own character, but play a pre-existing character. However, my current group would really enjoy this, so I'm kicking off the Dark Stryder campaign early next year. A few questions, though:

1) Can anyone that has played or run this give me a rundown, however, brief, of their experience? Most importantly, I'm looking for where the campaign's "trouble spots" are.

2) I haven't decided whether to run this as WEG d6, or as WotC Star Wars Saga Edition. There is a steeper rules learning curve for me to use the former, but I get to use the stats as presented right in the campaign books. There is not as steep a learning curve if I use the Saga edition, but I'll have to retool all of the stats in the campaign (where "retool" means "steal stats liberally from Threats of the Galaxy and the Saga adventure path at the WotC website")

3) It appears that the Jedi, a key part of the Star Wars universe, play a pretty small role in this campaign. I've been describing it to my players as a sort of "Star Wars meets Star Trek" model. It's the Star Wars universe, but you're flying around in one ship, and generally play the key characters on that ship. Does this seem accurate?

4) Per the campaign, everyone is supposed to be playing multiple characters. I've seen this advice in other gritty campaigns (like Dark Sun and Paranoia) and wonder how it has worked out.

I'm grateful for any input.

Now the first example was a CR 17 non core creature, which I...

Out of curiosity, what CR 17 non-core creature are you using? Because, as you know, non-core creatures are not all created equally, and some tend to be overwhelmingly more powerful than MM creatures of an equivalent CR.

Also, does the creature hide in plain sight? My biggest complaint about ambushes is that they don't usually work in RAW...you need cover or concealment to hide, and having cover or concealment between you and the hapless PC means you don't have a charge lane.

Apologies if this seems like a threadjack; I'm just looking for some further information.

And to get back on track, I also think that AC scaling needs to be better done. I've played quite a bit of high-level 3.5 play, and it seems that every attack is either "I'm going to hit you on 2+" or "I'm only going to hit you on a 20." That implies bad scaling to me.

Hiding this with a spoiler tag, as it relates to Hook Mountain Massacre:

I noted that sidebar as well, but took it as "we are distancing ourself from the Driz'zt model of drow" rather than a limitation to my ability to play or DM drow PCs.

I second that...

But also would love to see an Adventure Path centered in a Dwarven Cave Network.

And while I am at it - One on the Red Planet (I know I say that every couple of months).

Or one about how the Whispering Tyrant is taking over the dwarven cave networks on the Red Planet...

Hell, with 80% (or some astronomically high % like that) of marriages ending in divorce I would think that people wouldn't want to be a part of that.

I daresay the percentage is not nearly so high, unless you take a skewed sample.

Coming soon. :-)

Any update on when the "Report My Event" link will be active? Is it active, but I missed it? I organized a Pathfinder Society game day last weekend; I have all the numbers I need, but I need a place to input 'em.

I also told everyone to leave the Event Code blank, and we can fill that in as needed once I have it.

So, is planning a game day to play this on October 4th a good idea or a bad idea? That is, how reliable is the release date for this?

I think I recall mention of Vaarsuvius having a wife somewhere in one of the earlier strips...

Actually, I think that reference was to V being married, not any indication of gender (husband or wife). So V's gender remains unknown.

Not subscribing. I've got more free 4E adventures than I'll use in the next couple of years already from the free period, and the digital tools are laughably bad--I don't plan to pay them while they're fixing them up.

That sounds cool, we should see if joelf wants to play cause he could run, and maybe we could start an e-mail around about it.THoughts?

Sounds good. I'm at rules (dot) lawyer (dot) ron (at) gmail (dot) com

I've got wide-open availability on the weekend of October 3rd through 5th--perhaps we could get something together then?

I live on the south side of the city, and work typical hours...so a weeknight or weekend game works best for me.

I've run Silent Tide, and would happily do so again. I've played Frozen Fingers. I'd like to play the other two.

Hey, everybody still looking for a PFS game in the Chicagoland area, anyone interested?

Yes, I am!

Nahualt wrote:

So you never had a web aplication glitch on you before? Apparently WOTC can't ever win.

WotC didn't have a Web glitch. They've had repeated failures, often of serious magnitude. They've admitted this themselves.

For the industry leader, their performance is nothing short of incompetent. Seriously, how many major foul-ups are necessary before it is we can blame them for dropping the ball? It's a rhetorical question, but a somewhat serious one. Their failures have gone far beyond the point that many companies would be making major personnel changes.

WotC can't win because they keep dropping the ball, not because they aren't being given a fair shake (OK, at least on this issue).

I agree completely, Tatter. I also have it on second-hand rumor that your "major personnel changes" prediction may have already occurred: there was a massive layoff of the Virtual Gaming Table team a few months back...a friend of a friend stepped into that, and was frustrated because they've had to rebuild the whole thing basically from scratch. So no surprise to me that it's running way behind.

This is separate, of course, from the more recent round of layoffs due to corporate restructuring.

I'm on the South Side of Chicago and interested in playing...I'm also happy to rotate DMing as well.

I expect that Brad Ruby will be scheduling Pathfinder for his COWS campaigns (particularly Stuffed COWS over Thanksgiving). However, I'd like to get into other gaming, too. Even if I have to leave the city (sigh). :)

I think it can go, generally. I didn't think so a year ago, but I've been playing in a Savage Tide game where the DM eliminated alignment. A paladin's detection triggers when someone is actively attempting harm to the paladin or his allies. Protection from X spells become a bit more powerful, as they generally always apply. Chaos hammer and equivalent spells are "full save for half" for people you consider enemies and "half save for a quarter" for people you consider allies.

This has had a few fun results: I'm playing a noble savage darfellan, a paladin/barbarian that the rules formerly did not allow. Our well-meaning rogue is going to take a few levels in assassin.

So, the only "ditch alignment in D&D" experiment I've taken part in has worked very well, I think.

Caveat: I did have one DM who ran two campaigns in which there was alignment, but we didn't know what our alignment was. We played our characters however we wanted, and he would keep track of our current alignment on his side of the screen. We only knew what alignment we thought we were striving towards. Sure, we knew when our paladin slipped away from his code, as he lost his paladin powers for a time. But we didn't know how badly our wizard had slipped until an unholy blight did him no damage...

Those of you who are on Facebook may have noticed a neat little application called "Dungeons and Dragons: Tiny Adventures" that lets you play a quasi-4E character, go on adventures, gain xp and treasures, etc. It's been out for a couple of days, I believe, but I just discovered it today and I've been playing with lots of my friends (friends can't help you adventure, but they can heal and buff you while you are out adventuring).

This afternoon, the application started terminating for lots of folks, giving the message "User wizapps_wotc has already more than 'max_user_connections' active connections". I got back on, only to get kicked off for the same error message.

I point this out partly because I recommend Tiny Adventures, but mostly to say that I think this is an unpleasant, but sadly typical, example of WotC's ability to fumble any kind of web-based play/reporting/product launch/etc.

Cuchulainn wrote:

I've toyed with the idea of using the UA rules that make Bards, Paladins, and Rangers prestige classes; it seems to make more sense that way. I'm just not sure how well it comes off in terms of game mechanics.

I've seen one PrC Bard in play and they ended up being more powerful than a normal Bard by far. Maybe it was the player but having the bard sing the first round then start Balefule polymorphing or disentigrating everything seemed out of place. They didn't feel as well rounded as a normal Bard does.

That ends up being just how every bard/sublime chord I've seen (which is 3 or 4) ends up looking like. They play like sorcerers, but better.

Got inspired by the Is banned race post.Is there any class that you have banned from your game?and why?

For me there are 2:
any and all versoin of the paladin that not LG,that why they made the blackguard for.

And gestalt characters,multiclassing may lead to abuse,gestalt pretty much garanty it.

Curious that the options you mention aren't "classes" in the traditional sense.

I generally ban psionics (although I'm thinking of running Dreamscarred Press' Third Dawn all-psionics-no-magic campaign setting if they ever get it done). I also generally ban "oriental" themed classes from the Complete books (wu jen, shujenga, etc.), although I'm generally fine with the ninja class if players want to strip the "oriental" themes from it and become a ghostly assassin-type.

I also ban druids, generally. They're too powerful. Technically, they are available in my campaigns as a prestige class requiring +3 base Fort save and 6 ranks in Knowledge (nature), but no one has yet taken me up on that.

Although it's been a couple of years, I played High Elves in Fantasy and much more 40K: I had a pretty massive Chaos Space Marines army, a reasonably-sized Sisters of Battle army, and I'd just started in on a Craftworld Iyanden Eldar army before I moved away and (mostly) quit playing.

Living Arcanis had similar t-shirts. I can't remember the benefits granted, though I think auto-stabilising on reaching -10 hit-points may have been one of them.

This doesn't seem like a particularly helpful benefit. :)

I overheard several players at GenCon asking for these; it seemed unusual that none were available. People were fine with making up characters on site (at one of my tables, the first hour of play was 4 people making up characters), but the option of pregenerated characters would have been a good addition.

I like #3 better. It's clearer that it is a compass, as compared to #2.

I remember hearing fairly recently that "The Demon Within is as high level as we're going for a while." And now this. I like high-level adventures, and I'll be interested to see how this one plays.

One thought, though: if most Pathfinder adventure paths finish with characters in the 14th-16th level range, perhaps any 15th+ level adventures, like this one, should have a couple of sidebars like "Running this Adventure for Characters That Have Just Completed Rise of the Runelords" or "Running this Adventure for Characters That Have Just Completed Curse of the Crimson Throne" in order to provide a good tie-in for DMs to keep running the same group just one more time.

My congrats as well. That they would sell out of an item available on the internet for free says good things.

Has there been any official or unofficial word about the relative difficulty of scenarios for Pathfinder Society? As a veteran of both Paizo's published adventures and other living systems (LG I'm looking at you!), I'm curious where Pathfinder Society will fall.

Not having any of the 3.5 supplements can make it hard to make powerful characters, and super mind-bendingly difficult mods aren't really very fun, so I'm hoping that the mods have an emphasis on the FUN with a little dash of difficulty in there.

I'm heartened by the mention that the DM should try to make the mods work even after the party might make a plot point screwup (a huge problem with a lot of the RPGA mods I've played).

I've only read the one adventure that I'm going to be running, but it seems quite easy for 1st level characters. To a friend, I commented "a party consisting of two half-elven monks and two half-elven bards would find some of this a real cakewalk." That said, there are a lot of challenges and puzzles that look like they will be both fun to play and fun to run.

Of course, I haven't played or run this yet, so there may be some deceptive difficulties in some of the stats I've reviewed.

However, on the assumption that other Pathfinder Society scenarios are similar, I'm excited about the possibility of playing less-than-maximized characters and still being able to defeat the challenges of the adventure. In fact...I think I'll play a half-elven monk!

Thanks to you guys!

Taar picks weapon focus (unarmed combat) at the beginning of the first Step 5 (for which he is ineligible, as a monk does not have a +1 BAB), and then at the end of Step 5 picks Improved Initiative instead.

The cost for raise dead is the 3.0 price, not 3.5 price. I actually like this, but I don't know whether it is intentional.

537pm ET and still no guide.

This doesn't bode well. Very RPGA-like.

If they simply fail to produce it at all, or produce it months late, I'll call *that* RPGA-like. More specifically, it would be like the promised revision of the LG Deities document, the Fright at Tristor results, the Bridge over Svartjet adventure, the high-level finale for this year's DDXP, on-line character tracking for Legacy of the Green Regent, and so on and so on.

I have had in hand for many days the adventure I'm going to run twice at GenCon. I've had time to carefully read it twice. It's quite good, better than most (but not all) RPGA adventures. And much prettier, too. I'm still holding out hope, and I understand that it's still several hours until EOB on the west coast.

But that doesn't keep me from looking every 15 minutes. :)

...along with the rest of the Pathfinder Society website will go live sometime tomorrow afternoon. No, we don't know when exactly. "End of day" is our target. :-)

Gonna be a looooong day at work. I'll be wearing out my browser's "Refresh" button, I'm sure. :)

I'm shooting for getting the scenarios out in waves and having all of them out before 8/8. I don't have additional specifics, but 8/8 is the drop dead.

This is later than I'd like, but your drop-dead date is good for me to hear. On the 9th I'm leaving town for a family reunion, and I'll be flying right from there to GenCon. So please don't push this into next Monday, or I'll have to get the scenarios on-site and prep them when I'd prefer to be gaming!

Certainly brave tactics helped win the day, but I also noticed the effectiveness of the sleep spell when cast as a standard action instead of the 1 round action that it is in the rules.

I agree with the previous response that you shouldn't let rules get in the way of the fun in oddball actions or corner cases...but be careful of letting them hold all the cards!

hazel monday wrote:

hazel monday wrote:

hazel monday wrote:

Mortal Kombat is the greatest videogame of all time.

I disagree. While Mortal Kombat is an excellent game, I feel that that Donkey Kong is the greatest videogame of all time.

Donkey Kong Sucks!

You know what?! YOU SUCK!!!!

Hey, quit the arguing you...guy. Hmmm.

So it's simple: What is your favourite video game, ever? And why does it hold that lofty position?

Loom, by LucasArts: the most beautiful story told in the computer game medium.

Runner-up, for attitude: Fallout 2.

Reading these posts, I feel quite advantaged: I played two separate Torg campaigns back in the day, each lasting 5+ years, and I've now been running a Torg game for just over a year, and it's going strong.

For the Torg-interested, be sure to take a look at Jasyn Jones' stellar Torg materials.

I also played and ran heaps of Masterbook. In fact, we ended up using it pretty much as the designers hoped: as the base rules set for other oddball games we played (not just Indiana Jones, but home-brew murder mystery games, a home-brew game set in the world of Warhammer 40K, etc.). Everyone in our gaming circle knew those rules, so we could apply them to a lot of things. In that sense, it did for us then what the d20 system does for my gaming group now.

I agree that Masterbook's SFX system was a pale shadow of Torg's systems, but the SFX system was intended to be generic, while Torg had a lot of specialty systems whose rules did not overlap (magic spells different than pulp powers different than miracles different than occult rituals...). A rebuild of Torg and/or Masterbook from the ground up by smarter heads than mine would be a beautiful thing.

This is a sad state of affairs for Eric Gibson; I don't know him, but I had high hopes for Torg 2.0 (I run a Torg game every other week now). Now it seems that he's out of the industry.

Nearly 20 years of gaming industry advancement could have done stellar things for Torg 2.0, I think. I only hope that someone takes Eric up on his sale offer and puts a good mind to Torg.

And here I thought I was being all clever for going to Mystara for my 4E game :-D

I love Mystara. Always have, always will. I finally got a copy of the Karameikos boxed set off eBay ($7!!) and am working on advancing the timeline some 200 years or so. My basic idea is that a great Event happened and changed the workings of magic forever. Many previously powerful spellcasters lost their abilities and others found new ones. The world is still reeling from this event and the PCs are thrown into a hostile and dark world.

Just refresh yourself on Rad and the nature of the Radiance, which is the source of magic itself. Your "Event" should probably be something based on the Radiance, such as the events set forth in Wrath of the Immortals. Just an idea from another gamer that remembers Mystara fondly.

Congratulations! It looks like a very satisfying conclusion to an epic campaign. How did the final battle go?

Late, is the best answer to that question. We generally play from 7 pm to 10:30 pm or so, but the final battle started at 9:30 or so and took us until past 1 am. And all of us had work the next day, but we didn't want to quit.

Also, our DM made a good call regarding Adimarchus, that I think was tough but fair:

[SPOILERSPACE]

[SPOILERSPACE]

[SPOILERSPACE]

[SPOILERSPACE]

Adimarchus has word of chaos at 30th Caster Level. This means all but the one non-chaotic party member would be dead, no save, if he used it. Which would not be fun for anyone.

So, instead, our DM determined that Adimarchus could quicken one spell-like ability each round.

Dalanet or "D" as he is knowed comes from a large falimy. Out of 3 set of twins, he is the youngest and has no twin. After pleading with mother and father they desiced to let thim study to be a wizard. He study with the Eladrins but found it takeing too long. So while looking in the study he found a short passage detailing on how to get more power in 1 day,than in a hunder years. He thought it was a joke so D on a clear night filled with stars called to the star da'call... In what seem like a hunder eladrins lifetimes all knowage was knowed and in the next insant it fragmented.D thought it was just pretest nitemares and went to his bed and slept. The final exam was here and D was next. At frist no spells came to mind... he stuggle to call the spells he spent 10yrs learning but silnce. The protures said you have a ten count before you fail. 1... 2... 3...a fant voice wisper 4... 5...da 6... 7...da'c 8... 9....1 with a loud voice DA'CALL!!! a shaft of brilliant, cold starlight to lance down from above. Well from that day on D became a aveaure.

so what do you think yes i made lots of spelling errors.

"He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster. For if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you." ~ Nietzsche

Interesting background (although, as you note, you need to work on your spelling).

What kind of stats does D have?

Hey, all. I just wanted to say that last night our Shackled City campaign came to a close with the defeat of Adimarchus. We had been playing since early October 2005, so it took us almost 3 years of biweekly play to win our way through. We ended with six characters, each of 17th level.

Indigo: human paladin/monk/dervish
Strom: human cleric/radiant servant of pelor
Einar "the White": elf bard/sacred chord (bearer of the Smoking Eye and mayor of Cauldron)
Edeo "the Black": human wizard/loremaster
Dane: aasimar paladin/grey guard
Jugash [me]: half-elf barbarian 2/scout 13/wild runner 2 (and bearer of Mindbite!)

It was a fantastic ride, and I'm grateful to Paizo for putting this together and for our DM for running the whole behemoth for us. Here is the "finale" post that our DM posted to us earlier today:

With the defeat and destruction of Adimarchus the band of adventurers
known as Futharc's Fist have freed the city of Cauldron from the
insane dreams of the demon prince and removed much of the evil forces
which had dominated the city for so long.

The City of Cauldron itself has suffered, it's bowl shattered by the
earthquakes below the central lake now lies much lower, and a stream
provides run off onto the slopes below. Many homes in the wealthy
quarter were utterly destroyed by this rent, to the glee of the
general population of the lake district. That this stream now
allows for most of the cities filth to be carried out of the lake has
dramatically reduced the pollution and virtually eliminated any
issues that the flood season may have caused.

Over the next few months the City springs back from its near
destruction far faster than one would expect. Or perhaps not,
considering that most of the forces of evil which had siphoned off
the wealth of the region has been removed, the demons in the jungle
have retreated far away from the plantations, the taxes paying for
the bands of half-orc's have been eliminated, and the wealth of
Hookface's hoard has been recovered.

For now the streets of Cauldron are safe, the church of St. Cuthbert
with the oversight of Jenya and Indigo reform the city watch. Once
one of the least powerful churches in Cauldron the Church of Pelor
quickly rises to dominate the care for the inhabitants of Cauldron,
Strom's rebuilding the cathedral that was once dedicated to Wee Jas
and rededicating it to Pelor still has a tendency to make Kristof
Jurgensen tear up with joy.

The benevolence of Einar the white and his mysterious companion Jil
open Cauldron to golden age of wealth, commerce and high couture.
The summer season of concerts and fashion show rapidly becomes the
event of the season, especially when so many of the models are angels
from the outer planes.

Along those same lines the attendance of students at the Blue Water
academy has similarly risen, with many of the students continuing
their studies on the furthest outer planes. The students even
whisper that along with the gates to Celestial realms Edeo the black
has hidden gates to darker places - including a gate to a plane of
the Abyss.

These gates provide easy transport for the Paladin Dane, as he
continues his quest for stern and swift justice, bringing the fight
to the evil ones on their own planes, and freeing the parts of
Celestia from the grip of the plane of Occipitus.

Of the last member of the Fist, Jugash is seen least of all. He and
his gisarme spend most of their time out in the jungle, where the
children growing up on the plantations and the workmen in the field
tell tales of how whenever a scream is heard in the Jungle, another
demon has met his end.

Partway through The Skinsaw Murders now, and the party I'm running is as follows (gestalt rules):

Esmerelda, human (varisian) fighter/rogue
Slip, human (varisian) ninja/beguiler
Herne, human (mixed) warblade/scout
Jervas Keen, human (chelaxian) archivist/factotum
Ogre, ogrekin cleric/monk
Reed in the Wind, raptoran paladin/cleric

I played the Delve and Scalegloom Hall at DDXP (they were more than enough to let me know that 4E is not the game for me).