Battle in Kelmarane

Friday, September 17, 2010

I had the pleasure of meeting and running a game for Kyle and Nani Pratt at PaizoCon a few years back, and since then Facebook has brought me occasional awesome updates from their campaign. But when THIS showed up, it was too awesome not to repost here. Check it out, with the whole story by the mad geniuses behind what looks like an incredible campaign!

(Forewarning to Legacy of Fire players, minor spoilers might follow.)

F. Wesley Schneider
Managing Editor

Nani and I actually took the inspiration from the battle market that someone else made a year ago from here. Originally we thought we were going to just make something exactly the same, but then when we noticed how good the map was, we thought we could blow it up properly to give a good "full immersion" for the market. So my wife Nani took the image into Photoshop, sharpened the image, and then increased the scale to 1 inch. When it was all said and done, we printed it out on ~30 8.5 x 11 pieces of paper and cemented it onto foam board. We had envisioned making the columns look better... but we sadly ran out of time before the game so we had to hurry with a makeshift styrofoam solution!

We really wanted to make our Legacy of Fire game have immersion and put us all into the feel of the game. It's what makes the Paizo products so great, so we're trying to go the extra mile with this one. All of our players were so surprised we had this game aid and thought it was wonderful. It really made everyone understand exactly what the market was like (and just how huge it is compared to the characters themselves. We actually already had the Ruined Crypt of Kelmarane made for after this, and decided we wanted to go the extra mile. I think our players are going to be really surprised at this one too. Hopefully World Works finishes up the Garden from the next AP in time!

The fight itself was completely memorable. Our entire party snuck in through the north entrance using Undrella's key. Our rogue, a goblin, scouted ahead in the guise as a member of the battle market, and ended up talking with both the gnolls in the guardroom and Hurvank. With some very good bluff checks he convinced the poor ogre that the gnolls had set him up to lose in his last bout with Haleen. Hurvank then went over to the gnolls in the guardroom imagining that each one was Haleen and started to strangle them all to death. The goblin quickly went over and pitoned the second door to the guard room, trapping the remaining guards inside, scaring and confusing the gnolls on the first floor. Meanwhile the rest of the party (who didn't know what was going on) heard an ogre running across the market yelling about how he was going to kill Haleen (all three of them). The character with the "Finding Haleen" trait went rushing in to attack the ogre... which caused the bugbears to join the fight against the PCs fighting the ogre. Meanwhile, the gnolls all were trying to kill the ogre and had no clue what was going on. After about 10 more rounds of confusion, the remaining gnolls/defenders on the upper terraces finally figured out what was going on and rushed to protect the remainder of the battle market. By this time, though, the damage was done and a large number of the forces were dead by ogre/bugbear/gnoll/PC hands.

Having the market made prior to this made the combat incredibly easy to run. Instead of just describing how far up the terraces were we just placed the gnolls and described how they were shooting down from above. It was a GREAT aid!

Kyle Pratt
GM & Mad Architect