Good morning ladies & gentlemen,
I would like to apologize for my extended absence. Play-by-post games are a communal storytelling endeavor, and when one member disappears, it can adversely affect the flow of game. I hope you can all appreciate that was never my intention. A couple weeks ago before my posting stopped, you may remember it got a bit sporadic. As mentioned at the time, this was because of working long hours during restaurant week while battling a bad chest cough. I thought I had “toughed my way” through it, and was starting to feel a bit better. It turned into pneumonia instead, with severe complications because of my asthma. As such, I have spent the past two weeks in the hospital, on a heavy dose of several medications. I am happy to say I am back out and feeling much better, with functioning lungs. I am truly sorry for detracting from everyone’s gaming experience, and hope you still have a place for me at the gaming table, as I would most certainly like to rejoin the game. If not, I totally understand and wish you all the best.
- C
glad youre alive!!
Glad you're feeling better man!
Also, I think the paizo downtime erased any "new message" notifications. I've been checking this regularly but didnt realize there were new posts. Will catch up now..
Damn, I hadn't been getting updates, and had assumed this thread had gone dormant! So sorry all. Posting now.
Wraxus has decided to drop from the game. Combination of my slow posting rate, and so many details he doesn't feel like he is aware of what is going on.
Yes. Going to wait till after new years though. Let's get through this battle if we can before then, then take a holiday break.
Everyone doing okay? Just checking in, been pretty quiet
here as always. had a busy extended weekend
Hope everyone enjoyed their holidays.
On a side note, I will be out of town and unable to post between the 19-26th of this month.
Have another interested in joining the game, building to fill the arcane caster role, but not sure what their exact plans are yet.
I don't remember Banmor, he was some kind of accomplice of Hezek? (found by searching his name)
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Something like that, Hezek gave his name up when we interrogated him but nobody had ever heard of him before. He was some sort of organizing influence for the Rebels, though my sense is that Hezek was more an ally of convenience while Banmor was more like the Rebels patron. In any event, he is at least indirectly connected to the murder of Master Torenest and therefore high on our Most Wanted list. They called when "Lieutenant Banmor" suggesting he is or was affiliated with the Army.
I'm sorry if it's presumptuous of me to post in this thread, but I've started working on this character.
I actually have a lot going on at the moment, so it may be a little bit more time before I'm able to write him up to the standard that I'm expecting of myself, but I wanted to ask the peanut gallery about some of the things I am planning and/or thinking.
My character is a psychic/investigator. As such, he is capable of a wide range of skills as well as a variety of psychic magic. As an amnesiac he is capable of changing out his entire spell list if you just give him a few days.
My character is also an infamous villain from a past generation, although few remember him as his identity was kept a secret in order to keep good-aligned heroes from scrying him and showing up at his lair. His current state is the result of his defeat at the hands of adventurers, who were merciful types unable to kill a defeated foe in cold blood. Instead of killing him they locked his memories behind a powerful blocker of magic, and hoped that they could rehabilitate him into society. While their plan worked to an extent, he always felt a certain draw and some shadows of memories - their spellcraft was imperfect. Now, he has some vague memories of his past that serve to drive him to discover what happened to him.
That's where the Tower stepped in. They promised him help with recovering his lost memories in exchange for his labor and power lent to the Tower's missions.
My plan for him is to have whatever it was that sapped his memory to be connected with whatever metaplot you have going on, but I'm honestly not sure what it is that you have going on, or what the best opportunity for Dareon to be introduced is?
Does anyone have any helpful thoughts?
This week I will finish filling out this profile.
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Welcome Dareon! Great to have you join the game.
Good to hear your PC will have a non-Divine spell casting focus, as that is our group's principle need. We have a melee "tank", a divine caster and a rogue/face type so a psychic sounds like a great fit.
Very interesting background. The Tower (at least one "wing" of it) has a history of reclamation projects and other such things they keep secret, so your backstory could fit well.
This is a somewhat different campaign world than most I've played in. It is very much a Sandbox run by a GM that has a real strength in responding to whatever direction the group decides to go in. We get numerous leads and decide which ones to pick up and run with. As such there really isn't one over-arching plot, rather there are numerous threads. One or more these could be a good connection point for your PC's backstory (more on that in a minute).
I would recommend reading at least the Campaign Tab info, and as much of the Gameplay thread as you can tolerate. There's a lot...like, a lot (the game has been going on for ~6 years). So reading it all is likely not possible but at least the recent pages would give you a sense. Because of its longevity this can be a tough campaign to jump into and feel like you have full sense of the scope. But with a bit of a sense of the world and what the recent events are you'll get more out of it.
Essentially are group is a trouble-shooting squad for the Mageocracry, the Government in the area run out of the Tower in the capital City of Coran. Coran is where most all of our group's adventures have taken place. Our group has work on a ton of different things, but two that might relate to your background are Radgar the Anti-Paladin and the Exiles. Radgar has faded to the background a bit, but was killing guards for a while until we executed a drow prisoner. Haven't heard as much from him lately. The Exiles were a group of criminal malcontents the Tower banished to the lower planes as punishment....except at least some of them didn't die and are back causing problems. The GM might be able to work out a link there. A long-time plot arch has involve competing groups from the merchants, a rebellion and the criminal underworld (when this campaign began these were actually separate campaigns the GM ran), there might be a connection there but again I'd recommend working with the GM on that. Finally I'd think it's fine if your PC's amnesia has nothing to do with any current/past missions and is just as simple as what you proposed: he needed help with his condition and the power provided it with a stipulation to serve. Master Hast in particular might be game for that.....
Lastly, the fact that your PC was originally a villain and "turned" good is an interesting mix with our group. Two of the 3 other PC's in the party are Lawful Evil, and the other is quite solidly neutral. My (Soliel's) background is actually something of a "redemption" project like yours, except that she stayed Evil (she a devil at heart) and just found a new inspiration. We're a pretty ruthless bunch overall, even if our goals are generally "welfare of the City/Govt" kinds of tasks. Anyway, will be interesting to see where it goes.
Welcome again, if you have other questions ask away!
So, I believe I'm done with my character's crunch, should someone like to take a look.
I also did some work on Dareon's backstory.
Like most teenagers, he had naive, half-baked philosophy based on very little actual experience. Unlike most teenagers, he could act on this philosophy and had little reason to change himself. It doesn't matter specifically what this philosophy was, but he had some idea of how society should be, and over a period of a few years he built up a massive network of informants, servants, toughs, and more using abilities like modify memory, dominate person, charm person, and more.
When he was in his early 20s he fell in love with a young woman. Without even thinking about it he used his powers in order to force her to fall in love with him as well, and within a year they got married and moved in together. He thought he was happy. After a few years of this life - crime lord during the day, psychically lobotomized wife at night - he had a crisis of conscience. He dispelled all of his charms and memory alterations because he felt it might restore her artistic spirit that he had fallen in love with her for. Worst-case scenario, he figured, she would remember everything and hate him. But to him, it was far worse than that. Without his psychic reminders, she just stopped. Everything about her personality had been accidentally erased as, for too many years, she simply hadn't had to think. She just stood there with a vague smile on her face.
He fell into a grief and his first period of self-reflection. He came to many conclusions about himself and he began to prepare a plan: He dismissed most of his network and made a hole one person wide in the world. Then he used his magic, not only to change his appearance, but to layer false memories over his real ones. He layered a false memory of adventurers discovering his criminal empire and defeating him, and placed people he knew would be so dangerous and evil that he might die fighting them in his memory. Then over that he placed a layer of normal memories: The memories of the person he had removed to make room for himself. At that point, he was gone.
He woke up the next morning as a 22-year-old baker's apprentice named Dareon with no memory of his previous life. Instead, he only had memories of Dareon's life: Dareon was an orphan who had been taken in by his current boss, a burly but good-hearted baker named Lewis. He lived in the attic of a bakery in Coran and worked most of the day. He had a girlfriend named Samantha, who he met at the library while trying to educate himself, since he never had the opportunity to attend school. He had friends, with whom he would visit cafes and restaurants when he had a few extra silver pieces to spend on someone else cooking for him. The plan to make Dareon into a regular person was a good one, but it wasn't long before he began to rediscover his psychic abilities, and his predecessor's spellcraft had been imperfect and left the vague impressions of some lost memories behind.
Soon, Dareon approached the wizards at the Tower in Coran. He was curious about both of these strange phenomena. Despite the protests of his baker benefactor, he change residences and jobs to Tower-supported options as they offered to research his memory difficulties for him. In exchange, he would explore his own psychic powers by taking on jobs for him. They had indeed detected some memory blockers in his mind, and indeed had noted that his psychic potential was very great. They instructed him to keep notes on the effect and feeling of using his powers, as well as a dream journal and a journal of any deja vu he experienced.
That was a year and a half ago. Dareon had undergone several missions on behalf of the Tower now. His replacement life's friends have distanced themselves from him somewhat, as it's strange to watch someone that you thought was so wholesome and simple become a magical enforcer of the law so suddenly. He's uncovered some things so far, but nothing very significant of his memories: Mostly new and old psychic powers.
I've filled out his profile and believe that I am ready for play. The only thing I'm missing is equipment, which I will work on now (and is my least favorite part of building a character).
I'll take a look over it.
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@Dareon: Great backstory! While the GM is looking over the character, one thing I saw for certain is your skills. A house rule in this campaign is that Bluff and Intimidate don't exist, you use Diplomacy for anything you'd use those skills for. So you can drop the ranks you have in Intimidate and Bluff and put them elsewhere.
Thanks for the note - I put 5 ranks in Acrobatics and 5 ranks in Sleight of Hand, keeping 7 ranks in Diplomacy.
Everything looks good Dareon, welcome to the game. Feel free to make a post in the game thread introducing your character to the others.
Did we scare him off already?
He has not responded to a PM I sent last week either.
At this point, I'm going to bring this game to an end. The drow/medusa was Diguri (with some custom abilities), for those who might have been wondering.
If there are any loose ends you'd like to wrap up, I am willing to do that, primarily as a role play.
Ah ha! I suspected that was Diguri. Had a feeling this fight was the wrap-up. (Ian hasn't made that connection yet though).
Bittersweet. This game was my very first real experience with D&D or anything like it. Pathfinder is a tough system to learn from nothing but it was worth it. Still one of the most layered and deep stories/worlds I've had the pleasure of RP-ing in. And the most ambitious format for a PbP game I've seen someone run, having three simultaneous campaigns of players in separate factions in conflict with each other. I have never envied the amount of work this game must have taken from you throughout, but I've always felt like Ian Marros existed in a real world.
Props to Secondsight for always bringing your A game. Each of your chars has been distinct and interesting and even over 5 years I wish I'd had more time to get to know them. And props to Tenro for playing consistent, understated and believable characters (and for inviting me to the game to begin with). I still miss Tavrus, the old dead bastard.
Just for a little nostalgia, June 30th, 2013
Reporting in to the tower Jori greets the group. "Akane, Aurelion, and Tunny, we have other duties we would like you to attend to. For the others of you I'd like you to meet Serelina Bellafini." He gestures to a beautiful woman with pale skin and icy blue eyes. "And Ian Marros." A middle aged man with touches of gray in his hair. He is clean shaven and shows a number of battle scars on his tanned skin.
"Well met. Looking forward to assisting." His voice was as rough as his demeanor.
This is sounding weirdly like an Oscar speech or something, so enough of that. Some of the RP elements I'd like to hit before the curtains close:
-I'd like to write another letter from Ian to Brother Tomlin. Response totally optional.-I'd like Ian to ask to retire from The Tower. He'd probably go to Hast or Veray. If they allow him to retire, he'll stop by Bellafini to say goodbye. But since that players gone, don't need to play that scene out unless you want to.
-If he's allowed to retire, it'd be cool to do a goodbye scene with each of the other players too, probably Ian stopping by their quarters to tell them the news and goodbye.
-Speaking of the old dead bastard, awhile back Ian wrote a letter to Hast: "Hast, Did Tavrus get brought back? Where's he? -Ian", did he hear back?
Wow, just saw this as I was about to type up a post about getting back to the Tower. Totally agree with RinValek (Ian's player, had to actually look that up!) on all points. As one of the "originals" along with Tenro, it's been quite the journey with tons of folks having come and gone. Serelina's player is a friend in RL, though he had to drop out he'll be interested to hear how the game wrapped up.
Big kudos to you, GM Ascension. This has been the richest and best sandbox I ever got to play in. Thanks for the hard work and the deep, immersive world. It's too bad the other factions didn't sustain like ours did. Just goes to show the Mageocracry is the best!
RinValek: Definitely welcome the letter to Tomlin as part of the wrap up. And much appreciation for how you took the most basic of class/race combos (ok, half-elf later, but still) and turned it into one of the better personality and backstory PC's I've seen. I'd join another game with you anytime.
@GM: Would you indulge a few behind-the-scenes questions? There were tons of loose ends we never had a chance to run down and I'd love to know what the answers were:
What did the little book Diguri have say?
Who/What was Lt Banmor, where was he?
Who were the two other rebellion folks we killed, what was their plan?
Who was the 6-armed snake-thing who's body we found?
What happened to Radgar after Maklo was killed?
Who killed the librarian and played the harp?
Who were Sela and Ky?
Where/who were the other Exiles back from the Abyss?
I might think of others...….
a grand and satisfying wrap up to kill those bastards. and a tough fight. good to play alongside you all.
as for myself i have kinda gravitated away from pathfinder so this was one of my old holdouts from a bygone era, haha.
@GM: Would you indulge a few behind-the-scenes questions? There were tons of loose ends we never had a chance to run down and I'd love to know what the answers were:What did the little book Diguri have say?
Who/What was Lt Banmor, where was he?
Who were the two other rebellion folks we killed, what was their plan?
Who was the 6-armed snake-thing who's body we found?
What happened to Radgar after Maklo was killed?
Who killed the librarian and played the harp?
Who were Sela and Ky?
Where/who were the other Exiles back from the Abyss?
I might think of others...….
While written in cyclopian, it's also a coded message. But it is a collection of notes to keep track of various details of the Thieve's guild and other organizations that Diguri also had a hand in.
Lt Banmor was a human who saw the corruption creeping into Coran politics. He had long served in the military of Coran and became disgusted with the waste and greed he saw. He was willing to go to great lengths to overthrow the government.
Characters from the original rebellion group, one had been in that first fight where Rosco was taken, but he had fled.
A Marai rakshasa.
Radgar left the city searching out more artifacts of Ris'jae - he was also the harp player. Like many characters in the game he relied a fair bit on illusion and disguise to move about. You actually fought him briefly at the gate, that was him in the full plate.
Ky was Diguri as you correctly guessed. The Iron Gullet being one of those other organizations she "owned" that was not part of the thieve's guild. None there knew her as anything other than Ky the informant. Sela was bodyguard for her there to deal with the day to day problems of men in the establishment who didn't fully understand Ky's standing so that Ky didn't have to deal with combat situations.
A few of the exiles were in Issust Hold and would have come into play had the game ever gone that direction. The others I had no specific plans for you, but were background characters that could be brought in should I need new villains.
It has been a fun 6 years of playing with all of you, and I appreciate all of you sticking around for it. While I played d&d back in the 80's, and have a long history of RPG's, I learned a lot about GMing with this experience, particularly some things that work well and some not so well in the PbP format.
I was a little sad no one got turned to stone :). I placed the DC to have a reasonable chance of that without making it an instant party wipe, but those good saving throw rolls made that a non-issue.
I definitely held my breath on those Fort saves. Don't have a reroll for those like Iron Will. We got lucky.
@SecondSight, you too, absolutely.
Very interesting! At one point I was semi-obsessed with all the background plot mysteries going on. Maybe a few more questions?
*What was the Biggest surprises/twists for you as a GM in the game, things players did or routes stories went you hadn't thought likely to occur?
*What was the whole story behind trying to blow up Tiny Town? Did the Rebellion really plan that if they saw themselves as the “good guys”?
*Was there a Thieves’ Guild HQ we never found?
*Who was Dether? Seems like there was more to him than met the eye.
*Did Diguri know it was Soliel at the Iron Gullet? Was the “tip” she provided about Banmor being at the in just to ambush the party?
*Did Rocosmia see through Roland’s disguise?
*Who was behind the Gumlat/Fran demon problem? Was that part of some other group’s plot?