DM Brainiac's Ironfang Invasion: Table 1 (Inactive)

Game Master DM Brainiac

Makes sense.

Wulfram will buy a scroll with 4 Protection from Evil spells.

Did we get a significant amount of extra money to spend? I think crafting is out of the question due to the time involved.

Karla is ok. I hope!

Okay, finally got a chance to level up Rogar:
Level 17 Summary:
+19 HP
+1d6 Blast damage
Infusion Specialization 5
Infusion: Grappling infusion
Metakinesis (twice)
Feat: Elemental Overload
Skills: Perception, Stealth, Acrobatics, Profession (stonemason), Knowledge (engineering, dungeoneering)

Wulfram Level 17 highlights:

+11 HP

+1 6th lvl spells/day
+1 9th lvl spells/day

Feat: Improved Iron Will

Adventuring skill increases:
+1 Diplomacy
+1 Perception
+3 Spellcraft

Background skill increases:
+1 Linguistics (Draconic)
+1 Profession Soldier

I would like to buy:
Wand of Cure Serious
Wand of Mirror Image
Wand of Daylight
Celestial Armor

Wulfram doesn't actually have a very good chance of making a DC 25 Strength check. With Righteous Might, his modifier is +9, so he would have to roll a 16 or better. So perhaps we need a different plan.

We don't need to take the stone, or the dais, and move or remove it, I think. What we need is to realign it, no? It can perhaps stay where it is. Perhaps Karla could do it subtly?

I'm also game to see Wulfram risk that roll, if he's up for it, but I agree that it is quite a big risk.

So other scenario: Mass invisibility to all, then Karla tries to sneak down and realign the nexus silently.

Comparing Wind Walk with Teleport:

Teleport is better, unless there are barriers we do not know of, and there's the limit of medium creatures. At the moment, we could do it more easily if Karla can see where to arrive and if Sia and Nik'o are made smaller.

Wind Walk has a similar limitation, but it doesn't say medium creatures, so Sia and Nik'o can stay large. Karla can change our appearance as we travel with Veil to either make us look more like cloud (don't know if it helps not getting spotted given we're in the Vault) or as Hobgoblin elites if that matters.

Karla can also Veil the group to make it look like a patrol.

Either way is fine with me. I wasn't sure if we had any way to make Sia and Nik'o smaller.

I still have two scrolls of Pup Shape to reduce them if needed.

DM, just to be sure. Can we see a place to teleport from where we are?

Yes you can teleport to a safe location.

I think we're ready for Karla to disguise us with a Veil spell and teleport onward.

Okay I will post tomorrow morning.

Sorry, Karla! If you had just used Bluff it might have gone better. Unfortunately, the minotaur has a high Will save. :(

I will be on vacation from 6/13-6/21. During this time, my posting will be limited. Some days I will probably not be able to post at all. I'll catch up on everything again when I return.

Thanks for the heads up. Have fun!

Last week wasn't good. This week is looking better. I'm sorry that I haven't been as consistent in posting as I would like.

Eustoma and Rogar are up!

The belt of physical might +4 (Dex, Con) and the belt of mighty constitution +2 Karla and Nik'o could use, but they would also be good for others. Anyone else?

The other items don't seem so relevant to split immediately.

Sorry, been caught up with a lot of things lately. I'll bot Eustoma tomorrow morning if she hasn't posted by then.

Sorry, been caught up with a lot of things lately. I'll bot Eustoma tomorrow morning if she hasn't posted by then.

Does that mean I can get the good magical stuff? ;)

Karla took the Belt of Con +2.

Somehow I had missed that the other belt was Dex and Con, which is not as useful for Nik'o.

Karla, Nik'o can still pounce in dragon form.

Could the red shard be the sardonyx shard? I think we have that, no?

That would be a good guess!

Hehe... Thanks!

Rogar is up!

Remember, the Ironfang lieutenants suggested disrupting the battery to draw Azaersi's arcane advisor, the naga Zanathura, away from her side and potentially open the way to the general.

Thanks for the reminder. Now someone has to remind Karla IC ;)

The dusty rose prism ioun stone would be great for Wulfram, no?

It's a very good item for Wulfram — so much so that he bought one earlier! So the new one is available to someone else.

Wulfram can assume the form of a fire elemental, so that would give him immunity to fire (along with vulnerability to cold). He could fill some higher level spell slots with Communal Protection from Energy. And he has Resist Energy memorized, and could recast it with a Pearl of Power.

Yes, that could work. It's likely to be massive amounts for each type, which means resistance will not be as good as protection from energy or immunity.

If it were about resistance, then Nik'o with angelic form and dragon form would be great.

Karla Teg wrote:

The dusty rose prism ioun stone would be great for Wulfram, no?

It's a very good item for Wulfram — so much so that he bought one earlier! So the new one is available to someone else.

Ahah! Ok, Sia has an impossibly high AC, so I say Nik'o gets the stone.

Sorry last week sort of exploded on me. I couldn't get to posts.

No worries! I'll update a bit later today.

I think I'm going to call Rogar 'One Shot,' as in 'you get one shot, then you're paste.'

I may only have one trick in combat, but it's nothing if not a really good trick.

I'm having trouble coming up with suggested cease-fire terms. I'm a bit hazy about the nature of the Onyx Citadel, and what safeguards would be necessary so the Ironfang Legion can't destroy Nirmathas.

Presumably after a cease-fire, there would be peace treaty negotiations, which would spell out what territory would be set aside for a hobgoblin homeland.

FWIW, the 2e canon seems to indicate that the hobgoblin nation of Oprak is created by the peace negotiations.

Yes, the "canon" ending for the AP is negotiation. You don't have to come up with all of the terms right now, but you can suggest the hobgoblins make use of the resources of the Onyx Vault and claim some uninhabited lands in the mountains southwest of Nirmathas itself. As long as you make a few more good skill checks, it will be sufficient.

If anybody else has something to add, please do so now. I’ll post on Monday. :)

My posting will be reduced for the next few days. I'm helping my sister move 600 km.

I'll write a post for Wulfram later this week, when I'm back home.

Thank you all for playing! Before we wrap things up for good, I wanted to hear from you. What did you like about the game? What didn't you like? Which storylines or characters resonated the most? Is there anything you would have liked to have done differently? Was there anything you would have liked to have seen me do differently? Any other feedback you'd like to add? :D

Thank you so very much Brainiac, this was quite an amazing feat to go through a whole AP is such a short period of time! You did an amazing job of keeping our momentum forward and avoid us getting bogged down in sub-plots. I thought the adventure was quite entertaining and you did an amazing job of giving some space to character development amidst this chaos.

I don't have anything negative to report. You can't have it all is my perspective. If you want a more open game with lots of space for side-stuff, then it's not going to move along briskly, so it's a compromise and I was ok with it, as you handled the balancing act amazingly well.

Unrelated, I must admit still being confused how powerful Rogar's character was in comparison. As was mentioned, it remains a few-tricks pony, but those tricks... So I guess the one-shoting of so many boss encounters is the only thing that I wish had been different. That being said, I learned a lot about power-balance in parties, and we did a good job of not making a big deal of it.

Once again, many thanks to you, Brainiac, and to my dear colleagues, who made this an amazing experience. Let's hope we fight each others on the boards soon!

Yeah, I had a great time as well! I don’t have any complaints about the story or anything, though I do agree that Roger was probably on the top-powerful side overall, so I tried to fold that into my personal narrative as time went on. Perhaps, doing it again, I would have tried to play him far more inoptimally and never really nova the bosses, but that’s neither here nor there.
I’m not sure if any one particular storyline I enjoyed above the others, they were all good.
I had a great time, and hope everyone else did too.
Thanks again, and I hope to see you all again elsewhere!

Thank you so much for running. I enjoyed this very much. Eustoma wasn't good at all the diplomacy at the end of the AP. Good thing we had Karla and Rogar for that.

I enjoyed the speed very much, and I appreciate that we were on a bit of a linear ride for this. Otherwise I think we'd still be climbing a tower to meet the Rangers.

Thank you for running this. Not many PbP games make it all the way through to completion, so it's quite an achievement.

I particularly enjoyed the romance with Rhyna, which became just as important to me as the main plot-line. It's a tricky thing to handle well, and you pulled it off.

I agree with Dreaming Warforged that the later boss fights were a bit anticlimactic. I don't think that the AP writers fully anticipate the potential of powerful ranged attackers at the higher levels. On the other hand, re-writing a lot of the higher level encounters isn't really realistic.

I think you did a good job of moving the plot along, without getting bogged down in the smaller details. Things like summarizing the results of searches and identifying magic items, and avoiding getting bogged down in the details of dungeon exploration, are IMHO a great idea in PbP, in order to maintain momentum.

I am glad everybody enjoyed the game. This was the first one I started on these boards after taking several years' hiatus from online games. I am glad that we were able to make it all the way to the end!

I appreciate all of your feedback and look forward to seeing you around the boards. And with that, we shall close the book on the Ironfang Invasion AP! I'll make this game inactive (complete!) in a few days' time.