Hi guys
School has got me completely exhausted. I have a short day tomorrow so I'll update there, and it looks like the combat is pretty much over. Now to stop Hearteater and Varlagan Stross and hopefully rescue Illysari and Wimbley.
Hang in there Chingo!
Need an ice pack on the head to cool it done from over thinking.
No problem with any delays.
I most likely not be posting from 20-24 November as I be travelling around country then off to Europe for vacation. While on vacation I will definitely be able to post, as where I be staying there is internet.
Guys, I'm going to be mostly offline Saturday through Monday. Please bot me as needed. Sorry for the inconvenience.
@Rhialla it is Arday, Thaal 13th, 447 DE
@Arukara and Hawkren thanks for letting us know.
I will post an update later today/tonight revealing what you find down the stairs.
Hrmm... the good old hostage situation. Honestly much less of a threat than just dropping them down a ravine in the presence of life restoring magic.
It would be 10,000gp to restore those two to life (less if they don't mind coming back as something else via reincarnate.)
Likely much cheaper than the net cost of whatever vile creature they are trying to free down here.
Also Aruka has Liberating command as a spell and would very likely be able to get one of the two freed. possibly both if they rolled decently on their escape artist checks.
Then we'd just need a distraction for them to get away with.
Yeah, really counting on the casters here to pull off something. Rhialla is simply consulting her mental code of ethics to see what is more important, stopping the ritual which likely have mega consequences if allowed to continue or letting Wimbley's egg break to make an omelet out of these guys.
In hostage situations time is pretty valuable toward winning over the hostage takers and getting them to surrender peaceably, but we don't really have the luxury of time here.
Arukara's village of koroku, Torukaro, are the Keepers of Ang Varshon, thus will do anything to prevent the evil from being release, that would including letting others die to achieve the goal of keeping the evil contained. The Torukaro koroku are fully prepared to die fighting to keep the evil contained, thus to Arukara, the two hostages are simply expendable in the goal of securing Ang Varshon.
She will attack to disrupt the ritual with whatever attack that would be best of effect to stop the ritual, and even killing those performing the ritual.
Flaming sphere is probably best attack to use against the shamans. Can place the sphere right at the shamans.
Well that escalated quickly :p
Chingo: how far is everything from the party? Rhialla is going to try something drastic but I need to know if she can even hope to reach
EDIT: did I say drastic? I meant desperate
Yeah, sorry about that. I apologize for stepping on any and all toes.
As a player, especially a new one to the team, I would normally just back your talk-em-down tactic. I tend to go with the flow and don't 'lone wolf' it. But in this case, I had to let character judgement trump team-play. These baddies brought an army knowing they'd face opposition and our ultimate goals are diametrically opposed - they want to free Ang Varshon and we can't let that happen.
I'm not sure what you guys found out about Ang Varshon's past but from what Hawk discovered among the Ghost Bears... this dude needs to stay trapped even if everyone dies in the process. So the ritual has to be stopped and the hostages situation just appears to be a delay to let the shamans do their work.
No need to apologize Hawk everyone was thinking the same thing, we don't have time to talk these guys down.
Arukara, are you really at 14 of 30 hit points?
Yes. No time to recover from battle in village. Took heavy damage there.
Arukara just witnessed Rhialla cure Magnes of his wounds. You don't have to go it alone.
Sorry, but I won't update until tomorrow. School is really taken its toll at the moment.
How long did our sprint down the stairs take? Magnes had buffs from the last combat that could very well still be active.
Also with Manges's normal reach there is a good chance that the charging bugbear warriors will provoke from Magnes as well.
Almost assured if Magnes gets to use his Long arm reach buff.
He can make them even while flatfooted due to combat reflexes saying so.
Rhialla what is your action for round 1?
Magnes your buffs are still active. Go ahead and make AoO's.
Let's try to get the Wyvernwaeld adventure done before December so we can run a christmas special in December lol
Bhallur is haunted by the Christmas ghosts. He has to defeat them with tribal song and dance.
Hoho. A new upsey-daisy turn to the classic film/act of Christmas Scrooge :P
Ghost of Christmas present played by Magnes Coalbrow.
Rhialla the aptly named "Lady Not Appearing in this Story"
Ho ho ho... it's time for a slay ride...
The editors responsible for this story have been sacked.
Also we need a place to store a moose.
:D
"Slaughtering the screaming, small and green looking children, an ugly expression on Bhalur face as his scythe reaped once again life out of those small bodies. Creepy laugh escaping from his lips and maddening glitter in his eyes while running rampant among his victims, occassionally yelling "Happy BUSINESS TIME! Time to get all you non-existent furballs out of your innocence". In the background could be seen an animal, a huge one, slaughtering a bit bigger version of these children, piling bodies on its antlers..."
Waking up screaming and sweat pouring, Bhalur was trembling and muttering to himself "Happy thoughs Bhalur, just happy thoughts. That was... not you, nothing". His tail twitching behind and fur standing up, Bhalur tighly grapped Shaer on with left hand while right hand moved to his backpack and touched the old, warm, a bit worn-out fur of old teddybear and slowly succumbing back to sleep... hopefully dreaming a bit more light-hearted themes
wic
I am still living. Internet now sorted for vacation in Europe.
Update coming up tomorrow.
From 15th to 16th December I wont be available to post as I be traveling home from vacation.
Any ideas on how we might help Bhalur out? All of us are pressed with the number of bad guys in the area but if the black knight hits him again he will be out of the fight.
I can't heal him faster than that glowing dark sword wielding maniac is hurting him. I'm open to ideas though.
well, so far we he took 40 damage and now with me and Kevroth doing additional damage its already 76 damage. If he will not go from that, daaam...
Chingo created a monster there :P
I keeping within Arukara's character, what the Torukaro have committed their lives to, hell bend to stop Ang Varshon from ever being released, even at the cost of their lives and those assisting the cause. Her primary purpose now to stop the ritual.
Oh no I'd never expect that, Pathfinder combat rewards offense drastically more than it does healing. boosting someone's AC so they don't need healing is a much better option if killing your enemy before they can hurt you isn't an option.
Unfortunately most of our damage is spread out between bad guys so they are not dropping yet but I imagine it will be happening soon.
As to chingo's monster, we shall have to see. Might require some burnt hero points on our parts to keep everybody up and active. With the number of bad guys on the field though I can't imagine this fellow will have much more life to chip though.
I mostly want to ensure that if a player drops it happens near the end of combat so we don't have one player stuck on the sidelines of a rather massive combat that is likely to take weeks to conclude.
Spectator mode is not all that fun in this style of RPG.
I always disliked that about this type of system at home games, it is a bit easier to deal with on pbps. It isn't just death that sidelines someone, there are so many spells that take a player out of combat entirely.
well, I do have 3 Hero Points saved up and if I remember correctly, 2 is needed to avoid death. Might be interesting to see how this turns out.
Yeah death is easy to return from in pathfinder but heaven forbid if someone baleful polymorph'd you into a tuna fish and let you loose in the ocean.
Combat wise it becomes much harder to play a fighter at higher levels due to the number of specific cases of cripple effects you need to combat.
Still puts you out of action for the rest of the combat though, which is really what I'm attempting to avoid here as that is rather boring for you.
You can burn a hero point for additional actions out of turn, so you could consider trying to intercept the Knights attack with one of your own and hoping it drops him.
you could also petition the GM for an interesting effect from hero points. EX: spend hero points to get an additional/ buffed up use of your second wind ability and regain enough HP to fight on.
Or perhaps apply the Same +8 you'd get from the attack roll bonus to AC and just hope Bhalur can weather the attacks.
Hrmm.. wonder if that Knight is under a haste effect. Weird that his second attack has the same bonus modifier as his first. Usually those are -5.
I've had a very busy day today and still have stuff on my schedule, so I might not update until tomorrow.
It is all fine by me. Real life activities do take preference of online games. That is the game of life after all.
Sorry for vanishing and not giving notice. My ISP turned the bandwidth spigot down to 'pathetic trickle' and it made it nearly impossible to access Paizo.
It looks like my ISP is starting to fix the problem so I'll try to catch up with the game this evening. Feel free to bot me if needed. Sorry for the inconvenience.
It's alright Hawkren.
Also, too tired to update today too. Tomorrow. That's a promise this time.
Alright so the bad guy casting deeper darkness is fair enough but it does look like a few things occurred that don't make a great deal of sense to me.
First while you didn't say he did so did the black knight make a concentration check to cast in melee?
Also is there a second set of stairs in the room somewhere? I was under the assumption that we were on the only set and with the collected group of players/NPCs we had blocked up the stairs.
I guess there is second set of stairs or he will attempt to bullrush/overrun our group to get out
As for deeper darkness, it could be weapon specific ability? or maybe profession/race specific supernatural ability... Not sure but if so then he might have been much higher leveled opponent than I thought.
What I am mostly worried about is that even though he might kill me, he might as well be heading towards our ranged attackers now
*shrug*
No idea about the stairs, why i'm asking as it changes how this combat will play out.
I don't often tinker with Deeper darkness due to it having been long considered an unfun tactic. Though I suppose my next purchase of gold for Magnes will be a casting of produce flame heightened to L4 so he doesn't have to worry about this again.
Anyone in the group could also use the *act out of turn* hero point action to get a chance to change the events of this round. Getting hit in the middle of casting a spell or whatever that was is nearly guaranteed to prevent it from happening.
Though on movement assuming he is is heavy armor his move speed is not likely to be all that impressive. If we can just figure out where he is at we can likely deal with the issue of darkness.
Though it might be better to consider the pile of spellcasting enemies that have just been freed to start attacking us.
Chingo already described where the darkness came from. It is a command-word-activated ability of his sword, not a spell. It provokes no AoO and there is no chance of disrupting him.
EDIT: I always forget about the "Act out of turn" use of hero points.
Darkness and deeper darkness function as touch spells that target an object. From my reading of that sentence the man cast his spell and channeled it into the sword causing the weapon to generate the darkness effect.
But it being an effecthis sword can generate is entirely possible. It also makes me want to loot this man very badly. Such an object would be worth a great sum.
Only Chingo knows the full dimensions of the room and positions of everyone. He did not mention, Arukara was engulfed in darkness so continue as normal, anyway moving the sphere around the pedestal is a trivial concentration move action, as the sphere will stop against the next shaman regardless if she can she him or not.
All I know is that this dark knight is going to be rather angry if the ritual is a failure.
Sorry been real busy these last couple of days.
Short answers:
Hey Tabby Cats.
I am currently preparing for examns so that is why I'm not that active at the moment. I will be a lot more active when I am done.