Iron Gods: Forged into Legends

Game Master polyfrequencies

No problem.

I get it, but Keldor doesn't. Stealth isn't his highest priority normally.

same ;p

Thawm hates having her sleep interrupted ^_^

...

Base speed is 50 on small Fire Elementals, so a full run is 150' per round right?
...
Can I retcon a little and have the Timeworn Brown Nanite gun handy?

double move is twice speed, unencumbered without the run feat is 4x speed in a straight line.

Horses have the Run feat for 5x speed unless heavily armored/encumbered :D

Also, Thawm will arrive with a scroll of CLW in a moment :3

Yeah run is 4x and she is not fully in between buildings yet.

Also Kelso doesn’t know you have a clw on the way. He also doesn’t know you that well. Don’t meta too much :-).

She does have a bandolier with all 8 spots taken up by CLW potions...

edit:

...Don’t meta too much :-).

Buuuuuuuuuuut I waaaaannaaaaa~

I would keep shooting, but she's out of range.

Guess I'll wait to see how the glitch turns out before I attempt to act :)

Yea sorry about that. It was a crit if a searing light. I did have to treat you like a humanoid and not a construct. But I am 99% sure that was correct of me.

Sorry for the adrenaline spike. This encounter is definitely one of those that is tricky. You are all tapped, low on resources.. and it is a bit “mean”. I reread motivations, and even laid it all out to my wife (who I game with and is currently GMing for me). It was determined it would go this way.

I am not the type of person who revels in killing players. Hopefully everyone understands a crit is a crit. No one is dead, yet.

——- on second hand, my wife did just kill my Suli Monk in the mummy’s mask game she is GMing, so maybe she is not the best resource... :-)

Oh, no worries :)

I did a post before when I misinterpreted the spell - what irks me is that she is out of range for a counterattack, not that she hit me with a critical ray :)

As you say, no one is dead, and she seems inclined to disengage - I doubt I'll be a priority target right now so actually feel fairly confident I'll survive.

So, you are very welcome to get some joy out of the attack ;) Critical Ray attacks happen fairly seldom ;)

@Construct/Humanoid: I concur. She gets a couple nice immunities and boni out of it, but the drawback is that she counts as the 'worse' type for effects targetting her.

Thanks for the stabilize. I was actually holding off on my turn to see if Keldor managed to get me back up. Seemed like a good chance(50 percent that it's a glitch, and even if there's a glitch, a good chance the thing fulfills it's function regardless).
In which case she would have been able to stand up and continue pursuit, rather than stabilize :)

I was curious if that would've worked out too.
It's better this way though, now you can borrow Thawm's horse and be a mounted desperado :P

edit: also finally got around to ninja-ing a bunch of things from the loot list (all the potions and scrolls, the thief kit, the everburning torch, the mwk dagger, and probably something I forgot)

The 50% chance was to SEE if it Glitched. The GM needed to roll AGAIN if it did, on the chart I posted.

Hence why I said, in jest, that if we group glitch probability and glitch result into the same roll, we should shift to "glitch happens" at 51-100

I know it was just an oversight by GM, hence why I attempted to joke about it. Badly so, if I needed to explain it - but I suppose that's fitting for a logic-based life-form. :)

Oh! Oops. Sorry about that. Next time I have time on a computer I will adjust. :-)

And here I thought it was rolled secretly somewhere I didn't notice. I didn't even check if a 10 results in no function xD

The fire elemental has a base speed of 50. How did she outrun it? If she paused to cast a spell, he would have gotten an attack of opportunity at least!

need a base speed of 60 to make sure that you can use a SA to attack even around corners. Withdraw would protect her from AoO unless you get a fire elemental that's smart enough to walk around her in a 15' wide alley...

That is very Meta of you. Maybe she moved, cast expeditous retreat, then spent a swift action on her quick runners shirt to do another move.
Boom, now she has 60 feet speed and outruns it.
Maybe she turned a corner and became invisible for a while? Even mundane stealth(a small fire elemental only has +4 on perception and hardly enough int to act smart)
GM says she gets away, she does. Probably for some climactic battle later.
I wonder how this was supposed to play out in the AP, but there's a number of options she could use to flee. *shrug*

If you want to be really nit picky: How did Keldor order the fire elemental around without speaking its language? :o

Well, technically, he does not even have to.

It appears where you designate and acts immediately, on your turn. It attacks your opponents to the best of its ability. If you can communicate with the creature, you can direct it not to attack, to attack particular enemies, or to perform other actions.

Summoned creatures magically know who you consider an enemy, they have built-in IFF. They attack automatically, and there only was one target it could reach.

You are right, of course, that using it as a source of light to come along until we FOUND enemies would have been difficult. But he simply could have called it in later - Dirissa had light and Basil never depended on illumination(actually wanted to keep low-profile).

I'm not trying to be meta or pissy. I expected her to KILL the elemental quickly. But that might have given us the chance to catch up to her. I could then summon another one, one that flies (Small Air Elemental?) then. Or whatever...

I personally just don't like it when no matter what I do or try to accomplish... It's a personal thing. Nothing I did seemed to matter. Only the Nano-gun thing worked, and even then it worked badly. I HATE that. If the GM wanted her to get away, I would have rather the GM says..."she gets away"...not give us a feeling there was a chance we could have stopped her. We could never have caught up to the robot that flies when we are at 3rd level, and a robot like that would have torn through anything I would have summoned to attempt to stop it.

I'm not trying to blame the GM either. I just hate situations like this one. Obviously we should have had a better guard on the object than we did. That's on all of us.

I totally understand that it seemed like I gave you "Hope" but then took it away. Maybe it has more to do with the fact I am on vacation right now and might not have the space in my brain to go through it more fully..

Here is a small breakdown without opening up the GM screen too much:
According to the map you are about 200 feet from the water.
There are plenty of buildings to move and dodge around.
She likely would have gotten hit by the elemental, but she was going in full withdraw. Each round she just withdrawed. Which means 60 feet of movement each round.
It is possible for her to hide well as well.

I read through the AP many times. This was the logical option. But I also knew you where tapped for the day. When I started this encounter, I didnt fully realize how hard it would be for you to get to her in time, and see for that matter. Once I realized she had the space and I nearly dropped Basil I moved into the escape phase.

I hope this was not too annoying to everyone. Sorry if it was a bit too contrived. APs are not perfect. They can't always be followed perfectly, or they might offer a suggestion, but not detail. This was a "custom" encounter. I maybe could have done it differently.

TL;DR - I understand you are frustrated. I apologize. I hope you are willing to stick it out with me. I am still learning (I don't think a GM ever stops).

Aye.

Did I like how it happened? No.
But in the end, the GM is trying to tell a story, together with us.
Could it have been done differently? Sure.

What irks me is the speed of the attack. Basil started going outside the moment they broke in. By the time she reached them, they were already outside and leaving.
She didn't waste any time, so clearly, the item was in plain sight and near the entrance. Not how I would have thought it would be stored, with thugs and technic league around, but they did not have to search for their target, or secure it in a way.

I figured usually groups would take a bit to rally. Wake people up, get up, fetch gear, start moving out orderly.
We skipped a lot of that, with people jumping up right from sleep and rushing out to follow Basil.
Not complaining, but that moment, to me, it seemed we were supposed to come "too late" and GM resolved it as best as he could.
As in, we ourselves gave us that 'illusion' of hope.
*shrug*

Some things in AP's are supposed to play out for story purposes, without giving the players a real chance to influence them. They offer a chance for RP at the table, regardless.
In PbP, they are often not interactive to keep the game moving - instead summed up, but on the whole, I don't mind.

I think the 200-ish feet to the water is really what makes the getaway more obvious.
Welp, next time we should break the thing or put it somewhere safer xD

Or simply booby-trap it.

They had no time to check for traps. Some mundane setup that throws a couple tanglefoot bags at them and rings an alarm would already suffice :P

Alarm spell too? :D

You may be right about booby trapping the box or something. For the sake of open communication. I assumed it was in the very western part of the building. The robot had a pretty impressive speed. I even accounted for breaking the door, and time it took to get to the box, and even penalties for grabbing and turning.

I also assumed it was covered to hide its purpose. Like with a tarp or something.

All of which was accounted for.

It may be small, but maybe just talking it out will help soften the blow. I did fail in certain ways. I didn’t have your wizard friend wake up... for example.

Hopefully we can continue without too much frustration

Well - I checked back, from the moment she heared them breaking in to the moment she was downed, it was 4 rounds.

She was awake and up - going out the door, and going around the building took less than half a minute.

24 seconds, exactly. I could have been exactly one round faster because I spent 2 rounds moving and readying.

They must have known pretty exactly where they would need to look - by the time I arrived they were already out about 50 feet away.
As said, our fault.

If we assume a round is spend waking people up, people spend a round getting up and fetching equipment, one round getting light/preparing to go, it would probably be 6 or 7 rounds even in a hurry, by that time they would have been out of sight and the deed done.

So at least we learned WHO was responsible.
@Frustration: Honestly, there is only one thing I am frustrated about - the lack of downtime to turn my Blunderbuss into a Dragon Pistol or similar :D

No worries, as said, it may not have been handled optimally, but I GM a pbp myself and messed up much worse, so I'm all good. Just venting a bit, but no problem, at all.

I'm cool with it and you GM. I just hate coming up short in a game. I feel like I let myself, the players, and most importantly the overall story down when it happens.

NOTE: This kind of thing will cause Keldor to take notice and act differently about such things in the future. He's pro-active. He'll stock on healing stuff and start thinking more about guard duty and such...

Want Thawm's bandolier of CLW potions? XD

No...but he might make his own!

I am glad a pro-active character growth would be an outcome of something like this. I feel better for having done it. Maybe I could have done it a different way that didn;t make you feel useless..

But shit happens.. right? thanks again for sticking with me here :)

BTW, we do have 2 uses of hemochem (grade I) that we've identified. That the stuff lasts exactly 1 minute and heals exactly 10hp might be OOC, but we know it heals and needs one of our two medlances to function :3
we also have 5 uses of the glitchy hypogun left :3
kind of like a 5 charged wand of CLW (that requires no UMD!) :3
Also, did anyone claim the ring of protection +1 (+1 deflection to AC)
or the amulet of natural armor? (almost certainly +1 nat armor to AC)
It's still in the unclaimed section of the loot sheet :3
If you've claimed it, please mention it here and delete the line from the loot sheet ^^

Thawm would love to hoard that stuff, but it probably wouldn't make the difference for her very often. I think Keldor might need non-AC bonuses the most, but Dirissa also needs as much AC as she can get xD

Does either Dirrisa or Keldor use buffs that grant either nat armor or deflection bonuses to AC?

Also, now that I'm thinking about the loot:
@DM Nex: is there anything on the loot sheet we wouldn't be able to sell in town easily? The timeworn stun gun and the timeworn radiation detector are the most expensive things we might sell, but even those combined are only just over 1k...

I think I asked for/about the ring because I know it would work with or without Gauntlet to aid me, but I didn't want to claim it outright.

Gauntlet IS partially (sort-of?) a Natural Armor bonus so I doubt it would work for Keldor properly.

Dirrisa is better with the Amulet of Nat Armor as a barbarian unless she already has one I would think.

I'll gladly take any unclaimed AC boosts

I think I asked for/about the ring because I know it would work with or without Gauntlet to aid me, but I didn't want to claim it outright.

Gauntlet IS partially (sort-of?) a Natural Armor bonus so I doubt it would work for Keldor properly.

Dirrisa is better with the Amulet of Nat Armor as a barbarian unless she already has one I would think.

You get to choose how much is natural-armor and how much is straight armor for normal eidolons. I'm pretty sure it'd be the same for synthesists :3

edit: In other news, the loot sheet reminds me that Thawm grabbed the Mwk Thieves tools. In case anyone is wondering why: I plan on getting Aram Zey's Focus :3

Torch can buy up to 5,000 gp without issue. There is enough of a market. So anything you want to sell, 50% would be super easy.

well, if we're not going back early the next day, Basil will definitely get free healing from Thawm
Actually everyone, 'cause AoE healing
Channel Energy (heal living): 5d6 ⇒ (1, 1, 1, 5, 6) = 14

edit: Basil needs more than 14 hp xD
CLW: 1d8 + 3 ⇒ (2) + 3 = 5

Yeah...since he's a walking suit of armor, I chose most (if not all) of his armor bonus as a Natural Armor bonus. It just made sense to me.

If there are no complaints then I will take the ring and update my sheets. I would also like to take the new extra flashlight and a spare 'battery' for it and/or my Neraplast suit.

Well, I would think Basil should take the Veemod Goggles then and the special Helmet if she wants them. She's our spotter/shooter. Right? She hasn't gotten much of anything else yet. The maybe the new second Amulet of natural armor too I think?

If we can afford it, we should definitely sell all the rest of the loot we don't need (all the weapons and armor we don't want to take) at least.

Maybe we can purchase Bacers of Armor for Thawm then? OR another Ring of Protection +1? It guess it depends on what kind of spells she prepares for AC boosts right?

We should split the food tubes among the group too. Right? Or sell them and buy normal food when we need it?

And someone should take and carry the radiation detector. I will volunteer if nobody else wants to carry it. But it will remain the party's 'group' treasure.

I feel like we'll want the Bertie Botts every flavor food tubes for later.
Maybe after Thawm gets another level of cleric so she can start casing Purify Food and Drink on everything suspect?
Then again, maybe the use-by date is a large multiple of centuries in the future for newly made food tubes? xD
As for the radiation detector, it'll glitch on our probable only use, so I'm not sure it's worth keeping. Especially now that Thawm has Detect Radiation :3
Though she hasn't prepared it yet... maybe she should? xD

Hm.
My issue with the Veemod Goggles is that it seems so...inefficient.
I suppose it is non-magical and does not 'occupy' the magic item slot.
But a skill bonus is bonus squared * 100 if memory serves.
Hence, Eyes of the Eagle cost 2500 gold, for a +5 bonus.
A +2 bonus would then cost 400 gold.
Which is the exact cost of the Black Veemod, but it drains charges per day.
Proximity Helmet does seem like a decent gimmick in that it works through obstacles. But drains 1 charge per hour. I would be reluctant to use either unless needed, opting to conserve charges.

@Not got much yet: I would need a couple hundred gold worth of materials, depending on GM.
Technically, for 300 GP, I can repair my blunderbuss and upgrade it into masterwork.
But, as repeatedly mentioned, I would prefer instead 'upgrading' into a Dragon Pistol(and eventually in a Paddlefoot).
(Reason being that for one-handed firearms, cartridges plus rapid reload make reloading a free action - for the blunderbuss it's a move action still.)
I put upgrade into quotes because technically a Blunderbuss is valued at 2000, and Dragon Pistol at 1000. So theoretically it could be considered a downgrade.
Paddle-foot, on the other hand, is 2500...but brings inscreased range.
I digress...what I'm saying is that I would much rather save up about 1500 gold for Basil to get her a proper usable weapon(and some ammo) than be assigned things that I'll never use.
(I will make use of the grenades, but as mentioned earlier, I think they are most useful when we have surprise and are likely to win Init.

I wonder if some merchant in town would be willing to swap that MW chainmail for a small size mw chainmail?

@Dirissa: I wonder if we can have it resized?

@Basil: As long as Dirissa does not one of of them, then sell it all and buy what you want/need. You deserve something out of all of this.

agreed.

I have been thinking about this rule for awhile.. There are not real rules for resizing, other than some magical addons to gear..

So consider it house ruled from now on, unless I say otherwise (for some weird story reason), Small and Medium weapons and Armor can work interchangeably.

Call it a small nod to the rules of 2E.

sweet! then I'll definitely upgrade to the chainmail
And I'm fine with selling the tech. She's an old fashioned kinda girl, well, aside from the flashlight cause that's just cool

I'm updated so far.

Has everyone taken what they wanted? Sold and upgraded their stuff?

I'd like to purchase a healing wand if the group coinage can afford it after that.

Sold all the mundane armor and weapons that was still unclaimed in the loot sheet (except for the mwk chainmail that Dirissa claimed, I moved that down to the second page under her name)
Does anyone have UMD? If not, Thawm will take that second wand of magic missiles :3

@Keldor: you didn't list the zipstick's 10 charges in your alias :3

(Which reminds me, how do those giant meaty batteries fit inside such a tiny pen-sized object...?)

Also the timeworn hypogun has a color (brown) and I rolled for charges somewhere above in the discussion when I was sorting through our loot.
It should have 4 more charges if we've used exactly 2 charges :3
In better news: we don't have to worry about a glitch again until its last charge unless we don't use it for... a month?

And did you want the 2 new potions of CLW to go with the 4 charges on that hypogun? :3

@Basil: did you want to keep the grenades only on the loot list?
Also, please add the +1 natural armor amulet to your equipment when you get the chance :3

@Dirissa: did you want to keep the +1 light hammer? I don't see it on the equipment part of your sheet :3

I have UMD and a decent Charisma. I'll take the wand if no one else can do it. Makes a great back-up. Are they both 3rd level caster?

I'll take the CLW potions too!

Batteries attach and then are used recharge an item. Once drained they are regular silverdisks as I understand? Some can be re-charged (magic?) but its rare and dangerous.

Zipstick: Got it!

I'm sure it's fine and you just tap the zipstick on the side of the battery somehow
...buuuut I just have this image of a massive flat disk being shoved into a long thin pen in my mind and I can't help but share xD
The wands are both CL 3, and they both started with 44 charges, which makes me curious if we should really have two xD
I'll move the wand, one of our loot pile batteries, and the two potions of CLW under your name :3

Also, unless anyone protests, I'm going to sell the probably-defective timeworn radiation detector xD
I have the related spell from both that one stash and from cleric levels, so I don't think the (possible) hour of radiation detection is worth the 500 gp we wont get from selling it :3
(Actually we can sell it for 1% after using the last charge, but at that point it's just a very heavy silver disk...)

yes, keeping the +1 hammer, it's among my weapons

Batteries can be recharged. The silver disks are "fully dead"/broken batteries. So you might want to track drained batteries as you might find a way to recharge them at some point.

One wand of Cure Light Wounds is only 750 gold assuming it is fully charged. Is there one available in town?