Sanita will look at Oleg and nod, tell him she's also not planning on eating toadstools, fox glove, drinking snake venom, or sleeping on termite mounds either, while she's not drinking the methyl alcohol. She's wanting to make Formaldehyde, yes. :) The jars are for sample storage. Sample in jar, formaldehyde in jar, when she has time, take sample out and work on it. :)
So, 5 GP of Methyl (or Ethyl for that matter) Alcohol, 5 gp worth of sealable glass jars (preserves jars work wonderful, the old Bell type), and 25 GP worth of reagents for Alchemy. 35GP, and most of her cash.
Sanita everyone in this group except me are humans.
Well, you say that like it's my fault. Either you should have chosen to be human, or they should have chosen to be something with darkvision.
:)
How you planning to get formalin introduced to solution? Also yes plan is to move in as full army to soot scale, see if they know where the fort is, and then push to fort and break into three strikes. I will explain plans when I know what we are dealing with. Also have watch schedule up for the mass and for my group. Group two and group three need to decide on leaders and have them figure out watch. If asked to place someone in charge for each he will choose rowan for group three and will tell two that if they can't decide it themselves he will place lanya as she should be able to keep track enemies easier from the rear. He really wants the groups to be able to work together as a unit and not a unit and not a arbitrary hierarchy.
My assumption was the Alchemist's Crafting Kit would have Iron and Molybdenum in it to use as catalysts. Add the catalyst to a beaker, stopper it and put a tube in to capture the gas, put it over a fire, and you've got Formaldahyde gas. Run the tube into a mixture of Methanol (Methyl Alcohol) and water, and you get Formaldahyde as the gas saturates the water.
edit : With 15 gallons (!) of methanol, I should be able to generate a good 50 gallons of Formaldahyde over time.
Bej would suggest Rowan for his group leader, since he's a "priest" of Erastil and a guy who knows how to move in a forest.
Fhârn would be fine with either of the two older / original members since both appears to be capable woodsmen
Rowan brings up a good point, what does Oleg have for small weapons and mining equipment?
Lets set out! I wanna kill some bandits!
Sorry I completely forgot to post this. watch schedule as full group of doom in two hour increment, Dantalion and Wilhelm, Bej and Vors, Dante and Masamura, Sanita and Anastacia, Felix and Rowan. This should allow everyone to get a decent amount of sleep and also allow those pesky arcane casters to regain spells. For Felix group by itself Felix, Wilhelm, Vors, Sanita.
Small comment on the schedual - Bej is also an arcane caster and he seems to only get 6h of uniterrupted sleep (after his watch).
Fhârn gets to sleep all night? Sweet! (He can take the first or the last watch and still get to prepare spells)
And merry christmas to you all!
Switch bej with wilhelm. Forgot he was a transmitter.
Switch bej with wilhelm. Forgot he was a transmitter.
A Transmitter? Never heard of that type of Mage.
Switch bej with wilhelm. Forgot he was a transmitter.A Transmitter? Never heard of that type of Mage.
It's one of those mages that just spam sending and whispering wind in all directions ....
:)
MERRY CHRISTMAS EVERYONE!
Everyone gets a
Free Reroll on any die!
Usable at any time.
I will be out of town tomorrow, so everyone enjoy the holiday!
Switch bej with wilhelm. Forgot he was a transmitter.A Transmitter? Never heard of that type of Mage.It's one of those mages that just spam sending and whispering wind in all directions ....
:)
I hate you right now...
My Shadowrun Game has a Decker, Technomancer, and a Rigger that all love doing that to our opponent comms.
MERRY CHRISTMAS EVERYONE!
Everyone gets a ** spoiler omitted **
I will be out of town tomorrow, so everyone enjoy the holiday!
How generous you are! Is this applicable to rolls that our opponents make as well? Say...saving throws against our spells?
How generous you are! Is this applicable to rolls that our opponents make as well? Say...saving throws against our spells?MERRY CHRISTMAS EVERYONE!
Everyone gets a ** spoiler omitted **
I will be out of town tomorrow, so everyone enjoy the holiday!
I think I'll just let it apply to your own rolls, to minimize ret cons. However if the reroll doesn't substantially effect your action, it won't be used up. (For instance, if you roll a 1 and your reroll is a 2 and still fails, you still have the reroll.)
Booby Trap....HA!
I've included a link to the Nightly Watches at the top of the page.
Let me know what your plans for approaching the Fort are if any and I will post the next day.
Hope everyone had a Wonderful Christmas.
Sounds like it's kind of up to Felix what our plan is.
If Sanita is consulted on her role, she'll state that she can do some sneaking but she's not an expert in it. Good enough to get by usually, but can't guarantee she would be unseen. (Stealth 6, Disable Device 6). It just kind of depends on who else has stealth skills. If she's one of the top 3, then she should be a scout. If she's not one of the top 3, she should be in the melee vanguard. Also, she's better with a rapier than a bow, but can also fill out the ranged ranks if we're short on ranks.
What it comes down to is, Sanita is about as big a generalist as you can find in the group, and can flesh out any role, she just won't be the best at any specific role (unless that role is to throw explosive things and do damage, she's pretty darn good at that).
Come in with the sun to our backs. Attempt diplomacy from range. If that does not work move to full assault. Rowans group will be ranged volleys against the walls while Fhârn can help defend said group from sally. Other two groups will work to find a breach point and we will go from there post breach as layout and threat assessment will both be important.
Also. Summon eagles.
Sorry for the lack of posts from my side. My IRL group decided they wanted to run a lot of marathon campaigns and they didn't have a working internet.
Might I suggest sending a stealth team to strike against the enemies quickly. Say me and anyone else with reliable stealth abilities?
That's very, very dangerous for those involved and there's nothing that the rest of us can do about any danger that you get put in with any immediacy.
Not if set up correctly...
Namely we hide out and strike at the enemy in a three pronged attack.
Sanita is, as they say, a character.
I realize that some who make the Survival check will wish to stay at the caverns until the weather passes. If that is the decision than you are at the Sootscale Caverns having lunch when Lanya tenses up.
Have linked to a hand drawn map of the area around the Fort. Scale is 1 hex = 100' so for every 10' of movement you can move one square in 1 minute. Hexes with a C are full of cover, mostly trees and count as difficult terrain. Hexes with a circled C are hexes where some mechanism has dropped large boulders along the western side of the hill the Fort is on. You can use the boulders for cover and the terrain does not count as being difficult. The rain is giving Perception and Ranged Attacks a -4 modifier, but those that made the Survival check at the beginning of the day know the rain is about to end. Within the hour certainly and you have about 2 hours of daylight left. In game this means you can set the parameters for sneaking about and how effective ranged weapons will be during the encounter.
Option 1:Act now. Rainy and 2 hours Daylight.
Option 2:Wait an hour. No rain and 1 hour daylight
Option 3:Move around and fight at night. No rain.
Option 4:Camp and wait until morning.
The party is currently on the western side of the Shrike River as it flows into Lake Tuskwater.
Obviously, Sanita is voting for 3. And being sneaky about it. She thinks Felix and Dante are just giant 'death before dishonor' idiots who would rather get everyone killed than besmirch their honor.
Sanita is fully aware of what Dante looks like, towering over a 5'6" girl, veins bulging, yelling at her, while she calmly responds in a calm quiet voice. :)
Curious to see if he loses it. :)
OOC: Apologies to Felix & Dante, all IC stuff, not OOC stuff.
As much as I hate to lose the rest of this debate which is really some great roleplay stuff, I'll be on vacation with minimal to none internet access since January 3rd.
Bej's line of conduct is this:
1) Chain of command is important. Felix's word is final.
2) if given a chance to vote, he'll vote for a sneaky close peek at the fort (carried out by Masamura and Dantalion, most likely, or by familiars), then divide and conquer (ambush small groups of bandits that have been lured out, try to Intimidate them into submission or fight them non-lethally if practical).
Honor is for people who have their belly full and no family depending on them.
Looking at the map, it looks like they've cleared everything within a 100 ft of the fort, good defensive doctrine.
If I were in the fort, and wanted to be sneaky, what I'd do is fill those heavy woods that are close to the fort (the four (C) spaces) with as many noisy and nasty traps as I could. Pits, snares, deadfalls, etc. Because the obvious sneak approach is to sneak up through the heavy woods to get 100 ft away.
That 'open' terrain? Is it completely open, or is it brush and grassland? If it's brush and grassland, I think a good approach might be to use the lake by night to swim down to directly south of the fort, and then use cloaks that have had limbs and brush attacked to slowly (and I mean slowly) sneak up closer to get a recon on the fort. Sneak into position at night, set up a covered blind, and then sit the entire day watching the fort and getting info.
Alternately, are some of the C spaces home to trees that are taller than the fort walls? If so, someone could sneak to them, climb up, and stake out the fortress all day and night (team of two or three people) to get an idea of the internal layout and people inside etc...
Or both...
DESCRIPTION OF THE FORT
There is a 15' tall pallisade constructed of wooden logs (DC 15 to climb) whose top is adorned by sharpened branches and splinters (DC 12 Acrobatics to get over top without damage). The hill the Fort sits on looms about 200' over the Lake's Level and although there are trees higher than 15' in the C areas none of them are tall enough to afford a look behind the pallisade. The pallisade has a gate (currently closed) on the northern side of the Fort. Three wooden watchtowers (20' tall with a peaked roof arching another 10') have been built. All the watchtowrs do seem to manned and have a 2' wooden railing that provides those within cover. One watchtower is immediately to the east of the gate just within the northern side of the pallisade. The other two watchtowers are on the northwest and southwest corners. There is no watchtower covering the approach from the southeast. Both the pallisade and the watchtowers seem to be recent construction. There is a trail leading from where you are to the gate, it is completely without cover. The area around the Fort without C, has no easy cover, being mostly thorny bushes. One would have to be prone and move very slowly to Stealth through these hexes. The last 30' from any direction has been totally cleared and has completely no cover.
I have added the Fort to the Tactical Map in the upper right corner. You can only see the three areas labeled Z3 (Watchtowers)
Ok, having looked over what we can tell, a frontal assault on this thing is suicidal. I'm sorry, but it is. They can fill us full of arrows and turn us into pincushions. If we have to do a frontal assault, we would need the entire sootscale tribe, and we'd lose a lot of them.
It's on a hill, which gives them the high ground, and great visibility. Off hand, my thought is that we lure them out to weaken them, as has been suggested, and we get some people in under cover of night who can sneak and see what they can find around the fort.
Maybe there's a weakness in the wall that's not apparent from far away, or maybe they have some sort of escape tunnel or something for sieges, although why they'd need one this far out I don't know. Worst case scenario, I say we siege them instead of attacking. We have enough magic and ranged peopel to bottle them up inside the fort. If they have a way out, they'll use it and attack, so we'll get them out of the fort and on to our ground.
Bej said they'd see us building siege weapons, and I think that would be fine. If they do, they'll know we have them under siege. What we would need is some portable cover, something with a roof to provide us total cover from overhead archers that can be lifted up and moved, and then put our archers under it to snipe their archers. We have healing they probably won't have, and unlimited access to food, which they won't.
The longer they sit in there and starve, the more likely the men are to turn on the stag lord and toss them out with a white flag. A few lobbed stones from a catapult would help, if someone has Kn(Engineering) to build them. They don't use normal rules for attacks, the person in charge uses Int + BAB to attack, and we have quite a few very smart people in the group. Force them to come out or we lob stones into the keep. Heck, even filling up the catapult bucket with skull sized stones and sending them into the inner keep would make their lives interesting. :)
The more I think about it, the more I like it. It really does force them to come to us if they see us building it 400 or 500 ft down range (heavy catapult is 200ft range increment, build it in place and fire it). We'd need 270 GP worth of raw materials (wood and rope) and a week or so. If they're content to sit in their fort, unable to leave without being sniped by archers while we build it, great, we use it. If not, we've forced them to come to us on our terms.
Yep, it's workable. Sort of.
We have 3 engineers who can design a catapult. We have one weapon craftsman who can build it, and since Craft is usable untrained, anyone with no INT penalty can use Aid Another to help out. Assuming we get half the group to make their aid another checks (DC 10), we can hit the 20 DC each week, we'd get (on average) 10+5+10=25, 25 * 20 = 500sp per week. Which means it would take us about 3 months to build a light catapult.
The biggest problem is we don't have an actual Siege Engineer to fire the thing, which is required. But the kobolds might have someone. For that matter, we might be able to get a kobold crew (they build all sorts of traps, this is a giant trap) to work on it while we keep the thieves bottled up.
All good, except we don't have enough people to invest the fort in a siege. Siege, like frontal assault is for armies. We need to come up with something that works with a small group.
Lanya's warning about scrying, kind of got lost in the argument about frontal attack, but it could mean we don't have the time to build siege engines anyway.
My point was the worst case scenario, we build it.
My hope was, if they see us building things to tear down their walls, we'll force them out to attack us on our terms, in ground we've fortified and made defensive.
Which would let Felix and Dante do their little prattle up to the gate, demand surrender honorably, get shot to death by arrows thing. The rest of us would then make a good show of building a catapult, forcing them to come out. If they try to ignore us, we attack anyone on the road from the fort as a group.
Anyone besides me capable of Invisibility? That way we might could get up close and penetrate the compound?
Maybe gain a few more levels first?
Just a couple things.
There are something like four faces that the bandits haven't seen before. We can use those to our advantage. Surely they're looking for new recruits. I say we send Bej, maybe Fharn, maybe myself, and we go in and we try to trick them into thinking that we're bandits.
I've got a pyrotechnics spell, and I can let Fharn copy it into his own spellbook if I can't go, to serve as a signal, and the three could just be in there, gathering information, and do their best to make it easier for the rest to rush in and slaughter everybody.
If someone has it in their spellbook or wants to lend me 300gp to give to Oleg, I can send for a scroll of invisibility and prepare it once/day.
A pure frontal assault is dumb, but it seems that slitting throats in the night is out of the question.
Also, Masamura, talking about level is pretty metagame-y XD
Very first thing, why don't we just send Fharn and Dantalion's familiars up into the sky to get a look at what's going on?
Discussion thread = OOC table talk.
Inherently Metagamey.
I could brew invisibility potions, if we had the reagents, and someone would cast invisibility into the pot. I'd need to make a higher roll due to caster level, but it's a craft alchemy check, and I have that pretty good.
It really doesn't help my lack of choosing invisibility as a spell known that illusion is one of my prohibited schools XD
Understandable. :)
I would like to peek through your spell book in the future and copy formulae out, when I have the cash to do so, assuming you'd be ok with it IC.
I'm sure he'd let you, assuming the sentiment was mutual XD
Wouldn't do you any good. An alchemist can copy a wizard spell to create a formulae.
But a wizard looking at an alchemist's book just sees a bunch of chemical formulae that are gobbledy gook. It's a one-way thing.
Things that Sanita would like to duplicate from others spell books...
Dareon Lebeda
1st - identify, see alignment
2nd - detect thoughts
Cost : 30/40GP
Fharn
1st - Shield, True Strike, Crafter's fortune, Identify, Endure Elements, Disguise Self
Cost : 50/60GP
I could make Elixirs of Hiding. It's a poor mans invisibility - and since it is a wondrous item there is no need for the actual spell. And for 200gp and some time I'll make us a decent tree (Tree Feather Token). It would be 60 ft. high, 5 ft. diameter trunk and top diameter of 40 ft. Aka decent cover, a high vantage point and if needed, a siege ladder.
Sadly I can't cast pyrotechnics since I've only got access to first level spells. But Clarion Call is a decent substitute. Can't cast it yet, but it is on the cleric list so with some help from Anastacia I could make a scroll and learn it from that one... Might be slightly iffy thou
You still need the spells to make the wondrous items, or it's more difficult to make.
However, a tree feather token tossed into the gate might do wonders for smashing it open if we did have to assault, although getting there to activate it would require a suicidal charge (or some guile).
The Elixir has a base DC of 10 (CL 5 +5) to craft, and without invis its only 15. I can make that easily. The feathertoken whoever has a base DC of 17(! CL 12 +5) and requires Major Creation for another +5. I can get 20 by takeing 10 with Munin helping me. If someone were to help (aid other) I could get 22 and thus be able to create our three without a fuzz.
Now - I just realized that there is also a feather token for a + 1 lance, so if we were allowed to combine the two (growing a 60 ft. +1 lance) it should be a decent can opener : )
Unfortunately, for someone to be able to Aid Another, they'd need to be able to make the check, which means they'd have to have Create Wondrous Item also. I don't think anyone else has it, so no 'aid another' for Fharn.
Ah yes true - I forgot!
Anyone know if someone with the Cooperative Crafting feat can provide both the bonus stated in the feat and an aid other bonus?
Circumstance bonuses usually stack if they are from different sources. The question would be if Munin is one source (thus not stacking the bonuses) or if his feat count as one and his action is another (thus allowing him to provide both the aid other roll and the feats bonus) and thus allowing Fhârn to create said tree.
Or if we really want a tree for something I could just roll the craft roll and pray : )
I took Create Wondrous Item as well, so I may be able to help.
Then we can create tree feather tokens ! So that option is open ... Now we just need a good plan.