Palace of the Vampire Queen (Inactive)

Game Master Terquem

So just as a mention as I don't want it to be overlooked in game.
Windel you caught my reference to a spell that you as a character are able to cast now right?

Yes I caught the reference for your spell suggestion. There are quite a few useful spells to choose from.

I still need to cut and past the updated profile from hero lab.

How long do you want to rest?

We are going to need at least 8 hours to be able to prep spells.
Hopefully the ice maidens take longer than a night to regenerate or we are truly screwed. This place is dangerous enough without every single monster in it coming to kill us in one boss rush.

Agreed, we should only rest the minimum time that we need. So eight hours... although, there is something to be said for making sure that Stephanie and Atharessa don't have the poison in their system anymore.

If any of you desire to respond to that little line but feel that your particular character would be asleep feel free to grab control of Stephanie's familiar Whiskeybarrel to wake your PC up with.
He's clever enough to get know to get help.

Unfortunately, my work is going to have me busy all week and next. I should be able to put up an occasional post this week (but not many) and I will be out of the loop next week.

I think we are ready to move on.

Broken water pipe,
Be back as soon as I can

Hopefully its outside and not inside.

Hose bib connection on the front of the house broke right where it enters the brick wall. Ice all over the front of the house, but no water inside, thank goodness. What a nightmare to repair though.

Just waiting for someone to take charge and tell me what the heroes are going to do now

Windel and Rownig won't be able to post till the weekend. Busy with work.

Well Terquem, with Baldwin gone until the weekend, the job of perception rolling is up to you.

Miagnik is ushering the group out of the safe alcove and onto the adventuring stage, once again. Heading for the most direct route down the stairs and into the deeper parts of the tomb of the Vampire Queen!

Sounds good.

I'll bring you right up to getting past the Guards, build a map and set the stage for a brief, hopefully, encounter

Thanksgiving is just about a week away and I know it is a time here in the U.S. when many people spend happy times (and sometimes not so happy times, haha) with their extended families. I am off work all next week and will try to keep all my games up dated, but I expect everyone here in the U.S. will be a bit busier than normal.

Do you want to initiate the encounter without Rownig and Windel here (and then I would need to NPC them) or just wait for Baldwin to be back

Also, sort of wondering what is going on with Hall?

To be perfectly honest, I utterly forgot about Moralane and Atharessa, at first. For combat purposes though, Moralane is an archer, so she's fine in the back and Atharessa is a Bard, so she's also fine there. If I had been thinking about it, I would have interacted with Atharessa and gotten her arcane healing put into the Dragon ring.

As for combat, I think we can make it happen without Baldwin.

Hall has just been pretty busy with a crazy shift change at work and various family obligations lately. But don't worry, he's still around.

I'm a bit lost on how this room we are talking about works.
From my reading there is a set of double doors, immediately past there is a set up of guardian skeletons in a position to strike the stairs leading downward with little issue.
Ranged weapons?
Or is the choke point of the stairs forcing the people entering into a bottleneck what is to be obtained from that.
Both?
Makes more sense to deny them the terrain advantage and get close enough to actually hurt the things.

Least that's what I'm understanding of it. Would anyone care to tell me where I'm going wrong in my reckoning?

@Stephanie - can you click on the map of Level 1? I think the area in question is at the top right... (Terquem can you confirm?)

From my understanding the skeletons are behind that door to the south. Ranged attacks are certainly an option, once the boneys are flushed out/are coming at us...

I am building the encounter map now

The map is built. The word "Stairs" occurs where the first step of the stairs is located (you have a 5 foot square before the stairs that is safe to stand on in that passageway)

Ok I get it now.
I was under the impression that the skeletons were behind or on the stairs themselves and not in a room adjacent to the stairs.
That is to say the skeletons were perched on rafters above the stairs or something triggered to attack anoyone who opened the door and didnt give the right words. Where they could just pelt us with arrows with next to no chance for us to attack back.
Or longspears from murderholes or something.

But instead the skeletons just come pouring out of a room to the side if we don't get the right words.
I was overthinking and thought we were significantly worse off than we actually are.

Atharessa: 1d20 ⇒ 10
Moralane: 1d20 + 2 ⇒ (14) + 2 = 16

This is my first break in a couple of days of holiday crazy town. I will try to update soon

Terquem, so I know we've had the discussion before, but what exactly was your ruling about the Enlarge meta-magic for burning hands? I tried to find it again but I failed to do so.

It doesn't widen the spell to a 30 ft. cone, but does extend the radius in some way?

Miagnik - just reading back, and realized I never answered your question. I would allow the feat to extend the range of Burning Hands, but not make it a 30 foot cone. I'd like to keep the width the same. Is that workable?

So I wrote this, but seems like we didn't finalize what the extent of that range would be

Hmm, okay. So, here's my idea; while it does not become a cone, the range dose extend to a 30 ft. cylinder.

Normally, from Miagnik's current square, the spell would affect areas; A7/8/9, B7/8, and area C7.

Now, it becomes areas; A7-9, B7-9, C7-10, and extends to D8-D10.

This is of course without the walls cutting off the fire. It's a little difficult to picture at a diagonal angle, but as is, I believe it should actually catch all the skeletons within the flames.

Or, if you'd rather the beam didn't fully double, I'd actually be okay with it extending to fill in areas A7-9 to C7-9.

Hrmm... Would twenty points of fire damage be enough to scour the grease Stephanie placed on the ground? Giving our bashy types a clear path would be a good thing.

I believe we've dealt with this before and as I recall the answer was not so much. Maybe if that's what Miagnik had had in mind and was aiming for the grease but he definitely wasn't there.

Grease used to be flammable in previous editions. It isn't anymore, so the effect shouldn't be wiped out by the fire.

Makes me remember the flammable grease spell from complete Mage, well that and mourn the loss of DnDtools as a 3.5 resource. (having a well made library of the entire 3.5 collection was amazingly useful.)
was a L2 grease spell that ignited for 4d6 damage though. Nice little one-two with an allied pyromancer.

It should also be mentioned that I as of now realize that Grease is a dispellable effect in Pathfinder. So what the grease is composed of and the effects large amounts of fire damage would have on it is moot.
Stephanie can remove it this round regardless.

@Terquem (and Baldwin/DH): I found the Best guide to running a PbP.

Just wanted to thank you Terquem for all that you are doing and hae already done. ;)

@ Terquem: so how would you go about mixing different types of movement together?

I don't ever recall it really coming up in the actual rules anywhere as it is unusual to do. But since Miagnik has a climb speed, how would you work it?

Obviously allowing a full move and climb would be awesome, but kind of ridiculous. The problem I'm seeing is that the speeds are very different from each other. A 10 ft. climb speed vs. a 20 ft. movement speed. One way I can see it, is if I only move 10 ft. on the ground, I can then still climb 5 ft. onto a wall.

On the other hand, the ruling that you can only really use one type of movement per action is also understandable. Since the two are so very different.

And then there are the spells like Expeditious retreat boosting my base speed to 50 feet, and using the climb skill rules, I could be moving much faster than my actual climb speed would allow.

I'm going to go read the bestiary and see if there is guidance in that (where a lot of monsters have multiple movement characteristics) and get back to you

@Terquem (and Baldwin/DH): I found the Best guide to running a PbP.

Just wanted to thank you Terquem for all that you are doing and hae already done. ;)

Thanks.

The Prime PbP GM Commandment is so true. Everyone gets excited to "run" a game but it is hard work and it takes a considerable time commitment on everyone's part. As a DM, I find the most important thing during the recruitment phases is to read the body of work of the potential players. Are they one line posters, combat stat only, are they descriptive, do they have unexplained absences, and do they have a history of in-game conflict. The same can be said for when I'm looking to join a game, I look to see if the DM has follow though.

I need to look through the spoilers and follow his links but it certainly looks informative.

Miagnik - I haven't found anything concrete about combining movement, but I recently was reading the 5e rule book and noticed they explained it sort of nice, in a similar way to some of the thread discussions here I've been reading.

You can combine movement types on a direct ratio basis (if you use a fraction of one movement type, a similar fraction of the other movement types is lost).

So with a 20 foot move, and a 10 foot climb, you could walk ten feet, then climb 5. or climb 10, and have no walking speed left. In a double move situation (40/20) the same ratios would be applied.

Okay, that's actually good to know it was explained somewhere. I'm fine with running it that way.

Well it seems there is a real mess as far as keeping track of wounds for this group. I went back to the end of the battle with Galinea, the last thing she did was Channel negative Energy for 8 points, some of you failed your saves

That Damage tracker (after removing the monsters) looked like this

Windel – takes 8 damage
Hallister – takes 22 damage
Maelodakh – takes 21 damage
Moralane – takes 3 (NL), and 17 damage (blind)
Stephanie – takes 4 damage
Miagnik – takes 7 damage
Atharessa - take 1 (NL) and 13 damage
Rownig - takes 4 damage

Now, I did my best to read the game thread as closely as I could, and found no mention of magical healing applied to the party (except removal of the blind condition from Moralane, if I missed it, please somebody let me know). After resting, recovering your level in hp, the damage tracker should look like this

Windel – has 3 damage
Hallister – has 17 damage
Maelodakh – has 16 damage
Moralane – has 13 damage
Stephanie – has -2 dex penalty
Miagnik – has 2 damage
Atharessa - has 9 damage

For the next couple of days I will leave the damage tracker off my posts until all of this can be confirmed. I will retroactively apply healing, if we determine it was missed

Windel was out of channels but I thought I asked if anyone needed healing before I imbibed Miagnik's ring with the cure spell. Windel would not have given a cure spell if anyone, including himself, was still injured.

Cure Post 1

Cure post 2

Ah, the reason I thought it hadn't been brought it before now was because we were in a safe place to bed down. Then after the night of rest and leveling you would have either cured or channeled for anyone still needing it.

It honestly might be a good time to use a channel Energy now. Since we're all thinking about it.

first - okay it looks like we didn't have any healing the day before, so the damage tracker above is correct

second - a couple of things, I hope Hallister was just making things up in his post because, A) the party only learned about the missing princess after rescuing Stephanie and were never sent to find her, and B) Stephanie is not THAT princess

If Hall was not just kidding around, then I have done a horrendous job here of trying to tell a story

Am I THAT princess? If not WHY NOT? [shakes morningstar vigorously]

Seriously Terq, coming in late, and not being as assiduous as Stephanie leaves me a little mystified about all the machinations and wheels within wheels. Which is fine, and I kinda prefer it that way - it helps to leave Mae truly in the dark about a lot of stuff.

I believe that Hal was just speaking in that Dwarven, complaining sort of way. Like the way people sometimes get details mixed up when talking without thinking about it.

Don't fret too hard about your storytelling ability Terquem, because it's amazing and we all truly enjoy it.

Wasn't there mention of finding a missing princess back when we were in town? I might be making things up. Honestly, with the amount of time it takes to tell a story arc in PbP games, a lot of details get jumbled up when the situation is complex.

If I'm wrong, just assume I'm complaining like an old dwarf.

Thank you everyone for supporting this game!
I have to go out of town today, leaving in a couple of minutes, sort of an emergency, but if everything id fine I should be back late Sunday. I hope to be able to update then

Thank you all so much, once again

If we want to take a break from going deeper down my characters will huff and puff but agree to the it. Windel could use the time to craft scrolls and now resources aren't an issue. Note: I suspect we will quickly become the talk of the kingdom and probably arrested as we try to spend the loot.

I don't care either way and Mae is easily led when she doesn't have an agenda of her own, which is most of the time excepting when she needs someone to bow and scrape to puff up her dirigible ego.

Stephaine would likely reverse her earlier decision. We are for the most part unharmed, resting means the possible return of these creatures from death and venturing further down means we have a better chance at finding someone associated with our dwarven adversary who knows something more about what is going to happen.

Plus I still have brand new Level 3 spells to cast. Getting a chance to use those would be nice.