The survivors (Inactive)

Game Master The Indescribable

There is nothing preventing you from helping her thought right?

As to strangeness I ask as I do intend for my familiar to serve as a scout for the party as needed. It will be easier to do that safely if even on being spotted the familiar is only seen as 'yet another vermin' rather than something strange and memorable a guard would come to investigate were they to see it two or three times.

I'll certainly take the name into consideration, thanks.

Anything seen enough times is memorable.

Yep but a pigeon in new york would need to do something really weird to be considered out of place where as a Peacock will attract attention regardless of where it is.

True enough.

different areas have different problems, you could end up in areas like that or you could end up in areas where they're worshipped.

So... Thinking more along the lines of India rather than China/Japan then?

No just went looking for monkeys in asian mythology

oh you're reffering to the temple, no that was just an example of how what some see as vermin can be seen as holy in other places.

Ah, I see.

Hmmm... I think I'm just going to go ahead with void. I really like some of the time abilities but it just wouldn't work as well thematically.

never understood theory crafting myself.

It's a way to try and plot out a character's abilities, I usually use it to help decide when to multiclass. Like, for example... Do I leave Valdis as Unchained Rogue 2, or... make him an Unchained Rogue 1/Kinetic Duelist 1.

You can see what he's at right now, dropping a level of UR and taking KD will lose me 4 skill ranks, Evasion and my Umbral Gear ability but gives me a way to overcome Light Sensitivity (with basis chaokinesis), bump up my Fort save, and give me a 1d6 negative energy blade (hitting touch AC) that I can keep active until I choose to dispel it.

Or I could wait until after 3rd level to even take the class, giving me another 1d6 to my sneak attack, being able to add Dex to my actual weapon's damage and danger sense before moving on to KD.

It fits more thematically to wait until at least after 2nd level to move into kineticist seeing as that's allowed him to mess around with creating weapons out of shadow, slowly working towards drawing power from the negative energy plane.

I dunno, when my real life group parted ways I fell into the habit of just making characters out of boredom. (You don't even want to know about my flat out Chronokineticist... not that he's ever been played, and it's not like he's super powerful either just... he's got some awesome stuff going on.) *sigh* I dunno

Yeah, it's the process I don't understand. But I know what you mean about characters, awhile ago I had like 20 different heroes for hero system because inspiration kept slapping me. Unfortunately at the time my group was already self destructing. Now thanks to moves and s+%*ty moment that kind of ruined Gencon two years ago our group is defunct.

The process? Um... Pretty much, as far as I do things, I take a fillable PDF character sheet and just make a new one for each level. That way I can do branching paths with the same base character to see which way works better i n the long run. Though I typically am not factoring in wealth or items into the equation while I do so.

That chronokinetist I mentioned has a 50ft move speed, and a +12 to initaitve at level 8. Which I think is pretty cool. Also do it to test out new classes and such. Pit a character against a level appropriate monster and see what happens. *shrug*

That's part of why I decided to try PbP, hard to find people that play in my area. Harder to find those that play seriously... Have a "friend" from high school that decided to try his hand at DMing and was allowing crazy homebrewed races in a mostly core game of 3.5 (by crazy I mean like Prince Goro's race from mortal kombat, +8 racial to strength, + 4 racial to Con, no negative mods...)

We had a half bat monster that gutted our druid's animal companion. This was a party member.

Same guy took every chance he could to try and kill any character played by a certain member of the group. Didn't matter if the characters were life long friends or literally just met in a tavern (slipped poison in his drink). Same guy also raped said party member after turning his male paladin into a female, forcing him to give birth to a clutch of half dragon eggs...

Needless to say, I'm still not desperate enough to join this guy's group.

Edit: No, I was not the recipient of his douchery

How the hell did that game even get that far? I can kind of understand hitting the rape point, but continuing through it to the pregnancy>

It... pretty much blackscreened through downtime and there was a clutch of eggs, the douche had been a dragon shaman and figured that was the "best way" for him to get a pet dragon, but they were all horribly disfigured so he killed them all. This wasn't an evil campaign either.

The DM was... more lenient than he should have been.

Yeah. I learned my lesson after I let a summoner of Lamashtu play.

And I'm guessing that was before Unchained. Same thing with the freaking factotem back in 3.5

No actually. The problem was not the summoner but the deity. He and his summons were VERY devout worshippers. Damn demonic rape wolf.

Heh. at the very least be thankful there were unaware of the existance of this horrifying piece of demon mother memorabilia
Suffice to say we were doing a pirate campaign and came across a large island with a concerning number of one eyed sheep... And their cyclops shepherd.

No. They were aware. But we were running we be goblins.

I'm going to ditch disguise for intimidate by the way.

Valdis, why are you giving up disguise?

I'll be taking an ability once I get into kineticist that will allow me to make a free intimidate check to demoralize the target of my attack when I hit them. So bumping my intimidate is a higher priority, I may still take ranks in it later, but the negatives to disguising myself as... well, anything, is a bit of a deterrent. I'd have to cake myself in makeup to maybe pass as an elf.

I should point out that while I understand that it's only a -2 for a different race, I feel that isn't a fair assessment of how hard it would be to look like a different race (might could disguise as a Drow with only a -2). Black eyes, ashen fading to black skin, pointed ears, grey hair...

Valdis you have not dotted in on the gameplay thread, just posting this hear I'm writing up the intro now so you don't miss the beginning.

No, I did, I just deleted the post afterwards.

Alright to assume that we wake up in order of posting?

That's fine.

Uh.... Subtract 3 from my perception, I was kinda tired last night, don't know why I put 9 and not 6.

Oops, I forgot to add my background skills so that is fixed.

As for helping you Valdis, that is ok, I am paranoid too and I think most of us should have taken that because you never know when someone may turn or infiltrate our team which may have helped in the demise of our sweet village.

Knowing my daughter, she would want to check out the village to see if any of the adults were alive. Add in ninja skills, the kids would probably stay in the trees hidden but just move positions or leave and come back.

I understand that, I was waiting for everyone to weigh in. Valdis wouldn't be the one to make the first move, as far as he is concerned the girls are in charge. Though, and no offense, he trusts Ai more and wants to know her plan. He wants to get the heck outta Dodge, but again, is going along with the group plan. Which so far seems that.

I am just making myself clear, I am reactionary, I do have some ideas, for instance wizards you might hear about and thus go after their books for resources for your clan rebuild.

@DM Yeah... the "Let's run off to the big new adventure that we as players know is just around the corner after these woods" isn't exactly a naturally flowing story, I'm with ya there.

I know I'm contradicting myself in that post from the one a few back, but honestly... after I stopped and thought about it, it really doesn't make sense for them to not go back and at least check for other survivors. The higher ups have to be pretty tough, and as children we should naturally assume they win the fight, even with being surprised. Plus, even if they are all dead and we wind up walking into a fight... at least then the characters have actual driving force in the game world to seek revenge and to rebuild.

Though, to be honest, I hope we don't run into any enemies (or at least that the ones we do wind up dead), not good to let your enemies know they didn't finish the job. Though... hopefully we just won't be seen.

Yeah, I figured it would be further away, was just going for (as you said) inexperienced/naive

Just making sure things continued. Seemed we were at a point for the GM to weigh in.

So about how far did we get? Dragon Horn Rock?

Not that that really helps judge how far, I just mean are we still in the woods or near a landmark? Though, I guess the rock could be in the woods, but one would think the "road" would pass a landmark like that.

You are out of the woods. I also love how you guys are naming random crap just to fill in details.

So... Should I just keep reacting and kinda drawing this out while waiting for Ai to weigh in or...? Cause it's not like I haven't been popping back in to see if there have been more posts.

I just don't know what the normal... "protocol" is in a play by post session
Back in my yahoo groups days most threads of the story only had like two people going back and forth.

I mean... I'm pretty sure we are going after an abandoned building or whatever but... If we are staying here any length of time people will see us and eventually start asking questions.

Let's keep going Valdis.

I will contact her tomorrow if she hasn't posted.

Truth be told I was looking for squatters, Valdis was looking for a place to stay. You knkw, talk to displaced/unwanted people and ask around for information of places one might do the same. Just thought I'd embellish a bit on the house, the general state of disrepair in that area of the town. But alright.

My absence was because of a low-grade 24 hour flu and will be catching up tonight. Don't have time now other then copy and paste this into all my games but wanted all of you to know what happened to me.

Safe to assume I can hear Deneb and see the Hanu?

Ask him that. As far as I recall he hasn't mentioned his positioning.

No worries darkshade, glade to have you back.

I'd figured I would send a PM or use a spoiler if there was something I was doing the rest of the party ought to not be able to see.
However the DC to hear a whispered conversation is something like 15+distance penalties.
So there is a not insignificant chance that you might see me talking to the ape actually making out what I am saying is more difficult.

So this time around I just added a post. Next time i'll make sure to add something like "Deneb then shares this information" when something like this happens again, just to leave no doubt.

In before vampire children attack, lol

Possible, though perhaps we can use some obscure lore about eastern vampires to avoid death.
I vaguely recall something about salt.

Additionally my appologies for not responding quicker, for some reason my game page didn't show the most recent game play post.