Wednesday fencing and gribbly bubs - may not have anything up till tomorrow PM as I've a full work day tomorrow.
In my minds eye Mark this is how you fence lol
Unfortunately I think I'm a bit more like the bloke in the kilt...
Nithing wrang wi that haggis! ;)
Wee heads up for one and all I've my works annual dinner and dance this Friday into Saturday so from tomorrow morning (UK time) and being as its Scotland and a free bar I'll likely (over)indulge - so I'll likely be off the grid until later on Sunday :)
Well, Rob Roy had beat that guys ass like six or seven times over the course of the movie. MAinly because he never gave a chance for him to try his swordsmanship.
Real fighting can be unforgiving when your foe has a certain set of specialized skills...
*shrug* no worries, only a minor annoyance, but it was in character for him to complain :p
Your DM begs a humble forgiveness for his inactitude, combination of a teething baby, very very busy day at work and need to organize a trip out of country to renew visa took up my time.
heh, no prob, I've been pretty lazy with my own RPs the last few days
+2 on that front, saves you having to post that Ragnar is standing waiting with a menacing look upon his face ;)
Seriously you know my games will wait and I'm more than happy to wait for thine.
Gnnaaaahhh - another night of delays and I've an eight hour meeting tomorrow. Watch this space a little longer, I appreciate your patience.
Depending on how our conversation goes Shen, am thinking perhaps we sow the seeds of rumour (at the least) of the mage perhaps dabbling in infernal magicks (oh the irony!).
We could sell ourselves as "disguised" Inquisitors perhaps? If we can frame the mage for some diabolical crime, then perhaps the ensuing arrest/chaos would serve us well??
What say you my blackest of hearts ;)
VoV has been busy,
Much work and stress flow over,
Post later he shall.
Just noticed that Gary McBride has followed suit with a number of other publishers and is using kickstarter to give his next AP (Throne of Night) a jump start. Regardless of how badly I'm currently butchering his campaign here - he does write good stuff and there are discounts on offer for the pre-order.
Conjures up images of Night Below - was my first mega campaign that spanned 2nd Edition into 3E and finally 3.5... loved it - combined it with the Illithiad... good times heh.
Baby got backed :)
Didn't realized he'd posted it, haven't been keeping as close an eye on the other parts of the forums, will definitely back :) I want more of what FMG's got ;)
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Thanks for the support, guys. Greatly greatly appreciated.
Gary McBride
The Throne of Night Kickstarter is up and running!
no probs Garry, it's a good deal, though I'm a bit cheap to pay the extra $30 for your John Hancock :p An explorer is me!
Mi'Dre'll sleep in a bit late in the morning, but is going to suggest a meeting after Shendalyn and Cruxcarr's return to discuss plans.
If we don't feel like playing out another in character brainstorming session then I can just post my thoughts on what we should be doing in here.
Sure. Could use a good idea. Right now I am out of them.
I'll set up the ambush tonight as I'll need to furnish with a map and what not.
cool :) Lookin' forward to it. Mi'Dre did have some things he wanted to accomplish that morning/afternoon while they're roaming the city being merchant-like. Basically he's keeping his eye out for the homeless and disillusioned of the city, especially any criminal elements he can sniff out; if he can find a black market or the like then that would be perfect. He's also trying to get a feel for how closely the local church interacts with the town and how it's viewed, things might be a little looser on the frontier perhaps?
Cruxcarr might also sally forth and seek out if there are any budding mages within the city... in the guise of an itinerant arcane scholar he might be able to discern more useful information or identify some patsies...
Should we just jump from stealth on them or elaborate a more complex hoax with our disguises?
Mi'Dre is far better at stealth than hoaxes :p If you other guys don't think you can hide well enough then you could try a deception I suppose.
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If we can locate an actual bear or similar significant beastie, we can perhaps arrange for its body to be found with the scouting party, and then try to cover up any wounds we put on the men during the fight with claw marks and bite marks.
It does mean that we'll have to have *two* fights instead of one, which will be riskier.
As for the actual attack on the patrol, if we can attack them at night, when at least some will be unarmored, and they won't necessarily have all their weapons close to hand, to increase our own chances of success (and eliminating any escapees messing with our plans).
If the patrols have some means of long-distance signaling, such as signal horns or flaming arrows or whatever, those need to be dealt with first.
Ahh yeah, I meant to suggest the same thing with the bear, slipped my mind. Mi'Dre has claws handled albeit a bit on the small side...
As to waiting until night that does increase the risk of them sensing something's up, or spotting one of the less stealthy of the group. Cruxcarr and Shendalyn are only at +1 and Albina and Black Jack are +6 (which I'm assuming is without Jack's full plate :p). Assuming they only have one sentry I suppose Mi'Dre could sneak up on him and grapple him to keep him quiet.
I'll be on a four day vacation starting at 11:55 tonight - disappearing down to Perth for a few days to do the familial visitation thing. Highly likely I'll be delayed in posting during that period
Spells Prepared for the upcoming Encounter ():
Cantrips: 4 – Arcane Mark (Rune of Gluttony), Bleed [2 slots], Read Magic, Touch of Fatigue [2 slots]
1st Level: 3 – , , Mage Armour
2nd level: 1 - Ghoul Touch [2 slots]
Albina - will do.
I am back in KL now and returning to the typical home routine... though will be another 8-24 hours before I get the first post back up in thread. Thanks for your patience :)
Mi'Dre votes for night ambush. He would also like to settle the matter of when they track down the bear.
DM is still here - just going through a small real life loss of creative focus. Issue will rectify soon I am sure and I shall return to form. Patience is appreciated and please enjoy a cookie while you wait.
Just a quick update - I'm getting my head back in the game and re-energized towards giving you guys better service then I have over the last few weeks. However the next three days I will be on a short roadtrip - getting put into a fake helicopter that they'll repeatedly drop into water upside down while I'm in it. As long as I get out without drowning I pass...
I'm hoping there will be interwebbage in the evenings... but I'm not certain.
Ahh, I've seen that before, hope you survive/have fun :p
Woop - good luck with the survival training Mark - mine was fun... faulty rebreather which had me sucking water instead of air while inverted heheheh. Was all good tho, didnae panic... deathly calm infact lol.
As a side note was amazed that there were non-swimmers doing the survival training... crazy or brave??? :S
Regardless - enjoy
Net turns out to be quite limited - so I'm going to write up the post offline and get it up when back to civilization on Thursday.
BD - yeah that would've had me stressing a little bit. Non-swimmers are pretty much a given in Malaysia. Last time there were 10 on the course, and I can only dog-paddle... but I was still the only 'swimmer' there. SE Asia is surrounded by water, but they just don't seem to go swimming in it.
My Orcadian trow blood came in handy when we got dooked...
Man that would scare me more than anything being on a chopper with full compliment of non-swimmers...
*sits back and lets you guys RP*
Honest question for everyone:
I know that I've had a chunk of time being a pretty poor DM with distractions, slow posting and what not - for which I apologize... but for a while even before then and continuing to now I've had a few doubts as to whether this PbP is still functional and enjoyable for people?
The area which has been reached is a bit of a quagmire section for a PbP due to the number of choices on offer - and lord knows I've been fairly poor at giving you a decent idea of what is and isn't on offer... but I still don't get a full feeling that I've managed to engage all five of you in the story.
So in all honesty (and please don't hold back) - who is still really enjoying this PbP as it has stood over the last couple of months?
Well, I've got to admit the pace has been a disappointment lately , but sometimes that just can't be helped. I'm really interested in the adventure path, and wish to continue with it if you are happy to keep running it. If you feel that you no longer have the time to commit to it however, then I can certainly understand that, I've dropped a couple of my own including one of the ones I was running about a month back.
Hey DMV - echo Mi'Dre - love the pbp and still getting a handle on Cruxcarr as a character... but have felt a little more opportunity to be complete basterds wouldn't go amiss (and that also falls with me as a player, I've not been nearly as imaginative and nefarious with Cruxcarr as I did in my mind's eye and still getting a feel for playing my first wizard in a LONG time)
That being said, think there is loads more to come (from me as a player and the AP itself)
I'm still about though i worry little about the pacing given my own lck of it.
I'm still interested I think I'm just frustrated a little at how to make the game flow better with respect to the assault on Balentyne.
Tark - do you think that your availability is going to improve or disprove over the next wee while?
Black Jack - Are you still out there?
Set - Would be interested in your thoughts as well... though perhaps the fact that you've announced you're back from your trip to three or four other PbPs and not this one kind of says the story anyway.
As I mentioned above - I definitely hold my hand up for not putting more thought into Cruxcarr's reactions and scheming.
Ultimately this group should be a nest of vipers and I've not done my part to create that vibe more...
Game to continue in some shape or form, but with a personal onus on making our bloatmage much more nefarious...
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When I'm not sure what to say, I tend to say nothing, which is hardly helpful, I know, when you're looking for assurance that I'm into the game. :)
I lost a step with the tower stuff after my initial naively optimistic plan of 'let's just poison their food and then beat them up!' turned out to be a loser. The series of smaller events we have to orchestrate to whittle down the much-larger-than-I-thought tower full of guards feels a bit less like us being deliciously proactively evil and a bit more like marking items off a checklist for our evil overlord.
That's probably intentional, since we *are* marking items off a to-do list handed to us by our evil overlord...
My problem isn't with the adventure itself, but with managing my own expectations. I knew going in that this adventure was a nearly first-of-its-kind attempt at an evil adventure series, and that it would have a ton of chokes and brakes to keep us 'in line.' Very much not 'evil sandbox.' I kind of went into it with the thought of 'mwahaha, freedom to be eeevil!' when it's more, 'for your next mission, my ambitious henchling, fetch me items from this grocery list.'
I'm also concerned about the scope of our current circumstances. It seems, as I understand it, that we have to accomplish a half-dozen or so smaller missions to weaken the garrison here, and do so with a margin of success high enough that not only do we take them 'offline,' but also manage to do so without anyone getting away, raising an alarm, or becoming suspicious that their border outpost has been effectively neutered without once considering that it might be more than just 'freak accidents,' and sending out for reinforcements (which will blow our mission, to weaken the area for the bugbears to take).
There's a whole lot of 'points of failure' in this section, and, not being the best dice-roller in the world, the larger the number of chances I have to utterly botch the AP (by letting someone get away, or raise an alarm, or just fail at a Bluff check and arouse suspicion), the more likely it is to happen...
Not one of these guards in the woods, for instance, can get away, or raise an alarm. Whatever injuries we inflict have to be disguised to appear as animal or monster attacks, not weapon attacks (or fiery burns, or whatever). We have to obliterate our own tracks, and try to manufacture some that appear suitably 'wild animal' ish. Any failure on our part (or even a great tracking roll by the men sent to investigate) could lead to the leader of the garrison calling for reinforcements to deal with 'bandit activity' or whatever, which is, for us, mission fail.
And then we have to enact multiple other plans of this sort, all *perfectly,* all without arousing suspicion that half the garrison has gotten bumped off or taken out of action by anything other than 'freak accidents' or 'bad luck.'
We can, obviously, try to pre-empt some points of failure and give ourselves a little wiggle room, such as, if they use pigeons or whatever to send messages, kill them so that they can't call for help, but that in itself puts us on the defensive mode, as they will realize something is wrong and start sending out messages via riders, which we will have to intercept and kill, *without missing one.*
Once the dominos start falling, it's going to get a lot more intense, and we are going to have to be everywhere, watching everyone, to stay ahead of the game.
We need Mission: Impossible levels of clever planning here and James Bond levels of adaptability and follow-through.
Having one of us get in close enough with the guardsmen to know what they are thinking (if they suspect foul play) is beginning to look like a necessary thing, and some means of quickly communicating with each other (even if only through pre-arranged signals, such as draping a certain color of cloth out of a certain window, or via some sort of trained animal, or message spell or item) to very quickly alert each other of imminent situations (such as being able to tell Mi'Dre at a moment to fly up and kill the pigeons, or someone else to get to the edge of town to intercept and waylay a messenger leaving the keep).
Set - Thanks for weighing in and letting me know you're still around. You've hit several of the nails that I've been thinking on straight on the head. And this particular section of the AP has been a quagmire for the WotW game that I'm currently a player in too. It's very much paralysis by options combined with a reticence to try anything due to risk of failure compounding and screwing up the whole mission.
The AP states: If the PCs started a straight fight with that lot, they would face a CR 14 fight. Actually, the battle would be harder than that (CR 16?), because the soldiers have a well-coordinated command, artillery (ballistae and stone droppers) and defensive fortifications as well as dwarven allies. the risk / reward balance is not particularly amicable.
If we were face to face across a table I'm sure this would go a fair bit better - there would be a much more organic back and forth... but on PbP it doesn't really function the same way. Compound that with the fact that I know that I'm struggling to get the right things down on paper to inspire and guide.
So - I've a proposition that I intimated to one or two over PM... let's just skip the whole bally thing. Go straight past the tower and into the second book of the AP.
Let's face it I've muffed it up pretty solidly and it is a bit of a quagmire to extricate from. By skipping it we can start fresh on the second part of the AP... which is actually my favorite part of the entire chain. You get to liberate an evil stronghold, fill it up with your own minions and then defend it against assault by all and sundry while you perform an evil ritual to free a plague.
On another matter: Tark - do you think you'll be able to get back and active to roughly a post a day on weekdays? - or will you still be super busy?
Black Jack - same question?
If we get back up and moving it'd be good to try and keep the momentum going so we can get back to why we started this PbP in the first place... ie. to have fun and indulge the black little voices within our hearts and minds.
Well I think perhaps Set is exagerating the danger, but yeah it's not an easy predicament. As long as we get the Xp for it (I believe we're meant to be 5th level for the second book, currently still 3rd unless I missed the instruction to level up) I'm cool with skipping to the good stuff (aka book two and devilish transformations for Mi'Dre :D) and if it means everyone will be more comfortable, happy and posting more regularly then doubly so.