If we do go after her, what are we going to offer/say?
That we want to give her back all of her parts/help her get revenge is my initial thought.
Didn't she take everything she wanted from Kaldwell's former body?
Revenge might be a reasonable angle... I just hope to hell she doesn't blast us again.
Do we have any ideas about where to go next? We still need to hunt down that merchant, and then resolve the issue with the smith. Is there anything else we need to get done?
Playhouse?
So we have one suggestion for heading to the Playhouse. Anyone want to second or suggest a different course of action?
I'll second the Playhouse
I can't think of a better option. To the playhouse it is!
Rest in wilderness or circus first? Playhouse sounds good
Yes, I'm assuming you're resting. I was going to assume in the wilderness, but if you want to travel for an hour or so, you could go to the circus first and then rest.
Wilderness should be fine
We probably don't want to be chilling at the circus when our new friend arrives to have a word.
Playhouse sounds like fun.
Can you please out of character tell us what is going on?
It's not at all clear.
Does making a will save not effect anything?
Why are there two maps, and are we supposed to move tokens on both?
If it is clear to anyone else, please speak up.
Did illusions that I successfully disbelieved against attack and damage me?
Why did an npc get to perform a steal combat maneuver against me without rolling initiative, but when I try to poke someone in the eye I have to roll initiative and lose my action?
None of this is particularly clear or really even fun right now.
As for initiative, I think it comes down to what you are ready for. If someone steals from you and you are watching them, it is initiative. If not? Then no initiative. If you poke someone and they are ready, then initiative. If they are not ready, then surprise round.
No, an illusion did not attack you. Not everything is an illusion. Namely the figures on the Theatre map are not illusions, though there are two people standing in the same square who have a single token. You successfully blinded one of them, who then cast a spell.
The NPC was successfully able to steal from you because you were unable to resist/respond/do anything other than dance due to failing your Will save vs the fiddle, so he was going to get away regardless of if I formally rolled initative or not. And if I had rolled initiative, would it have really been interesting to spend a round following him in combat order? The description of the main room both included where he had run off to and the map had him on it.
As to rolling initiative on your attempt, I had you both attempt to Bluff to surprise the director and attempt to roll initiative to act faster than him. If you had succeeded either, you would have got off your attempt without the illusion going off, but you didn't.
It also occurs to me that perhaps I should be more clear about some of the mechanics that have been going on.
First off, at no point did Balimar/Balio get a free turn before initiative was rolled, which I realize now might not have been clear. What I mean by this is that they didn't get a free standard action to cast the illusion spell; the spell was, in fact, cast long ago and triggered as a free action when Balimar yelled "Treachery! Fiend! Vagabond". So regardless of if Delroy had triggered combat here or if it had been triggered elsewhere, combat was always going to start with the illusion going off immediately. And while you might have surprised me with an especially good idea, most likely you weren't going to get Balio/Balimar's token without fighting them as unlike many of the other Conspirators, they don't really have anything that they want in exchange for it.
Second, I want to talk a bit about the illusion. First off, the illusion has not injured anybody. Balimar and Balio have injured people and used the illusion to help confuse people and cover what exactly is going on. Benefits of disbelieving the illusion include:
- No more -8 to perception because the rain is fake
- No chance of attacking empty space where an enemy is incorrectly believed to be
- Balio/Balimar don't benefit as though they have a Mirror Image spell up
Round 1:
- Lokhir buffs his weapon and does not get a Will save vs the illusion because he didn't interact with it
- Eirnar Evil Eyes an illusion and succeeds on his Will save (rolled by me) to disbelieve the illusion
- Balimar uses a wand of fireball to blast most of the group
- Balio uses his 10ft reach to slam Delroy, missing once and hitting once
- Kaldwell draws his weapons and attacks an illusion, but fails his Will save (rolled by me) to disbelieve
- Yattle technically blasted at an empty space, but since I had described the fireball as coming from that location, I instead used the Mirror Image rule and they missed due to that. They then failed their Will save (rolled by me) to disbelieve
- Delroy succeeded on his Will save (rolled by him) and then successfully blinded Balimar
Round 2:
- Lokhir attacked an illusion and then succeded on his Will save (rolled by me) to disbelieve
- Eirnar cast Resist Energy (and unfortunately either forgot or misunderstood my request to tell everybody to read the spoiler about disbelieving the illusion when he posted)
- Balimar, currently blind, cast Haste
- Balio, now Hasted, slammed into Delroy 3 times and hit each time
- Kaldwell failed his Will save twice (rolled by him)
- Yattle succeeded on a Will save (rolled by them) and still has a Standard action left.
Hopefully that clears up what has been going on and illustrates that while you may not have wanted to start combat, the party hasn't been disadvantaged by it starting here vs some other point in time.
I'm waiting for some party member to weigh in on if you want Delroy to accept the surrender or keep attacking Balio/Balimar. It will affect what they do on their turn.
Delroy has traditionally returned his bounties alive, hard to do that without accepting surrender.
Kaldwell supports surrender.
Surrender = Information. Learn alot more from the living than the dead.
Generally our policy so far too :-)
I'm going to go ahead and redistribute Delroy's cards. I'll go ahead and say The Rakshasa, The Sickness, The Survivor, The Trumpet, and The Twin are no longer useful and The Midwife is also probably not useful. This pretty much just leaves The Cyclone and The Keep. I'll give Yattle The Cyclone since they got the one fewer card last time and The Keep will go to Kaldwell. I'll leave the Midwife floating around in case someone wants to try playing it/in case the bonus ends up being useful.
So y'all said you wanted information from Balio/Balimar. Was anybody actually planning on asking something?
Also, as a heads up I'm going to be a bit busy from this Thursday through the following Tuesday. I'm guessing I'll be able to update most of that time except for probably Monday/Tuesday, but if I can't, that's what's going on.
I guess we could go with some general questions about outstanding tokens?
Anyone else have thoughts?
If you don't actually have questions, Balimar/Balio can also just give you their token and you can move on.
Thats fine for me. Did the one Yattle melted have anything?
She had two scimitars if you'd like them.
I'm highly inclined to kill this whirlwind, not wanting it to kill the Centaur.... Not that Eirnar has any actual ability to do so.
If that isn't the route we're going. We should probably try to grapple him to pull him out. I'll probably channel instead since that has range and will keep our centaur going another round maybe?
If the liberating command works, Eirnar does his shell of succor. If not, he channels to try to keep the centaur up.
Eirnar has freedom of movement, not sure if that does anything against the whirlwind.
Yeah, it doesn't want to talk, doesn't want to play with things that it won't kill by doing so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
"Ah," Kaldwell said for a moment as he kept one eye on the wind being. "Would you happen to the Nightpeddler?"
That’d be interesting given our deal...
My team is pushing to make a big work deadline on Friday. As a result, I'm pretty wiped out. I'll update on Saturday when I have some room to breathe.
Understandable and relatable. Good luck!
Sadly, we did not get our project done enough to ship on Friday, so we had to push back the deadline to Wednesday. I'm hoping we at least got enough done that I won't need to pull as long of hours on Monday through Wednesday, but we'll see how it goes.
Ouch, good luck with that.
Indeed. Happy Thanksgiving and stay safe everyone!
Waiting to see party position before I yolo to my death
Will the Immediate action be used this upcoming turn or last turn? I used a swift action last turn, but I'm happy to use it for the upcoming one.
Next...if I could t use it this turn when I tried it on myself I can’t use it on anyone else either
Shiny. I probably won't need it, being young and buff, but I can always roll a one so I'll take it.
For the record: it is pretty dumb that liberating command can’t be used on oneself. I get that it is raw, but I can’t believe that it is rai
Also holding off on my turn to see what I can do after the party’s actions. Being pinned doesn’t offer many options
It's an old spell, too. I must admit, I'm surprised they haven't made it work better, but such is life.
And yeah, I'd intended to come help if I made the Will save, but instead I'm kinda playing the stunned condition off as Kaldwell going slightly berserk. Sorry.
Eirnar has a liberating command prepped, would it help while pinned?
It would help after Lokhir's current turn; right now he doesn't have the Immediate action to use to break free on his turn since he used it to cast Liberating Command on Kaldwell.
As for RAW and RAI, it's not like this is some obscure interaction. It's pretty clear that it's using two Immediate actions in a single round when a single character has only one. That suggests to me RAI is that you're supposed to cast it on other people, not yourself. Furthermore, technically you should have made a concentration check to be able to cast the spell while grappled at all. The fact that Liberating Command doesn't help you at all with that further suggests to me that the intent is to free someone else.
I meant to update last night, but wound up needing to crash from lack of sleep thanks to being oncall. I'll update tonight. In the meantime, let me know if anyone has requests for what Eirnar should do. FWIW, I sent him a PM, but from a brief check, it looked like he hadn't posted anywhere in a while.
Take care of yourself. Crashing from overwork is never ideal.