From what I can see looking at the slide history and your post history is you started with 2, were given 1, and have used two. So one remaining. You failed the first save though, so 2nd crit is going to take you down and you'd be making the 2nd save vs drain life while on the ground unconscious. You can certainly use that last hero point but you might be better off saving it for a heroic recovery since you're now dying 2
edit: dying 2 before the 2nd drain life save. Failing that would bring you to dying 3 since the condition you lose hit points equal to your level.
So essentially the choice is to hero point and stay at dying 2 if you succeed. no hero points to stabilize.
or to keep the hero point, you go to dying 3 but can stabilize.
I mean if he was petty he could do a lot worse lol. I had something else fun planned but your save changed things a bit. (another note for the post-scenario spoilers all)
and yes, corporeal now
nothing additional visible or audible happened with disabling the final rune other than what I wrote, no. The connections between the runes and the spirit have been severed when disabling the rune and i've tried to hint at when those connections had previously been lit up, or if something immediate/apparent happened then I described that (like stopped flying)
The Demonaic becoming corporeal seemed happened on the creature's turn, immediately following Amada's crit fail vs Drain Life. It had been eluded to each time someone failed a save prior to that.
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6-62-Drained for 9 = 71? Not sure if Necalli is downed quite yet unless I'm missing something. (Might be referencing the Level 8 HP, Level 9 HP is Ancestry 4 + ((Class 6 + Con 2) *9 Level = Total 76)
Drained will not only inflict 9 damage but also reduce max hp by 9. Necalli's new max hp is 67 and she has taken 71 damage so she is in fact down.
looks like i did have the wrong HP in there, I checked at start of scenario but might've been changed after. Necalli after the strike is at 14/76. Hit points are reduced by 9 to 5/76, and then max is reduced by 9 bringing Necalli to 5/67. So Necalli is still up. If we calculated based off of damage then this inadvertently double counts the hp loss. My tracker calculates (MAXHP - DMG) / MaxHP so in the other instances of drained you just see a reduction in MAX HP, the amount of damage stays the same to prevent double-counting, but then the current HP is automatically reduced as part of the formula.
TLDR - Necalli is still up.
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Zac, how important is it to recover your dropped items before the end of combat, relative to, say, getting healed?
Just my gut feeling, but I'm guessing that something epic and worthy of a upper tier level 9-10 season finale is about to happen, like the whole circle of fire is going to collapse into a volcano or Urxehl himself will fly out of the chasm or something, and we're heading into a doubleheader Severe/Extreme encounter in literally 1 round. A lot of characters are down a lot of hit points, and taking down an undamaged troll is going to take at least all of our efforts for 1 round (and possibly more - even if we can do 140+ points of damage in one round, we'd still need acid plus 3 more hits to get them to Dying 4).
You're actually far enough away that I don't think anyone can heal you this round unless you move closer. And if the whole map turns into an environmental quagmire (like Urxehl unleashes a hurricane of spirits or something), it's going to be even tougher for anyone to do anything to you.
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1. I'm not so sure that was the boss. It referred to Urxehl rising in the third person.
2. I don't think the trolls will break free either. But if the trolls are all that's left, your bow is going to be most valuable anyway.
3. You will need a Will save, but at least on a success it appears to be just fire damage (rather than being slowed or paralyzed).
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Okay, but I'd rather not be in the Center, I'm taking damage to enter the center to then be healed. You're expecting a creature to come out of the center, in which case I'd rather not be in the center too close to it, when I'm wounded 1, where I'd take him out with range. Shouldn't have been in melee with a Troll, but who would have thought the Troll rolled so high to hit me 5 out of 5 times anyhow. But I also had no idea at the time if we were on a time limit to kill the trolls or not too. And if fire spreads, I'd rather be away from the fire, whether inside or outside the circle, at least back 20 feet or so.
Edit: As far as the next battle, it may or may not be immediately, in which case the only other thing I can do is use my healing gloves
@Zac - OK to use healers gloves. You've already seen the trolls have -a lot- of regen so it seems reasonable you'd want to heal. I'll just take off your last action (which was a hit) to use healers gloves.
@everyone - i may be able to make an update this afternoon/evening my time (GMT-4) if everyone has posted. But busy day with (Nearly) finishing Abom Vaults book 1 and yardwork, so may not be until tomorrow morning either way.
No worries! I generally assume a bit slower posting on the weekends. Sounds horrifying on multiple levels, and fun!
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Honestly the most horrifying part of the module are the Encounter Difficulty descriptions of each section; the module loves making Moderate encounters that feel like Extremes and Severe Encounters that feel like they're Lows. That said, it's been fun watching the party slowly put the pieces together of what occurred in the module's backstory. Might be my favorite PF2e Adventure Module I've ran/played so far. (Not counting Society scenarios, but comparing it to Slithering/Plaguestone and the Beginner Box)
Just fair warning that if you haven't played it that the module feels like Casual Bonekeep.
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So um, if someone decides to get me up, via healing, keep in mind I will be wounded 2. This might tempt the boss to try to attack me again and if it crits, I'll be dying 4, I mean dead. He did stabilize this turn, so if he fails he goes back to dying 3. He might be better off napping until the hand dies.
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I burned my last hero point on that demoralize reroll and Astrid very well might die next round but it was totally worth it! How many people get to scare a god?
Apologies for the delay in posting, currently running a VTT table of Malevolence on Sundays that is doing 10-hour sessions to blast through it in 3 sittings, passed out immediately after yesterday's run. Good news is we're on track to finish it in three sittings!
Honestly the most horrifying part of the module are the Encounter Difficulty descriptions of each section; the module loves making Moderate encounters that feel like Extremes and Severe Encounters that feel like they're Lows. That said, it's been fun watching the party slowly put the pieces together of what occurred in the module's backstory. Might be my favorite PF2e Adventure Module I've ran/played so far. (Not counting Society scenarios, but comparing it to Slithering/Plaguestone and the Beginner Box)
Just fair warning that if you haven't played it that the module feels like Casual Bonekeep.
Watery Soup is about to run Rainzax, Tyrannius and me along with 3 others through that one in PbP. I'm looking forward to it.
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Apologies for the delay in posting, currently running a VTT table of Malevolence on Sundays that is doing 10-hour sessions to blast through it in 3 sittings, passed out immediately after yesterday's run. Good news is we're on track to finish it in three sittings!Watery Soup is about to run Rainzax, Tyrannius and me along with 3 others through that one in PbP. I'm looking forward to it.Honestly the most horrifying part of the module are the Encounter Difficulty descriptions of each section; the module loves making Moderate encounters that feel like Extremes and Severe Encounters that feel like they're Lows. That said, it's been fun watching the party slowly put the pieces together of what occurred in the module's backstory. Might be my favorite PF2e Adventure Module I've ran/played so far. (Not counting Society scenarios, but comparing it to Slithering/Plaguestone and the Beginner Box)
Just fair warning that if you haven't played it that the module feels like Casual Bonekeep.
Have fun with it; don't dump skills lol.
Have fun with it; don't dump skills lol.
We start in just over a week. The current build of my character is trained or better in every skill except survival.
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Have fun with it; don't dump skills lol.We start in just over a week. The current build of my character is trained or better in every skill except survival.
Sounds like a build that will be rewarded in the module. Won't go into more detail than that. Have fun with it, if I had to rate the module currently I'd say its about a 4.5/5 as far as modules go and has the best overall story.
tl;dr I'd be excited for Night of the Gray Death if it wasn't being written by Ron Lundeen (see Slithering); still probably going to run it just for the level 16 play though, lol.
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They skipped the room where they found out Tomil had died, so at the end I just shrugged and made Tomil the BBE. I let them read the module after we were done, and they were like, "Your plot makes more sense." Yep, that's right - The Slithering, as written, was too complicated for them.
Their favorite combats were the ones between Kibwe/Holy Xatrama at the beginning of Chapter 2 and between Holy Xatrama/Kibwe at the beginning of Chapter 3. Total simplicity, just random things appear and you kill it.
I had one of their backstories tie in to Ademe, so when they walked in, she was in human form and recognized them. They tried to kill her anyway.
Apparently, though, there's a moderate disconnect between the people who bother reviewing the products and the people who buy them. A Paizo employee said the ones that get good reviews often have poor sales - I forget who said that and where, but it might have been Michael Sayre somewhere on the forums. So maybe we're the weird ones.
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** spoiler omitted **
Checking back on my store page review, it seems I rated it 3 stars due to it being a rough base that could be easily improved by updating the story to simply NOT perma-kill the mastermind and end with a fight against a clueless lackey, and I think that's fair enough. The bones of a good module were there, but you still needed to put in some effort as a GM to make it work; as I mentioned on the store page, the edits in my thread were enough that the players walked away feeling like the scenario was at least 4 stars, but I digress.
Hopefully after I'm somehow the first person to review Malevolence in a week's time, it'll be enough to encourage some GMs to pick it up for Halloween and course-correct the ratings =/= sales issue.
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** spoiler omitted **** spoiler omitted **
... whatever. My kids had a blast, so, *shrug* I got my $23 worth.
We're doing Fists of the Ruby Phoenix next, and they're already disappointed that apparently there's a plot more complicated than "you enter an arena and things attack you." Because when I explained the Ruby Phoenix Tournament to them, they thought that was literally the whole AP, they just use the same map for 90 fights in a row. :\ I told them, "we go through Bestiary 3 alphabetically and you have to defeat every monster, the demon lord Zxrkxbl is the end boss," and they were like, "oh, cool," before they realized I was being sarcastic.
@All We're going to be winding down -- little bit of roleplay opportunity and conclusion left. First off, congratulations! I'll post some spoilers-all stuff once we finish
Secondly, this would be a good time to do downtime.
Everyone gets 8 days of downtime. or 12 days if you're field-commissioned. If you're doing an earn income then i need the following:
Skill being used // proficiency (Trained/Expert/Master) // your roll
If you have anything unique like something that lets you do a higher task level than normal, an alternate skill, field comission, etc then make sure to note that.
Third, if you are buying/selling anything make sure it is on this slide otherwise I will assume you're not purchasing/selling anything or that you are filling it out yourself
As always if you have questions or need help feel free to reach out here or via PM's
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After her brush with an EVIL GOD THAT TRIED TO CLAW ITS WAY OUT OF THE EARTH, Quinoline is ready for some extended relaxation time.
She spends some time finishing up her crafting projects.
Crafting (Field Commissioned, 12 days)
Begin: moderate elixir of life x2 (198/300 gp)
Craft 12 days @ 6 gp/day
End: moderate elixir of life x2 (270/300 gp)
Buying out moderate elixir of life x2 for 30 gp
Then, she travels back to her homeland in Thuvia. She heard stories of the fabled sun orchid elixir when she was little - she looks for any evidence that the legends are true. She may also help her friend and fellow Pathfinder Nina Jaribu reclaim her lands in Vidrian.
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Jakoby bottles some of the Finger blood, and spends the next week combining it with different herbs to distill some of the God Essences into an herbal edible treat.
When you apply this boon, choose a common alchemical item or potion of your level or lower to which you have access. The Verdant Wheel has taught you how to craft this item far more efficiently and provided you with a source for the rare herbs and ingredients needed to make 1 batch (typically 4 copies of the item). Making the item with the Verdant Wheel's method uses the standard rules for Crafting the item, with the following exceptions. First, you must use Nature, Survival, or Herbalism Lore in place of Crafting for all purposes. Second, you only need to spend 2 days of Downtime before attempting your first skill check and subsequently beginning to reduce the item’s effective cost.
Task / DC: Potion of Quickness, DC 25
Raw Materials: 45 gold each (Batch of Four)
Prep: 180.00 raw materials, 2 days preparation
Skill Check: Assurance w/ Nature (Master) @ 25
Value: 4 gold per day x 6 days = 24.00 gp progress
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Astrid gives the dwarf a huge grin. "Ha! It was glorious! Urxehl himself tried to climb out of a giant chasm and I managed to frighten him away. It'll be some time before he has the courage to cause any more trouble."
In case it's not obvious to everyone by now Astrid is not one to let the truth get in the way of a good story. This is one of the reasons I'm considering taking bard dedication at 9.
Normally Astrid would use legal lore for income but in light of the recent giant battle happening off camera we'll go with warfare lore this time.
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Thank you everyone for playing! Had a blast and hope you did too!
Going to give another spoilers-all. This scenario is not repeatable but i will but it behind spoilers just in case you ever want to replay with a GM replay.
@Astrid (i think) was the one who mentioned about all the work for disabling the ritual sites in the first part of this scenario. It actually played a HUGE part of the scenario because your degree of success weakened the firestorm. The group just barely managed to severely weaken the firestorm which is supposed to be tough to do. So congrats on that! But what does that mean?
Combat A vs the Ravener it applied the weak template. The ravener normally was a CR 11 creature so the weak template made that combat much more manageable.
Then in Combat C - @Quinoline had asked about the hit points. The Hand of Urxehl had 280 hitpoints and was a CR 11 creature. But based on your success vs the firestorm in the first part you would've fought the Hand for 3, 2, or 1 round. Severely weakening the storm meant that the Hand of Urxehl could only sustain himself in the material plane for 1 round.
@Amada, you mentioned the spirit was being pettty for picking up the staff. Had you succeeded your save vs drain life the spirit would've remained incorporeal and my plan was to telekinetic haul it up into the air and play keep away with it. Petty? Sure. But The spirit was fairly intelligent and you did do some serious damage with your magic juggling. The original target was going to be Spirit Breaker but you managed to pick that up before it had the chance to do anything. I also wondered if the Spirit would've thrown the staff through the rift....but destroying equipment isn't cool (extremely punitive), especially when that's not written in the scenario text, so yeah it was more just the spirit being an opportune petty jerk rather than a complete Vrock.
Re: Cryptic Scholars - I believe we saw this used twice at least. There were two times a nat 20 was used which turned a failure into a success. Because monsters were generally CR 11 with Unique tag making +10 to DC.
@Zac - Both times Zac used Ring of the Ram, the monster rolled a nat 1.
One time this changed a success into a failure. The other time it changed a failure into a crit fail. This was very exciting to watch but I have to warn that it probably isn't going to continue seeing the same results when we're starting to look at fort saves of +19 and +22
@Zac - Trolls were CR 6 and Zac was Level 8. This means in a 1v1 combat the Troll is a CR-2 creature worth 20xp and in a party of 1 a moderate encounter would have an XP budget of 20 xp. In other words, Zac 1v1'ing a level 1 troll is a moderate encounter. We tend not to think about this too much but moderate threats are described as "a serious challenge to the characters, though unlikely to overpower them completely. Characters usually need to use sound tactics and manage their resources wisely to come out of a moderate-threat encounter ready to continue on and face a harder challenge without resting." Usually moderate encounters are fine, but sometimes they are not. So yeah, it was luck that the troll took down Zac, but in a 1v1 with a troll it was still considered a serious threat and that's what we ended up seeing. The Hand of Urxehl was more just bad luck. The hand had "impossible reach" (defined as 1000ft in this case) so i randomly rolled for the targets and Zac lost. The Hand of Urxehl was CR 11. It had +22 to attack (which was less than the Demonaic Spirit) but it rolled high and then rolled near max damage.
@Astrid - The Hand of Urxehl was immune to mental traits so shouldn't have been able to be demoralized, but that didn't seem fun, especially considering the hero point to get the nat 20; so looked up the DC of a CR20+ creature, figured out a reasonable Will DC for a demon lord, and then used the result for that. So end result is Astrid really did intimidate a demon lord!
That's all I took notes down for during the game, but if there was something else you were wondering about feel free to ask.
Otherwise thanks again for playing! Be sure to download your chronicles (in campaign header) and let me know if anything needs to be fixed. I'll mark this campaign inactive sometime next week (likely Tues or Wed to give everyone time to download)
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On another level, I'm interested in GMing the series someday. Is there any advantage (mechanically or otherwise) to running all three in series? Were there any bonuses that carried over?
I'm very excited that I got to use some old boons. I totally forgot that Cryptid Scholar even existed until recently when someone mentioned in one of the Discord channels that high-level characters might get a lot of mileage from the boon. And I was like, hey, I've got a high level character with that boon about to face the apocalypse!
I thought the spirit was the BBE (and was using my reagents as such) until the line about some sacrifice so Urxehl could rise. And then I suddenly realized, oh no, we've got one more coming.
Thanks for running - not just this one, but all three, and in series. I really enjoy playing these multi-parters with a stable group. And it's been really fun playing with everyone here.
Quinoline's leveled out of all the PFS scenarios for now, so she's taking a break until the Season 3 7-10s come out. If any of you are interested in getting back together to fight whatever evil god tries to claw its way into Golarion at the end of Season 3 (Season 1 = Qxal, Season 2 = Urxehl, lol), I'm up for it.
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So while it is disappointing to have it end sooner because you did so well, i did somewhat appreciate the failsafes were there to make the scenario deadly while still making sure some groups had a chance to not die. My only improvement would've just been some kind of opt-in mechanic to keep the fight going.
There is no benefit/bonuses that carry over from one scenario to the next. Each one is kind of self-contained though there might be 1-2 times it mentions if PC's played part 1 or part 2 then you get automatic knowledge for the beginning briefing. The main draw for me was just remembering how much fun i had doing the Perennial Crown parts 1/2 with the same group.
And sounds good for Season 3 - Would be nice to get the same group together again should it work out!
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GM redeux you are my favorite GM i've played under - fair adjudication, emphasis on story, player aids (including recorded talk throughs and linked soundtracks!) - coupled with the idea of running connected adventures in a single series.
Thank you for running for us lucky players!
After her brush with an EVIL GOD THAT TRIED TO CLAW ITS WAY OUT OF THE EARTH, Quinoline is ready for some extended relaxation time.
She spends some time finishing up her crafting projects.
Crafting (Field Commissioned, 12 days)
Begin: moderate elixir of life x2 (198/300 gp)
Craft 12 days @ 6 gp/day
End: moderate elixir of life x2 (270/300 gp)
Buying out moderate elixir of life x2 for 30 gpThen, she travels back to her homeland in Thuvia. She heard stories of the fabled sun orchid elixir when she was little - she looks for any evidence that the legends are true. She may also help her friend and fellow Pathfinder Nina Jaribu reclaim her lands in Vidrian.
So going over Astrid's chronicles I notice that every single PbP game she's been in has also had Quinoline. It's gonna be weird playing one without her now.
Thank you everyone for playing! Had a blast and hope you did too! @Astrid (i think) was the one who mentioned about all the work for disabling the ritual sites in the first part of this scenario. It actually played a HUGE part of the scenario because your degree of success weakened the firestorm. The group just barely managed to severely weaken the firestorm which is supposed to be tough to do. So congrats on that! But what does that mean?
Combat A vs the Ravener it applied the weak template. The ravener normally was a CR 11 creature so the weak template made that combat much more manageable.
Then in Combat C - @Quinoline had asked about the hit points. The Hand of Urxehl had 280 hitpoints and was a CR 11 creature. But based on your success vs the firestorm in the first part you would've fought the Hand for 3, 2, or 1 round. Severely weakening the storm meant that the Hand of Urxehl could only sustain himself in the material plane for 1 round.
The reason I mentioned all the work for disabling the ritual sites wasn't so much about the task itself but about composing the posts. Ultimately the ritual disruptions are just a couple of skill checks but the posts took some time to compose. I had to determine which characters to include as part of Astrid's team and spend about an hour or per post coming up with a funny interaction between them. I can't imagine spending an hour at a table rolling a single acrobatics check.
These games were a blast thanks so much for setting this up and running us through Redeux. You did an excellent job making this a memorable experience.
So going over Astrid's chronicles I notice that every single PbP game she's been in has also had Quinoline. It's gonna be weird playing one without her now.
Yeah, they've played a lot together. I can't even remember where they first met, I only remember thinking, "oh, it's Astrid again!" at their second meeting.
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** spoiler omitted **
There is no benefit/bonuses that carry over from one scenario to the next. Each one is kind of self-contained though there might be 1-2 times it mentions if PC's played part 1 or part 2 then you get automatic knowledge for the beginning briefing. The main draw for me was just remembering how much fun i had doing the Perennial Crown parts 1/2 with the same group.
And sounds good for Season 3 - Would be nice to get the same group together again should it work out!
Definitely would be down to play with this group again in the future. I tend to run a lot of the high level games locally, so online games give me a good chance to play the sessions as well. As for what would be the Season 3 baddie, not currently expecting it to be another deity, maybe some organizational threat? Should be interesting to see in any case.