Protectors of Golarion (Wrath of the Righteous AP)

Game Master Sensen

The queen does have SR, and you can feel free to roll twice as you see fit, Elliot.

Sure. Have demon? Add 4!

Sr attack 2: 1d20 + 8 ⇒ (1) + 8 = 9
Sr attack 2: 1d20 + 8 ⇒ (16) + 8 = 24

Sr attack 3: 1d20 + 8 ⇒ (15) + 8 = 23
Sr attack 3: 1d20 + 8 ⇒ (18) + 8 = 26

I hope it has less than 24 sr ':)

You're good!

Worldwound GM, would the +2 Sacred bonus against confusion from the Righteous Medal of Clarity apply in this situation and make a difference?

If so, please feel free to keep my first round actions.

If not, please feel free to roll on the confusion chart to keep things going when appropriate.

I think I included that, if it's the one you wrote in your status. If not, then it actually would!

You had the base +7 and +2 heroism. So looks like Thesius was okay after adding in the medal.

Oops, I guess I forgot heroism, for some reason. Yeah, you're good.

GM, Verene has the same Eldritch Breach ability as Elliot, meaning she rolls twice and takes better against SR. I should have rolled the SR rolls, since I knew from your discussion with Elliot that the queen has SR, but I forgot. For the future, in case you need to roll for her, I'll just put two copies of her SR rolls in her botting spoiler in her profile.
Caster level check vs spell resistance: 1d20 + 6 ⇒ (18) + 6 = 24

So the spell didn't fizzle. But the queen is dead anyway, so it doesn't matter.

P.S. On Thesius's Will save vs the black swarm's Gibber ability, you have +7 base, +2 heroism, +2 medal, but not +3 Archeologist's Luck. So I think that's a 17 and he's actually not confused, if Elliot and Azira were fine on a 15 and 16 respectively. Also, this is not your fault, but that base Fort save in his status line is just wrong. It should be +1 from his class levels, +2 Con, +1 cloak of resistance, for a basic bonus of +4 before heroism, and Archeologist's Luck. That gets him to a result of 15 against the swarm's distraction ability. Don't know if that will make a difference.

P.P.S. This is not that important, but Thesius, I thought you were going to start using the +1 cold iron longspear we found. Did you change your mind?

Hey all, I am in Ohio for Thanksgiving and my internet availability here is not nearly as good as I expected. I should be able be able to keep up with posting but if I cannot log in when I have time to post there’s a chance I might fall behind. I apologize in advance if that does happen.

Dangit, I forgot the Prescience! I meant to use it just like in the previous night of blades post. But I can't now because I hit submit without thinking about it and if I put it where it should be, it will mess up the d20s below. Well, if you'll allow it, here it is anyway, GM.

Prescience, 7/8 remaining: 1d20 ⇒ 20 Lol, of course.

GM, Verene has the same Eldritch Breach ability as Elliot, meaning she rolls twice and takes better against SR. I should have rolled the SR rolls, since I knew from your discussion with Elliot that the queen has SR, but I forgot. For the future, in case you need to roll for her, I'll just put two copies of her SR rolls in her botting spoiler in her profile.

So the spell didn't fizzle. But the queen is dead anyway, so it doesn't matter.

Dammit. So many things to juggle! Thanks for letting me know.

P.S. On Thesius's Will save vs the black swarm's Gibber ability, you have +7 base, +2 heroism, +2 medal, but not +3 Archeologist's Luck. So I think that's a 17 and he's actually not confused, if Elliot and Azira were fine on a 15 and 16 respectively. Also, this is not your fault, but that base Fort save in his status line is just wrong. It should be +1 from his class levels, +2 Con, +1 cloak of resistance, for a basic bonus of +4 before heroism, and Archeologist's Luck. That gets him to a result of 15 against the swarm's distraction ability. Don't know if that will make a difference.

Goddammit! I'm sorry, Thesius, I am really bad at this, apparently.

And Distraction would also be fine if he's at 15. Yeesh. Batting pretty low now.

No worries. I missed updating my line for you as well. I will get that done so it's easier to see. I've been thinking of starting to put together a little section at the bottom of my posts to help keep track of it as well as you have plenty to keep track of as is.

He should be updated now. I'll working on creating a signature like blurb for future posts.

Also, I believe Thesius is at 51/54 hit points as well because of the belt.

Adjusted!

And that might be helpful - I appreciate any help you guys can give me there. xD

Thanks for all the information everyone.

I wanted to ask just in case, are we supposed to not have access to any spells that can close abyssal rifts yet? As the lowest level one from that list requires a level 7 character.

I guess I might still be suffering from the whiplash of how rapidly we were levelling in book 1 compared to this one, apparently. ':)

The meat of this adventure is at Drezen. Truthfully, we've been going fairly slow compared to an in-person game, so it hasn't seemed like it.

All right, fair enough.

Then unless someone has an idea for instantly caving in the area around this rift, which probably requires some type of magic too, it seems like it's up to Verene and Meri on whether they want to burn MP to temporarily prevent whatever is coming across from coming across or deciding we'll have to fight whatever it is.

Sorry for the delay, I was very busy with holiday prep today. I likely won't be able to post tomorrow, but I'll be thinking about spells Verene could maybe use to bring down part of a cavern. Earth tremor maybe? Please let me know if Verene would think that spell has a chance of blocking off the rift for good, GM. She'll cast it with Wild Arcana if so — but maybe not in time?

Happy Thanksgiving to those in the U.S.!

I'd allow earth tremor to do some significant blockage, yeah. Alternately, some sort of Knowledge (engineering) roll and a fair amount of time/effort with shovels/picks.

Thanks GM! If she only blocks the small rift-containing cavern's entrance, though, would that allow teleportation-capable demons to still successfully cross the rift into this plane and then teleport away somewhere else in the Material Plane? Is there any way she can use the spell to fill the rift itself with enough rubble that nothing could cross in the first place?

Do we have the time to shovel this though? As it read as though something was crossing over now-now.

Can we assist Verene by using a bunch of alchemist fires, perhaps? It's an explosion at least. Elliot has two of them; perhaps the others have more? Would it make a difference?

You can definitely drop the ceiling on the rift proper, that makes sense. But there is likely something coming through shortly.

Not that you need to worry, 'cause you've been slaughtering everything pretty well. (I gave the vescavor queen advanced, maxed her HP, and I think I added a few Hit Dice, even.)

So, we wait and kill whatever comes through, and then we have enough time to collapse the ceiling?

Almost certainly. You probably could do so before it came through, but it'd be a much tighter thing.

I'm just going to stand back for now then and cast shield from the wand.

Verene won't delay in casting earth tremor once she realizes what she can do, meaning it's probably been 2-3 rounds since the end of the last combat when she casts it. We'll see if that means we get to fight another beastie or not. :)

Sounds fair to me!

Sorry for the delay. Been sick for the past week. I'll have a post up later today.

Welcome back, Thesius. Hope you're feeling better!

Hey everyone, my life is the Elmo on fire meme right now. I have so much work and studying to do before finals on the 11th. I'll try to check in and post as I can, but please bot me if I don't post in a reasonable time period. I don't want to hold the game up.

Best of health to you, Thesius! And good luck with your studies and work, Meri. We'll be here when things settle down.

Thanks! Seems to be the tail end, but coughs just seem to take forever to get rid of anymore.

Good luck with everything Merixia! You got this!

Best wishes to both of you! For health and success in studies.

Yes, good luck Merixia! Sending you the best, Thesius.

The observant among you will notice that I've put an entry called "Siege Points" underneath the date and everything up there. This is a system I think I'll probably use. It measures the morale and rough success chance that the Knights of Kenabres face in the siege of Drezen, as well as the balance of power and the willingness of the demons to call for reinforcements.

Winning battles and accomplishing missions will increase it. It will decrease by 1 for every day you spend besieging Drezen, as the soldiers grow more hopeless and the demons start considering calling for reinforcements.

It has some mechanical effects for mass battles, but since we're not doing those, I'll make it a little more abstract. At the moment, the crusaders are feeling fairly good, since you've caught all the saboteurs and hopeless sorts, and you've got most of your buddies with you.

Good to know, thanks GM!

Indeed! Gives good cause for us to take actions to keep up morale through various efforts.

Sorry, ill get up a post later today. Massive IT crashes at the government these last few weeks and we're trying to play catchup to make it all work... again :(

Help me out, guys, I'm dying here! I know it's hard to think of things to say when the goal is pretty abstract and there's not a direct choice or question in front of us that our characters should necessarily have an opinion on.

I appreciate all the length and effort you're putting into writing these posts and giving the NPCs voices, GM. For clarity: the schirs, humans/tieflings, and ghouls will each be separate army battles, right? And the bridge at least, maybe also the watchtowers, will be a party-only encounter?

So that's four or five options, and we should come up with a plan for which to tackle first. (At least I assume we're expected to give input — otherwise, by all means let's just skip to Irabeth making a decision and giving us our marching orders!) Should we assume the PCs will not be participating in the army battles and instead will do a PC-mission simultaneously? Or can we fight with the army somehow for the battles?

That's mostly correct, though there's a party encounter in the graveyard after the ghoul army.

As for the army battles - I'm not sure. I can run additional encounters with the leadership or the like, or we can let the Knights handle it.

And yes, you do have some input on where you'd like to go first.

I'll give it until tomorrow for everyone else to give their thoughts - I know it's a busy part of the year for a lot of folks, so I don't mind some things slowing down.

Yeah, work is crazy for me right now, sorry (and home is pretty hectic too for that matter). I think I'll probably have time for a post tonight... and I should have time for one on Friday... that might be all I can manage this week. Again, sorry.

Apologies, I will be aiming to get up another post tonight if given the opportunity and one each day moving forward.

I will be moving towards the latter part of the year, but I should be able to work around that to keep posting.

The weapons and armor that Elliot mentioned are ones they we have already (presumably) stripped from the cultists and whatnot that we defeated on the way here, right? If so, how many people worth of stuff could we carry between bags of holding/Meri/possibly a floating disk?

If it's enough, maybe we could use magic to sneak to the prisoners while our army launches an attack elsewhere? Once we free the prisoners, we could equip them and have them help us fight our way out?

The bag of holding III alone has 1,000 lbs capacity and a floating disk cast through MP would have another 800. While I do like the idea of a cinematic prison break, in-character we don't know for sure that these prisoners are ready to leap up and fight for us; the weapons we could currently give them probably aren't cold iron, because they were taken from the enemy; and we'd be putting them in serious danger if we tried to encourage them to fight schir demons, who may dramatically overmatch them because of said lack of proper weaponry.

Also, out of character, I think it would probably be a lot more work for Worldwound GM. It looks like there are three army battles and three PC missions here, counting the graveyard thing we don't know about yet. The schirs are one of the former. If the armies are abstracted out for the mass combat system and not meant for PCs to fight in adventuring-style round-based combat (even though you and Elliot totally could do it), there are probably no maps, no further description of the area, no information on the state of the prisoners, no individual identities for any prisoners, etc.

It's a reasonable guess that the prisoners might not be in a condition to immediately fight - or at least, that they would take excessive casualties if they did try to fight.

And Verene is correct - I'd have to make up pretty much everything from whole cloth if you go for the army encounters, though I am open to doing so if you really want to.

I certainly don't want to make a ton of extra work for you, especially at this time of year!

Oh my god, what a week. Apparently I pushed myself way too hard with finals and my final project. Jumping right into holiday shopping and baking the next day was, in retrospect, not my brightest idea. I've had more migraines in the last week than I've had in the past three months.

But hey, I got an A-! In graduate level statistics! So it worked and I'll probably do it again next semester. :P

Congrats, Merixia!

Congrats, Merixia! And I appreciate that, Azira. :)

Way to go, Merixia! Reminds me of my own days as a student. Having to finish lots of things before the holidays started was always busy. (And it usually didn't improve right afterwards. "I have to buy *how many* gifts for the family and write *how many* cards!? In one day!? But I just finished my tests!")

Actually, I guess things haven't changed much since in that regard. :')

@everyone There's been another huge IT crash and we are still trying to keep the local government afloat throughout it all despite the tight, now virtually impossible deadlines. I'm doing the best I can to see as many patients as possible, but it's eating a lot of free time, including potential writing time. Though my vacation does start after this week so things should improve a lot then. Please do not hestitate to bot me this week if I am holding things up, and thanks for your patience.