GM supervillan's 5-05 The Elven Entanglement (Inactive)

Game Master supervillan

I find myself in agreement with Pai that a retreat is probably a good idea right now! Working tonight but I'll look over my sheet and see if there's any way for Nina & Inky to get Thoriel out there.

Happy Halloween to those that celebrate! Got my pumpkins carved, candy ready, porch light on and dressed up in my skeleton kigurumi. Now to see if any trick-or-treaters stop by - and if not, it was still fun to carve pumpkins and dress up :)

Happy Halloween to those that celebrate! Got my pumpkins carved, candy ready, porch light on and dressed up in my skeleton kigurumi. Now to see if any trick-or-treaters stop by - and if not, it was still fun to carve pumpkins and dress up :)

That’s awesome!

Not a single trick or treaters in my neighborhood this year

Thanks!

We've not gotten anyone yet and with only an hour left to go, I'm guessing we probably won't. Not really a huge surprise since there aren't a lot of kids that live on my street and we're also several miles out of town, so anyone that doesn't actually live on our street would need to drive in. The town also did a big fall festival thing Friday evening that featured Trunk-or-Treat so I'm betting a lot of parents probably decided to just take their kids to that and skip going door to door tonight.

Ah well, just means I get to offload this candy on my coworkers tomorrow night :3

Same here! The coworkers know I bring in plenty of the good stuff the day after.

I live in a little subdivision outside of town but generally, we are older overall without many Halloween age younguns running around. I suppose most parents do the trunk or treats downtown here as well.

I'll try and summarise your options here.

1. You can press on. Get healed up with wands and continue towards the looming demon encounter. If this encounter occurs more than 24 hours after your battle with the spectres - and you can of course wait this period out - you'll have saves to remove the negative levels. But if those saves fail then the negative levels are permanent.

2. Backtrack towards the Red Winter kellid encampment. Perhaps you can get help there, but it was a very small settlement. It's also over 1 day's travel at the speeds you've been going.

3. Try to get back to civilisation where it is easier to find help for your ills - but you're a long way out in the wild.

A single Restoration spell can remove all temporary negative levels, or one permanent negative level. It costs 380gp OR 2 Prestige for a Restoration spell, unless you need to remove a permanent negative level which costs 1280gp or 4 Prestige because of the increased material component cost. If you are not in a settlement of at least 5000 souls the Prestige cost increases by 5. The kellid camp is nowhere near that large.

Also note that Restoration spells can only remove one permanent negative level per week. A Greater Restoration spell does not have this limitation but costs 5910gp or 16 Prestige. (21 Prestige if not in a large settlement).

Your mission is to find a suitable staging ground for the Pathfinder Society. You've surveyed two out of a possible three sites.

The Red Winter demanded that you kill a powerful demon as proof of your prowess and valour before they will ally with you.

How are we feeling about Option 1, healing up and bypassing the ghosts and just heading towards the final encounter? I guess it could depend on how we go with any negative level saves in the meantime?

I could be reading it wrong, but Options 2 and 3 both sound like giving up on the scenario, or at least only partially completing, as I am assuming Option 3 would rule out coming back as part of this game? - and we'd probably go via 2 anyway?

I don’t have any boons to help here either.

I don’t see any way we can succeed against the undead. I think we have to skip them or the same thing will happen.

We could try to make it back to a town and buy, I don’t know, some high level summon monster scrolls and spam them at the final encounter and see what happens.

I think #1 is probably our best option at this point, followed by #2. Taking #3 would effectively be heading all the way back to where we started and would probably take long enough that any headway we've made in our mission would be negated.

If we have any means to maybe help Thoriel & Quiella make their saves against the negative levels, we should do so.

Looks like option 1 is the consensus.

I'd suggest going ahead and rolling wand uses. Your usual more efficient oradin healing is greatly hampered because Quiella is effectively at 0 life links and level 3 paladin Lay on Hands and Channel.

But you could just retreat to a (hopefully) safe distance, wait out the 24 hours and see if Quiella fights off enough negative levels to make her healing effective again.

Or try a hybrid of both approaches.

If I remember option 1 correctly it makes Quiella effectively a Paladin 3/Oracle 0 as far as class abilities go. Makes me pretty nervous about going into a fight. No life link, no spells, very little lay on hands, weakened smite, etc.

You don't actually lose prepared spells or slots, but negative levels do reduce your caster level, which does mean that a lot of spells just won't work (because CL=0).

Since you're at least a day away from the Red Winter camp barring unusual transportation, I'd suggest that you wait the 24 hours and see how many negative levels you're left dealing with.

That works for me.

Fine by me as well.

Sounds good to me too.

As Thoriel is unconscious in game, she will be guided by others as to where we retreat to and when we start healing etc.

For the Negative Level saves, she can cast Bear's Endurance on those of us who need it to give us a boost...and heroism as well, which I think will stack.

Would be good if we could wait long enough to be able to clear the damage, neg levels and then get some rest to replenish spells etc. before taking on the demons, perhaps?

Good thought, Thoriel!

Yep, good idea! Nina's still got two potential castings of Heroism available, too.

Hey folks, I'm still alive. There's been some things going on IRL on my end that've been taking up my time and mental bandwidth lately, on top of work and today's US holiday. I can't guarantee that I'll get around to catching up today since I'll be spending time with family, but I will do my best to do so later tonight or tomorrow.

In the meantime, Happy Thanksgiving to those who celebrate and Happy Thursday to those who do not or who live elsewhere in the world :)

Same boat here. I got sick over Thanksgiving and I'm still recovering.

My whole family caught RSV recently. My daughter had to go to hospital twice. We're all fully recovered now though.

In Kentucky, everyone has the flu right now. I’ve never seen it as bad as it is around here right now. Several school systems are closed because illness.

Had a short pre-christmas trip and then I've been sick since before Christmas. Still getting better but I'm getting back to life. Should be posting again starting this week.

Feels like Thoriel is essentially crippled atm by being a lizard. If defeating the demons is our main objective here, she may not be able to help much/at all.

Since your mind is intact Thoriel you still have access to any abilities that don't require you to be an elf, but looking over your character sheet I think that limits you to your Spelldance supernatural abilities, which may enhance your defence or let you move away to safety, but don't contribute to attacks.

(This is your BBEG encounter by the way, unless you decide that you also want to hunt down the filth demon).

I don't really want to bot Quiella and Nina at this point, in the final encounter. But I will do so in approx 48 hours in an effort to get us over the line :)

Yeah I’m not sure any action in particular is going to change our loss, but we might as well get it over with, GM!

Sorry! I'll try and get something posted for Nina tonight.

I will try to post soon. Sorry for my extended absence.

Friends, we seem to have come to a practical halt.

I am tempted to call it here. Since you don't have the upper hand in the battle, I would call it a draw. You would retreat, alive, but would not complete your mission.

What is your preference - and availability?

I’m here and us running away is probably the best we could all hope for. We aren’t the strongest overall group, and the dice have been most hateful to us!

Yeah, I'm honestly good with calling it a draw here (which is very generous and appreciated) as we don't seem to have quite enough means to deal with what the scenario is throwing at us *and* our luck has been pretty poor on top of that.

For my part, I'm sorry about contributing to the slowness of things. It's honestly felt like we've been in a slow-motion TPK (vs. a challenging but winnable situation) for a while now and that's 100% dampened my desire to post.

Okay, absent any dissenting views I will aim to issue chronicles by the end of the week. We all have covid here, so it may be a little later than that.

I plan on taking a break from GM'ing for a bit. Although I originally planned to run a couple more high tier scenarios my availability for PbP is less than it once was. I think the next scenario I run will probably be Waking Rune, and I'll give priority places to anyone who's played any of the season 4 Lissala scenarios with me.

Might be a month or two before I set that game up though.

Thanks GM for running this and all the previous games. I'm also Ok with the decision to call it a draw.

Thanks GM! Greatly appreciate you running all these great games for us!

That works for me, GM. Thank you again for running for us for so long and thanks to everyone else for being such great players :)

Chronciles are here!

I have issued 0xp chronicles. To get 1xp you have to complete 3 encounters. Since you fled from both the undead and the beast demons you did not do so. You earn gold from completing the initial combat successfully.

I have assumed Take 10 on your day job rolls.

You receive 0 Prestige. The first prestige point requires that you survey the three potential campsites, signal Aram Zey at your preferred site, and either win over the Red Winter tribe or defeat them in combat. The second prestige point is earned by winning over the Red Winter by fulfilling their condition of besting a powerful demon (which also earns a boon, albeit one with little to no use).

I'll get the game reported presently. Let me know if there are any errors on the chronicles.

Sorry it ended this way. I'm sure I'll see you around on the boards though.

Thanks GM!

Chronicle received, thank you so much!

Looks good, GM! We were lucky to escape that one!

Thanks GM!

I actually had a plan for what to do next in the encounter, but I'm not sure if it would have turned things. Felt like a winnable fight that we didn't properly prepare for.

Sorry for my contributions to the slowness. After I made the save I somehow completely forgot to come back to check on the game.

My life has changed a lot over the last 6 months; the time that used to naturally present itself for posting in PbP disappeared. However, I finally carved out set-aside time for PbP on a regular basis, so that shouldn't be an issue going forward (except for last week when my kids and I were on spring break).

All this to say, despite how slow I was in this scenario, I'm ready to play the next scenario whenever and should not be nearly as slow when we get to it.

Mammoths has been reported.

I will leave this thread open for a couple of days or until Thoriel confirms receipt of chronicle.

I am glad that things are looking up, Quiella :)