Our second marathon is a wrap, so let’s get to it! In case you haven’t caught up on the first report, our party of gunslingers succeeded in delving the top level of the Abomination Vaults, but at a cost. We fared much better on this marathon: we started to click more as a party and improved on some of the combat strategies needed to pump lead into every monster in a megadungeon. It’s hard to say at this point, but if we play as well through the remaining marathons as we did here, we might just gun down the entire Abomination Vaults.
Order of the Amber Die (OAD) members are spread out across the country, with about twelve-to-fifteen active members at any given time. As we’ve shown in other blog reports, they’ve flown in from places like Washington, Rhode Island, and North Dakota to our headquarters in New Jersey for days of gaming. It’s also the norm for members to drive up to eight hours to be here. For this marathon we really tapped into our membership with numerous cameos (all gunslingers of course), turning the marathon into a mini reunion. The encounters got a bit harder with more characters, but more guns meant more fun!
- Adventure: Ruins of Gauntlight
- Marathon Length: 59 hours
- Session Hours: 34 hours, 30 minutes
Our party, the Black Powder Cadre, picked up where we left off by exploring levels two and three of the megadungeon. We also continued developing our organization by employing the Pathfinder Second Edition organization rules, along with adding new gunslingers to our core four-character roster. We’re a sizeable band, though the Black Powder Cadre doesn’t exactly take the usual approach. We gave a false party name to town authorities, took the books we recovered from the Vaults for ourselves, pickpocketed patrons in a tavern to foster competition from another establishment, and lied to the mayor about a nefarious incident involving Otari’s foremost librarian. What can we say, we like working together!
Highlights from Ruins of Gauntlight
- The symbol of the Black Powder Cadre is the harmona bird, and each of us wears a different shade of blue to represent it. You can imagine our reaction when we ran into a cult of blue-robed ghouls on level three of the Vaults. Someone had to establish dominance over this precious primary color, and it wasn’t gonna be them. A fierce clash in the library ensued and, despite improving our skillset with the dying condition, we prevailed.
- Megadungeon crawling is dirty business; so far two characters have acquired Cocytan Filth and two more picked up Ghoul Fever. We’d like to thank our sponsor and friend Vandy Banderdash, head priestess of the Dawnflower Library! Frankly, Vandy is one of the main reasons we haven’t TPKed yet.
- When we decided to bring this many firearms into a megadungeon, we knew there would be some heroic displays of marksmanship along the way. The first nod goes to a cameo from Auralee, a veteran of The Slithering Salve, who joined the Black Powder Cadre during this marathon as “Lady Sniper.” She once put down four critical hits in two rounds, with a staggering 36 damage scored from a single bullet as a 2nd-level character. Vlai’s dwarven scattergun holds our next favorite record though, with six allies hit in just one blast from the boomstick.
- We finally came across something that could outduel us: a wood golem. It beat us to the draw and fanned out 103 damage across four targets with a single splinter volley—respectable by any desperados standards. We pulled steel and returned fire, but in the end decided to run. We'll be back for another showdown in the next marathon.
- We probably shouldn’t have picked a fight with a bearded devil, but someone had an itchy trigger finger. Before we knew it, two PCs were on the ground in horrible fashion. Mazatl, practicing the Way of the Spellshot, scoped in hard and held his breath. The devil’s chest exploded with a sound that was only slightly less gratifying than the natural 20 as it landed on Erick’s copy of Pathfinder Guns & Gears.
The Arsenal
We're a party consisting entirely of gunslingers, so what makes each character stand out—what gives them identity—isn't the same as other parties of the past. In this campaign, it's your weapon and the way you use it that separates you from the rest. The sound of a harmona gun is unmistakable, and you won't be hearing anything for a while after Maloika fires it. The quick grouping of holes that tears open the enemy in front of you comes from Breen, our pistolero. When a ghoul's dome bursts into pieces from the far end of the hallway, that's Mazatl, our sniper. And that sting in your back? That's Vlai with the scattergun. Out of game, it's just as important to distinguish your gunslinger from the rest, and that's where our props come in. Each player's weapon has been crafted and custom-painted to look like the one they have in-game—it helps to have an artist at the table!
Character Deaths
None. Props to Matt, our player captain, for the pre-marathon strategy posts in the Google Classroom.
Best Quote from Marathon 2
Town notary: "And your party's name?"
Zoric: "Umm... the Blue Coat Adventurers."
Town notary: "Very well..."
Party (to each other, bristling with firearms): "Seriously, 'Blue Coat Adventurers'?"Current Situation
The Pathfinder community was right when they said that we would run into some issues with a party consisting entirely of gunslingers. That being said, this is OAD, and over the years you've seen how competitive we can get. We've adapted to our main weakness, which is any enemy with a high Armor Class. We've taken advantage of our strong point, especially on level three, which is mass combat. In fact, the more enemies the better—we make our own ammo and have plenty of it! We've managed to clear most of level two and three at this point, discovered Otari's ghost once again, and followed it down to level four. We've done pretty well with discovering lore, so we have a decent idea of what once happened on the upper levels of the Vaults. As for what lies beneath, that's a different matter…
More Content
Our table was brought to life with the help of Blue Table Painting for the miniatures, and Black Bard Studios for custom adventure-specific miniatures and terrain.
Follow Order of the Amber Die:
The Abomination Arsenal: Part 2
Wednesday, April 12, 2022
