Victory and Total Party Kill!
We have a saying in the Order: We don’t start campaigns, we finish them. Yet, no matter how many times we find ourselves at the end of an Adventure Path, it still feels nostalgic and we never take it for granted. Having played more than 160 published adventures to date, we’re extremely fortunate to have seen the bottom of so many dungeons, the end of so many stories, and we always make sure to toast when we reach the final encounter. Our headquarters in New Jersey has a shelf with champagne bottles that read “Giantslayer,” “Strange Aeons,” “Ruins of Azlant,” and more.Our last marathon of Abomination Vaults was everything you’d hope from the finale of an Adventure Path. The sheer number of hours we clocked dwarfed all previous marathons of this project. We hardly slept, played our hardest, and even Golarion’s pantheon took notice. Rovagug delivered a 4.7 earthquake that shook our miniatures on the opening day, followed by Sarenrae and Tsukiyo providing us a solar eclipse after a 22-hour session to close out. Across the last decade of our Pathfinder projects, this marathon will always rank among the best, and you just had to be there.
Before you read the ending, get caught up:
After eighteen months of real time, our party of gunslingers had worked its way down through ten levels of Paizo’s largest megadungeon! We managed to get the doors open to some kind of temple that felt like it predated the construction of the Abomination Vaults themselves. This had to be it. This was the bottom level.
- Adventure: Eyes of Empty Death
- Marathon Length: 69 hours, 45min
- Session Hours: 51 hours, 25min
Highlights from Marathon 7:
□ Let’s start with the adult black dragon that we mentioned in the last blog. Never have we laid waste to any dragon in the fashion that we did here. Terrain was in its favor but irrelevant: Standing knee-deep in a swampy cavern doesn’t matter if your only actions are shoot, reload, shoot. Zoric, our unexpected sharpshooter, redefined the Black Arrow for Pathfinder when he landed a critical hit with his arquebus for 102 damage. Still, the dragon got a nice breath weapon off, along with a couple other attacks. We suppose it did take two rounds to bring it down – that’s just being respectful. About as respectful as cueing up “Looking Down the Barrel of a Gun” on our soundtrack while we sorted through its treasure.
□ We had to face a horde of Urdefhan to get their Emerald Fulcrum Lens and progress deeper into the Vaults. They had already summoned daemons, as you can see in the photo. The problem though, was that the author allowed our GM to decide if their current summoning ritual was successful or not. Of course it was, and Adam had a leukodaemon show up. Still, the bloodsuckers wanted bloodshed, and blood is what they got. Ever blow a hole through a transparent creature? It’s pretty cool.
□ The bottom level of the Abomination Vaults came complete with encounters that drew from all our experiences in the levels above. A month before the marathon, our GM gave us an assignment in the campaign’s Google Classroom: We had to submit three of our moments of success, along with three of our moments of failure throughout the campaign. The Path of Pleasant Memories on level ten thus became a fun tour through our favorite moments, remembered with fondness and smiles. The Path of Failure, however, was anything but. Adam turned this into a GM roast of the players with our lists of shortcomings – embellished further to his glee – and we had to take it in stride.
□ There are scenes in classic westerns where the protagonists get surprised by a circle of enemies on a ridge. We entered a room with a surrounding upper gallery that had a bunch of slits in the walls. It took us a second to realize the gallery was occupied by undead with blowguns, and the slits were for firing lanes – at us. What encounter could be more suited to a party of gunslingers than what the author himself described as a shooting gallery? Our steely performance here would have made those who had to settle for the O.K. Corral jealous. Everyone did their job, concentrated their fire on individual specters, and we pulled through with just a few pin pricks.
□ A bunch of glass golems were guarding an old section of Nhimbaloth’s temple on level ten. There was fantastic original art for them, and we guessed this might be a serious encounter for some groups. Asking us to shoot out windows with our BB guns that bypass physical resistance 10? Come on. This one was over so fast, including a competition to see if anyone could top the highest damage total in the campaign. Lady Sniper’s 82-damage shot was outdone by a 92-damage critical hit with Spellsling from our beast gunner. We couldn’t decide on whether Mazatl and his Penetrating Fire double-critical-hit counted.
Character Deaths
□ Deep in the cavern complex that comprises dungeon level nine, Belcorra seized another opportunity to ambush us. We’ve heard plenty of players over the years say “yeah, phantasmal killer is decent I guess, but they have to miss BOTH saving throws.” Vlai, founder of the Black Powder Cadre, missed both saves.
The Arsenal
Our goal with this project was to prove that you didn’t need balance or any specific role in a party to be successful in Pathfinder. We’re proud to have accomplished that goal. The outcome of the last encounter had nearly everything to do with prior decisions our players made on level ten, and very little to do with our characters or party composition. We have a lot of data and behind-the-scenes material to release in the wrap-up blog to come, which will help tell a larger story of how stable the game of Pathfinder 2E truly is – even with a severely unbalanced party of gunslingers. For now, we’ll celebrate another successful project in the books!
Best Quote from Marathon 7
(a trap goes off in a small room, and gas begins to fill the chamber)
Adam: “There are seven holes in the ceiling, each no larger than the size of a human finger.”
Theodora: “Okay, we could stick our fingers in the holes?”
Jody: “Just don’t use your trigger finger.”
The Final Fight
There she was, the ghost queen herself, flying high in one of the most impressive chambers we’d come across in this megadungeon. Accompanying her were four soul feeders: elite dread wisps we had unknowingly sent to the final battle from a previous encounter. Needless to say, we were sweating bullets. So much so, that we opened up with a fusillade of vicious anti-aircraft fire. Grundak began with his barricade buster, also known around the table as the 20mm cannon. Critical hit. The rest of us continued our blaze of glory, and with scrolls of ghostly weapon the results were staggering. The queen of the vaults suffered so much damage that she had no choice but to return fire with her nastiest spell first: phantasmal calamity. Breen, our medic, rolled a natural one and went down hard. We exchanged shots while the dread wisps surrounded us and began to use their Feed on Despair ability to devastating extent. It’s key to mention that we came in with many characters having been drained by an encounter with an isqulug, which allowed the wisps to use Feed on Despair from the start. Mazatl, Way of the Spellshot, held his breath one last time and zeroed in on his target. Critical hit to the incorporeal dome, completely destroying the ghost queen! Dropping Belcorra Haruvex in barely three rounds will always have a place in the annals of Amber Die history, but it didn’t stop the wisps from adding us to the pile of legends too. We weren’t exactly sure what we needed to do with the fulcrum lenses we had acquired in the levels above, and now Belcorra was gone. Tess Rajani, Way of the Drifter, made a last stand and tried everything she could to invest the lenses into what was left of Belcorra’s essence in the room, but to no avail. Yet, for everyone at the table who took our radical party of gunslingers through hundreds of hours of encounters, this was just a single fight.
Even though Belcorra won – so did we.
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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/terrain.
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The Abomination Arsenal: Part 7
Friday, September 27, 2024