Aeonesti's page

I plan to run it that Zev's link is severed when he is destroyed. He's no longer corporeal at that point and will take 2d6 days to reform. Mithrodar can only anchor corporeal undead.

My question is, the party is doing research on breaking the chains. The Chained Spirit entry says that Dispel Evil/Law will work, but the dispel evil/law entries say they won't work on any spell that Dispel Magic can't remove. Dispel Magic won't work on the chains.... so how did you word that conundrum assuming they spoke to any of the reasonable anchors?

I didn't physically expand on Candlemere much, but I did make it the part of Hagrulka's kingdom expansion. The wisps there were talking to / involved with the BBEG and from there, went to the lizard folk, the trolls, and the Dancing Lady to spread the word of the Big Bad and how keeping the Stolen Lands wild was better than civilization. Hargrulka ate that up and started the rival monster kingdom that the PCs spent all of book 2 opposing. (all thanks to Dudemeister for creating that alternate kingdom)

There was a mini-bloom there in the ruined tower and killing wisps by it shut it down. The PCs aren't high enough level to pass the skill checks needed to figure out what exactly happened, but I'll toss some more small blooms their way as the books go on so when the big blooms come in book 6, they will be surprising in their strength, but not in their existence.

My party was convinced by Kroft to get Trinia so she could have a 'fair' trial instead of mob justice. But when they turned Trinia over to the Guard, they insulted Cressida by implying that they couldn't trust her custody. Cressida threw the party out of the Citadel and took Trinia to the Longacre building. Which meant that Ileosa got access and used her suggestion and dominate to foil Abadar's Truthtellers and force Trinia to confess to killing the king.

The party was in disbelief and went back to Trinia's house to search for evidence. They were interrupted by news of the execution that they hurried to catch. There was talk of trying to convince the Queen that they needed more time (they knew something dodgy was going on, but not that it was the Queen herself behind it at this point), but they were blocked from getting to her by the new Grey Maidens. Then Blackjack appeared and the party got behind his rescue attempt and shouted helpful warnings.

Over all it worked out for everyone involved. Except the Queen I suppose.

Small nitpick: I found that Venster is called Eodred's step brother in part 1 (page 13), and half brother in part 6 (page 346).

My PCs just recently finished up Book 2 and thanks to all the suggestions here, it was pretty incredible.

They literally had tears in their eyes as Pervilash told them about Tyg-Titter-Tut and what he had been forced to do to those poor humans.

Hargulka was an amazing minion to the BBEG who masterminded the beginnings of a monster kingdom to oppose them. They fought over the loyalties of the Kobolds and the Fey. It was all-in-all masterful! The PCs know there is some big bad out there, but who or what is still shrouded in mystery. Time to head to Varnhold!

I think the weakest character I ever played was a Ninja under the 3.5 system. A character based on throwing stars is a neat concept, terrible in actual play. 1d4 + x dmg (and xd6 sneak attack) is pitiful at higher levels.

After doing one of these with no prep, I found that splitting the difference worked.

I would lay out a random spread a couple days before they got to that part and write down an interpretation of the cards at my leisure. Any card can be shoehorned into pointing out things you want it to if you have enough time to think of the right words.

Then I would shuffle the stat cards, let them draw, then pretend to shuffle those back in and lay out the spread according to my already written interpretation.

So it was still random, just not so random that I actually had to think of prognostications on my feet. Also I didn't feel guilty for purposefully putting too many (or too few) of the stat card in the spread (since it was a random draw).