Anne Radcliffe de Sade's page

Lair of the Frost Worms

Buttkickious Personae

• Rudyard "Rude" Kipling, CG (CN?) male wyvaran barbarian 13th;
  
• Geoffrey Chaucer, CN (CG?) male gnome arcane (sage) sorcerer 13th;
  
• G. Orwell, CG male Medium Humanoid sword-devil ranger 13th (archer);
  
• me, N/NE female gnome Gravewalker Witch 13th (Death patron)
  

A trio of frost worms erupt from the stone-hard ice floor of the vast tunnel leading towards our mysterious goal here in the frozen mountains.

One of the trio I manage to briefly paralyze via hold monster - and all three take full damage from a rod-Maximized fireball from Chaucer.

The other two slither closer and attempt to popsicle us by way of their powerful breath weapons, vast cones of arctic cold. Chaucer's rapidly growing fondness of emergency force sphere absorbs the twin waves of boreal energy intent on turning us into crunchy meat treats.

Orwellian archery ... okay, just what would this really look like? "Papers? No?" *thwpft*thwpft*thwpft*thwpft* "Ow. Ow. Ow. Ow." ... begins to take its toll on the closest hero-munching monsters whilst Rude does his level best to pulverize them.

First one, then the second are beaten unconscious - and much to the GMs consternation they have a sufficient Con bonus as to stabilize reliably on their own accord when reduced to negative hit points. The third Chaucer possesses, burrowing ahead on a reconnaissance "run" whilst we repair to a safe distance before Orwellian archery sends them to the Boneyard for 'reeducation' by way of exploding deaths.

Chaucer's reconnaissance is short-lived as he runs afoul of an unhallowed altar-plinth buried in the frozen mountain - its magic circle against good penetrating twice as far as usual, forcing him out of his "exploding meat shield".

We enter close to the aforementioned unhallowed altar chamber. Therein a fiery grave knight awaited our arrival, eager to acquire our heads for a lime-filled basket to present to his bosses.

Chaucer noted the presence of combustible loot in the form of a wooden chest and a set of large shelves behind the altar to Minderhall at which the grave knight had been praying.

"Mental note: NO FIREBALLS."

This was no ordinary grave knight giant. This is a mighty frost giant champion, brutally slain by dragonfire centuries ago, returned to Minderhall's service upon the awakening of Da Forge. Seriously, a frost giant with both the mighty and grave knight templates. Nasty customer. :) Kudos to Da Fighter, our GM, for this combination.

"This guy's immune to cold, electricity and fire?"

"Ayup."

"Alrighty ... so we wreck him the old-fashioned way. Kinetic energy!"

As it turned out, the Mighty Grave Knight had a quartet of zombified giant minions and a quartet of witchfires at his behest. We held firm to our purpose: smashing him to pulp.

My dice rather disliked me for doing anything during the first several rounds of this fight. Attempted dispel magic? Nat 4, burn a hero point for a re-roll, nat 1. Beat SR to make an ill-omen spell stick? Nawp, nat 1. Fortunately everyone else rolled fine.

Minderhall's will thwarted mine, its fell influence laughing at my feeble attempts to hex his mighty champion.

Unfortunately for this mighty champion, Minderhall is neither omniscient nor omnipotent. Orwell proceeded to methodically 're-educate' the zombies. Rude gave better than he got, although I burned a hero point to ensure Rude received a proper heal spell during the fight so that he came out on top.

Once the champion fell and the zombies were messily dispatched, we agreed that it was a simple matter of "kiting" the witchfires until they were destroyed too.

Rude received a +4 manual of bodily health, Orwell received a +4 manual of quickness of action, Chaucer and I each received a +4 tome of clear thought whichever one it is that grants an inherent bonus to Intelligence and Heimish Watson, despite his absence, was to receive a +4 tome of leadership and influence along with some other nice loot.

We *bamf'd* out of there with a sack full of intelligence documents on Lord Purplemort's activities, war plans, training camps and a second sack full of loot both mundane and magical.

Over the following month we trained, advanced to 14th level and acquired our hard-won goodies. I got myself these adorable magical ankle tattoos with cute zombie kitties that also act as boots of the earth without the 5 pounds of encumbrance. Also, they're so cute!

For once this month has concluded, it is felt that we are racing against a clock to prevent Lord Purplemort from stomping all those smaller than Large sized into toe-jam, stew ingredients and generally being a tyrant, conqueror and all-around meanie.

We're using a shared Golarion, so Lord Purplemort doesn't have it as easy as the AP authors might like to think it would be. The "Sihedron Heroes" are 1st tier mythic/20th level badasses with a fully unlocked Sihedron at their disposal plus a gaggle of other nasty artifacts and magic items. The city-state of Korvosa are ruled by devout Kuthites that are - by now - at least 17th level on their own, plus the half-dozen identical 15th level druids in the fens, among others. And that is just accounting for this group's own player characters!

As it turns out, for some reason Rude's character sheet had been "locking" his Constitution at 17. This was fixed. No longer is Chaucer and Heimish attempting to keep a mere 180-odd hit point barbarian alive and kicking. When raging, Rude sports a staggering 385 hit points.

Ohhh mmmyyyyyy ....

Since we had agreed to a longer-than-usual game session, we begin the "trench run" commingling Chapters 5 and 6.

We arrive about an hour's walk / overland flight away from what we perceived to be the least-guarded entrance into the Volcano of DOOM. Once we can clearly, albeit barely, make out the seemingly unguarded entrance, we begin the minute-per-CL "buffs" that are so vital to not-dying.

"Fee Fei Fo Fum, I smell the butts of Gnomes!"

More than 80 human paces ahead emerges a GINORMOUS hill giant. By ginormous I mean COLOSSAL. Its club is a solid shaft of adamantine forged by way of shoving a great oak into the ground some forty feet, firing it, then pouring molten starmetal into the "mold" so created, then removing it once it cools. In addition to this 48,000 gp club it sports a pack full of REALLY BIG ROCKS and a REALLY BIG ROCK in its off-hand.

The GM asked: "Can you animate 40 HD?" "Yes." "Crap."
Also, it turns out that Signature Skill (Perception) is pretty handy to have when you have 40 ranks of Perception. Who knew? ;)

Initiative Order

• Chaucer and I thanks to battlemind link
  
• Da Giant
  
• Rude
  
• Orwell
  

Chaucer casts haste, which makes the GM grin evilly as displacement has proven much more effective on Rude than anything but shadowform. And I prefer displacement, but I'm not Chaucer. I attempt to magically blind the giant, to no avail.

"It was worth a shot! Besides, we're too far away..."

Da Giant hurls a mighty boulder that (fortunately for us) is not a critical hit via Greater Vital Strike, smacking Rude right in the gut for somewhere around 130 damage, divided between Chaucer and Rude as a result of shield other.

Rude charges Da Giant with intent to smoosh via Agrimmosh. "Agrimmosh MINE!!" Da Giant drops his immense club and disarms Rude of Agrimmosh, claiming the artifact as his own. "HAH!!" Rude whips out his trusty +1 longspear and finishes his charge with it, scoring a still-impressive 40-odd damage.

Orwell finally realizes just how awesome being a Sword-Devil Ranger with the Archery combat style and an adaptive giant-bane composite longbow is. For three or four - I believe four - consecutive rounds he uses Rapid Shot and Chaucer's haste to great effect, scoring well north of 400 points' of damage against Da Giant, in no small part due to confirming at least 3 critical hits against it. Out of 20 attacks only one misses his target, 2 of which are nat-20 auto-confirmation critical hits plus a third nat-19-and-confirmed critical hit.

He did eat a tasty boulder the size of a cottage once, wiping out about 2/3rds of his hp.

Belly laughing the whole time, Da Giant attempts to pulverize Rude with a mighty blow via Greater Vital Strike while wielding Agrimmosh - for which Chaucer found himself immensely grateful that Rude's charge to engage Da Giant severed the shield other link due to requisite distance - that was narrowly avoided thanks to displacement.

Just before the session wrapped up Heimish Watson, hobbit Life Oracle extraordinaire, *bamf'd* in to aid us. Seems that summon player ally expired sooner than expected.

GM: "I'm having too much fun with this. Let's get a proper healer on-line for this fight." Copious channeled positive energy topped off most of our hit points for the fight to resume at the start of the next session.

We left off in media res with a foe that has not yet been dealt more than half of its hit points despite several solid rounds' worth of "Gatling Gunning" by Orwellian Archery and a skewering from Rude. Even reduced to his +1 longspear, thanks to heroic proportions Rude is literally Huge, dealing 3d6+35 damage per stabbing with that thing and a BAB of +14. Pretty sure the giant's 34 AC isn't going to hold up for long against Rude and Orwell.

All we have to do is keep them from dying.

40 racial HD, Colossal ... that is gonna be one hellacious zombie ... nnngggrrrrlllll

Winter Wonderland
-or-
We Frickin' Hate Snow

Buttkickius Personae

• Rudyard "Rude" Kipling, CG male draconic-wyvaran Barbarian 12th;
  
• Geoffrey Chaucer, CN male gnome "Oracle of Nethys" Arcane (sage)-bloodline Sorcerer 12th;
  
• Heimish Watson, NG DMPC male hobbit Oracle of Life 12th;
  
• me, N/NE (depending on whom you ask) Gravewalker Witch 12th (Death patron)
  

We *bamf* into a big ol' high-altitude mountain slathered in blizzards and crawling with smelly big meanies.

Giants, snow monsters, all of the usual - by which we mean "things that can see through snowstorms just fine" - horrors that make horrible catapult fodder.

We waste a bunch of those, eventually breaking the morale of the frost giant training camp at the lower-ish end of the mountain's altitude scale before we finally make our way to the entrance into the Lair of the Frost Worm, attaining 13th level during a fitful night's sleep in an improvised igloo.

The nastiest fight by far was against a cold oni - a demon native to the Tien lands across the Crown of the World to the north - with a pair of cold-infused animated wooly mammoths of doom. The mammoths went down fairly quickly ... the yai oni, not so much.

I don't recall all of the nitty gritty details of this fight, but this time Rude went down to the oni - but only to "mostly dead". A chocolate-slathered walnut and a breath of life from Heimish put him right as rain (mostly) again before Chaucer and I took him out.

In this case, a hero point for an extra standard action, a hex curse (-4 save penalty) and a sleep hex - which is a total gamble as I have no idea if this thing even sleeps at all being all outsider-y and what not - sends him to nap-nap land.

I cackle horrible things in its ear to keep it asleep before Rude gets back up and shatters its skull into chunky salsa.

Three of them, frost worms, that is. We left off in media res with a trio of these big bastards burrowing through the ice towards us.

We know that they don't give a fig cookie about [cold] and that they explode when they're killed. And, based on the cracking of ice tearing the air apart ahead of us, that they burrow.

Jooyyyyyy .... critters that explode. I won't be able to reanimate them!

*pouts*

I didn't watch new feeds or anything, but I am looking forward to doing some giant killing tomorrow.

DOOO EEEET!! animate the corpses into exploding skellies for added amusement value. :D

The gods are big meanies. >:(
First, they let the love of my life become disgusting giant toe-jam. Then this jerk Menderhall enables the duel between us and the smith-priest slag giant in a "do or die" demiplane in which the Forge of Its Name is present.

Buttkickius Personae

• Rudyard "Rude" Kipling CG male wyvaran with pronounced draconic tendencies Barbarian 11th;
• Geoffrey Chaucer CN male Tiny gnome 'Oracle of Nethys', Arcane-bloodline Sorcerer 11th with a fondness for (shadow) spells;
• Heimish, NG male hobbit GMPC Cold-blooded Life Oracle 11th;
• me, Neutral with questionably Evil tendencies Gravewalker Witch 11th.

The Dead One, my beloved poppet, does not let me down. I shall have my vengeance no matter the cost!

We enter the giant's dueling arena willingly courtesy of Minderhall Itself - some 30 feet high with a nameless minion working the forge on one side while we square off on opposite sides of the 'arena smithy'.

Minderhall ensures that all sides are fully healed with all spell slots available. The downside is that we cannot *bamf* out of the demiplane. We defeat his champion fair and square, or we get turned into lawn ornaments. Not that any of us have plane shift to begin with.

Spells are cast in rapid succession by Heimish the Healer (Cold-blooded Life Oracle, GMPC), myself and Geoffrey Chaucer (self-styled 'oracle of Nethys'/Sorcerer).

As we get down to casting short-duration 'buff' spells (such as haste and prayer), the nameless smith-giant minion off to the side finishes up the project it has been hammering out in the Forge.

As each of the short-lived spells is cast by the four (us and the Venerable Smith-Giant who challenged us) the smith's hammering takes on a more urgent tone, sparks cascading. We await the smith's extinguishing of his work into a trough of special water.

Sooner than we might have liked, HISSSSSSS WHOOOOOOSH

FIGHT!!

Chaucer's haste and Heimish's prayer fire off and combat begins!

I cast greater heroism on Chaucer and Rude - the way this fight went, I am really glad that I did since the save bonus alone made a difference on an awful lot of saving throws!

Our enemy casts a blade barrier of whirling heated blades in an attempt to bisect Rude, Chaucer and I - we step towards the enemy as part of our successful Reflex saves - before Rudyard roars forward with mighty Agrimmosh arcing towards the slag giant smith-priest's skull.

With a wry grin and a cock of his head, he merely stands there, amused at the draconic wyveran's rash charge before he halts unexpectedly some few paces away from the giant courtesy of an anti-life shell.

"My turn," before he overran Rude and closed with our three squishy-ish spellcaster-y selves, but not too far from Rude.

Blasphemy!!!

Luckily for us the GM rolled once to determine the weakness penalty and duration. 4 Strength penalty puts Chaucer into nap-land (since he has a 3 Strength) and very nearly puts Heimish under (leaving him with 1 Strength). Being the awesome gnomish Gravewalker that I am, my 7 Strength only drops to a 3 - and I have a +2 Str for encumbrance purposes which keeps me well within the adjusted Light encumbrance limit.

I fail to dispel the anti-life shell and the mutual beat-down begins in earnest.

Unfortunately I did not think to keep a turn-by-turn summary going for this epic fight.

The fight went on long enough that Chaucer has to cast haste again, Heimish cast prayer again and the bad guy cast all THREE of his blasphemy spells in the course of the fight.

Hexes and ill omens flew thick and fast, a half-dozen hungry pits were littered about the field of battle. The third hungry pit succeeded in entrapping the giant-smith within its bowels, into which I cast both cloudkill (which sank to the bottom) and atop it I cast a barrow haze.

The smith-priest, while within said hungry pit cast delay poison on himself, 1 or 2 heal spells and another spell before dispelling the pit to release both cloudkill and barrow haze into the middle of the battlefield.

Funny thing about barrow haze is that I can see through my own perfectly fine.

Near the end I had my aura of desecration up and running. After the smith-priest beat Rude to 1 remaining hit point and had outright slain Chaucer the round before, Heimish asked for direction: do I save Chaucer, or attempt to slay the enemy?

"Save Chaucer", Heimish restores Chaucer to the living via breath of life and a super-cool permanent loss of 1 channel energy/day to double @ max the hp restored. Chaucer burned his last hero point to "pay" for the lost channel/day, so Heimish gets to keep his otherwise permanently lost channel/day. We're gonna need it in the adventures to come, of that I am sure.

It came down to me, the enemy within my aura of desecration going after me in intiative order.

As my action I brave the enemy's attack by flying through his reach to deliver a vampiric touch that brought him very, very low. We honored our mighty foe by coup-de-grace'ing him in the Forge of Minderhall before returning once more to Golarion adjacent to the Forge.

For loot we receive a +2 inherent bonus to our "primary" ability scores each (INT for me and Chaucer, STR for Rude, CHA for Heimish) and a philosopher's stone that majority vote determined be made into cash.

We *bamf* back to Kaer Maga to recover, retrain, spread the word about the (literal) Big Bad Evil Giants' plans and get our magic items on. Mommy needs a headband of vast intelligence +4.

In today's episode, we

• teleport into the top of the central tower with a mistaken minimum of preparatory magic up and running. As it turns out, a juvenile red dragon still sports a 200' fly speed. Despite an evil eye and a slow, the big fryer got away in short order. Sadly, Rude's attempt to tackle the dragon by way dumping Mister Leaky on it from above missed by that much.
• We explored the lower levels, rescued a couple of Medium Folk from horrors, fed them, got them black-out drunk and stashed them in a somewhat safe spot with an endure elements to keep them warm.
• We heard the dragon return, spelled up, dimension door'd back up top thinking we would catch the dragon returning to its napping spot - only to find it expecting us to return to the spot we originally arrived at a few minutes prior. This time the dragon did not escape - we bled it before Rude ate its heart.
• We returned to the bottom floor of the tower after looting the loot we found on the way back down (again). Via slathered invisibility spells and yet another set of haste and something-or-other else we snuck up on a couple of stone giant sergeant types. Rude makes short shrift of one of the two giants whilst I succeed with a temporary retribution hex on #2 immediately followed by being blinded courtesy of a guest-appearance by a GMPC "basic healing oracle". The second guy lasts a bit longer as it takes a tag-team of Rude and Chaucer to eliminate Sergeant #1 thanks to entering nappy-nap land via my slumber hex. The second giant is fanatically loyal to The Cause. We glean enough useful information to collate with the copious piles of documents and maps to realize that the surrounding nations are in deep kimshie if this big purple bastard of a storm giant is able to realize his evil machinations. As he talks smack about how Medium and smaller folk are fit for nothing more than slaves and food, I promise him he will be of use to me after his death.

As the bound-and-helpless monster knows what's coming - I don't try to hide it - I slide a vampiric touch coup-de-grace into his left ear canal.

Just before death claims his worthless soul, he utters "Hail Volstus".

Not too long after we have collated and collected all of the information collected on Volstus' Evil Plans - including the location of the Frost Giant Training Encampment - and are discussing our plans to disseminate the information regarding what the big bad guys are up to when Chaucer notes footsteps slowly trundling up the stairs from the chapel below.

We take up ambush positions - including myself and Chaucer sitting atop the corpse of Sergeant #2 (my intent being to animate his bones into an exploding skeleton) - when the sharp-eared giant picks up on Chaucer's quiet utterance of a spell.

As it turns out he is the Keeper of the Forge or some such thing. Poor bugger's been the guardian of this dump for about 900 years. He's old, sports a rather large smithing hammer and as it turns out has the same objective we have: relight the forge here and get something or another done (I forget what, exactly). We have to bail in the morning, but he informs us that the quietest time during the day in the cathedral is an hour after high noon.

We abscond to the upper floor with our rescuees and the corpses of their fellows (these stashed in one of the magic bags) after I release Mister Leaky from my command. Keeping them fed and hammered after the horrors they endured, we burn off my three prepared teleports the following day to attain the following:

• *bamf* to Kaer Maga, deliver the rescuees and their dead buddies to Appropriate Authorities - we run into Miguel (above) who has attained a respectable training position and sees to getting the information we have duplicated and widespread as quickly as possible to anyone of 'interest'.
• *bamf* to where we stashed the Spark Stones.
• *bamf* back to the Cathedral and help relight Da Forge.

The spectacle of the re-ignition of the centuries-dormant forge - which is a Major Artifact - is a Lawful Evil thing that churns my innards something fierce.

Then the Big Old Veteran Giant of Minderhall demands Agrimmosh from Rude, who promptly refuses.

"Will you accept a duel in an hour's time, or do I kill you all now?"

"We accept."

I am so turning this big bastard into a self-propelled land mine.

Next session - which is hopefully next weekend - we have been instructed to advance our characters to 11th level prior to a four-on-one duel with this chapter's BBEG. I am expecting a CR 14-15 foe, so this is going to be gawdawful messy.

Just finished a session of Giantslayer today - we're almost done with Chapter 3.

Hiiiiii, it's been a while my little poppet.

Sooo, at this point we're staring across a mountain valley filled to the brim with an army of giants, a dragon hanging around somewhere plus attendant beasties and critters. We're staring across the valley at a huge temple to some deity of smithing or something that we really need to get into.

I've one teleport left. Hopefully we can sneak in, do what we have to do and steal some goodies.

Oh, and we probably need to let the smaller folk hereabouts know that the giants have a big ol' army stashed in here.

Hrm ... a few well-placed earthquakes would bottle these big buggers in here for at least a little while.

Cinco de Mayo coming up we're playing again.

Party composition:

• Rudyard "Rude" Kipling, semi-dragon wyvaran barbarian 10th;
• Geoffrey Chaucer, gnome sorcerer 10th;
• Ayn Raynd, half-elf Slayer 10th;
• little ol' me, Gravewalker Witch 10th.

Sadly, Zombie Fishy, Mr. Hand and several other zombified giants have up and died on me. On the plus side, I have a bloody skeleton pried from a stone giant recently. On the down side, Mister Leaky is just a gawdsawful mess to have around.

Ah - okies. I do too, although I would 'screw over' a player who was careless with their mindless mini-onions if it is plausible/the timeline of the villains fairly permits yoinking said mini-onions. ;)

HWalsh wrote:

Anne Radcliffe de Sade wrote:

If they make animate object able to attain roughly the same result as animate dead with similar access points, then by all means I'll give up on animating the corpses of my enemies to eat the rest of my enemies.

There is a certain je ne sais quoi to animating the dead. Some jerk tries to stomp you into stinky toe-cheese, you kill 'em, animate their corpse into your newest scroll caddie and sort through their pockets for loose change.

That animate object is a divine spell has long been quite ludicrous, as is its current spell level of 6th. Not even the highest level caster can animate the largest objects ... and they are not particularly fearsome at the point a character can currently access this spell. Hopefully this changes promptly in PF2e.

So, as I suspected, it has everything to do with the fact that Animate Dead is a cheap way to get a powerful effect. It always comes back to power.

Exactly. That is why it is so fun when a Good Necromancer raises a bunch of undead to further his good plans... then an Evil Cleric takes them over and wreaks havoc with what is now *his* Evil undead army. Fun for everyone.

"Powerful effect"?

They come in handy for distractions, carrying heavy things when they're big enough and positioning themselves between me and the giants trying to stomp me into stinky toe-cheese.

If they make animate object able to attain roughly the same result as animate dead with similar access points, then by all means I'll give up on animating the corpses of my enemies to eat the rest of my enemies.

There is a certain je ne sais quoi to animating the dead. Some jerk tries to stomp you into stinky toe-cheese, you kill 'em, animate their corpse into your newest scroll caddie and sort through their pockets for loose change.

That animate object is a divine spell has long been quite ludicrous, as is its current spell level of 6th. Not even the highest level caster can animate the largest objects ... and they are not particularly fearsome at the point a character can currently access this spell. Hopefully this changes promptly in PF2e.

Alas, poor Miguel, he fared rather poorly with the deck of minor things, aging past the point of usefulness. Oh, he tried and tried, nearly dying several times. In the end Rocinante was far more capable than his rider.

Me? Oh, hi. I oversaw the burial of Miguel's uncle a few years back. Made my way to Freedomtown. Made myself useful. Animating the occasional scroll caddy for money.

It's an interesting place. As in "this dump is a wretched hive of scum and villainy without the courtesy of featuring a decent waterfront" interesting.

Amazingly enough, when I first ran into Miguel in Freedomtown, I thought Miguel had his uncle resurrected. Nope, the poor bastard was an old fart.

Being a gnome is awesome. We don't die of old age, we die of boredom.

He introduced me to the rest of the group he's been adventuring with attempting to kill off all the orcs and giants that are making life miserable for us squishy folks. So we're going to wipe 'em out. Me, I need some large, strong silent types with a penchant for killing stuff when I tell 'em to.

Botching Knowledge (local), addressing Kipling "You are one huge kobold."

"I am not a kobold!" he replied, snapping teeth angrily in response.

"Please don't eat me."

My poppet de Sade conveyed in Draconic, "That is no kobold." "How was I supposed to know? Everyone knows kobolds do weird dragon-y things. Why, I've heard the purple-scaled ones are extra-douche-baggy!" "Shaddap."

Fine, fine, fine.

We find ourselves downriver a ways about 10 miles east of the fortress full of naughty giants and orcs that have been diagnosed with a serious case of Needtodieitus.

We make our way a few miles inland when a boulder-chucking hill giant and his four orc mini-onions attempt to bushwhack us. Ol' eagle eyes Ayne Raynd or something - a male half-elf Slayer, very fond of chopping things into apple slices with a pair of kukri - spots the big thug with his pile o' boulders.

The ambush begins with Randy whiffing mightily with his arrow. The giant, whom I dubbed Lolli, tagged Chaucer square in the kisser with a perfectly thrown rock.

The beat down commences. Randy gets whacked with a big club. Kipling gets whacked with the same big club but not as thoroughly. Four orcs are swiftly put down, with Lolli taking a slumber nap.

"No decapitations or dismemberments." "What, why?" "Zombies don't do us much good if they are missing appendages and especially their head."

Giggling more than some would consider mentally healthy, I hop off my Pony with No Name, slap my onyx-infused grape swirly lollipop on the side of his head and proceed to animate my first. EVER. HILL GIANT ZOMBIE!!.

SO AWESOME!! "Arise, Lolli!"

Yay! A ginormous brute wearing armor and packing a club! He smells better and everything!

Elated, we trundle onwards to the semi-ruined castle crawling with bad guys. Giants. A dry moat with its water supply blocked by a dam with a big gate that would let all the water from the adjacent lake in to drown a gaggle of filthy orcs. After a couple of hours or so, we devise a brilliant plan.

Send Lolli into the drink to release the floodgate and drown a bajillion orcs. The ensuing distraction should give us enough time to sneak in and kill us some bad guys.

Instead, some big fishy thing ATE Lolli!

....

<.<
...
>.>

Which of course means I HAVE to get whatever ate him as a replacement.

Turns out, a mere rope lashed about a tree with a hook imbedded in a deer carcass isn't sufficiently up to the task of catching the big fishy.

"So uuhh, Chaucer, how 'bout that mount spell you keep on about. How long do summoned horses stick around for?"

"Out of the wand? Mmmm, couple hours."

"Great!"

We braid four coils of rope into a ridiculously strong super-rope with a grappling hook 'hook' on the end with a big buck skewered on it as bait. The braided rope in turn is hooked up to twenty - yes, 20 - mounts. In goes the bait, hiyaaa! goes the +30-something opposed Strength check and Zombie Fishy lands ashore, takes a nap, takes a dirt nap and my trusty reanimator's walking stick brings us a Fast Zombie Fishy. The giant gar? Yep. it's my zombie minion. Suck it!

We have Zombie Fishy take up position, pop the floodgate and I order Zombie Fishy to kill everything in the water once we're not in the water ourselves.

Shooom!! Off goes Zombie Fishy, terrorizing the Baalzebulb out of those green tusk-faced booger-nozzles. Giants are generally laughing it up at the booger-nozzles' expense.

In the meanwhile, we infiltrate the gatehouse, raise the drawbridge, lower the portcullis, rescue some poor sheared-beard dwarf from the clutches of a dire bear and her three "cubs", patch him up and send him on his way to his sister a short ways off with our ponies.

Next we make our way to the next gatehouse under cover of invisibility and most of us being decent at the fine art of sneaking around so the things that need to die will give up their stuff before they know we want it.

Kipling and Randy make their invisible way over behind a trio of ogrekin mutants guffawing and taking potshots at any orcs that make their way into firing range from within the moat without outright drowning or being eaten by Zombie Fishy.

Kipling and Randy make short work of the mutants when we see a hill giant atop the next interior center defensive building hucking rocks at my pet Zombie Fishy. Little does Chuckles here know of his fate.

I flit over via flight and invisibility with Chaucer, quietly drop us on the roof behind the big lug, put him to sleep and one coup de gras via inflict light wounds from the reanimator's walking stick prepared Lolli's first replacement.

A giant with a disturbing sounding sense could be heard below us in a stable of some sort going on about art and hands and horses. Weirdo.

We enter what turns out to be a mess hall with attached kitchen. A gorgeous giant undead HAND was waiting in there. Chaucer sends a horse in, it gets pounced on by Mr. Hand and the gibbering hand-munching idiot of a giant with a meat cleaver and no flesh left on his left hand - 'cause he ate it off already - came out to collect more hands with which to make some 'art'.

Two of Chaucer's summoned horses kept Mr. Hand busy for a bit before I brought it under my command. Yay, a pack-hand! Welcome to the fold, Mr. Hand. A brilliant illusion by Chaucer kept Cleaver busily sucking on a figmented hand while Kipling and Randy flanked him, killed him dead and yay, my second replacement hill giant corpse is ready to go. Oh yeah.

Current undead minions: Zombie Fishy, Mr. Hand
Future undead minions: Choppy, Chuckles.

Added bonus: two cauldrons filled to the brim with green slime. Perfect for Kipling and Randy to administer some death from above, screaming death style.

Oh, and this weirdo Harrow deck showed up while I was pondering the wonders of having big strong dead things do all of the heavy lifting. Drew a happy Joker, Jack of Spades and the King of Clubs. Feel funny, but a good funny rather than "my spleen is about to explode" funny.

Wonder what's up with that?