CamTarn's page

Have you got a complete list of your Rods effects?

I'm tempted to give it to one of the slightly unstable lackeys in the RotRL game I'm running

For the sake of even more randomness, I'm using an alternate table from here, alongside the standard table.

When someone rolls for the Rod, I use an odd-even roll as well as a percentile. Odds, the effect comes from the corebook Rod table; evens, it comes from the alternate table. Anything which doesn't make sense is rerolled.

I also found a Wild Surge chart (about halfway down the link), which is excellent, although I haven't had a chance to use it yet :)

Good grief. They're still using it...

The rogue got blinded in the most recent encounter. Still wishing to contribute, he pickpocketed the Rod from the wizard, aimed it at where he remembered the enemy being, and fired. The first firing caused animated band instruments to march up and down the middle of the area. The second cast a stinking cloud on the enemy... which would have been great if it weren't for the fact that the opponent had ridiculous saves and the party members in melee around it did not.

I have a feeling that this rod will be destroyed with great prejudice at some point :)

Zurai: Awesome! I love the idea of a thoroughly bemused Glorio running around entangled in vegetation :D

An update from the above. The PCs decided they had to confront the Arkonas before disposing of the rod.

Two of my PCs - the druid (in hummingbird form, smouldering from a recent Scorching Ray) and the wizard (currently invisible) - got trapped in a tiny room in the Vivified Labyrinth with Vimanda. The wizard/paladin decided to use the Rod of Wonder for some unfathomable reason, pointed it at Vimanda, closed his eyes, clicked and...

...it started raining heavily in a 60ft area. A drenched Vimanda glared at the now-extinguished druid and launched into a tirade about lowly food not having the right to turn a hunt into a stupid farce.

Luckily, the discs turned, allowing Vimanda to leave, before the Rod did any more damage.

Mikaze: you just know that with an item like the Rod, if it were chucked in a river it would turn up in the belly of a fisherman's latest catch or something similar (possibly having done something to its temporary host - like causing it to grow leaves, turn purple or become the world's first telepathic fish) :)

What did the Rod of Wonder do in your game?

In mine, where I was using an extended Rod of Wonder table in combination with the classic DMG one, it...
- summoned a banquet table and chairs, set with a gourmet meal for four
- caused one party member to glow bright yellow
- fireballed half the party
- caused a 50ft tree to grow under the wielder ... twice
- cast a cone of acid immediately in front of the wielder
- caused gems to stream forth from the wand
- caused silver coins to stream forth from the wielder's ears for five rounds
- transposed the wielder with a randomly selected party member
- summoned a sturdy steel cage enclosing the wielder
- fired a lightning bolt

The party had gotten impatient of waiting on Pilt's audience, and had kicked off a fight in the rooftop stadium. Since Pilts had turned invisible at the first sign of combat, they took care of Jabbyr and Pilt's various minions (aided by a rioting crowd).

Pilts himself hid in the crowd and attempted to get the Rod to do something useful. After a couple of false starts - the aforementioned gourmet meal - he managed to get off a fireball. This resulted in our cranky, Badass Good (and fire-resistant) tiefling fighter sitting on Pilt's throne, glowering, glowing, and on fire. Several members of the crowd immediately began worshipping him as a new minor deity. The rest of the crowd were too busy trying to get away from the rogue, whom Pilts had charmed, who was "trying to clear a hole in the crowd for his new buddy" by throwing vials of alchemist's fire.

The next activation caused a tree to manifest on top of the building, lifting Pilts, and the wolverine who had been in the pit next to him, 50 feet into the air. Being in Bridgefront, and thus constructed of the cheapest and flimsiest materials around, the building immediately developed a worrying list. Unfortunately, the next activation did exactly the same thing - Pilts and the wolverine rose another fifty feet, then fell twenty feet as the weight of the tree caused half of the building to collapse. Those in the crowd who had not been thrown off the building stopped rioting and began fleeing in terror.

At this point the party, bereft of targets, stopped to trade insults with the still-invisible Pilts, interrupted only by a yowling wolverine (the unfortunate victim of the sixth rod activation) rocketing out of the tree trailing acid and falling off the building.

The monk spotted the trajectory of the gems from the seventh activation, rocketed up the tree, and started hunting for Pilts. She didn't have to wait too long: after the eighth activation, his invisibility and displacement were rendered rather less useful by the showers of silver pieces coming from his ears. The paladin began trying to climb the tree, and found his ineptitude at climbing very rapidly solved when the ninth activation caused Pilts to swap places with him. Unfortunately, he now found himself on top of a hundred-foot tree with his target on the ground and no obvious means to get down.

Stripped of his handy hiding place and his invisibility, Pilts decided to run for it. He managed half a lap of the stadium with monk and fighter in hot Benny Hill style pursuit before getting off another rod activation. A hefty steel cage fell from the sky over him, temporarily granting him refuge from his pursuers.

Unfortunately, while Pilts could easily dodge from side to side in the cage avoiding the fighter's swords and the monk's grabs, his advantage did not last when the paladin finally found his way down from the tree, stuck his glaive into the cage and asked Pilts to surrender. Pilts responded by attempting to Dimension Door out... at which point all the held actions of the other party members fired. Pilts found himself grabbed and held against the cage bars. In one last desperate attempt to get away, he rammed the Rod into the face of the monk and activated it. The monk ducked, and a searing bolt of lightning shot over her head and demolished what was left of Pilt's stage.

At this point the finally-uncharmed and enraged rogue waded in with his humanbane rapier. The rod was confiscated by the paladin and, since we had decided that Rods of Wonder must be illegal in such a lawful society, was returned to the Acadamae for destruction with great prejudice.

Verdict (from Pilt's point of view):
Attack actions: 4
Useful attack actions: 1
Dubiously useful actions: 2
Useless but harmless actions: 2
Actions that would have been harmless if not for circumstances: 2
Harmful actions: 1

Verdict (from table point of view):
Possible the most ludicrous fight we've played... and that was after a fight with Laori that turned into mud wrestling between her and the female monk, and which featured the tiefling being tossed through a wall, set on fire, tossed off a bridge, emerging covered in mud with a fish flapping on his shoulder, being stepped on, being tied to a Rope Trick to lift him back onto the pier, being landed on by a muddy monk and Laori, and finally getting a clod of mud in the face for good measure.

We're going into the Vivified Labyrinth tomorrow night, so a little bit of levity before grim lethality was probably a good idea :)

This adventure path is the first time I've ever run D&D, and this would be my first ever near-TPK...

Name of PC / Class/Level: Maximilian (Wizard 5/Paladin of Iomedae 1), Adela (Monk 6), Kayvon (Druid 6), Loisha - almost (Rogue 6), Lucien - almost (Fighter 6)
Adventure: Seven Days to the Grave
Catalyst: A deadly combination of Rolth, Jolistina, a party of gung-ho and unprepared PCs, and the dice being on the DM's side

Story:
The party of five had enraged Rolth by destroying his lab in the Dead Warrens, and in retribution he had located their fledgeling magic shop (in the scrubbed-clean building which used to be All The World's Meat) and sent a second flesh golem to give the PCs a taste of their own medicine. Unfortunately, only half the party were at home when the flesh golem came calling. After it stomped Adela into the ground (-9HP), nearly killed Loisha, and trashed the shop, the party had built a healthy hatred of Rolth.

They had also come across Jolistina's handiwork in the abandoned Carowyn Manor, filled with plague victims who had risen in half-undeath. They had found Ausio Carowyn in the wine celler, but he would only babble about "the Harlequin".

When they finally discovered the secret of the Hospice of the Blessed Maiden, the party diplomanced the Grey Maidens into letting them see Davaulus without any fighting. Of course, most of the Hospice's Maidens and Doctors followed them up, and when the PCs accused Davaulus of being the plague's source and presented their evidence, he cast Invisibility and escaped, leaving the party to fight their way out from underneath the resulting dogpile.

They emerged hurt but victorious, discovered the secret passage down to the Temple, fought their way through the temple guards (Loisha being reduced to -2 by a cleric's scythe crit), and nearly lost two party members to two separate door-skeleton-scythe traps (Lucien and Loisha - by now developing a healthy fear of scythes).

They chased Jolistina through the Princess's Bacchanal (which I'd expanded into a twelve-room maze - a miniature version of Jolistina's running-away-giggling encounter from Carowyn Manor) and nearly got her, but unwisely decided not to search for her once she used one of her potions of Invisibility, but instead to go through the large double doors that they'd ended up in front of.

By this point, the party was down almost all of their healing, with no healing spells left and no charges remaining in their healing wands. Half of the wizard's and druid's spells were gone. They decided to press on regardless - after all, nothing they'd faced before had managed to do any worse than knocking out a single party member...

The PCs found themselves in Rolth's lab, with Rolth spitting obscenities at them from behind a wall of zombies and two clerics of Urgathoa. Rolth added injury to insult on his first round, catching three of the five party members in an Ice Storm and taking off half their health. Meanwhile, Lucien overran his way through the zombies and killed one of the clerics, only to be brought up short on Rolth's next turn by a Hold Person. The remaining cleric took his scythe to Lucien's throat, then Rolth took him down to just above zero with a Scorching Ray to the face at point-blank range.

On the next round, Adela - who had been making her way across the chamber's ceiling above the wall of zombies - launched herself from a height and tackled the cleric who had been about to end Lucien's life with another scythe slice. The cleric struggled and managed to get off a Bleeding Touch on Adela before being pinned.

Meanwhile, Jolistina had realised where the party were heading and rushed to help her prince - starting off by cracking the door open slightly and sneak attacking Kayvon through it, reducing him to negative HP. Max slammed the door in Jolistina's face while he forced a potion down the unconscious Kayvon's throat, then held Jolistina off with his glaive when she forced her way into the room. Loisha abandoned his so-far-unsuccessful attempt to get past the zombies and took the opportunity to skewer Jolistina with his rapier.

Feeling trapped, Jolistina tumbled out of harm's way with a typically flashy cartwheel, finishing off by quaffing a potion of Invisibility. Rolth, with both of the combatants who'd reached him otherwise occupied, decided to do something about the remaining interlopers, and fired a lightning bolt down the length of the room - taking out one of the bed-bound prisoners and two zombies, and instantly frying both Kayvon and Max, who had been low on health.

The cleric's bleeding touch finally took its toll on Adela, who fell to zero HP and chose to use her Disabled action to release the cleric and attempt to take a potion. Unfortunately, the cleric's attack of opportunity rolled a crit, and his scythe swing cut her in two.

Loisha, finding himself without a target, tumbled past the zombies and wound up next to Rolth. His plans to make necromancer kabob were cut short by Jolistina's crossbow bolt embedding itself in his back, taking him into negative HP.

Rolth took a moment to gloat on the scene - four dead PCs and one paralysed (Lucien hadn't managed to roll higher than 4 on any of the five will saves he'd rolled) - then called Jolistina to him and Dimension Doored out. The remaining cleric fled from the seemingly-indestructable fighter who had taken out his comrade in one turn and was bound to come out of paralysis fairly quickly.

When Lucien finally regained movement, he gathered up his companions' bodies, piled them on a plague cart, and dragged them south to the Temple of Pharasma to call in some favours...

Epilogue:
Davaulus is currently rebuilding the Hospice of the Blessed Maiden. The Queen has released an edict calling for the death of the vicious criminals who had slaughtered the entire population of the Hospice. As a result, the party are hiding out in the crypts and catacombs of Gray District, sending Loisha and Majenko out at night to gather news and supplies. They're trying to decide between hunting down Rolth, contacting Devargo Barvasi, or simply storming the Hospice again and finishing the job. They're also now significantly more wary about kicking down doors and rushing in unprepared...