You set up a funeral pyre. The heat has made gathering dry firewood easy, and the resulting flames are fairly smokeless - it should not draw undue attention until the light fades, and, hopefully, the fire will have just about burned out by then.
The captive hobgoblin mutters a few words over the dead, in a strange smattering of goblinoid and broken draconic. "As their flesh chars from the bones, may their spirits serve the great mother."
And that's just about that.
You march on towards Drellin's Ferry, and closer to the river. Your captive plods along on his lead, seemingly quite unfazed by his predicament.
The road draws nearer the broad, sluggish river, and the town appears in the distance, built mostly on the near, southeastern side. Six old stone piers jut out from the water, marking the spot where a bridge once stood. The span itself is long gone. Instead, you spot a couple of long, thick ropes that span across the river, secured to a flat-bottomed ferryboat. The various houses are mostly one-story, stout buildings, white-washed walls reinforced with black timber, and tatched with straw. A few look decidedly older, built from red brick and mortar, and with tiled roofs.
The light is fading as you reach the first houses, bathing the scene in the almost golden light of a setting sun.
A group of armed townsfolk - three in leather armor, holding crossbows, the last in mail and with a rifle slung over his shoulder, stand guard at the road. The sergeant, a grizzled man with grey stubble, hails you as you're about to enter town. "Hello, strangers. Caught that one on your own?" He nods to your hobgoblin and spits on the ground. "What's your business in Drellin's Ferry?" he asks.
Nothing in the area is magical. However, the swords are all masterwork.
Inara finds no traps on the lock, and soon has it picked open. The chest contains money in various coinage, mostly silver pieces, but also a good deal of gold.
There are two books. One is titled Pathfinder's Guide to Andor, while the other is a journal. It has little text in it, aside from the owner's name - Sarella Toil - written on the inside of the cover. Instead, the pages are filled with columns of numbers. It's a trader's ledger.
Spoiler:
4 Masterwork longswords, and 494gp, 1233sp, including the coins that Inara's familiar found stuffed into a bedroll.
You head down to the camp. It's a small trail, that winds past a small hill. On way, you pass five freshly dug graves, rectangles of brown earth against the yellow-green field. They've been dug just out of sight of the main road.
The camp itself sits where Kyras remembered. There's a bunch of empty bedrolls, a banked cooking fire, tools for weapon and armor maintenance, a large barrel of water, and a rack with drying meat on it, probably horse meat. Inara's familiar is currently fluttering in and out of one of the bedrolls, bringing out a coin on each trip. It's gathered a small pile of coins already, in the middle of the camp.
There's also what looks like loot - some oilskin bags, containing books and spare clothing, a traveler's chest, and two small kegs, markedwith a prancing lion and containing wine. Next to that stuff sits some discarded clothing, with old bloodstains and holes where they've been cut with swords. There's a dress, four suits of leather armor, mostly ruined, and of course, there are four well-made swords.
How far away is the camp? Less than a mile? I can send my familiar with you while I talk to the hobgoblin. The familiar's got a high perception and it speaks common.
Less than a mile. A two-minute leasurely walk or so. Just out of sight from the road.
He merely looks at you impassively, clamming up. You think he seems sincere - he really believes that you'll die sometime soon. He also doesn't seem very concerned with what will happen to him now that he has been captured, but he does look at you oddly, as if you aren't acting quite like he had expected.
A man appears in the doorway. He's probably of age with the town speaker, weathered, but tough. His gear is well kept, and of surprisingly high quality for a woodsman. Right now he's holding a heavy bow, not quite aiming at you, but it's there if he turns out to need it.
He looks you over, then nods, and prod the nearest dog with his boot. "Down." Satisified that the beasts are currently behaving, he adresses you. "Huh. Thought it was the townspeople come out here again. Still, you dont like a talking to you can sod off." There's not much vitrol to it, though, more like an off-hand comment. "Might have some for you. Not sure how much. Don't see why I should tell you, unless you're willing to trade for it. What do you want to know?"
"What good's your 'freedom' done you? Look around. You've been out of danger for scarcely a minute, and already you're squabbling." He spits out some blood. "Freedom is three tribes in a burning forrest, warring over who should put out the fire." He smiles at you. It's fairly menacing, what with all the blood from Pelius' channeling, and his teeth probably weren't pretty in the first place. "I will say this: My leader is Wyrmlord Koth, a powerful sorcerer. You have won today, but this battle matters little. You'll be dead soon enough."
Same words from Johannes, but with a very different bent.
It will be an interesting trek to Fort Westwatch.
Johannes will discuss religious matters with Pelius as he feel that the vision of how a civilization should be built has strong similarities and equally strong dissimilarities between the two faiths and that Pelius and Johannes interpretation of theirs faith tenets isn't the most standard too.
He will discuss with Kyras too, if he is interested and willing.
If it isn't an obscure deity, I'd say recognizing the faith of a holy symbol is a dc 15 religion trait. Pelius has certainly been brandishing his enough for you to spot it, what with all that channeling.
As Inara speaks to him, the cleric throws her a blank stare, before resuming his murderous glare at Pelius. He responds when Kyras questions him, however.
"Oh aye, we follow the Dragon Below. Insult her all you like - soon all you barefaced kneelers will be dead. Especially the old weakling and his god. We'll see who's 'lowly' then, won't we?"
It's a particular tribal variation of goblinoid, there's probably hundreds of them, but it's close enough to what Kyras is used to that they can talk just fine.
It'll take a few minutes of your time, but sure. The arms and breastplate are +1 each, while you're not certain of the banded mail. And Inara has already deciphered the scroll in the IC.
To her vision, the letters on the scroll warp, becoming perfectly legible. The purpose of the scroll is clear to her, although some of it will require either a cleric or some finagling on the part of the caster to get to work
The scroll has Dispel Magic (CL 5) and Spiritual Weapon (CL 3) on it.
Johannes moves further down his checklist, scanning the prisoners to determine their moral outlook.
The cleric and one of the prisoners is Lawful Evil, while the other prisoner is Neutral.
Two of the foot-soldiers are still alive, but bleeding out fast. They're some of the ones that Kyras shot.
As for magical gear, the paper, or rather the writings on it, are magical. The potions, too, of course, The two masterwork suits of armor, and the glaive.
You spend a couple of minutes going over the various items. You don't know what the scroll does, or how powerful the weapon and armor are, but you can tell that the vials are potions of Cure Light Wounds.
As you work, the cleric is just about coming awake again. He sits up, and stares daggers at Pelius in particular, but is otherwise silent.
K.Religion: That's a stylized symbol of Tiamat, titled the Queen Mother of Dragons, or sometimes the Dragon Below. According to her faithful, she was the one that slew Aroden, back at the fall of the empire. That's considered a dubious claim at best by most scholars, but whatever her crimes, it is certain that she is imprisoned in Hell.
She is almost exclusively worshipped by chromatic dragons, and is said to be one of the first two dragons in existence, and thus the source of all dragonkind. She's a tyranical deity, but paradoxically she holds that all gods are tyrants. Whatever moral outlook they espouse, they are in fact lording over the mortal creatures, and it is only under her dominion that mortals may be free from their divine slavers. As such, worshippers hold that she is not in fact a god herself, despite evidence to the contrary.
Her holy symbol is a depiction of her five heads, or sometimes just five stylized claws in a spiral.
K. Local or History is appropriate for the red gauntlet. Religion can do in a pinch, but it'll net you a -5 penalty on the check. You could even do Arcana, but that one comes with a -10.
Antonius' wounds itch something dreadful just after he sips at the liquid. As is the case with such things, it was not mixed for its flavour, but for the effects of the ingredients, and that leaves it with a somewhat... Musky taste, is the best way to describe it.
The woman has a powder horn on her belt, and a small pouch of bullets.
Spoiler:
Powder horn, 8 bullets, and 8 doses of powder in the horn.
Pelius enters the ruined building. There's a foul stench about it, and it only grows worse as you approach. It's divided into two rooms - the first one is half collapsed, and has some marks in the dirt floor where you suppose the hell hound must have lain in wait, out of sight from the road. The flies are thick here. There's a waterskin sitting discarded on the floor too.
In the second room, the stench is unbearable. There's a half-butchered horse carcass in there. Apparently, once the hobgoblin had taken what they wanted, they just left the rest of it in there to rot. And rot it has, what with the summer heat and all. Probably for weeks. Or maybe shorter, it's hard to tell.
Besides that somewhat macabre sight, the structure is otherwise empty.
The soldiers carry a longsword, an oaken shield, a longbow, and a couple of arrows each. Quite a few of the mails show some impressive damage from the blows and shots they've taken. The weaponry generally fares better. None of them carry personal items, jewelry being an exception. One carries a woven armband, another a necklace with a big tooth in it, from some sort of canine beast. There's also a few vials of
The leaders carry gaer of higher quality, but they don't have personal items either. The closest they get is your prisoner who has this symbol on a chain around his neck.
The warrior with a glaive has the imprint of a red gauntlet painted on her breastplate, against a backdrop of a yellow disk, giving the impression of a red hand grasping the sun.
Loot List:
12 suits of scale mail. Quite a few of these are broken, courtesy of having a shotgun fired at them point blank.
12 longswords
12 heavy wooden shields
5 vials of blue fluid
12 longbows
53 arrows
Masterwork Breastplate with red gauntlet symbol
Masterwork Pistol
Masterwork Glaive
Masterwork Banded Mail
Masterwork Heavy Mace
Masterwork Heavy Wooden Shield
Holy Symbol (k. religion is appropriate here)
Unreadable sheat of paper, with two paragraphs written on it. None of you can make out what they say. There's room for another paragraph above the two, but there's no text there.
If they've waylaid other travelers apart from you, they don't keep the loot on their bodies, at least.
The cleric offers little resistance as you tie him up, still too dazed from the blow.
I think the ability would force a reroll, of the original attack rolls, since its technically different than a confirmation roll. Which is what I thought would happen :P but if you want to rule Nat 20s can't be messed with that's fine to me as well. Ha-ha.
I did reroll the attack. That's why he wasn't crit'ed - an 18 would be more than enough to confirm a crit on Pelius.
Anyway, immediate actions sit in a wierd place in pbp. At a table, you'd use the ability after the 20 was rolled, not after all the effects of the attack was figured out.
The cleric tries in vain to bash your head in, and your riposte is swift.
The flat of your blade hits his helmet, and he collapses to his hands and knees, heaving.
He's probably not getting ready to face you any time soon.
And there you are. The forrest path is littered with corpses, and the dust of the road is mixing with the copious amounts of blood, creating a red, thick, and above all sticky substance that cover your boots, at the very least.
The flies are thick in the air, although they have yet to move in on the corpses. Instead they swirl about the farmhouse where the leaders and one of the hounds were lying in wait.
Well, Pelius moves 5ft to cast invisibility, then uses his left movement to get behind Antonius (25ft)
Not sure if this works this way, if not, just the 5ft and the spell.
5'step and spell works. Once you've spent a 5ft. step, that's it for your movement on that round, unless you have a special ability that lets you move more.
Quick Runner's shirst, for example, can be activated after taking a 5ft. step.
Pelious was in danger and saved by you, Johannes would have laughed at a "paltry" 23 for the confirmation roll.
Unless I am mistaken, we are starting the 6th round and only Antonius has acted in it.
Situation AFAIK:
1: Inara
2 Pelius
3 Johannes
4 Antonius - Acted
5: Kyras
6: Cleric.
Not quite right: Antonius acted last round. At this moment, there's no enemies between the two player initiative counts ( Inara + Pelius + Johannes & Kyras + Antonius), so they have been collapsed into a single big one. Right now you're all up, and Kyras has just now acted. The reason Antonius seems to have acted once more than everyone else is that he recieved an action in the surprise round.
The shots impact, and the hobgoblin falls to the ground as a bloody mess. A good deal of his face is missing.
The timely warning let's Pelius duck out of the way - instead of a bash to his skull, he takes a hit to the shoulder. Painful to be sure, might even be broken, but at least he isn't dead.
Pelius attack reroll:1d20 + 6 ⇒ (12) + 6 = 18
Pelius only takes 11 damage from a regular hit, instead of the full critical damage.
The hobgoblin barely manages to get his shield in there as he passes - the flat of your blade impacts on the metal-bound edge of his shield, causing the steel to vibrate in your hands.
Eyes zeroing in on Pelius' holy symbol, he snarls, furiously, and closes in, apparently with every intention of killing the priest, even if it's the last thing he'll ever do. In the process, he leaves himself wide open for attack by Johannes, turning his back on him, even.
To hit vs Pelius:1d20 + 6 ⇒ (20) + 6 = 26, 1d8 + 5 ⇒ (6) + 5 = 11
Meanwhile, the last warrior standing rushes Kyras in a desperate last ditch effort, bashing at him with his shield.
The snake slithers across the forest floor, and squeezes the life out of the hobgoblin.
*headdesk*
Mechanically, it was a bite attack. Fluffwise, it makes sense for it to kill the thing by constricting, what with it being a constrictor snake and all.
Antonius over-shoots the crack of his beastwood blade, but drives his estoc clean through the hobgoblin's body, his fish-scale mail cracking under the pressure of the sword's point.
Kyras' Shotgun knocks one of them down, and Pelius' red-tinged dark waves cause most of the remaining hobgoblins to collapse. The cleric is made of tougher stuff, and simply wipes the blood off of his face with the back of his arm.
Shotgun, double-barreled: 7,000 gp/1d6/1d8/×2/20 ft./1–2/2/15 lbs./B and P/scatter. They're the ones on the SRD, at least.
That'd give it a 20ft cone. The range would increase when you used the Steady Aim deed, but not otherwise. The cone size does make a difference, as a 30ft (and higher) forward pointing cone is two squares wide at the beginning, whereas smaller cones are only one square big at the starting point.
Still, even a 30ft cone would still only be able to tag one of them.
The stealth rules are more crap than I thought, then. That makes it virtually impossible to sneak up on someone, if you get to make a perception check for every 30ft.
I'll have to think on that. Maybe even brew up some houserules. I guess I've always run with the houserule that you make 1 check to notice someone, and unless you succeed, they can pretty much do whatever they want until they attack and not be noticed, as long as they keep to hard cover and/or concealment.
Currently we'll go with you getting to make a DC 30 perception check each round to pinpoint invisible creatures, (roll it on your turn, but technically it's reactive) and can make another one with a move action.
Also, might as well try the stealth rules as written.
Well, I can't quite agree to that. You don't get to make a reactive perception check against stealth every turn, even though they move about and take actions when stealthed, for example.
By the way, in case you didn't look it up, the shaken condition lasts 3 rounds total in this case.
1rd for beating the dc(18, in your case), +2rds for beating the dc by ten.
Edit: Not sure if you can flank with either. Inara is holding a shortbow at the moment, so that shouldn't treathen, and Pelius... does he have a weapon out? I'll go check.
The reinforcements (those surviving, that is) hesitate briefly, but moves in to deal with Antonius and Kyras. In both cases, one of them circle around, while the other attacks head-on. The one who took a shot-gun blast to the chest drops his sword to drink a potion first, however.
There's the stomp of feet as the invisible cleric closes in with Inara, and comes into your vision, just as he is about to whack her upside the head with a heavy, flanged mace.
In the bushes, one of the hobgoblinsH5 on the map thought dead is trying to surreptiously drink a healing potion without anyone noticing.
Pelius:
There must've been some life left in some of the 'corpses'. Two of the downed hobgoblinsH3 & H5 are currently trying to be stealthy as they drink potions.
Antonius & Johannes:
You note how one of the hobgoblins earlier thought deadMarked H3 on the map is sneakily drinking a potion while lying down on the forest floor.
H3:1d8 + 1 ⇒ (5) + 1 = 6 H5:1d8 + 1 ⇒ (8) + 1 = 9
All the enemies between you guys in the initiative row is dead, so all of your turns are now.
Regarding detecting invisible creatures, it seems you get 1 reactive check, and all further checks are move actions. You'd need to re-make them each round as it moves about to keep track, it seems.
Edit: Actually, I'd missed this:
Quote:
Feats and abilities that modify or present alternative uses for channeled energy (such as Command Undead and Turn Undead) work normally with these variant channeling abilities.
That seems to imply... Something. Anyway, in either case that's not what's going to happen.
I posted this to the Rules-questions forum, but have yet to recieve a reply, so I'll just post it here. In your opinion, what happens if you Channel Smite and has taken a Variant Channeling feature?
The healing wave rushes over the battlefield, and while invigorated yourself, you also note some of the hobgoblins twitching as their wounds close. Will they be getting up to stab you while you're otherwise occupied? You're not quite sure it isn't so.
Johannes chops the hellhound's head clean off.
Neither Pelius or Johannes are quite sure where the cleric is.
Kyras' shotgun rears in his hands as fires. The front two simply collapse, their chests a bloody mess of ripped up armor. The back ranks fare somewhat better having been protected by the bodies in front of them, but one still looks like he's about to keel over.
By the way Johannes, just roll the extra damage when you roll critical damage. The reason the glaive-warrior rolled 2 extra d10s is that glaives have a *3 crit multiplier.
I'm really sorry about your mom. :( I'm glad it's nothing serious.
Thank you :)
Kyras Lorach wrote:
also, I have goblin as a language, would that be the same speech as the hobgoblins?
Yes, yes it would be. I was actually hoping to have someone who could understand them, will make things easier.
By the way, RE pinpointing invisible creatures who're making noise:
It's not covered in the rules, for some reason, which is strange. It's of course possible, but I'd also say it's pretty difficult. Personal anecdote time: I once stood in a field. Somewhere close was a grasshopper making that loud, continous chirping sound that grasshoppers make; I was trying to locate the thing by sound.
Took me a solid minute to be sure of the right smaller area so I could start going about looking for the thing with my eyes.
Homebrew time:
What I take away from this is that it should probably be dc 20 to locate an invisible creature not careful about what kind of noise it makes, and take a standard action. Now, there's an obvious problem with that, so I'll also say that you keep track of any movement the invisible creature makes until the start of your next turn.
The normal range modifiers, (-1 to perception per 10ft between you and what you're trying to percept) which we usually just ignore, applies here.
The incoming reinforcements seem unsure about the situation, but at some harsh orders from the invisible cleric, they move forward. Two of them are in range to close in with Kyras, and do so, swinging their swords above their heads.