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She literally doesn't understand that she needs to proactively provide information for the operation to succeed,and players probably don't know the right questions.

This is exactly how I have been treating it, and will probably continue going forward. Meyanda knows quite a bit, but doesn't make the kind of connections about the threat Hellion presents nor does she just blurt out what the party would want to know.

I take that a step further. In Meyanda's mind, she doesn't understand the danger Hellion now presents to her personally. In her time working for him, her lack of emotional understanding has caused her to confuse Hellion's madness and rage as a kind of fierce determination for the cause. Since it has thus far not been directed at her, she still treats the Lords of Rust as the only family she has known. She is just now beginning to see how dysfunctional it is compared to, say, how the party operates. I perhaps should have noted earlier Meyanda doesn't actually know why the connection was severed, just that she can no longer commune with Hellion. So in my mind she heads back to Hellion confused and with the mistaken hope it will take her back in.

How Vlad or Gratz see this seems valid to me too, though. All depends on where you want to take the character and what you think is best for your party.

Are you sure it wouldn't be HM-14(CX-335)? :)

I like the way you think.

As for the generator, I don't think Greater Make Whole applies to artifacts either. And if it did, even RAW I don't think even a 20th level caster could handle repairing the generator with only 5 pounds per level. I would say given the enormity of the thing the reactor is far more than 100 pounds. If it was light enough for the spell, Meyanda probably would have just brought it back with her as she originally intended. Strangely, Make Whole has easier target limits.

Even more RAWy is that even Make Whole doesn't really work either. Bear with me as this gets into the ridiculously rules heavy. Technically, both Make Whole and Greater Make Whole specify they restore Xd6 points only when cast on construct creatures. They can, however, instantly fix an item at 0 hit points of fewer. But the generator still has hit points so that doesn't work. If you wait around until it does have none left, you let half of Torch go with it. Both spells do function like Mending, though, so they can restore 1d4 points per cast as that spell specifies it heals objects. With the reactor taking 2d6 points of damage per day while outside of fail safe you will about 3 casts a day to keep it stable. Put it in fail safe and it will still take most casters more than 2 months to get it back to full 1,800. Oh, what fun math! And this is why I always play rules as intended.

As I suggested earlier, I think its possible to fix the reactor, but the resources and skills required are far beyond what Meyanda or the party has access to as of book 1.

Oh boy, looks like get to contribute a T.P.K, with a real party this time.

Victims: Half Orc Bloodrager 2, Human Inquisitor 2, Human Gunslinger 2
Cause of Death: Hetuath

The Story: This fight looked a whole lot like Crustypeanut's test PCs. The party was pressing on after fighting the skeletons, which drained the rager of all his resources (rounds of rage, orc ferocity, and elemental strikes) and ate the inquisitor's judgment. This proved to be decisively crippling for this fight.

The gunslinger won initiative and prepared a shot for when the zombie got with touch AC range. Hetuath charged next, eating the prepared action but only taking a single point thanks to DR. He got up in the bloodrager's face and did some damage. The bloodrager went next and even against DR wiped out half of Hetuath's health in one greataxe swing. But things rapidly went downhill after that. The inquisitor cast divine favor, and the gunslinger dropped the gun, and gave the bloodrager a flank with his longsword. Hetuath, though, proceeded to drop the barbarian with his full attack. The combination of his high AC and DR left the remaining two with little options.

The gunslinger put up a valiant stand fighting defensively and hugging a pillar for cover. He managed to survive two full rounds of Kasatha four armed fury while the inquisitor healed the bloodrager back to consciousness. It should have been one round, but the first touch of the Cure Light Wounds wand healed the minimum. The rager bravely got back into the fight but missed his swing. Hetuath put him on the floor again, and this time finished the job with a coup de grace as the inquisitor could only watch. One full round against him too ended the fight.

Rather than reroll characters entirely, we decided to just rewind the entire fight from initiative and give the party a second a chance. The second fight started as a mirror of the first, but I let them use every little metagamey trick they could think of to pull though. Two rounds in and the party was passing around the barbarian's greataxe to each other as it was proving to be the only thing hurting him. The inquisitor had to use True Strike just to be able to hit with the thing. However, Hetuath still managed to drop both the rager and the gunslinger again. The inquisitor was ready to just give up, but I pressured him into taking his final turn. He pulled off a hit with his light crossbow, and with max damage got through the DR to finish off Hetuath's last two HP. Quite the last stand, as he provoked two AoO to pick up and fire the thing. Thankfully, Hetuath missed both those attack rolls.

Overall, Hetuath is a brutal fight. He has a good AC for the party level, he is effectively immune to 3 energy types, and can put out a horrendous amount of damage with his 4 arms. His DR is very tough to bypass at this level without oil of magic weapon on hand. He even has combat reflexes so my party trying to game out provoking his AoOs so other players could perform actions didn't work. The real joke, though, is that the party didn't fix the habitat module so I get to see the look on their face when Hetuath comes back for round 2.

My party just crossed the "desert" after a pretty rough skeleton fight. We had to stop just before the habitat control room and I was thinking about modifying it some. I have two PCs with the Numerian Archaeologist trait, so I want the room to have a big impact. In addition, there is a lot of interesting flavor with the regenerating Kasatha and their curse.

However, just pressing an obvious glowing button to reactivate everything just doesn't seem to have the right buildup. I am going to make the button repower the room into a standby state instead. The computer has been scrambled over the years and in order to get habitat back to its normal state the experiment parameters need to be put in again. This is a DC 25 Disable Device check, as Disable Device seems to be the UMD of machines, with the usual -5 penalty for lacking Technologist. This is pretty tough, but there are hints scattered over the room. There are bits of researcher notes scattered on flicking screens, a variety of datachip or disc devices to be inserted, and tech components to be reattached. In other words, a DC 20 Linguistics (to decipher the notes), Knowledge(Engineering) (making repairs), or Knowledge (Nature/Geography) (to determine what the parameters should be based on what was seen) taken before the Disable Device check each reduce the difficulty by 5.

On success, the weather and sky patterns return to normal as indicated in the AP. On failure, though, the habitat is amusingly calibrated to some utterly wrong setting. Maybe it starts snowing, or the sky is filled with quadruple the correct number of stars or something else completely out of place. The malfunctioning computer realizes the parameters are wrong even as the weather takes hold, spews an error message, and forces itself to reboot. The reboot takes 2d6 hours with an accompanying frustrating progress bar, and during this time the Disable Device cannot be reattempted.

What do folks think? An interesting alternative to encourage some skill use, or too convoluted for what was just flipping a switch?

On a completely different note, I was looking ahead to upcoming encounters. As far as I can see, Sanvil Trett is a veritable loot pinata with full PC wealth for his level. Is it expected the party gets everything on his person? If he gets away, should I throw in a few extra pieces of loot to the Engineering Deck to keep them on track for wealth per level? My party is small so they may need the help.

My party has a barbarian who really did destroy the drone in one swing in the first round of combat. I don't really see a problem with that. It was just after the inquisitor tried diplomacy to no avail, so everyone had a good laugh when greataxe diplomacy proved much more persuasive. Its not really a challenge but it does get the party thinking about robots and the other strange oddities to come. Considering much of the Black Hill caves are standard fare, the encounter sets up some foreshadowing of the craziness beyond.