Bloodless Vessel

Phoxglove's page

Organized Play Member. 12 posts. No reviews. No lists. No wishlists. 2 Organized Play characters.




I've run a one-shot of Little Fears in the past, and a several session short campaign of Wonderland No More, but this is my first time running a d20 game, and my first AP. We've had two sessions so far, and I'm beginning to feel a bit more confident about it, but any advice would be most welcome, particularly in regard to this AP. Anything that tends to trip people up on this one, or might need adjusting?

So far I've accidentally dropped our Inquisitor with the very first trap, panicked and missed part of the false tomb trap because there were so many moving parts, accidentally got my party fixated on an adventuring group I threw in as a joke, and learned the valuable lesson that players are going to do the wholly unexpected and force you to improvise when you least expect it.

Also the iron cobra fight ended up being unintentionally hilarious.


Hello hello, I'd really appreciate some advice from some more experienced players.

Basically my quandary is this: In my current Rise of the Runelords game I've been playing a Cleric of Callistria with the lust and luck domains. We've gotten through the Skinsaw Murders (somehow), have become level 7, and my GM has said he'd allow character changes/some approved rewrites between adventures, before we move on to the next AP book. He has noticed that I haven't been terribly happy so far with Cleric, so he allowed me to rewrite my character into Inquisitor.

Now, while looking over things I'm rather happier with the idea and my new increase in skill points, attack bonus, new armor etc. I'm torn, as frankly I worry my party (Barbarian, Monk, Summoner, Wizard/Rogue, Cave Druid), has far more need of a cleric.

I just found Cleric extremely frustrating. Invariably we'd be halfway through whatever place we were exploring and I'd be nearly out of spells, and inevitably I'd have need of some spell I hadn't thought to prepare. While my channel energy was helpful, and my healing appreciated, I never felt particularly satisfied and always felt like I just wasn't 'getting' the class.

Any advice on how to play a cleric so it doesn't feel like chewing broken glass? I'm pretty certain prepared casting just isn't for me, but aside from sinking all my money into wands/potions/scrolls I haven't been able to come up with much to help things. So I figured I'd try for advice here before I committed to my (admittedly fairly neat) Inquisitor build. My GM thinks I'll probably be happier with the Inquisitor, and doesn't want me to base my choice on 'we should have a cleric', but at the same time that last encounter in skinsaw was terrible, and I'll admit my cleric was *useful* even if I wasn't very happy. Inquisitor seems more fun for me, but if I could improve my cleric skills so I was feeling better equipped I might stick with it. I'm not even looking for broken optimization, just a way to feel more effective basically.

Sorry to write a book here :) but any advice would be fantastic. My gaming group friends mostly agreed I probably just don't like prepared casting, and that's likely so, but I thought I'd cast about for ideas. I'm a relatively new player, and so far have played Sorcerer to level 17 (so far), Witch to 6 (so far), Fighter briefly as a 2-session alt, and Cleric to 7 (so far...), so I have relatively little experience, and have been trying to work my way through different classes to get a feel for them.

tl;dr: How can I make Cleric less frustrating to play? Or should I go with my rewrite as Inquisitor?