Been chewing away at RotRL: Anniversary Edition on and off for the past couple years in a duet campaign with my wife. Last night we finally killed it. Her PC was a Varisian Sorceress/Evangelist, and she was accompanied by a Halfling Rogue who we later converted to unchained, a Half-Orc Shaman whose main spirit was Life and whose wandering/secondary spirit was Lore (I never let him change wandering spirits because I consider it OP) and a Shoanti Fighter/Bloodrager with the fire elemental bloodline. We later added a monk and a bard as cohorts.
Party was level 17, had inflicted 2 negative levels on Karzoug by interacting with his Astral Projections, and used a Mage's Disjunction via the Anathema Archive to free the Planetar Angel, Ayruzi, from Binding and get her on their side without having to fight her. Prebuffed a bit but nothing amazing; only the Arcane Sight ended up mattering.
Round 1: the monk cohort tries to run in with his fact movement speed and is thus the only person not in the initial meteor swarm and cloudkill, so Karzoug traps him in Prismatic Wall and that's the end of the fight for him. Party members scatter and the Sorc, Bard, and Planetar drop Greater Dispels on the Advanced Storm Giants and manage to get them free of Dominate Person before they act. Hugely important. Shaman gives some healing, Blue Dragon manages to breathe on the Angel, Bard, and Fighter/Bloodrager.
Round 2: Shaman uses Sunbeam to blind the Rune Giant right after it had given itself True Seeing and this will pretty much always work because its reflex save is only a +9 even WITH a Sihedron Ring. Good Move. Also drops a quickened channel positive energy, which is the True Spirit ability for Life. Horrid Wilting then nonetheless kills the bard and leaves all other party members near death, but the Angel is unaffected to to its SR and therefore tries to tank the Blue Dragon, which only managed to knock a Mirror Image or two off the Bloodrager/Fighter while the blind Rune Giant accomplished nothing. During Time Stop 2 Karzoug Wall of Forced the F/B, who was promptly freed by the Sorc with Disintegrate, put Spell Turning and Stoneskin on himself, but didn't get to Globe of Invulnerability.
Round 3: The party was doing so well that I decided to deviate from the script a bit. After the Shaman used his Mass Heal, leaving everyone who was not dead at or near full HP, Karzoug skipped doing Finger of Death and went straight for Wail of the Banshee. The Rogue and Shaman went down hard, and the Rogue had just finally gotten to melee range of Karzoug, too. Ouch. Sorc made her save on a lucky roll as well as having applied the Harrowed bloodline ability "See it Coming" to Fortitude, and F/B managed to survive the 190 damage despite rolling crap and failing his save. Angel again unaffected-- amazingly Karzoug doesn't have Spell Penetration. At this moment things look very bad for the party. The Sorc then takes a good hard look at Karzoug with her Arcane Sight, knowing we need to find a weakness quickly or we die. Many of the spells and items he has are rather complex and inscrutable, but there is one moderate abjuration aura that sticks out for its relative simplicity, at a mere DC 22 Spellcraft check to identify on sight with Arcane Sight-- his CL 7 Ring of Freedom of Movement. She shouts out to the Angel, who has Dispel Magic as an at-will spell like ability, to target this ring, and to her last surviving party member to get over there and GRAB him. The Ring is CL 7th, the Angel has CL 16-- can only fail on a 1. Karzoug has Spell Turning, but the Dispel targets an item, not Karzoug himself. Globe of Invulnerability wound have necessitated the use of Greater Dispel, but he hadn't gotten around to that yet. Fighter/Bloodrager dropped Cheetah's Sprint, zoomed past the whiffing attack-of-opportunity of the blind Rune Giant, and grabbed Karzoug with his Improved Grapple at a total raging CMB of 31. Karzoug never got off another spell; his concentration bonus with 2 negative levels is +31 against a DC to cast while grappled of 10+spell level+Grappler's CMB, and his own CMB to escape is not very good. Chink in his armor: FOUND.
Round 4: Still struggling with the Blue Dragon, the Sorc uses Waves of Ecstasy to stun it and it falls into the fire below the platforms. Stunned flying creatures fall. The F/B gets the pin on Karzoug. The blind Rune Giant only manages to kill most of the F/B's remaining Mirror Images as Karzoug screamed for help. The freed Storm Giants ran up to get involved, as requested by the Sorc in fluent Giantish, knowing that the Rune Giant and Dragon would soon have the F/B down. The Angel re-upped the Dispel Magic (only 1d4 rounds of suppression) on Karzoug's Ring.
Round 5: Dragon is still staggered but back in the fight. Karzoug remains pinned. Rune Giant kills Bloodrager/Fighter but one Storm Giant takes over grapple duty while Sorc and Angel bombard the Blue Dragon and the other Storm Giant fights the Rune Giant.
Two more rounds of similar slow progress, in which the Rune Giant re-dominated one Storm Giant but had it re-dispelled just as quickly and the Angel hopped between making Holy Greatsword Attacks and using Dispel Magic, Karzoug squirmed and cursed, and the Sorc used Caustic Eruption twice, as it affected the Dragon and Rune Giant but the Angel was immune. Soon enough both evil monsters were down and we had a raging, screaming, no-verbal-component-only-spells-having pathetic Runelord with an Advanced Storm Giant kneeling on his face, alone. Not knowing if he had a clone somewhere, allies who might Resurrect him, or a death contingency, or what, the sorc (my wife) had determined to use Trap the Soul on him, and the 3 good monsters forced him to drink the triggering object she had prepared-- a potion-- and he failed his non-mind-effecting Will Save on a roll of 6, total of 23, and was trapped in a huge sapphire worth 20,000 GP, forever. She then smashed the Soul Lens with her dominant weapon, and all was done.
I didn't fudge dice rolls; my wife making her save and being the only PC left alive to finish the fight was quite organic. So was successfully getting ahead of the Storm Giants in initiative and succeeding on Greater Dispel checks against a high DC to free them from Dominate person. Luck is sometimes kind. Most amazingly, Karzoug was beaten without ever once laying a Dominant Weapon on him.
Variations on this strategy should often work against Karzoug; technically per the way Arcane Sight is written it doesn't even take an action to notice a massive unstoppable Runelord is being held up by a dinky CL 7th ring. You have to concentrate to identify a creature's spells and spell-like abilities, but spells in continuous effect and items are just like making a knowledge check to know what a monster is: reflexive. A summoned monster with the Grab extraordinary ability should combo well with dispelling the ring also.
A few other RotRL hacks we discovered:
Redeeming Nualia: Her backstory makes her evil and villainy so understandable and sympathetic, doesn't it? But, she's written as being completely gone over to evil and too far gone to bring back. As is way-too-damn-often the case in RotRL, the PC's are not in time to prevent evil, all they can do is clean up after evil. All they can do is kill the poor (even murdering torturing cannibalistic) lass and send her soul off to explain its failure to Lamashtu in the Abyss. Or, so it seems. Her bastard sword +2 alone will sell for enough money to pay to have her brought back from the dead-- not through Raise Dead, obviously, but what good would raising her do, anyway? She'd still be the same evil, partially demonized bitter person. No, what we want is Reincarnate! It's cheap enough for low-level adventurers, if perhaps Shalelu Andosana knows a good Witch or Druid, and it removes both her demonic taint and her Aasimar race. An Aasimar is a native outsider, and as such it CAN be raised normally-- but the chances of her reincarnating as the same thing are essentially 0. We happen to have gotten her back as a Halfling. When you do this, you rid her of her demonic body parts and Lamashtuan scarifications, but you ALSO reveal to her an important truth-- that Lamashtu, who is known to delight especially in corrupting Celestials and part-Celestials, just like everyone else in her life, only cared about her for WHAT she was; only valued her as an exotic and not as a person. Once she becomes a plain old Halfling, and the PCs kill the Greater Barghest she was trying to release, and her failure to Lamashtu is complete, her Goddess's favor towards her fades, and her sense of betrayal-- the same sense of betrayal that fueled her rage against her father, her lover, Desna, her own Celestial heritage that made her an exotic, and her entire gawking bullying community-- now is directed also towards Lamashtu. Lamashtu, who promised her revenge, but turned out to value her only as an exotic and an object of desire just like everyone else in her life. She hits rock bottom. The only people she can then turn to are the PCs-- they had her brought back to life at no possible direct benefit to themselves and are now still trying to work with her and convince her to turn back from evil before it's too late, even though she is just a Halfling now. They're the only people she's ever met who she KNOWS care about her for a reason that doesn't have to do with her being an exotic, or beautiful and attractive-- because she isn't those things anymore. At this point redeeming her is highly achievable, and if you redeem her, and Tsuto Kaijitsu isn't dead, you can probably redeem him too, as he's completely devoted to her, and was also only driven into evil by being abused. In fact, little secret: we used the retraining rules from Ultimate Campaign to pay to retrain her, after the level loss from Reincarnate, into something the party needed a bit more than a Fighter/Ex-Cleric, and took her with us as a cohort! The Monk and Bard in the final fight detailed above who did not last long but did manage to Greater Dispel one Giant and get Karzoug to waste his Prismatic Wall-- they were, in fact, Reincarnated Halfling Nualia, and Tsuto.
Witch of Infinite Resurrection:
When Paizo published RotRL in the 3.5 rules set, there was no class that could cast Blood Money and Resurrection. You could emulate Raise Dead with Wish, but can't do the material component for Wish with Blood Money, as you'd need a 50+ strength. When RotRL: Anniversary Edition came out, though, the Blood Money spell also applied to Witch, and Witches get Resurrection as an 8th level spell! In addition, a Shaman using the Lore spirit and the Arcane Enlightenment hex can gain Blood Money as a Sor/Wiz spell. Our Half-Orc, who managed to use a +6 belt of STR and his every-4-levels ability score increase to muster a STR of 22, could Blood Money Resurrect. It costs 20 bleed damage and 20 STR damage, leaving him a STR of 2 and needing on average 8 Lesser Restorations to get his Strength back-- but he could do it. He also could use Teleport (also from Arcane Enlightenment) or Transport Via Plants to go back to Sandpoint, or to Turtleback Ferry, and bring back all those poor victims who the storyline doesn't give the PCs a chance to save! Once we hit 15 at the end of Runeforge, and the Shaman got his 8th level spells, he was like the Grinch after his heart grew 3 sizes. He brought EVERYTHING back! Remember what I said about how the adventure only gives the PCs a chance to clean up after evil, not STOP it? Yeah, we didn't like that. Also, very much like a horror movie, RotRL is written to be very "anyone who has sex dies," from the couple at the sawmill to Tsuto and Nualia's amorousness being portrayed at part of what makes them so evil and deserving of death, to Lamatar and Myriana, it is an adventure extremely cruel to lovers. I think it must have been written by a Mormon. We didn't like that; it's supposed to be a story about the evils of greed, and it encourages the PCs to be gold-hungry little loot monsters just as much as any d20 fantasy game and falls into the old American "sin only means sex" literary trope. FIXED. Also, the Ice Nymph, Svevenka, was much easier to convince to help us across her swamp with no feyish pranks once she learned we had actually RESURRECTED her sister, not just laid her soul to rest.
Actually Killing Black Magga:
We didn't actually do this, but I figured out how you COULD. Black Magga has 152 HP in this fight. She's very hard for 9th level PCs to affect with either attacks of spells; about the only thing that would work would be non-spell touch attacks, and hopefully ones that didn't involve getting too close to her evil tentacles. There IS a way to do that, though. In the 1st round, we could have had the bard strike up Inspire Courage and the Sorc and Shaman use Summon Monster 5 to get 1d4+1 Lantern Archons each, averaging 7, which would have made 14 attacks at (with Inspire) +5 to hit a touch AC of 6 and 1d6+2 damage that bypasses any DR. Do the exact same thing on round 2, now having a total of (on average) 14 Lantern Archons, and you may well have the 152 damage you need, especially if someone manages to also land an attack on her in some other way.
You'd have to have had the party prepared casters prepare 2 Summon Monster 5's and the spontaneous casters take Summon Monster 5 as a spell known, and that's a bit we-knew-this-was-coming metagamey, but then Summon Monster 5 does also get you the amazing, dazing Ankylosaurus, and is as such an extraordinarily desirable spell just in general-- so maybe you could justify it!
So, in conclusion: while RotRL is a very hard, character-grinder type adventure especially early on when smart builds and crafting haven't had time to give you an edge yet(bloody Yeth Hounds), you CAN win it. You can redeem people you're only supposed to be able to have regrets about murdering, save people you're only supposed to be able to bury, and kill things you're supposed to be terrified of. In the end, you can make the world a better place, in spite of itself. And that, Ladies and Lords, is what adventuring is all about.
