I second Thundersroar. These are a great addition to my original paper copies and perfect for adding player handouts etc to roll20. Thank you.
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+ at least 1. Although the thread has been entertaining to read.
My players had a fun old time in here. Between the black pudding enveloping the sorceror... omn nom nom... gear starts dissolving, what's this say on your character sheet? Necklace of Fireballs? BOOOM!
And maybe he didn't. :p As a exercise for the reader: What happens to an arch when you stoneshape the keystone away?
Never mind all the ninth level uberness, a simple fifth level spell can avoid a big chunk of stuff. "Ooh! A big castle on a column that's only accessible via a bridge? Right, we stone shape the bridge into the chasm so there can't be any giant reinforcements and teleport to the roof of the castle."
OK, the overworm, that was a fight. (First time in: the Radiant Servant air walks forward to bring the wormcallers into turn range, the worm explodes out of the lake, crits him into negatives and the following round swallows him before the party can rescue him! Following the side quest to raise the funds for True Res, the Radiant Servant uses greater planar ally to get a planetar into the fight!) But the Harbinger? I ran the fight as scripted: There was one maximised orb of acid from the sorceror, the warlock's eldritch blast and it was all over before he could cast mirror image, let alone prismatic spray.
How to defeat Zyrxog, Plan the First: Orb of Force. Job done. How to defeat Zyrxog, Plan the Second: Summoned air elemental to grapple him down to floor level, where more summons (dire apes, giant crocodiles and so on) can grapple/rend/poison etc to their furry little heart's content while the party deals with the mind blast and octopins. My party used the second option. Or at least, most of them sprawled on the floor with mind blast, the druid hung back and got the job done. I killed him in the end though, as both the player and I agreed that the tactic of summoning something with a massive grapple check to tie up the spellcasters was quickly becoming tedious. Punchline: the druid was replaced by a radiant servant of pelor right before the champion's games. I'm just starting to get kills again and we're most of the way through Spire!
For instance, if he has chance to cast Righteous Might (+8 Str., +4 Con. and +4 Natural Armor Bounus due to size, It should be mentioned that Righteous Might has been included in a free errata article at the WotC site. (http://www.wizards.com/default.asp?x=dnd/er/20040125a) The spell now only grants +4 size bonus to Strength, +2 size bonus to Constitution and and +2 enhancement bonus to natural armor as well as DR 3/good (6/good at 12th level and 9/good at 15th, I don't have the module to hand to check Kelvos' CL)
I was all geared up to have some fun with Moreto and his page and a half of notes and exposition on the Seal of Law, except... The party gets down to the base of the waterfall. This charming, if pale, individual steps forward from a recess with a couple of mohrgs shambling behind him. The Radiant Servant of Pelor hears him say about three words before going all Greater Turning on them. Of course, because Moreto was closest, he was the one to shrivel into dust first.
I also had this issue, particularly with the Radiant Servant of Pelor getting distracted from the rather nebulous 'figure out what Raknian's up to' plot. There was a certain amount of "I can turn anything. Anything! Bwahahaha!!" and so on. Eventually I decided to make the corridor roofs rather shaky, and the fighter with ranks in profession(miner) persuaded the party otherwise.
Hmm, I'm mentally reviewing the party's spell lists. The sorceror doesn't have Fly. I think they may have to either jump or depend on the cleric's Wind Walk. Which could be interesting, in the circumstances...
I would assume if you have a DC for standing in the fumes near the pool, the DC for fumes elsewhere would be the same, or at most a point or two lower.
Hmm, a team's manager is able to bring in 1200 gp of healing every other day... If Smenk wanted to humiliate the people responsible for driving him out of Diamond Lake, all he has to do is lace the potions of healing with laxatives or some of the more interesting ingested poisons from the DMG.
Oddly enough, this is almost exactly what I've got. Hmm, now I have to start the Inquisition up to find out if any of my players are reading these boards...
We finished the Champion's Belt last night. After the performance of the gladiator teams, I'm wondering why half of them had potions of Fly. The Pitch Blade dwarves came swooping in against my party, all went well until the cleric cast Dispel Magic, causing one dwarf to nose dive for 3d6 falling damage. In the final round, I set up Auric's band as suggested. In round 1 the sorceror sets off a fireball enhanced with explosive metamagic (pushing subjects to the edge of the effect) which lofts Khellek over the 40' ceiling and disqualifies him. If the next fight were not the party's first dragon, I would make them fight mutliple dwarven defenders!
also, do not forget that only evil cretures can be summoned in the room due to the Unhallow spell effect. Add this to the point that should a PC cast Summon x in the room and you don't tell them the reason their spell fails, they will be mightily pressed to figure out that they cannot call for extraplanar help as all such non-evil creatures are hedged out. Gah! I completely forgot this. Still, if I had remembered and so prevented the druid's summons, I would have TPK'd, so in the long run...
Logic doesn't have a lot to do with it in my case. I have a gung-ho fighter type just itching to go up against Auric and co. Toss in a little foreshadowing for the undead hating cleric of Pelor, the changeling rogue who caught Auric's eye back in Whispering Cairn and the sorceror who tends to just go with the flow and I'm going to have a hard time keeping them out of the Games!
SPOILER ALERT!!
* * * * * Here's a trick: During our first session of STAP, my rogue found (and pocketed) the 100 platinum pieces found aboard the Blue Nixie and somehow failed to tell Lavinia about it. At the start of the second session, while we were sitting aroudn debating the best method to find the brother, a concern was voiced about healing magic. At which point, my rogue pulls out of his jacket a fully charged wand of Cure Light Wounds and says "What? Like this?"
From a fellow geologist, you've rolled low on your Knowledge (minerals) check. Hardness is resistance to scratching only, not to fracture (in the case of quartz) or cleavage (for the feldspars). Must...resist urge...to make... feat related joke... Still, adding in strength bonus as noted above allows a pick to defeat hardness 8 some of the time, so it is entirely within RAW to demolish the stone block without any tweaking. How fast do they break through? Use JM Straczynski's concept of 'speed of plot': If it takes x time to achieve something to coincide with the dramatic climax, that's how long it takes.
Zyrxog nearly made a mess of my party too. His first mind blast stunned only the rogue, but the fighter had no way of getting up in the air to splat Zyrxog with his power attack and Telakin's frost greataxe. The sorceror tried to fireball the octopins, only to see them shrug off the damage. (He was kind of put out until I told them about the unhallow afterwards)
An air elemental to whirlwind him down to the ground, a giant crocodile to grapple him and keep him there and a dire wolf to bite him all turned up before the druid himself shifted to dire ape form and got in close. Rather than rend the stunned party members, one octopin got stuck into the summons, while the other attacked the druid. One full attack later, I rolled a pair of 20's then a 20 and a 2 to confirm. The druid took 5d8+18 damage and became chunky salsa.
There's an illusion cantrip called Chalkboard. Combine it with permanency?
How low is 'low'?
However, back to the original point: I would say that the monk's abilities would be the easiest to impersonate. The sudden lack of casting would be too obvious. As long as the monk cannot achieve either of the escape conditions mentioned in the module (can't remember the DC's off the top of my head, but it's a Str check or an Escape Artist one) then they would be the best to copy.
Also, in my group, I replaced the rogue with Ixiaxian. She led the party through the mirror maze (I nearly killed myself trying not to laugh at the "I don't *think* there are any traps" routine) straight to Telakin and then sneak attacked the druid in mid-summon. It very nearly was a TPK; if the rogue had hit with a couple more sneak attacks then the only survivor would have been the fighter who threw a strop and didn't come down into the dungeon at all!
I'd support that theory. The octopus alone nearly TPK'd my 7th level group. That said, scrying and teleport is an ingenious method of recovering your lost party member in order to assault the hold at full strength. (You could tempt the party back down there by suggesting the kidnapped PC might want a smidgeon of revenge?)
I have a changeling in my party, so she was a natural choice for the doppelgangers to kidnap and replace. I figured that they would be able to contain a shapechanger being so good at it themselves, so no problems hanging onto her. Plus they would want to find out where this tainted half-breed cousin of theirs came from. It's been glorious. As the party member with the decent Appraise, Diplomacy and Bluff checks, she's been wandering the Artisan's Quarter of the city, selling off all the stuff that Diamond Lake couldn't afford and then telling the party she could only get about half what the items were actually worth! On top of the "Oh, well I never spotted that pit trap" stuff, the reveal next week is going to be absolutely priceless.
As for continuous damage...yes, debatable, but it makes sense that if you are taking continuous damage from multiple sources, the effect would stack. Otherwise, which one of those sources would you choose to be the one you had to make your Concentration DC against? I think his point was you save against all the damage effects individually and if you fail even one of them, you lose the spell/whatever you were concentrating on.
At least one member of my party went into negative HP each session we were in jazidrune. Our five-man party lost two characters in there, and my cleric spent so much time in negatives that the light at the end of the tunnel looked like a strobe!
I don't know another 1st level spell that not only finds and disarms traps but also summons multi-hundred pound weights to drop on people. This is one of our group's running gags: Using summon monster/nature's ally to call into being some poor critter a decent distance above the enemy. Of course, someone else then has to cast Major Creation to add the bowl of petunias and Ventriloquism to provide the "Oh no, not again."
We ran Obsidian Eye as a one off due to having players missing from the regular campaign for a few weeks. It was my first time DM'ing and I have to say it made for a pretty cool start to a career (I'm now running AoW). In what seems to be becoming a nasty habit, when the party reached Harbinger, he made the big "and your little dog too!" speech, rolled badly for initiative and was dead inside two rounds. The monk in the basement didn't last much longer.
My party just got the drop on him. A surprise round, followed very poor initiative meant that Filge barely had time to open his mouth, let alone awaken the zombies in the tanks.
We were playing (don't laugh. Cry, but don't laugh) Warhammer Quest of all things, trying to get a party to 10th level with having to raise anyone. We also played a Shackled City game on another night. I ran a one-off adventure one week when some of the SC players couldn't make it and got interested in DMing around the time that Whispering Cairn was published.
The Planar Alley. In which may be found the Celestial Dumpsters of Doom. ;) I'm sorry, I just couldn't resist that one. Someone summon a planar ally and smite me.
Oddly enough, all the frustration in my AoW campaign has been on my part. My party pretty much breezed through the Whispering Cairn, occasionally one would drop into negatives, but nothing approaching a TPK. It took until the end of 3FoE when the party overextended and took on the Faceless One and minions instead of falling back to rest at the top of the lift to actually cause a casualty. I don't expect the Mistmarsh to hold any party killers, so we'll see how they do in HoHR.
On the "getting hints of something wrong" line, the dwarves of the Greysmere Covenant might get wind of hinky goings on and want to make sure that Dourstone is on the straight and narrow.
Dragon #338.
In terms of Identifying scrolls / potions / wands, I generally let a UMD check work on the wands, an alchemy check work for the potions, and read magic has always worked on scrolls. If I may? According to the SRD, a DC 25 Spellcraft check will identify a potion. *uncorks bottle, wafts under nose* mmm...I'm getting elderberries, a hint of lemon...aftertaste of newt...
Depends on whether or not you see crazy worms eating the love of your life alive, I suppose. Oh and thanks, Golbez. I was looking to be a little more oblique than that, but there's some good stuff in there. I'll see what I can do with it...
Oh this is by no means railroading. All this is designed to is try to cut some of the inter-character bickering down and provide some cool moments down the road when they say "Hang on a minute, this looks familiar..."
Giving the whole party nightmares after destroying the Ebon Aspect also begins to hint at the 'heroes of legend' thing mentioned at the end of Library of Last Resort where they go back in time and witness Dragotha's defeat.
I'm trying to write dreams customised to my party members that will vaguely foreshadow things to come in AoW. Partly to work on the problems that the party is having with staying together, and partly to develop the theme of impending doom that has gotten a little lost amid all this dungeon bashing. The party will experience the dreams in the form of individualised handouts the next time they sleep after defeating the Ebon Aspect in 3FoE (probably tomorrow night). The fighter is getting a vision of the Ebon Aspect sacrificing one of his loved ones before the Spire of Long Shadows, the changeling rogue is getting a nightmare about identity loss (foreshadowing HoHR and her impending doppelganger replacement), the cleric is getting unpleasant dreams about the Mistmarsh (ready for the trip to Blackwall Keep), but I'm having trouble with the druid.
Does anyone have any ideas? (For the dream, not the prestige class)
Of course, there was the time where we got attacked at night and he didn't have his armor on (he almost died). Which is why my cleric always casts the first level spell Contingent Armour (from the Ultimate Divine Spellbook) on his full plate +1 before getting some kip. Awakened in the middle of the night? A simple snap of the fingers and the plate settles into place ready to smite. The cleric in full plate is kind of a cliché. I agree that half plate and banded mail should see more use.
Well, tonight we have the aftermath of Three Faces of Evil. Gosh, playing at such a speed is exciting!Anyway, we now have:
An as-yet-unnamed dwarven Cleric 4 of Kord. After Martina took 28 of a possible 36 damage from one of the Faceless One's lightning bolts, her player decided to create a greatsword-wielding dwarf and become the healer tank. Enys, human druid 5. Currently in bear form and unable to shift back to human as it was the first time he shapechanged and doesn't quite know how he managed it. Enys' animal companion, a wolf, got coup-de-graced by an acolyte after the Faceless One magic missiled him unconscious. Cue bear form... Enid, changeling Rogue 4/Fighter 1. Immensely funny scene where she revealed her ability to the uneducated and yokel-like Aethelwulf. Her skills as a shapeshifter have been underused so far, but I predict good things for infiltrating the lizardfolk lair and the Free City.
Character: Martina, 5th level sorceror.
[ooc - I really thought I had a TPK on my hands. The first lightning bolt didn't do much. On the second one I rolled 28 on 6d6, frazzled the sorceror and dropped the fighter to -9! The rogue made her save and took no damage, but she was damn close. Then the shapeshifted druid took a magic missile and almost went down, only to be droped to -1 by a lucky stab fom an acolyte's dagger. A second magic missile downed the druid animal companion wolf, who got coup-de-graced by the acolyte. Fortunately the rogue managed to get a potion down the fighter's neck before his next action, and the druid stabilised on his own, but Martina was well beyond help.]
A sleep spell, some rope and then 'persuade' one of the tieflings guarding the cathedral to teach them the knock. Simple. ;) Of course this relies on the party realising that they *need* a secret knock.
The only problem with that approach depends upon how well you know your party. If you can predict which group they'll go for first, you can fight out the rest of the battle beforehand. If not (and my party falls into this category!) then you may have to wing it. Fortunately my lot are about to face the Faceless One, so I don't have to worry about this yet!
A bit off the point, I admit, but what are the merits of point buy over say "4d6, drop the lowest and put it where you like"? This is not a knock, flame or anything else negative, I'm just looking for opinions.
After an awful lot of bickering and Sleight of Hand rolls against each other, my lot have finally settled down and named themselves the Diamond Blades. Not original as I can see from further up the thread, but I won't tell them that! Now I can kill them with the Faceless One and his lightning bolts. Let's see little miss 'sorceror with protection from arrows and a brooch of shielding who laughs in the face of kenku' cope with that! Heheheh...
The statuette is worth 200. Tidwoad, miserly little gnome that he is, is only interested in paying 30-50% of that (so he can sell it for an outrageous profit) so only offers up to 100 gp for the statuette. Whether your players sell at that price is down to them, a good Appraise check will tell them that they should be able to get 200 gp for it.
I would like to point out that there is a flaw in your theory here: If you only have a Sorceror in the party who doesn't get 3rd level spells until 6th, it hampers the party even more. As Sorceror is a core class from the PHB, I would hope that adventure writers would take this into account and allow for non fighter/wizard/cleric/rogue parties. I'm having to take this into account, as my party's arcane power is not only a sorceror, but a sorceror who is deliberately avoiding all the 'boring' spells like Fireball and so on. (She got an awful lot of use out of Ghost Sound in the grimlock section of 3FoE, for example.)
If I recall correctly, Diamond Lake has an 800gp limit or something. So if the PC's want to sell off, say, Theldrick's suit of full plate +1 because no-one wants to wear it (rogue and sorceror just laughed, druid shrugged and said 'not me' and the fighter is going for a lighter build out), are they going to have to hang on to it until they can spare a week to go to the free city or risk stashing it somewhere?
The first time in, the party downed the two tieflings in the cathedral easily enough, but not before one managed to alert the Hextor temple. The party chopped their way through the skeletons and were preparing to coup de grace the cultists put to sleep by the sorceror, when one of the guard tieflings released the boar.
I reasoned that Theldrick would set up an ambush and set up all his forces in and around the skeleton's chamber, with everyone rushing into position as soon as they heard the lift coming back down. So, the party opens the door after a night's rest. They get into the skeleton room and are beginning to explore when the left door opens and the cultists charge out, the right door opens and Theldrick steps out with a couple of tieflings, a third tiefling releases Beast and I utter the magic words "roll for initiative". My party's druid didn't bother with talking, he went straight to charm monster. And I failed the save by 1 point. Beast spent the battle goring zombies and tieflings. Theldrick spent several rounds swiping at the rogue with a Inflict Serious Wounds and missing while she attempted to feint him into sneak attack city. The fighter chopped his way through the cultists and into Garras and Kendra and the druid cast his fire spells. Ah well. I'll do better with the Faceless One and his big bugs...
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