Wayland Smith's page

Questions on Sodden Hold

My group is going to be hitting the Free City of Greyhawk (HoHR), and I'm trying to find the supplements focused on the city.

I have "Greyhawk: The Adventure Begins" already. Any other recommendations? My interest here is more laziness - the group has no real clue RE: anything "greyhawk"'ish.

Namely, the party raided the lizardcamp, killed the leader and parlayed with the shaman. Collected the human prisoners. And left.

They never reached the egg room - which means the false dragon egg with the worms is still there!

I'm guessing is that the egg will hatch and turn the lizardman eggs into spawn, right?

I'm thinking that Blackwall Keep is going to be overrun with wormy lizardmen soon! Excellent! (My group was dumbfounded when they had heard about how long the spawn was locked up in the basement)...

"Your friend turned into a zombie AND YOU LOCKED HIM INTO THE BASEMENT???"

"We thought he'd get better, mi'lord!"

"FOR TWO YEARS!!!"

I'm looking for information on tactics on how Spawn of Kyuss fight:

Their worm-touch ability appears to leave the worm on the target for one round - during this time, the worm can be killed by damage (10 AC, 1 hp) or the touch of silver. The worm doesn't start burrowing until the spawn's next round.

Now, what are the rules for attacking a worm on yourself or another person? I'm currently playing by: Using a light weapon, then std. attack that hits damages the worm, but not the "host". Use a bigger weapon, and you will cause the target half of the damage rolled (a morning star or a dwarven waraxe isn't exactly designed for worm squishing).

The "touch of silver" maneuver is a std. action and will automatically work - no roll needed.

Thoughts on that?

Next, seeing that an individual spawn can only deploy a worm 1/round, my thought is that a group of spawn would attempt to concentrate attacks on one person - The trick is to keep as many worms on the target so they can't get all of them off until the next round.

Are they that smart?

(My initial encounter with the Spawn in EoBK was a little anti-climatic - The paladin was within 10' radius of the party, so they got the +4 bonus to fear and saved against all three spawn. At which point it was just hack, hack, hack - the fast-healing was definitely annoying the wizard: "I do 5 pts with the magic missle" "O look, the wound just was stiched up by worms!" "Dammit!")

I'm needing to throw something together for my party for Thursday's session (Unless the fight with the Ebon Aspect will go for WAY LONGER than it should).

Has anyone done anything with sending Dourstone and Smenk to justice? Anyone use anything from Dungeon?

Right now, I'm thinking of someone stealing the 60-or-so potions that are clanking around in the fighter's backpack.

Looking for some ideas, that's all... Thanks.

Wayland, the extremely unprepared...

1) Are Wands of Identify legal by the rules?

2) Would dumping a WoI w/ 10 charges be too overbalancing in 3FoE? The party is stuck there and burned through a lot of resources, and I'd like them to be able to use at least SOME of the assorted scrolls/potions/wands/toys that they've found so far...

... namely CLW...

If the spell assigned to a wand is a touch spell, does the wand wielder need to touch the wand to the subject to activate the spell.

If so, then my party is going to b%*+~. If not, then I can definitely see some munchkin'ism - what would the range be? Do they have to make a ranged touch attack for the ray?

... Or whatever the Yellow King adventure was called.

I was thinking that it would be a great side adventure between EaBK and HoHR.

Have the first village be about a day's travel north of Blackwall Keep. Have the party stay there before the Keep. That way, when they return, the town will be dead.

Then have the theater troupe actually hit Diamond Lake as the small town. Replace the sheriff with Nebin, and have either Smenk or Neff be the mayor going insane.

This + "A gathering of winds" = Diamond Lake in need of SERIOUS urban renewal.

Finally, have the final theater be in Free City. It will definitely put the party on the map as people to watch.

The big challenge is that the party won't be quite powerful enough for the adventure even toned down to 7th level (After EaBK, the party should be 6th level right?). Some more adjustments might be needed.

And maybe work on tying "The Yellow King" into the whole AoW plotline - Maybe fudge the Hastur connection into having the bard troupe be a member of the Ebon Triad?

Anyone else have ideas on these lines?

So, as you may have seen from my recent obituary, the entire party has fallen in the temple of Hextor.

However, the party wants to continue the AoW campaign, so I'm trying to determine the best way to continue the plot.

What I need to figure out before this Saturday (I know, I should have asked before now) is a) If I want to even try continuing the 3FoE adventure, b) If I do, do I need to adjust the strength of the monsters, c) How to correctly play the opposing forces.

Issues with the previous set of PCs:
Lack of melee fighters - We had a barbarian and a rogue which prefered ranged combat. We also had two gnomes, one of which could only score 1 pt of damage in melee (Str of 7).
Tendency to burn spells instead of potions - Because the cleric was always converting spells to cures, he wasn't able to buff the party adequetly.

New party:
(I've permitted them to generate 4th level characters instead of 3rd level characters - I'm aiming for survivability here).

Human Paladin 4 w/ Cure Light Wounds wand
Dwarf Fighter 4
Human Rogue 1/Wizard 3
Spirit Shaman 4

This time we have better offense, and the lack of a "real" cleric should be offset by the wand of CLW with the Paladin.

Plot setup idea:
Allustan knows about the worm found in the mine. My plan is that he is concerned when the original party fails to resurface from Dourstone, so he contacts Melinde at the Garrison. Melinde isn't about to let petty issues of property rights to prevent her from uncovering an evil cult, so she assembles a strike force. Here she gets in touch with the Paladin PC, and the rest of his party (which is a roving band of do-gooders).

My plan is to have Melinde and a band of 6 1st-level Warriors from the garrison escort the party. This way we can see how well the Paladin manages the care of his strike force.
I will have to decrease the XP for the party, but what I will probably do is award bonuses for each garrison member who survives the excursion. My basic idea here is to try to rush through 3FoE so I can get on with AoW...

First Problem: How to get the entire army into the cultists area - My only guess would be to have Allustan cast Mass Invisibility to help them get into the mines.

Second Problem: I'm going to assume that this is a week after the previous raid - this will permit Theldrick to re-organize his defenses.

The casualties Theldrick has suffered:
All of the skeletons
All but 1 of the cultists
3 of the Tiefling fighters
Beast

What I figure is that the loot from the original party will have been ID'ed by the Faceless One and his acolytes and distributed where appropriate - this will raise the deadliness of a number of the encounters as now there is a +1 chain mail, a +1 axe and a +1 short sword around there, not to mention a whole lot of potions (cause the old party never used them).

In addition, Theldrick will animate Beast as a zombie or skeleton if he's able to, as well as the cultists, fighters and the dead PCs. That should piss off the players suitably for them to kick some a$$.

Finally the NPC sister of one of the PCs (she's a bit of an amoral survivor) has slowly been getting her sanity eaten away by the Faceless One's allip.

So, any ideas or other improvements?

I just bought Complete Adventurer, and the player of a 3rd level rogue likes the concept of a spellthief.

The question is how to handle this - I have two choices:
1) Complete conversion from 3rd level rogue to 3rd level spellthief - Since the Spellthief has on par abilities as a rogue, it shouldn't be too much of a logic stretch (just assume he wasn't using any powers till now). What on a spellthief got gimped to keep it the same power as a rogue?

2) Have him multiclass. The problem is that since he is 3rd level rogue, he is going to be gimped with the 10% EXP penalty. I could waive the penalty, but I'm not sure about the balance in his case (or fairness to the other players).

Thoughts?

Also, I'm running DMGenie, but I'm not up to creating a class definition... Anyone have a spellthief class definition available?

I was going over the Acidwraith's stats and I think there's an error in it.

In the description of being fluid-dependant, it says that the Acidwraith would lose it's fast healing ability if seperated from a liquid source.

The problem is is that I didn't see any mention of Fast Healing in it's SQ.

So, does it have Fast Healing (and if so, how much?), or is the fluid-dependant description in error?

I love the adventure! This will be 10 times more fun than my party's reaction to Filge's dinner party!

... with respect to magic items.

This will be a problem in my campaign I fear, because I have two gnomes in my party.

So far I haven't seen any weapons or armor targeted for the little people.

What is the correct way to handle this, just fudge some of the found weapons and armor to make them small (kinda hard to justify when they come off of medium-sized corpses), or should I make them just trade in the un-used stuff for smaller goods?

The message is endorsed by the Gnomes and Halflings Against Sizist Treasure (G.H.A.S.T.)

My group (and myself) would like to express their gratitude for writing the scene of Filge's Dinner Party...

Their reactions were priceless. Truly priceless.

They felt completely justified that he had died by slowly bleeding to death during the combat a day or two before.

It was truly a moment for DM's to live for.

My thanks again for a fantastic campaign (I just need to figure out how to get them to 3FoE now).

I'm prepping for the game this Saturday, and my party is about to head to Alastor Land's farm, and I need some advice to run the Owlbear encounter.

In the MM, it says that the Owlbear on attack can use Improved Grab to start a grapple.

However, looking at the grapple rules, I don't think grappling in the situation of the Owlbear fighting a group of assailants is a Good Idea...

Unless I missed the rules where the Owlbear while grappling can disembowel their attackers.

So basically, what are the effects of the Owlbear grappling? Does it just do a single claw damage (then why not just do a full-attack?), does it get to crush and smother it's opponent under it's weight (if so, how much damage does this do).

If anyone has a good synopsis of monster grappling, please let let me know, otherwise I'm just going to skip the grappling and just have it go with full attacks.

My group has had two run-ins with individual party members of the FCP (Free City Party). One was with the rogue in the Feral Dog, and the other was with Khellek at the nice bar (I'm at work, so no notes).

The adventure offers them to be used as foils, and I'd like to know how other people have used them. For now, I'm holding them as a reserve as a way to prevent TPK, but at a price.

My party is now at 2nd level, but I still think they'd lose if they go head-to-head with them, so I haven't set them up for competition, and the party has been very careful to prevent anyone from learning about the WC (to the point of the barbarian taking off the +1 chainmail and stashing it in the minehouse before going back to town).

However, I'm in the process of developing a sub-plot where a PC's NPC sister becomes "involved" with Khellek, potentially leading the FCP to the WC ('cause they aren't finding anything in the Stirgenest Cairn).

So, any advice on how to give the feeling of competition without a full-out head-to-head fight, or screwing up with solving the item-based puzzles in the WC (they have one lantern, and are nearing the second one for the next session).