I'm wondering how people have handled the Oblivian Doors in Chapter 8. It seems like the puzzle is a bit difficult, and not really clear. There's no real clues to tell the characters what the trick is. Even if they do figure it out, the main caster in the party is a sorc who won't be able to duplicate most of the effects. He's also distinctly lacking in transport, teleport, or really most utility type spells. We have a rogue, but he can't make the 45 necessary to pick it. There's no chance anybody could make the 50 strength to force it.
All I can figure to do is lower the difficulty to pick it down to 40. Then our rogue can make the roll. If anybody else has any good ideas please let me know.
I'm wondering how people have handled the Oblivian Doors in Chapter 8. It seems like the puzzle is a bit difficult, and not really clear. There's no real clues to tell the characters what the trick is. Even if they do figure it out, the main caster in the party is a sorc who won't be able to duplicate most of the effects. He's also distinctly lacking in transport, teleport, or really most utility type spells. We have a rogue, but he can't make the 45 necessary to pick it. There's no chance anybody could make the 50 strength to force it.
All I can figure to do is lower the difficulty to pick it down to 40. Then our rogue can make the roll. If anybody else has any good ideas please let me know.
If I recall correctly, one of the rooms in the complex belongs to Thirfane. This is where she goes to lie low if the party don't defeat her in the party at house Riavadi.
you could plant some clues to the doors working in thirfane's room. A map detailing some (or all) of the spells needed to activate the door. You could also hide some scrolls in her room. Thirfane could be curious about the rest of the complex, and wished to explore while Vhalantru was away. Perhaps she distrusts Vhalantru (paranoia is a beautifull thing after all) or is looking for a specific object or piece of information.
If you want to make it especially easy for the PCs to reach Rhiavadi's room make sure the route there is clear. The door to the central shaft could be wedged open (to allow the flamewardens a way out) while the door to Thirfane's room could have been broken or disabled (or you could let the rogue shine a bit).
The trick is not to give all the doors away, but leave a few unknown so the PCs still have a bit of figuring out to do.
My group had a dwarfen defender with a touch AC of 30+ and an adamantite battleaxe.
So the defender just hacked through the doors with pure force
(and much patience)
Well, I'm in the final stages of Flood Season right now and Lords of Oblivion is still a little ways off. However, I can see exactly how it will go. Allow me to give a mathematical formula:
door + ogre barbarian = GRUNT SMASH!
This is how they made their way through J'zadirune.
Well, I'm in the final stages of Flood Season right now and Lords of Oblivion is still a little ways off. However, I can see exactly how it will go. Allow me to give a mathematical formula:
door + ogre barbarian = GRUNT SMASH!
This is how they made their way through J'zadirune.
IF the Ogre barbarian survives until that chapter. We lost two Half-Orc Barbarian on the way...
IF the Ogre barbarian survives until that chapter. We lost two Half-Orc Barbarian on the way...
Very true. He's nicknamed himself 'meatshield' because he seems to be the damage sponge for the party. He's also partnered with a dwarf barbarian that's pretty bad ass and the two squish virtually everything that gets in their way.
If Grunt dies the player has his sights set on a kender. There will be significantly less smashing if that happens...
My players hit these today. I gave them a major clue: when the wizard cast Detect Magic and stared at the doors after three rounds he could tell the school of magic that was dominant on the door. This was the school of the spell that would activate it.
The first door they tried a Dispel Magic. I know it says the doors are impervious to all spells except the trigger spell, but it seemed to me that Dispel Magic should work. So I ruled that for the 1d4 rounds that Dispel Magic cancels out a magical effect in an area, the door would be non-magical. It didn't open, but it was non-magical. Once it "woke up" again, the force beams would strike.
Rd 1: Barbarian tries a strength check to open it. Fails miserably.
Rd 2: Rogue tries Open Lock. Fails.
Rd 3: Wizard says, "Oh ferchrissakes" and disintegrates the door.
Now normally casting a Disintegrate on the wrong door would trigger the force beams, but since the door had become non-magical for those rounds, it disintegrated.
They've now seen more doors, and tried a Charm Person on the Charm Monster door, activating 7 force beams and scaring the bejeesus out of themselves. They want to rest and get spells back before trying more.
Mostly I'm wondering about Oblivion sapping the resources of the party before they get to the Beholder. I thought between House Vhalantru and the first demondands in Oblivion they'd be at about half strength to meet the Beholder, but they went down to the third level first and now they're feeling tapped out. They want to rest, which means they'll be nearly fully strength when they meet Vhalantru. I always saw the doors as a way to suck the high level spells away, which still might be true.
So, DMs who've run this, how close to fresh was your party when they fought the Beholder? How much did the doors suck out the party's spells?
So, DMs who've run this, how close to fresh was your party when they fought the Beholder? How much did the doors suck out the party's spells?
My party just tunneled around the doors, negating the need to figure out how the doors work. Still, they were down quite a few high-level spells by the time they hit Big V.
In my experience, Big V isn't as much of a threat as you'd think. The save DC for most of his rays are pretty low, so a clever party should be able to take him down in under 3 rounds.
If you want to leave the party a couple of hints, planting a partial map of Oblivion, including the spells needed to activate the doors Lady Rhiavadi's room should help the PC's quite a bit. She's been staying in Oblivion for several weeks before the start of LoO, so she should have had plenty of time to do some exploring.
If you want to leave the party a couple of hints, planting a partial map of Oblivion, including the spells needed to activate the doors Lady Rhiavadi's room should help the PC's quite a bit. She's been staying in Oblivion for several weeks before the start of LoO, so she should have had plenty of time to do some exploring.
Actually I planned on doing that with the notes in Lady Rhiavadi's study. The party has them, but the wizard hasn't even given them a cursory glance yet. He's "waiting for some downtime" to properly study them.
He's going to be pissed when he finds out he's been carrying around the answer to the puzzle the entire time.
He's going to be pissed when he finds out he's been carrying around the answer to the puzzle the entire time.
I love this campaign :)
Mostly I'm wondering about Oblivion sapping the resources of the party before they get to the Beholder. I thought between House Vhalantru and the first demondands in Oblivion they'd be at about half strength to meet the Beholder, but they went down to the third level first and now they're feeling tapped out. They want to rest, which means they'll be nearly fully strength when they meet Vhalantru. I always saw the doors as a way to suck the high level spells away, which still might be true.So, DMs who've run this, how close to fresh was your party when they fought the Beholder? How much did the doors suck out the party's spells?
My Party rested several times before they reached V, so they hit him with full strengh.
But as the mages were contained into the antimagic field and the two melee fighters had almost no ranged firepower, it was up to the scout to do the trick. But because she was charmed in the first round of combat, it still was a tough battle for them.I tried to keep them moving by letting them know (through Meerthan) that riots were breaking out and that their "base" had been pillaged. (The half-orc mercenaries were "collecting" the 30% property tax.)
They were also attacked by Lady Rhiavadi while resting, but still insisted in resting, mostly because they had difficulties to keep up their fly abilities.
*edit* the final fight was epic, because as the Beholder began to flee and disintegrated his way out, the scout flew after him. 2 times the beholder killed the scout, 2 times he was rescued (by the spell revify) and able to keep up the chase.
Just at the same moment when the beholder broke through the streets of Cauldron, ready to unleash death clouds to it´s citizens, the last two arrows struck with a natural 20 and killed him.
I love showdowns like that
Daidai, how did you handle the antimagic cone? Because when I ran, it seemed to negate the whole battle. Neither side could do much of anything to the other.
i used it when casters where in range and closed it to use flesh to stone on the fighters when possible. So i switched between open and closed eye, as needed.
The spit attack was of little use, so i clearly had to use the eye rays after a while.
The group didn´t dare to enter the room completely, so i pinpointed them at the door.
The fighters were of no real use there, the healer had his hands full to cast stone to flesh, so the really outshinig character was indeed the scout, who (after her charm was dispelled), did a lot of skirmish damage.
Well, in the month since our last session the party worked out a way to get around the Oblivion doors-- polymorph someone into an Umber Hulk and let the Umber Hulk chew a new path around each door.
At first everything was fine. The UH chewed through his first wall then turned back to say, "Hey guys, there's treasure in here!"
Result: Two confused fighters-- the barbarian starts attacking the Umber Hulk, the NPC fighter flees at top speed.
While the rest of the party is dealing with the confused barbarian, the invisible rogue decides to check out this treasure. He yoinks the first thing he sees, and two stone golems rise up out of the floor!
Oh it was a beautiful thing.
Long battle short, they vanquish the golems and grab the loot, but now they're definitely tapped, so they head back home (222B Obsidian Ave., it's a townhouse, y'know) to rest up.
They head back at full power and the bard turns into an Umber Hulk this time. They burrow around and there's nothing much left in Oblivion but Vhalantru. They finally get to him and we only have 15 minutes left to play.
So we did 1 round of the fight. At the end of 1 round:
Vhalantru is down about 50 hp, but he's out of reach of the barbarian who only has a throwing axe as a ranged weapon.
The Bard/Umber Hulk is stoned.
The Cleric is paralyzed by Tarterian spit.
Still up and kicking:
Rogue/Spell Thief who does the most damage with a wand of sonic orbs.
Evoker who has gotten lucky with some disintegrates and fingers of death in the past.
Cuoatl cohort with empowered fireballs.
Ineffective Barbarian with his returning throwing axe.
So at this point, even if Vhalantru goes down in the next round (I think he's got at least two more in him) he's scared them silly and proven a worthy foe.
I assigned a different color for each of the spells (off the cuff) and when my sorcerer sent the wrong spell in, it was channeled to that "gem". The gem's rotated from door to door, tipping them off as to which spell was necessary to open it. (they haven't figured all of them out, but three are done. I also allowed one character with a ring of ramming to plow into the door, "loosening" it enough to lower the Open Lock/Disable Device DC to the rogue's range.
the doors did what they were supposed to... get the party thinking and working together, even a teensy bit frustrated... and then open and on their way.
I assigned a different color for each of the spells... (snip)
I used a similar idea. I had each beholder-shaped door to have nine eyestalks, each sporting a gem of a different color. So, I had a total of ten different colors, nine of them on each door. The color of the missing gem hinted about the spell needed to open that door (ie red for Inflict Wounds, black for Finger of Death and so on).
I thought it fit nicely with the 9-eyed Orbius, and actually my players managed to understand how to operate the doors. However, lacking almost all the necessary spells (to say nothing of their very limited knowledge about WHAT spells a beholder can fire from its eyes), they used the good old Umber Hulk trick to bypass them.
I had the doors kept in place by a quite large circular metal frame the Umber Hulk couldn't dig through, so it had to detour a little, sometimes ending into a room different from the intended one.
I'm a player in Shackled City and we recently played through Oblivion so here are my 2 cents.
Our DM didn't give us any clues/notes for opening the doors, Disintegrate didn't work on them, so I just disintegrated/stone to mud the wall next to it.
Badly designed obstacle, if you ask me. For us, it was just annoying.
So, DMs who've run this, how close to fresh was your party when they fought the Beholder? How much did the doors suck out the party's spells?My party just tunneled around the doors, negating the need to figure out how the doors work. Still, they were down quite a few high-level spells by the time they hit Big V.
In my experience, Big V isn't as much of a threat as you'd think. The save DC for most of his rays are pretty low, so a clever party should be able to take him down in under 3 rounds.
If you want to leave the party a couple of hints, planting a partial map of Oblivion, including the spells needed to activate the doors Lady Rhiavadi's room should help the PC's quite a bit. She's been staying in Oblivion for several weeks before the start of LoO, so she should have had plenty of time to do some exploring.
Use magic device was our solution to the doors, very simple
IF the Ogre barbarian survives until that chapter...
With Lord of Oblivion now behind us I can say that Grunt Demoncrunch survived with reckless abandon. Yes, such a thing is possible. I would not have believed it prior to this bastard of an ogre came along. He got it through his head to wrestle Gottrodd and then learned that fisticuffs with a red dragon is never a sound idea. Somehow he survives no matter how many times he drops his axes or gets thrown head first through stone walls by rabid dire sloths.
Oblivion went as follows: door + high-level ogre barbarian = GRUNT SMASH!!!!
Good to know the characters have been consistent over all this time.
I treated the doors like magic items. My party had a sorcerer with lots of Knowledge (Arcana), and there is a variant rule somewhere that if you cast detect magic, and get a high enough skill check, you can identify magic items. I also let them use identify and like spells to determine the correct spell needed. Once the pattern became clear, a Knowledge (Dungeoneering) determined what a beholder's various eyes can do, and off they went to buy a scroll for each for which nobody could prepare a spell.
Defeating the beholder was easy for my party. One of the party members is one of the best archers I've ever seen. He's mostly an Arcane Archer build, but the guy who plays him has him tricked out very well regarding feats and magic items. I'm here to tell you - beholders hate arrows!