Arrgh! Arrgh! I posted a thread on my AOW campaign here when I should have been putting it here all along.
Nevermind.
Our AOW campaign has been running for about two years, and we are midway through Kings of the Rift - the 10th module of 12. So, nearly done, but better late than never. I have five players at the moment, playing a Beguiler, an Artificer, A Fighter, a Cleric, and a Wizard (who joins us over the net). The game is played Friday nights in Canberra, Australia.
I keep a campaign log here - http://www.paulmurray.id.au/ageofworms. There's no scipting or dynamic content - just some pages with text and images. The earlier sections of it have images taken from BitTorrent downloads of pirated scans of Dungeon magazine, but at about module three I discovered the paizo website and found you could get legal copies. Hooray! Worth every cent - sixty bucks american for two years of gaming. The conversions of the images - adding transparency and resizing them, was done by me with The GIMP.
I will begin adding a message to this thread each week when I put up a new log entry, and I'll monitor the RSS of this thread.
Week 48 - Two short fights and one long one.
DM Highlights:
* I duplicated Wilmot Coldtooth. The Goliath fighter with an AC of 45 still walked all over him both.
* Party take out the Mother worm with a Destruction spell, before it did much damage.
* Fight with Xyzanth and an added 2 blue dragons takes all night. A long, complicated fight.
4 weeks is long enough to spend on this module. We'll conclude next week.
Week 49 - Well, that was quick!
I got jack of this module, so fast-forwarded. The party took out Brazzemal with Dust of Sneezing and Choking. Crap. Luckilly, there are some undead coming up, which will be immune.
Week 50 - A Scholar calls for help
All on track! The apostle is dealt with. And I just discovered in the web supplement that there is a wandering monster table for the fissure! Sorted! Better fun next week. There'll be time for wandering monsters, as our beguiler and artificer will easily deal with Zulshyn. Heck - they might even go the whole nine yards.
Week 51 - Screechy, we barely knew ye. RIP.
Thessalar is down. One bit of soul to go.
DM Highlights
Went pretty well, really, and I got to kill a cohort. A good session all round.
At these levels people are tossing around ninth-level spells and combats are over fast, so you have these enormous stat blocks 90% of which do not come into play.
And again - boss monsters must have minions. No matter what kind of monster you throw at a party, 4 actions per round beats one action per round. That's why there is a Time Stop spell.
Week 53 - The Tabernacle of Worms
Venk and Zyrith go down in the first round - but to 7-8th level spells. I (once again) am way to easy on the guys, ruling that the Repel Vermin works on the worms that are in the walls and floor - but not on the doors, dammit. Flash is already out of second-level slots from casting all those knock spells, and is having to use up his third level slots. Mwuhahaha!
As always, the story is at http://www.paulmurray.id.au/ageofworms.
Week 54 - A tripartite spirit again becomes one.
Dragotha went down after 2 rounds. The cleric has an "enervation" equivalent using positive energy, and it dropped D to low enough HD that he no longer had access to his high level spels.
Meanwhile, the Beguiler/Cheese was dropping maximized and empowered Bolts of Glory into him - 15d12 = 180 points, empowering it does an extra 45 (avg). Oh, and he has Action Surge, so as well as the maximised one he's also doing a normal one, averaging only 135.
Feh. It'll be nice to finish this campaign - it's getting ridiculous.
Cool weekly update, but how much splat are your player's using? The big D in two rounds???
At this rate keep kyuss without any weaknesses and just make to pcs do the groundwork in alhaster to be able to harm him at all!
Short answer - a lot of splat.
Goliath fighter
Warforged Artificer
Changeling Beguiler/Recaster (Eberron changeling class)
Human Cleric.
The artificer has manufactured a heap of jewelry for everyone. But even without it, there's a couple of spell compendium spells
* Bolt of Glory
* Ray of Dizziness
that ...
Ray of Dizziness, in particular, has turned a lot of fights into walkovers.
Oh well. Nearly done.
In any case - what does the final prophecy mean? I have looked through the last module, but I don't get the reference. Is Zeech the "hero of the pit"? I thought that him "using his fame" would involve the party's influence points vs his, but that's not quite the way it works.
I think he is, its been awhile since I read that adventure.
Those are two spells I'll blacklist so, I'm not a killer dm, and indeed try to avoid too much PC death, but i dont want it to be a walkover, i want CR challenges to be challenging. Thanks for the enlightenment!!
Hiya Paul, Luke, your good ol' DM from CanCon here. I had a quick look at your website... quite nice, I like the pictures, crosslinks, and sparkly text for spellcasting, especially.
If you're ever in the Southern Highlands of a Wednesday night, let me know- you'd be welcome at my gaming table any time.
Good luck for the last few weeks of the campaign, I hope it's all it can be.
Luke! Dude! Yes, this is teh thread - I don't have messaging software on the machine hosting the site. Not long to go now, anyway. I wanted the sparkly background for the spells to actually be sparkly - an animated gif - but meh.
(Luke is one of the DMs at CanCon, a convention run by the Canberra Games Society. I'm local, so I go each year. My Shujenga/Warmage/Mystic Theurge is level 10 now, and not dead yet.)
Southern Highlands, eh? Mittagon/Moss Vale/Berimma-ish? A bit far on the 125cc scooter, but who knows.
Week 55 - A clerical dispute; and: Flash makes more new friends is up.
Players - remember that you are not supposed to read this!
---
Sigh. On the bad side, I totally forgot to use the thing where Kyuss Knights blast with negative energy. But, it doesn't matter anyway because the party buffs up with Death Ward.
On the good side, I totally got Gauthakan. By rights, he is dead from intelligence drain and should have risen as a favoured spawn of kyuss. Mwahahaha! But ... whatever. They hit him with the Restoration pretty quickly.
I was very pleased at how encounter 2 came about naturally from the party's actions - Bevis deciding to have Frith urge the preist of Dol Dorn to do something. Flash being a Beguiler with ridiculous charisma, by the adventure text he would have gotten all the civilians into the temple before the attack. But we all decided "screw it" and I had the knights come out early. And *each* knight that was not attacking the party (or stuck in solid fog) was killing 1d4 civilians a round. The players could see me keeping track of numbers - and they *might* have failed to make the 150.
The killing of the first broodfiend did not count as a morale success, because no civilians were involved. I'm a bit concerned that they'll go straight from the dungeon to the spire, and miss the other main quest, which they don't know about. They haven't had much of a clue. But they will have to rest at some point, so encounter 3 is do-able then, if I can persuade them to rest there.
But then again, if Kyuss kills 'em all for failing the morale component, that will be good too.
I've decided, BTW, who to sub in for Maralee. I thought Loris Raknian for a bit, but now I have a *much* better idea. Maybe have Loris Raknian instead of Vulras, whom the party never really met.
Other issue is that Gauthakan is not really seeing much action - spellcasters rule high level games, as we all know. Perhaps area A11 should be additionally protected with an Antimagic Field. Actually ... I really like that. Antimagic does not affect supernatural abilities, so Buldumech can have minions. Say - aren't some Warlock abilities supernatural?
All warlock invocations are spell-like abilities, which means that they're about as powerful as an icecube in the City of Brass when the warlock is in an antimagic field. [/evil DM smile]
Week 56 is up! Yay! Long time between drinks, I know. The back entrance to Lashonna's dungeon leads pretty much straight to the vortex - so that gets taken care of straight away. Good fight, lots happening. But the party are so buffed and warded that there's nothing much can get through. The thing that hurt most was being dragged through their own walls of fire by the ghosts with telekinesis.
As always: http://www.paulmurray.id.au/ageofworms.
Week 57 is up. Great fight with the 4 overworms.
What level is Rary's Telepathic Bond?
I found it. I thought it was a made up spell.
Your website is down.
Week 58/59 is up. The party is ascending the spire - but they have forgotten a thing or two. I changed Vulras into Loris Raknian, whom my players recognise a bit better. It's all good.
I have something very, very special in mind for Maralee.
OK! Owing to ... issues, my web page is now at
http://www.users.bigpond.com/pmurray/ageofworms.
There's not enough space for most of the images, unfortunately.
Game over. All done. Pages are back where they belong - at http://www.paulmurray.id.au/ageofworms
Game over. All done. Pages are back where they belong - at http://www.paulmurray.id.au/ageofworms
Hi paul. I was looking through the AoW stories and stumbled upon your site. Unfortunately it is down and the only way to get to it is through the wayback machine. Did you move hosting? What's the new address?
Thanks a bunch!
Pages have moved to:
http://paulmurraycbr.github.io/ageofworms/index.html
Good times.