DM Drakli here:
So... how many parties have had trouble with the Quasit Queen of the Catacombs of Wrath?
With a 22 AC, invisibility at will, DR 5 Cold Iron or Good, and Fast Healing 2, my 2nd level players had a terrible time pinning her down. Literally, since the new grapple rules for Pathfinder Beta make it tougher to grapple a tiny creature than before. (They have to roll a 16 on their CMB to get her initially.)
They've fought two skirmishes against her, and wiped out her Catacombs quite efficiently, (Korovus went down to a one hit crit {We ruled a triple damage card on an already x3 weapon results in a x4} from the Critical hit deck.) but they were forced to call it a draw with two PCs (out of five) dropped to the negatives and single digits in a zombie pit, and Erylium out of spells.
The zombie pit bit might take a bit of explaining. It was one of the cooler things to happen during the adventure. The party'd kind of sort of been doing a running battle with her, where she's been leading them from room to room in the dungeon, hoping her minions will finish them off, and after they killed Korovus, she started harrassing them with what spells she had left. The party gnome barbarian did an incredible, human-monk-assisted flying tackle, grappling her and falling twenty feet down through one of the flimsy covers of the zombie pits, doing solid damage to them both. Then, a zombie chewed him into the negatives. The monk dropped down with healing to save him, which she did while Erylium tried to escape. The monk healed the gnome-barian back to consciousness, but then got dropped by the zombie. The gnome-barian finished off the zombie, while their friends covered the pit so Erylium couldn't escape. However, she issued an ultimatum: "Let me go now. You might be able to catch me, but not before I kill both of your friends." With the gnome having only a handful of hitpoints, and the monk within a few -hp of honest to goodness dead, they were forced to let her go.
Unfortunately, letting a villain survive is very demoralizing for my gaming groups, the moreso with Erylium because they couldn't even tag her.
Maybe it's because they didn't pack any tanglefoot bags, maybe because the party make-up was caster light, (A bard being the sole caster,) but I'm just wondering if any other parties felt crushed with confronting the (not so) Quixotic Quasit.
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Bonus questions:
At this point, the PCs are considering trying to get the entirety of the Sandpoint clergy down into the catacombs to bless, consecrate, and exorcise the hell out of whatever that monster-summoning triangle pool is (the lesser runewell.) And considering the PCs have dragged themselves back to the church twice in the same day, covered in blood, going, "Holy crap, there's bad stuff down there!" it seems plausible they could lash together an honest to gods holy contingent just based on direct evidence alone.
How many active priests are there in Sandpoint?
And... apart from the standard way of draining the pool's power, have any thoughts on how they can the pool? I imagine it's a minor artifact of sorts, but I don't want to just tell them, 'No effect.'
DM Drakli here:
(Korovus went down to a one hit crit {We ruled a triple damage card on an already x3 weapon results in a x4} from the Critical hit deck.)
That's not really what you should do for x3 weapons. The deck actually says on it's rule card that x3 crit weapons allow the player to draw 2 cards instead of 1 for a crit, and pick which one they want. Weapons that do x4 crit damage let you draw 3 cards, and pick one, etc.
The thing about the deck is that most of the crit cards end up dealing slightly less damage than one would normally do on a crit, but adding on other interesting effects. Depending on the situation, these can win battles for your PC's, or may be completely useless.
As for the other Erylium related stuff, I haven't run those adventures yet, so I can't really comment on it. I just love hearing about people using the crit and fumble decks :)
I don't imagine my experience was typical of GMs with Runelords at all...
The wizard hit her with a Color Spray. That gave them 1 round, during which the rogue (already moving into position) scaled a wall and grappled her to the ground. The half-orc paladin then drowned her in the pool (inventive way to bypass damage reduction— sent me to look up drowning in the SRD). Just a bad run of rolls for her on Saves and Grapples.
They were still first level, IIRC. I was really looking forward to swarming them with summoned baddies, but she never got the chance.
The sinspawn in the room made up for their easy time with the quasit. They made the mistake of not pummeling the remains, and so fast healing came into play at the end of the battle when previously defeated sinspawn "ambushed" them. Got the Wizard below zero hp before the party could regroup and finish them off.
Unfortunately, letting a villain...
My group was also having the same problems, and they are not caster light (Fighter, Cleric, Sorceress, Rogue). They would have been unable to defeat here - which would have been extremely demoralizing - without some GM help.
Also, I cannot help but see her as a serious "undercon" (to use MMO terminology), as she is both a Quasit and a Lvl 3 Thamaturge (effectively a cleric). Would not that make her closer to a CR 6 or so? - and thus a bit high for a Lvl 2 party?
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Also, I cannot help but see her as a serious "undercon" (to use MMO terminology), as she is both a Quasit and a Lvl 3 Thamaturge (effectively a cleric). Would not that make her closer to a CR 6 or so? - and thus a bit high for a Lvl 2 party?
this has been discussed before, basically, James said he wanted it to be a reminder that critical thinking is required when you play (drowning it or otherwise disabling it - and if I remember correctly, the party should have at least one cold iron weapon from earlier in the adventure, if they didn't sell it).
James said he wanted it to be a reminder that critical thinking is required when you play (drowning it or otherwise disabling it - and if I remember correctly, the party should have at least one cold iron weapon from earlier in the adventure, if they didn't sell it).
There is no cold iron weapon in Burnt Offerings before you run into Eryllium.
James said he wanted it to be a reminder that critical thinking is required when you play (drowning it or otherwise disabling it - and if I remember correctly, the party should have at least one cold iron weapon from earlier in the adventure, if they didn't sell it).There is no cold iron weapon in Burnt Offerings before you run into Eryllium.
Most PCs buy weapons at some point in their careers...
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James said he wanted it to be a reminder that critical thinking is required when you play (drowning it or otherwise disabling it - and if I remember correctly, the party should have at least one cold iron weapon from earlier in the adventure, if they didn't sell it).There is no cold iron weapon in Burnt Offerings before you run into Eryllium.
Sorry
DM Drakli here:
(Korovus went down to a one hit crit {We ruled a triple damage card on an already x3 weapon results in a x4} from the Critical hit deck.)That's not really what you should do for x3 weapons. The deck actually says on it's rule card that x3 crit weapons allow the player to draw 2 cards instead of 1 for a crit, and pick which one they want. Weapons that do x4 crit damage let you draw 3 cards, and pick one, etc.
The thing about the deck is that most of the crit cards end up dealing slightly less damage than one would normally do on a crit, but adding on other interesting effects. Depending on the situation, these can win battles for your PC's, or may be completely useless.
I know. It's a house rule I use, to make the crit deck more appealing for Players who have x3 weapons. An extra draw is still an extra card that has a decent chance of sucking, and you can only choose one effect. By my rule, instead of drawing the extra card(s), x3 weapons keep one of the x1, and x4 keeps x2 of them.
Heck, even as we ruled it (with the extra x1,) the player had to be cajoled by the entire table to draw from the deck, "I have a x3 weapon. I want to deal x3 damage. That's going to be a -lot- of damage, garuanteed. (he was a raging barbarian.) I don't want to draw normal damage and opponent loses an ear." The look on his face when he drew the x3 card and realized it meant he did x4 damage under our rules was priceless. I told him, refering to the rest of the game table, "We trusted in the heart of the cards."
We recently had the Erylium encounter in our 4E game, and I spent a fair amount of time trying to decide how much of the "frustration-factor" I wanted to preserve -
I ended up with a Solo creature that had over 200 hit points, and I gave her two standard actions per round. In a typical round, Erylium would attack someone with one standard action, then go invisible with her second standard action, then move to another location.
At first, a few players were readying actions to attack her when she became visible, but partway through the combat, they sort of forgot about that tactic and just kept attacking areas where they thought she might be (if they had area attacks) or trying to use active Perception checks to guess a location. The fight ended up taking quite a while.
Even so, I was amazed at how LOW the actual frustration of the players was. The extra options they had kept them interested, and this scene translated very well - I honestly think this scene works better in 4E than it does in 3rd edition.
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Also, I cannot help but see her as a serious "undercon" (to use MMO terminology), as she is both a Quasit and a Lvl 3 Thamaturge (effectively a cleric). Would not that make her closer to a CR 6 or so? - and thus a bit high for a Lvl 2 party?
Well, I think technically, by the d20 rules, she's on target.
A quasit is CR 2, but by the rules of CR for monsters that advance by character classes, non-associated class levels only count as 1/2 increases of CR, up to the point where they equal the creature's base HD, at which point, that level and additional levels count 1 for 1.
And also according to said rules, spellcasting classes only count as associated if the creature can already cast spells as a "blah" level caster of the same class and the new levels increase their existing spell progression. A succubus's uber-charisma might make her an awesome potential sorceress, but the fact she can only cast 1st level spells at her first class level makes levels in sorcery a bit less potent for her than, say, a Rakshasa who already casts as a 7th level sorceress and then takes a real level in the class. (setting aside the existing CR difference between monsters.)
By that approach, Erylium has 3 outsider HD and a base CR of 2. Adding 2 levels of thaumaturge (where she's working to catch up with 3 HD of non-casting.) gives her CR+1. Add a 3rd level of thaumaturge and her class levels equal her racial HD, for another CR+1. Total = CR 4.
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My group had a really hilarious fight with Erylium. Her very first attack roll using the dagger was...
1
followed by a Fumble confirm roll of..
1
Since we are using the Fumble Deck, I drew a card...and came up with the "thrown weapon ends up in possession of the target card".
You can imagine how fun did the things go on from there :)
Side note: my RotRL campaign has a recurring trend: big bosses go down without much trouble (Elyrium ? check. Goblin warboss ? check. Nualia ? pffft. Aldern ? check. Xanesha ? peasy.), whereas throwaway encounters which are supposed to be "mid-bosses" at best become lethal threats that the party barely recovers from. (Shadows in PF1 - Shalelu dead. Yeth Hounds - close call to a TPK. Ghoul Bat - 1 PC dead. Scarecrow - TPK, but 1 PC was not present at the fight and recovered the bodies. Biggun - 2 deaths, including 1 NPC)...
My party won on the firsr try at level 2, despite lacking offensive casters. Although she had no Lamashtu's "modifications", for setting reasons. Being wrathful, she got overconfident after first few rounds, and resorted to invisibility-attacking in close combat. Then they used big cloak of one of the PC's to pinpoint her location, while she was flying low after the second attack, then the cleric grappled her and the THF fighter managed to do enough damage through damage reduction to almost kill her and make her surrender and allow to bind herself just before dropping into 0 Dexterity from secondary damage of her poison.
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Took the party I Dm three tries as well. The first time they were 4 PCs. She turned invisible and moved behind the monk, dropping him to negatives as he was injured from an earlier fight. Then she moved to the sorcerer, critically hitting him and poisoning him...
The second time they recruited a fighter to join them...that didnt go much better.
The third time the PCs got smarter and they reached level 2 before going to face her again. Druid used faerie fire and the fighter taregeted her as best he could. The fight was long as she kept resorting to moving away and holding to strike the first person to come near her...
Just ran the Erylium encounter with the Pathfinder Beta rules - it was a tough one. Three PCs (Monk, Cleric, Fighter) accidentally bee-lined straight to her and it was on...
Amazingly, the long spear managed a hit and established how hard she'd be to hurt. Meanwhile, she was missing with her dagger and opted to risk flying in close to drop an inflict moderate wounds on the hurt fighter. Of course, he made his save and she rolled minimum damage.
But having closed, the monk moved in and managed to get a grapple on her before she could turn invisible and get away. It was over pretty fast after that - even her hideous spittle was no deterent. They tied her in ropes, and finished her off.
The only think that kept the party up was the extra hit points from the Pathfinder Beta rules and the fact that I'm running the adventure as written (no more than the barest minimum of adjustments of the NPCs). An excellent, tough encounter that I enjoyed running and I think my players enjoyed beating.