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There is nothing in the stat block stating such. Usually the attack entry would say something under the damage. Since it says 'bite +13 (3d6+9 plus grab)' and not 'bite +13 (3d6+9 plus grab and heat)' I would not apply the Heat damage unless the Grab is successful. (Which it usually is, making it a moot point.)
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RPG Superstar 2012 Top 32
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Just played this at 5-6. Couple of highlights:
I shot the remorhaz with lightning, then the witch slumbered it. Someone did a CdG with a x4 weapon.
It survived.
I shot it with more lightning, and the magus - desperate to take it down, and having missed with a Spellstrike'd shocking grasp already - decided to deliver the held charge with her bare hand. She knew about the heat ability.
She hit. She dropped it. She took 30 fire damage and then shoved her hand into the ice we'd been chipping away at.
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During the sled chase, I took out three of the four enemy sleds by casting liberating command on the lead dog of the lead sled. Came out to a +12 Escape Artist check, against what the GM decided would be a DC 25 to escape the harness. He made it, and from there things just sort of...
...snowballed.
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RPG Superstar 2013 Top 16
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During the sled chase, I took out three of the four enemy sleds by casting liberating command on the lead dog of the lead sled. Came out to a +12 Escape Artist check, against what the GM decided would be a DC 25 to escape the harness. He made it, and from there things just sort of...
...snowballed.
That sled chase has to be one of the most fun encounters I've ever played. I used create pit and murderous command (targeting one of the sled dogs) to great effect.
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You only need to worry if they can spam Overland Flight, which has an hour per level duration. Regular Fly spells only have minute per level.
At the upper tier, you start to run into all sorts of stuff that can break mods, like Teleport, Dimension Door, various predictive spells, AoE Resists, save-or-suck spells, etc.
Venture-Captain, California—San Francisco Bay Area North & East
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None of my 4 PC's had handle animal. One at least had a positive charisma modifier. They managed to make do on the way up with luck and lots of crashing.
They took down the remorhaz in the first round with a slumber hex. Then the 2 with fly and catfall boots jumped off the 1000' cliff while the one with good charisma sledded down with the gunslinger. I allowed the two with flight to eventually catch up, but they were on the wrong side of the mountain so I left them out until after the aspis fight.
For the fight, they managed to bola the musher on the first round, and trip him. I gave the passenger a ref save to catch the prone musher before he fell off the back of the sled. Later the cleric managed to hold person the musher, so it made driving interesting for a few rounds.
I liked the chase mechanics, but they required a lot of making stuff up as I went.
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Then the 2 with fly and catfall boots jumped off the 1000' cliff while the one with good charisma sledded down with the gunslinger.
This is the best answer for avoiding the chase that I've seen. Need to go down a mountain chased by Aspis Consortium? Nah bro, I'll just take 20 damage.
I know my sorcerer was stuck driving due to the fact that he had the highest charisma in the party and turned out to be a better driver than the druid was.
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Getting ready to run this tomorrow, and the biggest obstacle (as a GM) is that I'm not certain how long it should take to get up the Dragon in the first place. The dog sleds move at an average of 5 mph, and based on the map it seems like the distance up the Dragon is about 9 miles. So, should it be 2 hours up and 2 hours down, assuming the PCs stick to average speeds?
If so, how many Handle Animal checks are we talking in each direction? I'm thinking just a couple on the way up so they get a feel for the way it works, and then more as needed to run the combats on the way down. I remember when I played it a while back thinking there were way too many checks on the way up and it stopped being fun long before we got to the top of the mountain.
How has everyone else run this part of it?
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I'm running this on Saturday, and I've got a few questions on how things work.
Sled Dog Millionaire: Oh, where to begin here. I love the visual behind this encounter, but I have no earthly idea how the chase is actually supposed to work. I mean, the mod describes the Aspis at speed increment 8, and assumes that the PCs are either at 5 or slower, but what does that mean exactly? There's not an indication on how far back the Aspis are - do they immediately catch up? How do we decide what the PCs' lead is? Any thoughts?
Burn, Baby, Burn!: That darn remorhaz. I think I understand how Heat works, but let me just step through my logic - Fighter Alice attacks the beast, and fails her Fort save. The remorhaz deals 8d6 points of fire damage to her +1 greatsword. Since this is energy damage, it's halved (11). This damage is then against the weapon's hardness (normally 10, but +2 due to the +1 enchantment). Any damage left over (in this case, none) is applied to her greatsword (which normally has 10hp, but again, the +1 enchantment grants an additional +10hp). Am I missing anything?
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I'm running this on Saturday, and I've got a few questions on how things work.
Sled Dog Millionaire: Oh, where to begin here. I love the visual behind this encounter, but I have no earthly idea how the chase is actually supposed to work. I mean, the mod describes the Aspis at speed increment 8, and assumes that the PCs are either at 5 or slower, but what does that mean exactly? There's not an indication on how far back the Aspis are - do they immediately catch up? How do we decide what the PCs' lead is? Any thoughts?
Burn, Baby, Burn!: That darn remorhaz. I think I understand how Heat works, but let me just step through my logic - Fighter Alice attacks the beast, and fails her Fort save. The remorhaz deals 8d6 points of fire damage to her +1 greatsword. [dice=For Example]8d6 Since this is energy damage, it's halved (11). This damage is then against the weapon's hardness (normally 10, but +2 due to the +1 enchantment). Any damage left over (in this case, none) is applied to her greatsword (which normally has 10hp, but again, the +1 enchantment grants an additional +10hp). Am I missing anything?
I don't know the answer to the sled questions, but that looks correct with regards to heat. I think when I played, the GM forgot to halve the energy damage, so my poor Cold Iron Temple Sword didn't stand a chance. My fists didn't do much better when I had to resort to them.
The bigger question about Heat that I'm still not clear on is whether or not it's supposed to apply when the Remorhaz hits a PC as well as when the PCs hit the Remorhaz. The answer to that question can take the encounter from difficult to TPK fast. The description of the ability says:
An enraged remorhaz generates heat so intense that anything touching its body takes 8d6 points of fire damage. Creatures striking a remorhaz with natural attacks or unarmed strikes are subject to this damage, but creatures striking with melee weapons are not. The heat can melt or burn weapons; any weapon that strikes a remorhaz is allowed a DC 19 Fortitude save to avoid taking damage. The save DC is Constitution-based.
On the one hand, if it bites a PC, the PC is clearly touching its body. On the other hand, it clearly spells out in the next sentence that creatures striking the Remorhaz are subject to the damage, and it says nothing about when it strikes them. Heat is also not included in the Bite attack line, though Grab is.
When I played, it was run as Heat applying to the Bite, and two PCs died. My Monk nearly took himself out punching it trying to save them (a situation the Heat damage should clearly apply to).
EDIT: It may be that Heat was only applied after the Grab, but since the Grab was basically a given against anyone it hit, it didn't really matter.
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Venture-Captain, California—Sacramento
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Yeah, we played this a couple days ago.
Resist energy melee snipers* pretty well trivialized the encounter, though the traditional stand and fight fighter did rather... poorly.
Resist energy is going on my list of "must have" resources. It meant that the worm had to deal 40+ damage on 8d6 to damage most weapons, 60 to damage adamantine.
The Dog Chase was interesting, lots of ranged spells and such got used to send the aspis out of control.
*Gnome invulnerable rager with air elemental for mobility and a scout build doing hit and tun tactics.
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I'm pretty sure that the remorhaz does not get to add the Heat damage to its bite attack - otherwise, it would list the damage as "3d6+9 plus 8d6 fire plus grab". If it's able to swallow its prey, though, it can deal the Heat damage in addition to 2d6+9 damage. This does make them rather deadly still - on two successful rounds of strikes, a remorhaz can deal 13d6+18 damage, for roughly 64 points of damage. The party's barbarian may survive two rounds of punishment, but won't survive a third. Again, resist energy would go a long way to mitigating the remorhaz's main trick.
And I've done a bit of thinking on the dogsled chase. Repurposing the speeds to become positions means I can tell exactly where the sleds are in the chase relative to each other. Basically, there will be 11 positions, for speeds of 0-10. The faster you're going, the further you are in the lead. Rather than 8, the Aspis start at 2, and the PCs will default to 5, though their Perception checks at the start of the encounter will determine whether or not their speed has been reduced. After that, the rules Tim wrote for maneuvering the dogsleds will come into play. I'm tentatively calling each zone roughly 100', just so ranged combatants can have something to do during the fight, and reward anyone who bought Far Shot. I'm also not sure how often I want the scenery to change - again, I'll cross that boat when I get there, but it probably shouldn't be any faster than once every other round. Once every three might also be an option.
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It's only CR 7. CR 7 monsters should not be able to throw around the dpr that the other interpretation grants them. I don't consider be more aggressive ruling a valid ruling using this kind of logic. Of course, I don't consider griefing players to be valid GM behavior, either. Even the ones with animal companions.
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It's only CR 7. CR 7 monsters should not be able to throw around the dpr that the other interpretation grants them.
I don't find the monster at all interesting without that DPR. Every time I've played it, it has gone down like a chump by the second round. That immediate threat is what makes it an exciting encounter rather than another cakewalk.
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And I support the ability being used as a balancing factor, perhaps noted in the scaling sidebar. Use it only on swallow whole and defensively for an easier challenge, and on grapple checks for a harder challenge.
My 5th level Bard, with 33 hit points, would have supported this ruling, rather than going from full health to dead dead in one hit.
There comes a point where "challenge" is not equal to "one hit the PCs", which is what allowing the heat on the grapple does.Not all PCs are 7th level Barbarians with 20 Cons, Toughness, FCB to hit points, and all PP spend on retraining hit points...
Then again, there is plenty of stuff in this scenario that allows table variation, and /or unfun experiences.
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I am so late to this party. Finally ran this scenario tonight. It does not hold up well. Most of this is simply the change in expected power levels combined with the unpredictable nature of regional meta. When written, this was probably a much more interesting and challenging scenario. The party was very well-balanced and, as typical for the MN lodge, we had a table of 6 (not the greatest situation here) - Occultist 9, Bard 8, UC Rogue 8, APG Summoner 9, Fighter 8, and Alchemist 6. I'll be describing these in spoilers just for space's sake.
I handed out the dogsledding rules, the party determined who could best handle mushing, and they were off to the races. The ascent was thoroughly described, though the fact that there are only 2 events on the way up was somewhat disengaging for the players. They eagerly seized on what was available, though, and figured out some things about the taer and Aspis presence with The Bodies.
The avalanche was one of the things I was most concerned about. Having read the rules thoroughly on this in advance, I was relatively certain that this would either be a non-issue or a TPK, as determined solely by the result of the d6 roll. I got a 2, it was a non-issue. 1 character was buried, but the Occultist could use telekinesis to remove 250 lbs. of snow per round, while the eidolon could clear 1400 lbs. per minute without tools. I'm glad it was relatively forgiving in that a 2 or higher trivialized the encounter since a 1 is almost always going to be a TPK. The only PC in the party who could make the strength check to escape being buried was the fighter. The eidolon was flying the entire time, so even then it wouldn't have been a TPK for this group - it would only take about 5-10 minutes to clear everyone with just the eidolon working.
The monstrosity arrives a few minutes after PCs start digging...
A few minutes, eh? Well, the ice was destroyed in approximately 18 seconds by the fighter + eidolon. Mind you, this fighter is not a two-hander, but a sword and board defender. They find the bones, pop them in a haversack (still under the 1 minute mark by my count) and start heading back to the sleds, objective in hand. I decided that their "few minutes" were up at this point and had the remorhaz appear by the eggs. The party opted to go to the sleds and leave since the remorhaz can't keep up with the dogs. A couple Handle Animal checks later and the secondary success condition is essentially automatic - the waystation was never on fire because the taer were never enraged into attacking.
What bothers me here is that this was assumed to be a chase. Frankly, even a 3.5 core-only party could resolve this within a round without leaving the sleds within 1-2 rounds of "combat." Some suggestions from the party for resolution:
- Cast sleep on the dogs.
- Fireball the dogs.
- Shoot the dogs.
- JUST TARGET THE DOGS.
Frankly, this entire encounter could be resolved with level 1 spells at range as long as you can make the violent motion concentration check. It sounded cool, it was interesting to prep, but the reality of it was simply not a letdown.
As mentioned above, the PCs suspected Krysher was up to no good and summarily executed him in the kitchen before leaving. I cut to Osprey and started writing chronicles at this point because there was not a whole lot of anything to work with here.
First, the gold is INCREDIBLY low. Like, a full tier behind. I actually pulled chronicles from 3-7 scenarios in advance to compare and it's within 100 gold on a significant number of them. I was amazed that there was not a revised chronicle for this scenario and, if I didn't have the option to do a level 1 version of the chronicle, I simply wouldn't have taken GM credit for the scenario. The players were baffled by the max gold on this scenario.
Second, nearly all of the wealth is predicated on two encounters: the remorhaz and the Aspis ambush. I took a liberal reading of the conditions ("defeat" being that they successfully completed the remorhaz encounter via bypass, just like traps, and the PCs certainly "survived the ambush"). Were I to take a more strict reading of the scenario, the players could have gotten full prestige, but walked out with only 333 gold for the chronicle. That is ridiculous. I felt bad enough with the 3531 gold in the 8-9 subtier, but to reduce it further? No. Absolutely not. This is woefully out of line with other scenarios in the tier. Even the Alchemist, who pulled in out-of-subtier gold, barely got rewarded for his efforts. Seriously, I apologized to the players for how lame this chronicle was.
The players, in the end, thanked me for doing the best I could with a dated scenario. It had so much promise, but just a few issues caused the whole plot train to derail. Thinking through it, though, I want to stress that literally everything that happened could have been duplicated with a 3.5 core party. Whether that's a failing of the play environment of the time or a lack of imagination on the part of the author, I'm not sure, but this felt like a 3-7 scenario with 5-9 written on it by accident given that it certainly did not predict the types of resources available to 8th and 9th level characters. Additionally, because of the unique subsystem presented for dogsledding and use of relatively obscure pieces of the ruleset (altitude, avalanches, and cave-ins, for example), the preparation was significantly more difficult than other 8-9 scenarios I've run.
In short, don't run this for players who know how to play the game. If you do run it, it's ideal to do so in Core and with 4 players. Frankly, the design felt as though it failed to plan for the existence of casters. This severely undermined the fun of everyone involved.
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Venture-Captain, Netherlands
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A lesser ressurection today.
In a poetic twist of the universe, a single player died to the Remorahz. This player has been playing since AD&D. And knew what a Remorahz was. He was emediately scared s@~*less.
He got better, of course, as he had more then enough cash for a raise. But he loved fighting against one of the real classic monsters :)
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We are running 2 tables of this tomorrow night... and I see many of my concerns about the scenario have been aired, if not resolved, over the years. Oh well, it still looks like fun... if in serious need of tinkering/on he fly adaptation... and challenging, considering most of the folks in our area do not get into the heavy optimization.
I guess we shall see how it goes!
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My local pfs group ran this today. I havent been playing tabletop for very long, and i started with pathfinder. i was running my lvl 6 kensai, we had a party of 4, ranging between 6th and 8th level. i was not prepared for the remorhaz.
I just stared for a few seconds after finding out what it could do (yay knowledge checks...). A kensai's weapon is the core of their class, without it they lose so much, ac, spell effectiveness, they really fall apart. And i knew that none of us could handle fighting this thing for more than a couple rounds. i finally decided to go at it, spellstriking with shocking grasp. wiffed it on a 2.
But it seemed my dice had plans. next round i did Spell combat, struck it first with the persisting charge from last round. crit, confirmed. weapon barely makes its save. time for next attack, shocking grasp, spellstrike. Nat 20. i rolled to confirm. Nat 20. and again, weapon barely made its check. i had never had the dice rally for me like this. all told i did something like 130 damage, more than enough to drop it in its tracks before it could kill the bard it had its fangs in.
I can see alot of people were disappointed in this session. and yeah, we also nuked it in 2 rounds. but ill be a monkeys uncle if it wasnt the most fun id had with this game in a long time. the fight, the sled chase, even the ridiculous 10 rounds of sickened every time we encounter one of those dang beast men. we made it through the whole thing, intact, and had a great time. and i got probley the most epic kill off in my short career so far.
