So my group played this encounter yesterday. Due to some players being unable to attend the party consisted of:-
5th Cavalier (and his horse)
5th Wizard (specializing in crowd control)
4th Ninja
4th NPC Barbarian "Kelda Oxgutter".
After triggering the conjured lions and the Ninja losing most of his blood the party reach Asvig's home.
The Ninja and Wizard make for the roof while the Cavalier and Barbarian moving to opposite doors at the east end of the building.
The combat started with the Wizard dropping Stinking Cloud (the most powerful spell ever!) down the main chimney catching over half of the Asvig's warriors there who proceeded to roll poorly on their saves.
The Cavalier and Barbarian charged in and started carving up. Of Asvig's warriors who could act normally none could hit the Cavalier's high AC and the Barbarian kicked three of them back into the Stinking Cloud using Knockback.
The Wizard used Colour Spray then Grease to take more of them out of the fight and Mirror Image to protect himself, and the Ninja devastated with double sneak attacks.
Finally Asvig and his wife joined the fray but his attacks were mainly ineffectual and though she managed to catch the Ninja with Burning Gaze she was killed by his clever use of Vanishing Trick.
So all in all the Ninja took the most damage, the Barbarian copped two hits and everyone else was unharmed.
From the Obituaries thread it seems no one has died during this encounter. Just curious how this went for everyone else?
FDM
Not positive, but I believe my players' levels at the time were:
(Invulnerable Rager) Barbarian 5
Cleric/Sorcerer 3/2
(Vanilla) Summoner 5
(Master Summoner) Summoner 6
My players triggered the lions, but killed them before getting hurt, then snuck in through pantry/kitchen. Then they filled the main hall with summoned earth elementals to do their dirty work and tore through most of the main soldiers.
Once Asvig and his wife came in they had a little trouble, and the summoner got knocked unconscious. Since his eidolon went poof as well from that, the fight against Asvig and his remaining men was tough-ish, but the barbarian took him down.
Asvig's wife did very little. If I remember correctly everyone made every saving throw she dished out, and she was taken down by round after round of the master summoner's acidic crossbow bolts.
We steam-rolled this encounter with our horribly unbalanced fighter party when our GM ran it (Invulnerable Rager Barbarian, Two-Weapon Warrior Fighter, Qinggong Monk, and Archer Fighter). I don't even remember Asvig doing much damage at all. Maybe we would have had a few more problems had we triggered the leopard trap, but we discovered the bypass rune and brought Ameiko with us for her to use spellcraft to reconstruct it.
The barbarian really carried the fight, though, as he could guaranteed drop one of Asvig's warriors every round, and the monk and my TW fighter were more than capable of fighting Asvig and his wife. The wife actually died very quickly, mostly due to persistent pressure from my fighter, while the monk distracted Asvig (the most she did was use Evil Eye on me, and I made the save against it).
All-in-all, it seems like a pretty easy encounter, given that the bulk of the enemies are rather drunk and the real challenge of the whole thing seems to be killing/incapacitating everyone before the second group of reveler (all stone-cold sober) arrives...
I think for our group it was a rather fun, but fairly simple encounter. It did help that the wizard had communal darkvision, and they used a scroll to cast darkvision, so not only were the fighters drunk, but couldn't see either. Death from the shadows (and a lightning bolt too)!
My group was level 4 when they hit this encounter(most of them leveled to 5 with the exp from the encounter I believe). The Barbarian, Kensai, and Sorcerer stormed the back door near the kitchen and caused some chokepoints in the doorways and met some resistance from a large portion of the guards and Helva.
Meanwhile Asvig took the rest of his warriors out the other side of the house but was delayed a few rounds by a giant wasp and some summoned wolves from our Bard and Sorcerer doing their summoning routine. Outside of the Kensai getting feared by Helva, the fight went off without much trouble(Helva was able to escape after exhausting her spells though with a few guards doing a final stand to allow her to escape).
Asvig was captured along with a few other guards who surrendered after Asvig was subdued. Not a terrible amount of fuss on our side either.
Interesting. My players are getting hammered.
Gunslinger
Alchemist
Magus
Oracle
Zen Archer Monk
They had terrible luck with the animal posts, dropping the gunslinger to negative hitpoints. They split up into two groups and attacked the long house. Right now, the oracle is asleep from the witch's slumber, th gunslinger is at -8hp on the back of a mount probably ready to run off into the night (he has not stablized), the magus is down, the alchemist got hit with a Cause Fear spell, and it's just the zen archer in the middle of the main hall, with Asvig and his wife about to turn their attention on him. It's not going well for the party and I'm trying to think up contingency plans.
Being captured by the badguys is always a reasonable contingency plan (well, almost always). Then the adventure focus shifts from "storm the castle!" to "escape the dungeon!"
I'd play kind of loose with the guard routines and DCs on the locks and other stuff, get your poker face on, and listen to what the PCs come up with. Whatever plan they think is likely to work, let it work! (well, with appropriate challenge of course). Could make for a more memorable adventure than successfully storming the house would!
Here's a thought, building on what CaptainJandor said:
A note about this sequence is that you may need to decrease the challenge of the Rimerunner's Guild (remove a couple of guards) to make it Level 4 appropriate, and increase the challenge of the boat to make it level 5 appropriate (I'd just add a 5th ninja).
It looks a little messy, but it could also be really exciting- a kind of "out of the frying pan and into the fire"-type deal.
Thanks, those are helpful thoughts.
LOL I loved this encounter we went to town bought a scroll of cloud kill and rolled it trough all his outside guards and troughout the entire building oh good times an atonements for everyone.
LOL I loved this encounter we went to town bought a scroll of cloud kill and rolled it trough all his outside guards and troughout the entire building oh good times an atonements for everyone.
So your party murdered a whole bunch of innocent bystanders? That bodes well for Minkai.
Yeah we murder the framers, the party geusts, and dancing girls like i said atonements all around except my cn cleric of pharasma whom got a strict scoulding in his sleep by her handmadien.
Yeah we murder the framers, the party geusts, and dancing girls like i said atonements all around except my cn cleric of pharasma whom got a strict scoulding in his sleep by her handmadien.
Your GM is kind & generous. I hope you remembered him on March 4th.
Well the rest of the party vary good alinments worshippers of desna had to get attonments before they could be healed divinly again and at that lvl an attonement isn't cheap, But yeah as long as its not all the time he will affordus a bad decision or ill concieved plan.
Just got through the fight at the farm with my second group. They were as follows:
LG Dwarven Fighter 4
CN Halfling Sorcerer 4
N Elven Alchemist/Fighter 3/1
NE Tiefling Witch 4
The whole scenario went a bit differently to how the AP itself assumes players will handle it (my players were shocked when I admitted that the AP assumes the only possible course of action is storming the farm, as they thought their method was much smarter, and it was). The PCs approached during the day the first time (after meeting both Fynn and Uksahkka), fighting the lion/leopards and attracting the attention of some warriors who went out to ask who they were and what they were doing there.
The PCs expressed a desire to meet with Asvig, and though the warriors initially refused, saying their master was busy preparing for a celebration later that evening. However, through a series of persuasions, unlikely diplomacy rolls, and a circumstance bonus involving an offer of ale they were able to get in and see Asvig. From there however the three other than the dwarf tipped their hand too early, and did it in an inadvertently insulting way too. Realizing they were enemies, Asvig denied knowledge of Ulf's whereabouts and sent them away.
The dwarf believed they'd been kicked out for the rudeness of the others, but was unsure if his offer of alcohol in exchange for a party invitation was still on the table. He decided to buy a keg, bring it to the party in apology, hoping to get in to converse with Asvig without the others around to offend the man. The other three believed Asvig was hiding something and so spiked the ale their dwarven ally had bought (though he didn't know this) with quite a few potions of sleep.
The dwarf arrived at the party and was lucky enough to be let in, as Asvig was, at the time, in the bedroom "spending time" with his wife, and thus nobody there knew the dwarf was an enemy. The keg was opened up, and quite a few warriors passed out, as did Asvig himself when one warrior thought to pass some mugs around the screen into his bedroom. Of course once Asvig went down Helva sensed something was amiss and stormed out of the bedroom shouting and demanding to know who had thought it would be funny to put sleeping potion in the ale. The dwarf however had already passed out from the drink as well, not realizing it had been spiked
By that point in the evening, the other three had snuck up to the house, figuring out the rune to bypass the posts this time, and barged in upon hearing Helva shout and realizing their ruse had been discovered. Helva hadn't thought to wake Asvig himself before storming into the main room, so the battle was essentially the three PCs against 4 warriors (1 of whom was drunk), and the witch, with a 4-minute time limit before the sleep wore off and the other nearly one-dozen warriors would begin to wake up. The two from the pantry entered the room during the fight, and one of the sleeping ones was woken up, but the rest remained in magical sleep throughout a very fun, and fast-paced battle.
Helva on her own, or even supported by a few warriors was not truly a threat to any of the PCs (even when trying to kill them), but she was a consistently-hitting annoyance. The players still considered her a threat from the fact that she was spreading slumber and misfortune hexes, pox pustules, and cause fear spell effects successfully every turn even though I could tell she was unlikely to actually manage to harm them very badly.
(Interestingly, this fight handled entirely differently than my previous group's one, in which Helva consistently failed to land each spell and hex she cast.)
And that was the fight at Asvig's farm. Beyond here I've got some spoilers from points in the adventure after this encounter.
Once they'd taken down Helva and the warriors that had saved against sleep the fight was over. They then tied up the sleeping warriors, slapped one awake, and questioned him about Ulf and Suishen. They "correctly" interpreted that Ulf was locked within Snorri Stone Eye's burial ship ("correctly" in this case being correctly misinterpreting it in the way the AP wants them too) and that they'd probably have to look to the Rimerunners guild for Suishen (though at the moment they think Asvig sold it to them to turn a profit, and don't realize that it was in fact them who hired him). The halfling slit Asvig's throat while the others were distracted with interrogating the warrior. Then they looted everything they could find and fled out the back, telling the thralls to run for it, and leaving the 8 surviving warriors bound to await the second crowd of party-goers that would arrive in 20-ish minutes.
Getting things rolling in Kalsgard was tough for this group, but now that this has been accomplished they're almost certain to be able to follow the main plot from here. They've also built up enough NP to trigger the Anonymous Threat and Ransacked Room events, the first of which I'll do at the start of the next session, which will likely throw paranoia back on them, as they believe they've just killed the main villain of Kalsgard (they think Asvig was filling that role, and are thusfar unaware of the greater powers at work in the city). The second event's timing will depend on what they do. They might try to tackle the guildhall first, as I gave them a 4-day window to prepare for the matter of the funeral ship (otherwise I thought the scenario seemed rather rushed). If they go to the guildhall in that time, their room will be ransacked while they're there, if not it'll happen while they go to the burial ship.
Then that event will push their NP high enough to trigger Mistaken Identity, and that one will likely push them high enough to hit Fatal Warning. I plan to kill Kelda for that since she's no longer very crucial to the adventure, and none of the PCs built up a very strong relationship with her, but she's still the most familiar face they know in Kalsgard aside from those on the AP's "do not kill these people off-camera" list (Also I forgot to give them her scabbard of vigour earlier, and this gives me an excuse to bring her in again and give them that).
The events beyond that are perhaps a bit too far into the future to plan for, but the guildhall will likely push their NP into that range. They've been rather unsubtle about investigation, so I anticipate them being likely to face Omoyani's Deadly Kiss before this is all over, and unlike my previous group being ill-equipped to handle her high speed from being a monk, and her invisibility. That'll be a truly deadly, and recurring series of strikes on them that forces them to think creatively. I hope.
I play a Wizard (Illusionist) in a group that ran this. We're a pretty big group. Besides me, we've got: A Soulknife, a Paladin (gun variant), a Cavalier, a Rogue, a Witch, a Druid, and a Barbarian. We're running in a fairly crowded game shop with a lot of computers/card gamers around, so I may be fuzzy on some details.
We came across the runes, and knew what they were, but even after casting detect magic I wasn't given any info on bypassing them, so I tried to burn the runes off of the post with an Acid Orb spell. This activated the trap, and we had to fight the lions. We tore them apart pretty quickly.
We moved on to the farm, and had the Rogue investigate the area first to see if Ameiko, the guide dude, or the sword were around. The rogue came up empty, but we knew where everyone was at that point. So we tried to get in, and the guys inside were mostly drunk. A fight broke out, and for the first few rounds the melee in the party were doing subdual damage since they were fighting almost-helpless drunks.
I started out my turn by casting Enlarge Person on the Barbarian, and he made a beeline for Asvig and his wife. We'd been getting screwed by those damn crows for like two weeks worth of game sessions, so as soon as we saw her and that crow, she was kill-on-sight. My second turn consisted of casting Summon Swarm on her and Asvig, and with the entire party focus-firing she dropped pretty fast, and Asvig wasn't much longer for the world. The GM tried to have the crow fly away, but like half of the party all said "HELL NO" and let loose with a flurry of arrows and magic missile.
We did not kill Asvig, as we wanted to question him, but he died due to