| Tinalles |
Fluff
I ran the adventure in the playtest document as written, with the following fluff changes:
- The tree was once sacred to Curchanus, and had been fondly looked over by Desna as a memento of her lost mentor. This explains the lack of a druid looking out for it and the general lack of indication of its sacredness.
- Erastil stepped in to appease Desna, and the price she demanded was that the villagers (or their champions) remove the Coiled Beast.
- The Coiled Beast itself became sacred to Lamashtu instead of Gozreh.
Mechanically, everything worked identically to the presentation in the document.
The Party
The party consisted of the following, including the mythic tiers gained after accepting Erastil's gift:
Genrad
- male dwarf monk 6
- drunken master archetype (APG)
Ichabod Leirann
- male elf wizard 6
- abjurer, prohibited schools necromancy and conjuration
Felani
- female half-elf rogue 6
- no archetypes, but fights with an Elven Curve Blade
Clairette Belle-Cheveaux
- female half-elf bard 6
- songhealer archetype (UM)
- archer
- GM PC added at the last minute because one player dropped out
To avoid metagaming with the GM PC, I re-used stats for a character I built for a different one-shot almost 2 years ago. The rest of this account is from memory, so I hope I don't forget anything important.
Encounter 1, A Village Attacked
I drew out a village square and set out 8 villagers in addition to the party. 1 villager was killed outright, 3 more taken to negatives.
The mythic wolf died fairly fast at the hands of the monk, as did two of the other wolves. The last wolf failed a reflex save against a lightning bolt.
One snake took a critical hit from a bow without dying, only to have its last few hit points crushed by the little boy's frantic, frail grandmother, who rolled a 19 on her attempt to smack it with her cane and then rolled max damage. The other snake suffered a sneak attack while it was grappling a local strumpet, only to actually die at the hands of the wizard (he shot it with a light crossbow, iirc).
The monk was the focus of the wolves for most of the 3-4 rounds of the combat, so he got fairly beaten up, and the wizard took one hit from a snake. Otherwise not too challenging.
The mythic wolf really needed some DR or something.
Encounter 2, Ascension
Went smoothly. When I told them that all the food and drink in the village spoiled, the monk asked if that applied to stuff inside his Handy Haversack. I said yes, and the monk wept has he poured out a HUNDRED bottles of spoiled beer. Everyone else sang "99 Bottles of Beer in the Sack".
On a whim, I told them they'd all learned Celestial as a bonus language. Ichabod protested, "But I already know Celestial!" So I told him that he now spoke it beautifully, and would receive a +10 circumstance bonus on bluff checks to convince people that he's from Heaven, or that he's an aasimar.
Notes on mythic builds:
Genrad
- Champion 3
- Mythic Quick Draw for purposes of drinking booze fast
- Fleet Charge
- Feat of Acrobatics path ability
I don't have this character sheet, and the player took the time to work out his build in advance, so I don't know the full details of what all he took.
Ichabod
- Guardian 3
- Mythic Feat 1: Dual Path (Archmage)
- Mythic Feat 2: Dual Focus (+3 uses)
- Mythic Flaw: Aversion to Necromancy
- Guardian's Call: Absorb Blow
- Archmage Arcana: Arcana Surge
- Path Ability: Epic DR (Guardian)
- Path Ability: Snatch Spell (Archmage)
- Path Ability: Enduring Armor (Archmage)
My own skepticism about Enduring Armor was covered in the thread I started on that topic. My player however appreciated it because Conjuration is a prohibited school for his PC. He opted to leave a first-level spell slot open for purposes of Enduring Armor, effectively making simply a permanent Mage Armor without sacrificing any higher level spell slots or using 2 slots for the effect.
He was sad to discover that none of the spells he knew had mythic variants.
Felani
- Trickster 3
- Mythic Feat 1: Mythic Toughness
- Mythic Feat 2: Mythic Weapon Finesse
- Mythic Flaw: Insanity
- Trickster Attack: Surprise Strike
- Path Ability 1: Defensive Move
- Path Ability 2: Path Dabbling (Champion, Stanch Wounds)
- Path Ability 3: Path Dabbling (Guardian, Epic DR)
Player was confused about Surprise Strike; he thought the "within 30 feet" part entitled him to move as a swift action as well as making an attack. That was pretty clearly not RAI, since that's what Fleet Charge does. He opted to retain Surprise Strike as an easy way of getting sneak attacks.
Clairette
- Archmage 3
- Mythic Feat 1: Dual Path (Champion)
- Mythic Feat 2: Mythic Spells
- Mythic Flaw: Insanity
- Archmage Arcana: Wild Arcana
- Champion Strike: Distant Barrage
- Path Ability 1: To the Death
- Path Ability 2: Extra Mythic Power
- Path Ability 3: Component Power
- Mythic Spell (feat): Cure Light Wounds
- Mythic Spell (feat): Cure Moderate Wounds
- Mythic Spell (feat): Sleep
- Mythic Spell (path): Invisibility
We were unclear on whether Component Power affected a component selected at the time the ability was chosen, or whether it allows you to choose which component you want to ignore each time you cast a spell. The second is much more flexible.
Either way, Component Power could be used to cast in full plate with no spell failure by just ignoring the somatic component of all your spells. Handy for EKs, and fairly cheap at the cost of just one path ability. Compare to Armor Master, which you must take twice if you want to cast in mithral full plate, or thrice for casting in mundane full plate.
Encounter 3, Grove
Ichabod tried to use Diplomacy to soothe the treant into not fighting the party. Fortunately for the sake of the playtest, he rolled terribly on his Diplomacy check.
The PCs, newly juiced up with Amazing Initiative, went first. They forgot about the ability to take extra turns per round (!) and we just played as normal mostly.
The bears did very little damage before getting taken out. One failed a will save against Deep Slumber, cast by Ichabod. The other failed a will save against Mythic Sleep, cast by Clairette. Both got coup-de-graced by Felani.
Ichabod's failed attempt at Diplomacy only made the treant angry, and so he started out by chucking a boulder at him, which hit for 29 damage. Ichabod put a mythic power use into Absorb Blow, and as a third-tier guardian he therefore ignored all the damage.
We were unclear on what to do with damage less than 10 for purposes of calculating Absorb Blow's effect. The first 20 points of damage obviously triggered the increase in DR/epic and resistances. But the ability specifies that you get additional DR and resistances "for every 10 points of damage prevented by this ability". Is that a running total? Should we keep track of points less than 10 and add them to damage prevented by the ability in subsequent turns for purposes of calculating when the DR goes up?
Also, the DR gained from Absorbing Blow persists for a while. Does damage prevented by that DR count as "prevented by this ability"? For example, suppose a 10th tier Guardian is fighting a dragon and a kobold:
Step 1: Dragon does exactly 100 damage to the Guardian;
Step 2: Guardian uses Absorb Blow to negate it, gains DR 10/epic;
Step 3: Kobold does exactly 10 damage to the Guardian, which is prevented by the DR he gained in step 2.
At that point, does the Guardian's DR go up to 11?
And how about energy resistances? If a Guardian gains acid resistance from Absorb Blow, do points of acid damage prevented by that resistance count as "damage prevented by this ability" and increase the DR and resistances further?
This was an awesome moment, by the way. Ichabod is fairly frail -- 34 hp at level 6. Ordinarily taking 29 damage would be a HUGE wound (85% of his hit points in one blow). But with Absorb Blow, he just shrugged it off. I described it as Ichabod casually back-handing a boulder as large as he was out of mid-air to plow a deep furrow in the forest loam.
So if the intent of this ability is to make a Guardian well-nigh indestructible, mission accomplished!
The treant took a while to chip down, but he eventually perished at the hands (literally) of the monk, whose Amulet of Mighty Fists (flaming) added quite a bit of damage. The player remarked on how nice it was for a monk to have more things to do with a swift action.
Clairette was mostly doing healer duty, but her Enhanced Healing ability from the Songhealer archetype gave me a moment of pause. It lets her use, say, a Wand of Cure Moderate Wounds at her own caster level (6) instead of the minimum needed to cast the spell (3). I swiftly came to the conclusion that the spell "recorded" in the wand would not be affected by her new knowledge of Mythic Cure Moderate Wounds, and would be only a normal one.
But ... if she had Craft Wand, could she craft wands of Mythic Cure spells? If so, would other characters be able to use them? How would that affect the price? And the cost?
The price of a normal wand of cure light wounds is 750 gp (crafting one costs 375 gp). A wand of mythic cure light wounds would do twice the healing of a regular one. Would the price be doubled? How about the cost? I think the cost needs to scale with the price. If the price doubles to 1,500, but the cost holds steady at 375, then a PC could sell at 750 (50% of the market price) and still make a 100% profit. And since it only takes 1 day to make wand of CLW, you could do it quite a lot until the market couldn't take any more wands of Mythic CLW.
But I digress.
For rewards, they all got Ambrosia, plus one item each:
- For Genrad, Cayden's Cup
- For Ichabod, the Dagger of a Thousand Bites
- For Felani, the Cloak of the Hunt
- For Clairette, the Cornucopia of Plenty
Encounter 4, the Bridge over the Howling Chasm
Genrad: jumped it with an acrobatics check of 33 despite rolling terribly. The +20 bonus from Feat of Acrobatics made it easy. I had a lightning bolt try for him half-way across, but he easily passed the reflex save, and his Evasion meant that he effectively dodged a spell effect aimed at him by a god. Very awesome.
He also tied a rope to himself first and secured it to a rock on the other end to provide a hand-rail for the others.
Ichabod: flew over the chasm, triggering Absorb Blow to shrug off most of the lightning despite failing his reflex save.
Clairette: insisted on walking across the bridge the hard way and failed an Acrobatics check badly half-way across. She would have fallen if she hadn't been holding the rope Genrad strung up. Ichabod flew back out, shrugging off another lightning bolt in the process, and carried her to the other side despite her insistence that she was frightened of flying and wanted to walk. In a fit of pique, she thereafter refused to heal him because he didn't put her back on the bridge. Her mythic flaw really should have been hubris instead of insanity.
Felani: walked across the bridge, did not fall, failed her reflex save against the lightning and just took the damage. Clairette healed her up.
At this point Clairette announced that they were going to have a picnic, and poured a hero's feast out of the cornucopia. It seemed epic to have a picnic on a barren mound surrounded by the bones of dozens of creatures, fully aware of the danger and disregarding it.
Encounter 5, the Hydra
Ichabod and Clairette were the only members of the party with Knowledge (Nature) and both rolled very low. They knew nothing about a hydra's vulnerabilities, head removal, or anything useful.
Felani had spent a mythic power use activating the Cloak of the Hunt, and so was invisible. She slipped around behind the hydra -- no AoO because she was invisible -- spent a standard action to cast Shield using her Major Magic rogue talent. Then she spent a mythic power use to make a Surprise Strike on the hydra.
The attack missed completely on a roll of 2, but she was still invisible thanks to the cloak's Greater Invisibility properties, so the hydra didn't notice her. This caused a problem later when the hydra tried to take a five-foot step backwards, and I had no idea how to handle it. Clearly the hydra would provoke an AoO for moving through her square, but would she get to move out of the way? Get to move with it? Have to make an Acrobatics check or similar? I just didn't know how to handle a creature moving through the space of another creature of whose presence it was unaware. In the end I decided Felani could move back five feet, but wouldn't get her AoO unless she made an Acrobatics check with a DC of the hydra's CMD.
Genrad took quite a beating from the hydra, dropping as low as 1 hit point. Clairette did what she could to keep him on his feet, snapping off Distant Barrage attacks as well.
Things got interesting when Ichabod cast Deep Slumber on the hydra, using Arcane Surge to make it roll twice on its save, which it failed. They wanted to coup-de-grace it, but how do you do that to a Huge creature with seven heads?
Then Ichabod pulled out his Dagger of a Thousand Bites and pointed out that:
1) A coup-de-grace is an attack which is an automatic critical hit;
2) A sunder attempt is an attack;
3) A dagger is a slashing weapon;
4) The Dagger of a Thousand Bites can hit any number of targets as long as it doesn't miss.
Since the hydra was helpless, there was no way he could miss. So he declared his intent to cut off all seven heads at one blow with a thrown dagger. That sounded MYTHIC, so we tried it. He got six of them in one go.
... and THEN I remembered that it has DR 5/epic, which negated all six successful sunder attempts because I'd forgotten to account for it, and left them with the hydra very much awake and pissed off.
Under those circumstances, I wasn't sure whether to have the hydra make a fort save to avoid death as it would in a usual coup-de-grace attempt. We got into a paralysis-by-analysis fugue, until finally it got very late and we decided to just kill the body and not worry about the heads, which took only 2 more rounds.
It's probably for the best anyway, since none of them knew they had to cauterize the neck stumps, and their only source of fire damage was the monk's flaming fists anyway. If they'd succeeded in severing all the heads they would shortly have had a very angry 14-headed hydra to deal with.
Going into this I was worried about Mythic Combat Reflexes, but it never came up. It got no AoO against Felani due to invisibility, and even if she'd been visible her Defensive Move ability made her immune. It got no AoO against Genrad because in round 1 he drank a potion of Enlarge Person, which gave him the same reach as the hydra and meant he never provoked for passing through its threatened area. Clairette shot it from far away, and Ichabod took to the air. It did get an AoO for a sunder attempt against one of its heads (at one point after the abortive Dagger of a Thousand Bites part), but I'm pretty sure that was its only AoO.
Arcane Surge and Dual Path
At one point, a question regarding Dual Path arose. Ichabod was a Dual Path Guardian/Archmage, with Guardian as his first path, and Archmage added via feat. What is his Archmage tier? For example, Arcane Surge lets you roll twice against spell resistance with a bonus equal to your Archmage tier. If you're dual path, and archmage is your seconday, does that mean the bonus is +0? Or would you get +3? Or would it vary according to what tier you were when you took the Dual Path feat?
The End
Whew.
I hope this is helpful.