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A thought occured to me while at work daydreaming about pathfinder. What happens if the party decides to ally themselves with Krune? The scenario as written has the chance for them to talk to him, and some of them probably will be all runed up, and might come around to his way of thinking. Do you report them as dead or something? I know it's unlikley, but I do like to be prepared.
There's a faction mission explicitly to prevent that. I mean obviously, you might not have characters of that faction, but clearly the writer thought it might come up.
I'd report them as having failed the mission of course but... hmm... where does the character go from there?
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A thought occured to me while at work daydreaming about pathfinder. What happens if the party decides to ally themselves with Krune? The scenario as written has the chance for them to talk to him, and some of them probably will be all runed up, and might come around to his way of thinking. Do you report them as dead or something? I know it's unlikley, but I do like to be prepared.There's a faction mission explicitly to prevent that. I mean obviously, you might not have characters of that faction, but clearly the writer thought it might come up.
I'd report them as having failed the mission of course but... hmm... where does the character go from there?
I mean, clearly all the faction missions are some variety of "Make sure Krune is dead," but not everyone does their faction missions. Hell, a player I know plays a goblin who explicitly almost never does his missions because he can't read. That's besides the point though. In this hypothetical, the players just disregard it and let Krune win, essentially. I know in the post game it says if they die, the Decemverate step in to stop Krune or whatever, but what if they ally themselves with him?
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I mean, clearly all the faction missions are some variety of "Make sure Krune is dead," but not everyone does their faction missions. Hell, a player I know plays a goblin who explicitly almost never does his missions because he can't read. That's besides the point though. In this hypothetical, the players just disregard it and let Krune win, essentially. I know in the post game it says if they die, the Decemverate step in to stop Krune or whatever, but what if they ally themselves with him?A thought occured to me while at work daydreaming about pathfinder. What happens if the party decides to ally themselves with Krune? The scenario as written has the chance for them to talk to him, and some of them probably will be all runed up, and might come around to his way of thinking. Do you report them as dead or something? I know it's unlikley, but I do like to be prepared.There's a faction mission explicitly to prevent that. I mean obviously, you might not have characters of that faction, but clearly the writer thought it might come up.
I'd report them as having failed the mission of course but... hmm... where does the character go from there?
No, I mean one of the faction missions is "don't let anyone negotiate with Krune".
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No, I mean one of the faction missions is "don't let anyone negotiate with Krune".
Which one is that? The summary at the end of the scenario just has "Make sure Krune dies by the end of the scenario." for most of them. Three of the others are "look at Krune's stuff." which you cant' do till he's dead, and the last one is branding Kurshu.
Edit: Also, I guess technically faction missions don't exist any more?
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No, I mean one of the faction missions is "don't let anyone negotiate with Krune".Which one is that? The summary at the end of the scenario just has "Make sure Krune dies by the end of the scenario." for most of them. Three of the others are "look at Krune's stuff." which you cant' do till he's dead, and the last one is branding Kurshu.
Edit: Also, I guess technically faction missions don't exist any more?
That's how I interpreted the Andoran mission, which states: "make sure none offer him mercy".
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A lot of people ask me why my first fight is so hard. Here is my quick list of where things go bad for players at my table.
1) no buffs before teleporting in.
2) it's dark in there, spending time casting light, and missing the perception as Kurshu slips into full cover, she casts surged cloak of dreams DC 26. This is usually where her game ender begins.
3) any other buff spell equates to her casting displacement
4) initiative starts as she makes her first attack if no one has wandered onto her yet.
5) potions of fly dispels are only a roll of a 5 to dispel assuming you don't just fall asleep when you get to me.
6) animal companions are usually one hit from vegetable. Eliminate them when convenient, and prudent.
7) teleport over archers. Their turn starts, usually a sleeping archer and an easy finish the next turn or two.
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She is not, she is stealthing while there is no light source around. Just roll stealth, and if they make perception checks first round (like if the PCs have darkvision). But remember to let the PCs take the perception check, do not tell them to, as it has to be their incentive to the awareness of the room. If they setup by starting to cast light, she gets her displacement SLA off. She doesn't get this if something happens and she get lit up from being inside a daylight or something. If the PCs take 20 to look around, then you have free motion to do whatever you want. A simple tactic would be toss a Stinking Cloud on the party and strike them with a Phase Shift.
There is also the option of if you are playing with a low tier party of 5-6 to supercharge your Limited Wish->Circle of Death. DC 26 Fort or death, no Raise Dead. Ressurrection. But then again, you may or may not want to be "That DM".
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One of these days there should be a scenario that involves body recovery and nothing else. Some other Pathfinders just payed the 5 PP to be recovered.Body retrieval is still a go. Heck, the Pathfinder Society will go retrieve a body from another plane / planet. They will have ways of getting the PCs. If I remember correctly the society had other tokens, maybe they can use those to retrieve the bodies.Ok, thank you for your opinions. I still have two questions:
- The first one was what I asked a bit before: If there is a TPK, with the storyline attached to the scenario, is it still even a possibility that they can get a rescue team to retrieve the bodies? Or is it that they have to at least reach the gem to get transported back with the medals?
Whenever there is a dead Pathfinder in any scenario, my group like to take back the body, joking "I expect a kickback from the 5 PP they spent for this!"
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She is not, she is stealthing while there is no light source around. Just roll stealth, and if they make perception checks first round (like if the PCs have darkvision). But remember to let the PCs take the perception check, do not tell them to, as it has to be their incentive to the awareness of the room. If they setup by starting to cast light, she gets her displacement SLA off. She doesn't get this if something happens and she get lit up from being inside a daylight or something. If the PCs take 20 to look around, then you have free motion to do whatever you want. A simple tactic would be toss a Stinking Cloud on the party and strike them with a Phase Shift.
There is also the option of if you are playing with a low tier party of 5-6 to supercharge your Limited Wish->Circle of Death. DC 26 Fort or death, no Raise Dead. Ressurrection. But then again, you may or may not want to be "That DM".
The Ziggurat had a backside, which she can easily slip down behind when the PC's enter. That's total cover.
Just because it shows up on the map in 2D doesn't mean, as a GM, you can't use 3D environmental effects.
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I choose cloak of dreams because I personally don't like save or die spells.
I took your suggestion and used this.
I had 2 of the 5 players at my table asleep (including one of their familiars--Riddywhipple), and the elf who wasn't affected (immunity to sleep effects) was slowly getting constricted. The problem came in the form of the Gunslinger who was shooting her while she was killing everyone else.
On the flip side, I had a TPK in the final encounter, mainly because they had no way to turn off the Life Runes. Krune was down to 9 hit points when I took down the Fighter. RiddyWhipple was the last character standing (flying?) and I took him out with the Spear.
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I choose cloak of dreams because I personally don't like save or die spells.I took your suggestion and used this.
I had 2 of the 5 players at my table asleep (including one of their familiars--Riddywhipple), and the elf who wasn't affected (immunity to sleep effects) was slowly getting constricted. The problem came in the form of the Gunslinger who was shooting her while she was killing everyone else.
On the flip side, I had a TPK in the final encounter, mainly because they had no way to turn off the Life Runes. Krune was down to 9 hit points when I took down the Fighter. RiddyWhipple was the last character standing (flying?) and I took him out with the Spear.
Riddywhipple is actually immune to sleep. Also, our party's rogue came up with a devilishly clever way to take out the life runes...
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I choose cloak of dreams because I personally don't like save or die spells.I took your suggestion and used this.
I had 2 of the 5 players at my table asleep (including one of their familiars--Riddywhipple), and the elf who wasn't affected (immunity to sleep effects) was slowly getting constricted. The problem came in the form of the Gunslinger who was shooting her while she was killing everyone else.
On the flip side, I had a TPK in the final encounter, mainly because they had no way to turn off the Life Runes. Krune was down to 9 hit points when I took down the Fighter. RiddyWhipple was the last character standing (flying?) and I took him out with the Spear.
Andrew, was the gunslinger under the effects of a freedom of movement? If not, next time have the spear grapple, and then pin him?
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The spear disarmed him. Not sure how the spear would be able to grapple him.
The spear also threw the fighter into the maximized and empowered cloudkill.
The big nasty, was using his 8th level pearl of power to recall horrid wilting (which I took pity on the group and didn't maximize and empower it) which straight up killed 2 characters and seriously hurt the fighter.
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The spear disarmed him. Not sure how the spear would be able to grapple him.
The spear also threw the fighter into the maximized and empowered cloudkill.
The big nasty, was using his 8th level pearl of power to recall horrid wilting (which I took pity on the group and didn't maximize and empower it) which straight up killed 2 characters and seriously hurt the fighter.
Telekinesis at will for the spear equates to grapple from the spear. At least that's where I figure he's coming from.
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Telekinesis at will for the spear equates to grapple from the spear. At least that's where I figure he's coming from.The spear disarmed him. Not sure how the spear would be able to grapple him.
The spear also threw the fighter into the maximized and empowered cloudkill.
The big nasty, was using his 8th level pearl of power to recall horrid wilting (which I took pity on the group and didn't maximize and empower it) which straight up killed 2 characters and seriously hurt the fighter.
Ah, right... Krune TPK'd them. A large part of that was the spear actually attacking and doing damage. If I'd negated the Spear's ability to fly around and attack folks who needed attacking, then Krune would have likely died, even if the Gunslinger never got to shoot.
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One thing I was unclear on, was how to reveal things about the Runes.
I took the liberal approach and not only told the players the "clue", but also told them how to solve each rune as they ran across it.
But it seems that the knowledge or linguistic checks should only really give you the clue, and the 90+ minutes you may, or may not need is going to be largely absorbed by trying to figure out the clues.
And those that need a specific amount of damage in one hit or one round could really screw them over if they only know that "Tearing and flames should work." Or whatever it actually said for the clue.
What's people's thoughts on that?
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Cameron: Correct.
When we played it our GM gave us the mechanics of it. When you are throwing out Knowledge Arcana checks in the 30's you expect more than just a hint. You expect to be able to study the spell effect and know it's ins and outs if you make the check. I could see going either way but I could see players getting frustrated at the GM if all they got was a hint.
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If they beat the check by 10 or more they get the specific mechanics A successful check give them the hint (first line of the Rune description). A fail nothing.
My group disabled all the runes, but they had to work it to take advantage of their Knowledge checks. Only hit them once with the curse. But they used up some resources for sure.
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After reading all these posts, it feels like I softballed the scenario when I ran it at GenCon. As it was, I nearly TPKed them with the herald and Krune. However, some of my issues that I had against them with the Krune encounter were
1) They had too much prep time, they were able to use their enlarged persons with reach to sunder his coffin with their adamantine weapons and thus start the encounter on their terms. And with my crap initiative roll, they had him dropped over half his health on fervored full attacks before he could even blink.
2) Communal Protection from Evil shuts down his summons (granted he lost most of his summons due to rune breaking), but am I wrong in that Prot Evil makes his summons pretty much worthless against them?
3) How do you deal with sundering Wall of Stone? He blinked back into his coffin room after pulling them outside. Closed the hole up with wall of stone. But with their adamantine, they were able to sunder holes within 2 rounds. 4 inches of stone is only like 60 hitpoints (and hardness ignored with adamantine).
4) None of the party had any of the "buffs" for him to mess with :(
And a follow up regarding runes though. For the Rune of Alacrity, it states (The following can disable the rune: being entangled by a magical or alchemical effect for 7 rounds). It does not say from one source as some of the others do. The party bombed it with tanglefoot bags for enough rounds to disable it. I think it was sufficient, does anyone agree/disagree? Since tanglefoot bags last 2d4 rounds, I told them that I would roll secretly how long they lasted and not tell. They just bombed it every other round to be sure. I did find it amusing to see how many buffs they could put on a character to ensure he hit the "x dmg in a single hit" though. The war domain cleric said it is the first time he has used his domain power (give level/2 dmg to melee attacks for 1 round). On the Rune of Armor, I thought I was going to get to stack a few curses on the trickster as he kept failing the disable device check, but after the first failed save he kept making all the subsequent saves.
I am going to try to run this back home now with my regular group. I will learn from my mistakes and we'll see how they fare. Especially since I know several of them have the runelord's "special blessings" (mwahaha).
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2) Communal Protection from Evil shuts down his summons (granted he lost most of his summons due to rune breaking), but am I wrong in that Prot Evil makes his summons pretty much worthless against them?
He's not obliged to summon evil things - he can in theory summon a squad of Hound Archons to keep the party busy. If he does summon evil creatures (devils would seem in character) they get their spell resistance against Protection from Evil.
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Our GM went straight to an Atral Deva. Plane shift at-will is freaking scary, especially when only the lvl 11 cleric will actually be able to get back to the material plane.I believe a summoned creature cannot use any SLA of the conjuration(teleportation) subschool.
True - I forgot about that. Our GM never used it on us so maybe he remembered. Still a nasty summons to deal with.
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I thought that applied to summoned monsters. Called monsters (Planar Ally) are not summoned no?Our GM went straight to an Atral Deva. Plane shift at-will is freaking scary, especially when only the lvl 11 cleric will actually be able to get back to the material plane.I believe a summoned creature cannot use any SLA of the conjuration(teleportation) subschool.True - I forgot about that. Our GM never used it on us so maybe he remembered. Still a nasty summons to deal with.
Agreed. I assumed the deva in question was a summon monster IX since calling spells would have taken Krune too long to pull off.
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I'm trying to determine what would be the best way to "accurately" keep track of time. Since the players have the 90 minute clock after killing Kurshu, that's a little more than 10 minutes to travel to, study to figure out and deal with each rune. Granted, the life runes can go much quicker if they figure it out, but still. How much time does it take to "study" the runes to do their skill checks to get their hints and such? Especially if they don't speak Thassilonian and have to "translate" whatever writing might be on the rune to determine what it might do, or do magical study to identify it's properties. After I ran this at GenCon, I feel that the party probably would have taken close (if not more) than the 90 minutes which would have had Krune front and center waiting for them (having been informed of their presence by Vandiana).
I saw some people mention about the naga silent imaging a wall to block view to Krune's chamber. I like this idea, but would it cast it in preparation? Or would it cast it during combat? With it starting invisible, at least the PCs could not spellcraft it to see that she is casting silent image versus something like wall of stone. So no saves until they work their way over there to mess with it.
How exactly does Empowered Cloudkill work? At first I assumed that it changed the hit die "tiers" so that 6-9 = save or die, above 9 is just the con damage. However, reading the wording for Empower Spell again, it says Variable Numerical effects. So does this just mean that all that happens is that the con damage is (1d4)*1.5?
Finally (for now), I know that the common rule tends to be that you can "run" from a scenario at any time that you're not in combat. However, with the flavor text put into this scenario, unless you have teleportation magic, the only way out is through the crystal shards in Vandiana's room. If they can't reach there (i.e. they want to run after Kurshu/runes), can they still "quit"? What if they did not look at their refuge tokens or ask about getting home before they came down? Give them a chance to activate a "bad" token (if they try to flee prior to killing Krune)? I felt like my table at GenCon was debating running during the Krune fight but they had not looked at their tokens or asked about returning home.
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There are few details on the runes beyond you must be in Kurshu's room to return.
After having Kurshu smash 2 parties in her room. I took pity on them and allowed one person to take the entire party of willing albeit stupified characters with them.
Alternatively, I've had it suggested to me that each member has to have their token activated for them. Move: grab token, standard: send party member home.
Personally if you get smashed facing Kurshu then I feel sorry for you, and let you take the "easy" route. If you're getting smashed by Krune, you're on your own.
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Question on the Thassilonean Specialist boon, by the way: can a player with that boon retrain an existing Wizard into a Thassilonean Specialist? The boon only explicitly allows players to create a new character with that ability, but now that the retraining rules are open, I've had several players express an interest in adapting existing characters into that archetype.
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Well, that was an unfortunate way to end Tacticon.
Halfling Paladin 9 (Died twice)
Alchemist 9 (Died)
Bard (Archivist) 11 (Died)
Transmuter 11 (Lived)
Cleric 9 (Died)
Nobody had Sihedron Runes on their character (at least, until the transmuter was forced to put one on from the museum in order to open the front door.)
The paladin was lost in the first combat - Plane Shift to the elemental plane of Water. A lucky hold monster + coup de grace (from a riding dog!) killed the guardian. We then made the (incorrect?) decision to recover his body before pressing on - we were unaware of the time limit - and took too long to get back (recovering all these artifacts takes months, but you only have an hour to stop him from waking?)
When the party got back to the sanctuary we proceeded to look at the runes and had the means to disable most of the runes, but the moment we started disabling them a fully powered Krune and company emerged and the CR+9(?) encounter slaughtered all but the transmuter, who teleported with most of the bodies back.
I guess my major gripe would be lack of breathing room in the first few moments; none of the tactics are invalid but the difficulties are so far outside the scope of normal play that it was overwhelming: right into the middle of bad terrain with no chance to pre-buff.
Part of it was bad party tactics/non-optimized for combat. Part of it was a particularly unforgiving and non-descriptive GM.
I will say that power creep seems to be in full effect - I want to maximize ALL of my characters for power after this experience and "cheese out", but that runs counter for the greater season 5 demand for a broad skill set. From a player point of view, it seems impossible to balance.
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Question on the Thassilonean Specialist boon, by the way: can a player with that boon retrain an existing Wizard into a Thassilonean Specialist? The boon only explicitly allows players to create a new character with that ability, but now that the retraining rules are open, I've had several players express an interest in adapting existing characters into that archetype.
I have a different question on this boon, since I was just looking at it, and it does not appear to be a one-time-use boon like thge race boons. It appears that, once you acquire this boon, you could start as many Thassilonian Specialist Wizards as you wanted to.
Is that correct, or am I missing something?
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The party I ran this for had a pretty easy time with Krune to begin with as they disabled all the runes (the party had a wizard with enough knowledge to automatically know exactly how to), and got past the Lashmistress so fast that (combined with a high roll for Krune's resurrection time) they were able to buff up, fully heal and start right next to Krune's resurrection square.
And they had figured out just the right things to do. First thing of all, they beat him in initiative and slapped him with a dimensional anchor that ate his contingency. He was able to teleport away with quickened dimension door, and got away a maximized empowered cloudkill to cover himself, but any later attempts to cast nasty offensive spells were defeated by readied attacks against spellcasting - probably the best defense against lone casters. In the end, his undoing was a readied fireball that fizzled his casting of maximized empowered horrid wilting.
Lessons learned? You know you are up against an incredibly powerful conjurer in this scenario. That enables a lot of preparation (without any real metagaming), which my players did to good effect. Combine that with smart tactics against wizards, and it's not that difficult. The characters were reasonably optimized but mostly not really min-maxed, so I don't see that as necessary.
Of course, it did help that three of these PCs played together already in their very first scenario nearly two years ago, and all six were at 32 XP before this one. Today, I'm going to start running Eyes of the Ten for five of them.
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So what IS the cost for recovering a character that was plane shifted. Kurshu plane shifted the samurai to the Ethereal Plane (so that he could justifiably watch his allies move forward in the dungeon, but he left in a huff).
I would think that a mere 5 PP is too low for that, especially since the Society would not really know to which plane he was sent, nor how to find him there (if he hasn't already come to his end).
Should it just be logged as "dead" and cost a normal body recovery and raise dead?
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I am going to be running this a couple times at a con this up coming weekend and I have some questions.
1. What scenarios are the "Replica Dragon-Tooth Spear", "Rod of Runes", and "Lissala's Caress" from and what do they do? Can one person use the spear or rod if multiple people have it on character sheets?
2. Does Kurshu's feed ability provoke AoOs?
3. Do PCs become cursed from the runes by only physically touching them or does a PC casting a spell become cursed since they are trying to disable it?
4. If a PC is sent to another plane, what all needs to be done for the PC to return. I know they have to pay 5 PP for body recovery, but is the PC dead? Will the PC be able to return to the scenario or are they SOL?
5. The Rune of Control says it protects him from any creature he conjures. It acts as if he has protection from evil/good/neutral/chaos/law. What is the purpose of this?
6. Since there is not actually a spellbook listed, what options does Krune have when he uses his bonded object to cast? Can he cast any spell that is not of his opposed schools or is he limited to the spells listed in his stat block?
7. How does spell turning work with a magus who delivers a spell through a weapon? (If the attack hits, Krune takes weapon dmg and the magus takes spell damage.)
8. Does Globe of Invulnerability move with the caster?
9. Dimension Door states that you cannot take any actions until your next turn. Does that include AoOs, immediate actions, and will the contigency go off, if needed?
EDIT:
10. With the Runelord's Touch ability, if a feat is lost from turning the ioun stone and it is a prerequisite feat (i.e weapon finesse), is other feats (i.e. dervish dance) no longer usable?
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I am going to be running this a couple times at a con this up coming weekend and I have some questions.
1. What scenarios are the "Replica Dragon-Tooth Spear", "Rod of Runes", and "Lissala's Caress" from and what do they do? Can one person use the spear or rod if multiple people have it on character sheets?
7. How does spell turning work with a magus who delivers a spell through a weapon? (If the attack hits, Krune takes weapon dmg and the magus takes spell damage.)
Well, I know these two answers -
1. The Replica Dragon-Tooth Spear and the Rod of Runes are from Race for the Runecarved Key Part 2. Lissala's Caress is from Cultist's Kiss. I have no clue what the first two do, but the third is a whip that sickens the target it hits. I believe everyone who wants a copy who can get one is allowed a copy.7. You have it right. A magus delivering a spell with his weapons is just casting the spell slightly differently. It's still targeting Krune, so it'll still get turned back.
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4. I could not find a definitive answer for this. My VO who was present told the player that it happened to that it would just be a body recovery. I don't quite agree as I would think that the character would find his end by the time the society can find him, but whatever. I didn't send him to a "particularly" nasty place like the neg energy. I had sent him to the Ethereal as torture so that his character could still look on at his party as they eventually met their end.
6. I used the spells on his list (well, would have if they had survived to Krune). I wanted to be able to use Summon Monster VIII and IX because I'm certain he would have them in his spellbook, but without having his spellbook listed I didn't do it.
8. I think Globe of Invulnerability does not move with you due to these lines of text: "An immobile, faintly shimmering magical sphere...You can leave and return to the globe without penalty."
10. From the writeup in the scenario, "Loss of these feats may mean that the PC no longer qualifies for other feats that he has." Through lack of further explanation, I was planning on ruling that his runesense would go through walls as he felt the presence of the runes. And its use depends on how many of the boons people at the table have. If your party is loaded with them, he will definitely corrupt the power that they have stolen from him.