Any TPKs in Lords of Rust? *Possible Spoilers*


Iron Gods


Or just other anecdotes of whimsy and/or danger


The encounter with Birdfood and his orcs almost resulted in TPK for my group, in fact i had to use a deus ex machina to save them, don't get me wrong they had earned a deus ex machina in the 1st book but still it was needed, i didn't even played him at 100%, i followed his tactics as best as i could and i didn't even use his human bane arrows.

Maybe this encounter won't be such a problem for a party that has a little more diversity than mine (which has 3 humans and a half elf).


leo1925 wrote:

The encounter with Birdfood and his orcs almost resulted in TPK for my group, in fact i had to use a deus ex machina to save them, don't get me wrong they had earned a deus ex machina in the 1st book but still it was needed, i didn't even played him at 100%, i followed his tactics as best as i could and i didn't even use his human bane arrows.

Maybe this encounter won't be such a problem for a party that has a little more diversity than mine (which has 3 humans and a half elf).

What did you do?

Liberty's Edge

One of my players nearly died at Birdfood's fight, he full attacked and rapid shot the half-elf character and did exactly the number of damage needed to kill her, but she had enough Hero Points to save herself.

Kulgara nearly caused a TPK twice. On one occasion she one shot three party members in two rounds. She's quite the beast. They did try to break down the door to the processor and ended up being attacked by the orcs, dark stalker, ettin, and Kulgara while they were all confined to the tiny hallway. Thy did break the door down but then had to fight the four observer robots on top of everything else.

Silver Crusade

Kot the Protector wrote:
They did try to break down the door to the processor and ended up being attacked by the orcs, dark stalker, ettin, and Kulgara while they were all confined to the tiny hallway.

"Got Rouge?"

A well balanced party is the key to success :)


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Ayanzo wrote:
Kot the Protector wrote:
They did try to break down the door to the processor and ended up being attacked by the orcs, dark stalker, ettin, and Kulgara while they were all confined to the tiny hallway.

"Got Rouge?"

A well balanced party is the key to success :)

How will make-up help them survive the dungeon? :P


Had a TPK tonight. I was running the adventure through the last few sections of the lords of rust compound. Hellion unleashed all of its AOE attacks as they advanced through the compound. Kulgara gave the party a bit of trouble and one member had already died so after defeating her they decided to go back and rest and recoup their supplies. This also meant Hellion got all of it's spells back and was at full power when the players came back.

They cleared out Zagmander and the remaining dark stalkers/ettin and started heading towards Hellion. I had the observer robots waiting for them by the entrance, and after they took some damage they started retreating farther down the path towards where Hellion was waiting. The glyph traps popped doing some damage, but what really put them in was Hellion entering and managing to hit 3 of the 5 party members with confusion. Only one of them rolled to act normally in the five rounds that they continued to live. The remaining two had difficulty getting past his hardness. With Hellion's dual initiative he just chipped away at the confused party members and watched them slice into each other or themselves.


Reaver_Reader wrote:

Had a TPK tonight. I was running the adventure through the last few sections of the lords of rust compound. Hellion unleashed all of its AOE attacks as they advanced through the compound. Kulgara gave the party a bit of trouble and one member had already died so after defeating her they decided to go back and rest and recoup their supplies. This also meant Hellion got all of it's spells back and was at full power when the players came back.

They cleared out Zagmander and the remaining dark stalkers/ettin and started heading towards Hellion. I had the observer robots waiting for them by the entrance, and after they took some damage they started retreating farther down the path towards where Hellion was waiting. The glyph traps popped doing some damage, but what really put them in was Hellion entering and managing to hit 3 of the 5 party members with confusion. Only one of them rolled to act normally in the five rounds that they continued to live. The remaining two had difficulty getting past his hardness. With Hellion's dual initiative he just chipped away at the confused party members and watched them slice into each other or themselves.

Oh man. Total horror show. Dual initiative sounds way rough.

RPG Superstar 2015 Top 8

Reaver_Reader wrote:

Had a TPK tonight. I was running the adventure through the last few sections of the lords of rust compound. Hellion unleashed all of its AOE attacks as they advanced through the compound. Kulgara gave the party a bit of trouble and one member had already died so after defeating her they decided to go back and rest and recoup their supplies. This also meant Hellion got all of it's spells back and was at full power when the players came back.

They cleared out Zagmander and the remaining dark stalkers/ettin and started heading towards Hellion. I had the observer robots waiting for them by the entrance, and after they took some damage they started retreating farther down the path towards where Hellion was waiting. The glyph traps popped doing some damage, but what really put them in was Hellion entering and managing to hit 3 of the 5 party members with confusion. Only one of them rolled to act normally in the five rounds that they continued to live. The remaining two had difficulty getting past his hardness. With Hellion's dual initiative he just chipped away at the confused party members and watched them slice into each other or themselves.

Note that if you attack a confused creature, it will automatically attack you every turn (no roll required). So, once Hellion attacked one of the confused party members, that party member would attack Hellion, at least until some other confused party member in turn attacked them.


My party just got to Birdfood. He nearly murdered one of my PCs in one round and almost wiped another. Why the heck does his bow do 2d6? That's not the Human Bane Arrows is it?


Hobgoblin Shogun wrote:
My party just got to Birdfood. He nearly murdered one of my PCs in one round and almost wiped another. Why the heck does his bow do 2d6? That's not the Human Bane Arrows is it?

Before Combat Birdfood casts gravity bow.

He killed one of my guys and they used later the scroll of resurrection on him, but yeah his damage is quite nice, but my party played it quite stupidly.

The Exchange

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leo1925 wrote:

The encounter with Birdfood and his orcs almost resulted in TPK for my group, in fact i had to use a deus ex machina to save them, don't get me wrong they had earned a deus ex machina in the 1st book but still it was needed, i didn't even played him at 100%, i followed his tactics as best as i could and i didn't even use his human bane arrows.

Maybe this encounter won't be such a problem for a party that has a little more diversity than mine (which has 3 humans and a half elf).

Well to be fair, if there's any AP where a Deus Ex Machina is reasonable, an AP called Iron Gods about machines achieving divinity is probably it.


Kulgara and my Half-Orc Crossblooded Bloodrager (Undead and Destined) went toe to toe. She literally nearly tore him a new one. Almost died if not for some of his abilities. Her chainsaw is absolutely nasty. Totally horrific weapon. I loved it!

Anyway, he managed to take her alive and when it came time to take Leadership, guess who he took as his cohort?


Kulgara a cohort? really? even with Hellion she was just waiting for her opening to overthrow him. she honestly never struck me as the cohort type:)


Hey, the Technic League is made up of utterly brutal politics. Why not our group?


LoL I just found it surprising, the alpha dog she is and all:)

Silver Crusade

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Orcs have weird mating rituals.


This is truth.


Hobgoblin Shogun wrote:
leo1925 wrote:

The encounter with Birdfood and his orcs almost resulted in TPK for my group, in fact i had to use a deus ex machina to save them, don't get me wrong they had earned a deus ex machina in the 1st book but still it was needed, i didn't even played him at 100%, i followed his tactics as best as i could and i didn't even use his human bane arrows.

Maybe this encounter won't be such a problem for a party that has a little more diversity than mine (which has 3 humans and a half elf).

What did you do?

First of all this happened.

The thing is that Sanvil didn't die during the battle and after the resurrection of the gunslinger the party interrogated Sanvil for information, after they were done they spend a good two hours (real time) debating whether to kill or not and what to do with him in general, the crux of the thing is that the gunslinger (the one who was killed by Sanvil) was the one who really wanted Sanvil to be spared, in the end they did spare him.
Then i had a Cayhound (who the PC dubbed as woof) meet the gunslinger on a couple of occasions but because neither the character nor the player is very knowledgable she (the player) didn't understand what big dog was.
Now when the party was faced with a TPK i had the cayhound dimension door in the midst of the battle and engage Birdfood and pretty much defeat him and his hawks.
Thus the players had the good they had done to Sanvil repayed.


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Apparently Poltergeists + Concussion Grenades thrown about is a recipe for a dead PC and a near TPK.

Much pain, such carnage.


Birdfood is certainly a tough fight for the PCs. Generally when I was using his full attack I was having him split his shots between the human and half-orc in the party. I believe he knocked out the halfling monk and the half-orc barbarian, and forced the human brawler to hide in a corner. One of the PCs finally threw a gas grenade they had picked up off of hatchet hands into the room he was in and barred the door. He somehow failed his saving throw, and the party converged on him showing no pity whatsoever. Also, one of my PCs is an Android disguised as human, and he wasted 1 human bane arrow on him before figuring it out. As a GM I was quite happy with how it went down since it certainly drained their resources, and I was a bit worried about balance with them breezing through some earlier encounters. If there are any human wizards or rogues in the party though, I can see it ending really badly, since a single shot of 4d6+9 (I'm probably off by a bit) can certainly kill a level 4 PC with a d6 hit die on a bad day... and that's assuming he doesn't manage to crit.

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DebugAMP wrote:
If there are any human wizards or rogues in the party though, I can see it ending really badly, since a single shot of 4d6+9 (I'm probably off by a bit) can certainly kill a level 4 PC with a d6 hit die on a bad day... and that's assuming he doesn't manage to crit.

Yes, but attacking Birdfood's Will Save is likely the best way to take him down. And that is something a capable wizard sould be able to do.


On the first time through Hellion's domain, most of the party died to 2 Dark Stalkers and a few other threats. They had no answer for Deeper Darkness, so they ran away after losing a man and an animal companion.

They recruited a few friends and went back to try again. This time they prepared Daylight and made a scroll of Daylight as a backup (oye).

On the second attempt through, the druid cast Daylight to dispel the Darkness. Later, Daylight was dispelled by a second Deeper Darkness. A caster tried to cast Daylight again from the scroll... but he didn't work out that he can't read a scroll in the dark. Derp. Meanwhile, Kulgara was locked in the next room (because of "reasons") using the chainsaw to try and cut her way out while cursing in the supernatural darkness.

This lead to an insane fight and half the party died. One party member died to a fireball cast by an ally trying to flush the dark stalkers out blindly.

At the end of the fight Kulgara broke through, and killed herself with her own plasma grenade while the last surviving party member (not counting the bard who ran away) hunkered down behind a pillar at the last second. Though the party was essentially wiped out, they had succeeded in wiping out all of the Lords of Rust save Hellion himself.

The session ended with the two escaping Hellion's lair and fleeing back to the surface. Because of out-of-the-book story reasons, the Ratfolk have taken over Scrapwall at this point and kicked the remaining members out of their new territory (renamed Ratwall). The aging Dwarven bard decided to retire to his hills and stick with storytelling instead of adventuring. The other survivor, the fireballing sorceress, is now making a solitary march of shame back to Torch as I try and figure out where the story goes from here.


It's good to see other people had better luck running the Birdfood fight, in my session he failed his save against oneiric horror so he wound up shooting the air while the party wrecked his birds and orc bodyguards.

I wound up goofing the fight against Hellion's chassis (I accidentally thought his dual initiative was strictly if you were running a mythic campaign) so I had him gather up the few enemies the PC's missed (Tatterface's group and the chuul) in a desperate last stand to protect the central processor. The group had a hard time dealing with Tatterface taking potshots from her deeper darkness all the while the chuul squeezed around the back and started to rip apart the moonstruck summoner. The summoner up and died but the PC's managed to bring him back using the trauma pack plus that Redtooth decided to part ways with.

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