Actually, just had a thought: Do you have any way to post the images you rendered for one of the last four sessions? (The full renderings, not the ones you had to strip down so that other people's computers could handle them.)
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I'll admit I heavily borrowed from Inspectre's narrations of his own campaign! They work amazingly (especially the establishing of the Edge of Anarchy) and provided my players with a much better sense of 'belonging', along with me being able to better obscure how linear the adventure path is, deep down.
The things I, ahem, borrowed, which are awesome, if I say so myself, are:
Ileossa is actually a good person, corrupted by the Crown of Fangs, the loss of her true love and her step-mother, Andaisin.
Almost the entire Trial of Trinia arc.
The Blood Veil being a product of Andaisin trying to destroy the city after Ileossa one-upped her, with the Queen having none to do with it.
The Hellknights implementation to the players.
So far, it reads wonderfully. The rest of the campaign is riddled with my own ideas and concepts, obviously, but I admit once again that binge-reading through this thread has helped me be a better storyteller for my players!
UnarcaneElection - It was planned to have the real Queen Domina interact (and possess) her younger, healthy blood clone during the Book Four intro. I may still write that at some point. *sigh*
Sadly, the owlbear/manticore arse-biting was a little tamer than I had wanted, as the party never actually got to fight the revamped encounter with them in it.
Yeah, the gate was probably the hardest hitter, although I was *really* looking forward to those dweomercats leaping on Cid's face. :( As for Vaz'em opening up the gate, eh - I figured he was a close enough blood relative to count as a descendant, and it gave a nice "WTF!!?" foreshadowing moment to the "I am your father" bomb that Glorio dropped about five minutes later.
Maybe she will, but probably not? Then again, they were simply indifferent to the slaughter at the inn - they didn't actually perpetuate it the way Hazmarduk delighted in doing (he's a seriously bad dude, as the party continued to learn throughout the manor.)
Sevejar - That's really great to hear, Sevejar! I'm very pleased to know that reading about my off-the-rails remake of CotC had some useful ideas for you. Makes me feel like I'm giving something back to the community that inspired me to run this AP in the first place. :)
I am curious to hear more though - of how your players reacted to these various details (I assume they're none the wiser that you've tweaked some details of the campaign), if they're aware that Ileosa started as a good person (and how you communicated that to them, when as written they only have the one brief encounter with her for the first several books), and if you had some sort of scumbag lawyer "defending" Trinia that left your players gritting their teeth and wanting to shank him in a dark alley . . . but couldn't because he was Trinia's only legal defense (heheheheh)!
Actually, one of the reasons I begun searching for inspiration in the forum was that one of my players actually had gone through the AP before and so had I, both of us as players, so I had to switch things up so that some things were better presented to begin with and that I could keep him in his toes.
I'll have to make a brief synopsis of my game and hope that no one minds, otherwise the fine details won't make sense. Mind you, I play a homebrew campaign with a custom ruleset based heavily on PF, so I can't post my conversions. In the spirit of better communication, I'll keep the names of the AP intact in my post.
My players are:
Kumei - Ameiko Kaijitsu's LN tiefling magus blackblade uncle, he came to the mainland along with the rest of her bloodline some years ago. Some problems with the wizarding academy and his falling out with his family made him seek out adventure.
Elias and Flow - A TN half-elf druid and his wolf animal companion, respectively, he seeks to destroy undead. He's gone to Korvosa to investigate the weird dreams brought to its citizens.
Arasmes - A NE half-elf rogue/inquisitor of Norgober, a citizen of Korvosa who escaped there after he murdered a noble in his elven homeland.
Aleysia - A NG elf witch, adopted by humans. She tried to find an abducted friend of hers and, after she did, went to Korvosa in search of a way to do the right thing.
Oliver (yeah, I have one of those too) - a blinded style LN human monk who is actually blind, Aleysia's foster brother. After he got blinded by his older biological sorcerer sister, he went after Aleysia in order to protect her.
Because I wanted my players to be a bonded team before the AP began, I forewent Zellara's plot and revenge to Gaedren and instead ran my players through a converted Keep on Shadowfel (4e) adventure. Kumei and Arasmes had been hired to stop the BBG priest of undeath in a small city outside Korvosa, who had kidnapped Aleysia's friend. She and her brother tried to find her friend, while Elias tried to stop the undead that were spawned by him.
After defeating the BBG and finding out that he had kidnapped children and sent them to Korvosa thus connecting him with Gaedren, the players went to the metropolis.
As they approached the city, the palace's bells begun to strike hauntingly seven times - signifying the King's death. Bureaucracy prevented the players from getting inside the city together and, by the time they did, the riots had begun.
In the riots, they went through some random encounters: they prevented some guards from getting lynched and then met Specter (Blackjack) who stopped the Hellknights from executing people, who warned them in his Batman voice to be careful.
They also managed to interrogate one of the rabble-rousers; a member of the Liberators, an organization founded by Gaedren to overthrow the foreign 'B+~&#-Queen'. The plot thickened...
Arasmes asked his mentor, a priest of Norgober for Gaedren's whereabouts and he, in turn, told him that only one person in organized crime knew where he was: Korvosa's King of Spiders. They met up with him and he played for the whereabouts in a game of Knivesies with Oliver, who almost beat him.
They went to the old fishery and started chopping up Gaedren's team in pieces, but found out that their boss was already gone - in his way to the Hellknights prison with loads of alchemist's fire! They also discover the imp-pseudodragon brooch, given to Gaedren by the true instigator of this entire plot; Andaisin.
Our heroes rushed to the jail but it was too late; there was a breach in the courtyard and the Hellknights were fighting for their lives. Something had inspired a frenzy in Gaedren's children and they casually threw their lives away getting skewered by Hellknights, but also preventing them from doing their job and going into the prison.
Queue the heroes, who go inside the mini-dungeon. There, they discover that twin sorcerers (let's call them Darius and Xerxes, shall we? :D ) have opened up a portal and the prisoners escape through there. Gaedren attacks them, clad in full plate and punching like a gorilla. As he got struck for the first time in combat, he howled in rage and shapeshifted to his hybrid werebear form.
Naturally, despite being a dangerous opponent, Gaedren lost after Kumei one-shotted him with a critical shocking grasp to the face. Death claimed him and casting speak with dead revealed that Andaisin was behind everything (although Gaedren could not communicate anything further).
The Hellknight Commander himself took the players to the Queen so they could further support the treasonous plot with the evidence they had collected thus far.
The Queen, a 20 year old beauty in actual distress, spoke as a true noble who honestly felt like she should not be sitting on the throne. After she was informed of Andaisin's treachery, she ordered the Hellknights and the palace guards to go after her, leaving her alone with the Heroes and Sabina... And she promptly forewent all noble postures and broke down, crying. It was revealed then that Andaisin was her foster mother and that she was actually a good person trying to do the right thing. There was not a single person on the table who skipped on rolling a sense motive, the inquisitor used his discern lies ability, perception for disguise checks, anything!
Thus, they gobbed up that Ileossa is a good person (and I actually plan to have the final battle with her to be skip-able if they maintain a good relationship with her) and they actually like her. She promised to help them, showered them with gold and asked them, now that the mourning period of Korvosa was almost gone, to work with her - or rather, her Field Marshall, Kressinda Croft. They agreed.
After a few days, they visited the garrison and met up with Croft, the Hellknight Commander and Vencarlo. They wanted them to do the Thousand Bones plot. A necromancer who had escaped the prison bought the young Shoanti's body, and the heroes were tasked with finding the body and killing the necromancer. Vencarlo would take the heroes to the slums outside the city under the guise of looking for new students; a chance for Vencarlo/Specter to meet up the new Saviors of Korvosa as well as going quietly into the slums without the Necromancer finding out they were coming for him.
A dungeon later (filled with Derro, constructs and undead), the heroes retrieved the body of the Shoanti but, sadly, lost the necromancer after a brief fight with him. A shame, also, since he is the one that develops the Blood Veil alongside the Nosferatu...
Finally, the Trinia arc: we haven't reached that part yet, but I plan to play that part quite similar to yours, to the point of the Queen herself planning the young bard's escape (and further solidifying Ileossa as a good person).
It's been going well, but like you, we are playing with an incredibly slow tempo. We are ~20 sessions in and just now reaching the end of Book 1 (although I also ran them through another dungeon before).
There are more things I have changed, but I don't wanna bog down or hog down the thread. Hope you enjoyed my own rendition!
Sevejar's CoCT:{. . .} Arasmes - A NE half-elf rogue/inquisitor of Norgober, a citizen of Korvosa who escaped there after he murdered a noble in his elven homeland.Aleysia - A NG elf witch, adopted by humans. She tried to find an abducted friend of hers and, after she did, went to Korvosa in search of a way to do the right thing.
{. . .}
NE . . . NG . . . I've got a bad feeling about this . . . .
** spoiler omitted **NE . . . NG . . . I've got a bad feeling about this . . . .
So far it goes like this:
NG Witch: Oh look, a pseudodragon (Majenko), he's so cute, let's save him and take him with us.
NE Rogue: Let's *not*.
NG Witch: Pleaaaaaase?
NE Rogue: Fine, but I'm killing anyone that gets in my way.
NG Witch: Yay!
What's most interesting is that these too partake in the most standalone RP and RP with the other members, but the above interaction is pretty much the only RP they do between them. That and a 'message' spell when in dungeons!
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Sounds about right - so long as the NE guy restricts himself to petty evil rather than Capital Evil (like I murder babies and drink their blood depraved evil) while nonetheless making himself useful enough to the party that they're willing to tolerate his presence, it *can* work.
But it's definitely a tight-rope walk - the DM and evil guy have to work together so that he has a reason to refuse the inevitable "why don't you join us!?" offer from the bad guys, and the evil guy kicks *just* enough kittens to retain his evil alignment (instead of just playing a grumpy psychotic neutral character like most players treat CN) without simultaneously crossing the line.
Done well and with buy-in from everyone (including the good members of the party who are putting up with this a!&*#$&, at best, in their midst), you can play off a lot of tropes with an evil character - someone who eventually finds redemption, the psychotic comic relief character, the affably evil manipulator who wears the mask of a hero at all times (until the time comes for the mask to fall off). Nonetheless . . . it's an unstable situation, and one that can implode suddenly and very destructively if anyone stops playing along. Which is why it's usually not worth the risks and hassle! :-D
Anyway, Sevejar - you've satisfied my curiosity (for the moment), so please do not feel obligated to post any more about your game. But if you want to, please by all means keep us updated on how things play out with your own version. (Hehehehe, I love imaging the look on your players faces when the "feeble old man" Lamm hulked - or should I say were-bear'd ;) - out on them. Only to die immediately to a damn Magus crit, the bane of every low-level villain's existence. Don't worry - if Kumei is anything like Cid, you'll get to stomp his glass-cannon butt into the ground later.)
I just love hearing stories about CotCT, as it's a flexible framework that you can pretty much do whatever you want with it (I read a journal about a Three Musketeers flavored version that was pretty good). And, well, I am curious to see another example of how "Ileosa as a good person" plot ends up playing out beyond my current sample size of 1. (I'm sure Ileosa having a breakdown got the one player who'd been through it with you before to raise his eyebrows and lead the cry of "b*+*$&#*, I'm using Sense Motive!")
Nice using a conversion of Keep of the Shadowfel as a different beginning - it's not a bad intro module.
Anyway, it’s been too long since I’ve posted another session from my own game, so here you go! Enjoy!
So with the ballroom successfully cleared out, the party moved on to the east, approaching the library. The library also doubled as a magical item creation lab (you’ll see why in a minute), and Glorio was hoping to recover a wand of Hide from Undead (DM-Fiat allowed it to hide anyone the Wand was used on to be hidden from Hazmarduk, allowing them to move about the manor a little more safely. Of course, he could still track the party by sensing which doors were recently opened, allowing me to maintain the growing threat of his increasing interference in the following fights).
As with the previous doors, the library was sealed shut with the doors under an Arcane Lock, but Glorio fixed that problem rather easily with a ring from his new chime of opening. Inside were several rows of shelves packed with books, as well as several alchemy benches. As the party entered the room, Glorio went towards the benches while instructing the party to find some specific books (one was a magical Manual of War, which was disguised with a Bookmark of Deception, and another had a bunch of money tucked in its hollowed out pages). A heavily leather bound tome with a decoration of a human face on the cover flew up into the air at Glorio’s approach, greeting him. Several other books flew off of the shelves to welcome the group to the library, and informed Glorio that the wand he had commissioned them to construct was finished – long ago in fact – where had he been all this time?
Before Glorio could start smoothly talking his way past the library’s animated book guardians (homebrewed monsters – basically animated object wizards of varying levels and named after the four levels of alchemy – black, white, yellow, red), Hazmarduk spoke up. He ordered the talking books to destroy Glorio, for he had betrayed them all. Since Hazmarduk was the one who actually created them, he was still their boss and so they dutifully started pummeling the party with spells. Meanwhile, Hazmarduk interfered in this battle by telekinetically whipping books off the shelves and around the room, creating a swirling maelstrom of paper and leather that battered anyone in the room (basically like a room-sized swarm – anyone inside the Library took a couple d6 a round – and it really added up after a couple rounds!)
Library Battle Theme – The Dark Colossus Destroys All (And Nier was the original genesis for the idea of book wizards, so it seemed appropriate to use a song from that game.)
I wasn’t really expecting much from these guys – although their form was obviously non-standard, they were basically just a Level 3 Necromaner, a Level 5 Transmuter, a Level 7 Evoker, and a Level 9 Conjurer. But they surprised me by whopping the party’s collective ass! Guess that’s a lesson never to underestimate the benefits of flying (making it hard for my melee beatdown focused party), swarm damage, and having a *lot* of spells to throw around in any given round (4 spells a round, although it was quickly cut down to 3 spells after the party swarmed poor Nera, who had been the book on the bench that greeted the party, and thus was at ground-level for a melee curbstomping). The party also quickly realized that it was a better idea to grab what they wanted from the library and get out of the swirling maelstrom of books that was starting to hurt – a lot – so Rholand and Vaz’em spent a number of actions searching the stacks of books still on the shelves for the ones Glorio directed them to find.
They eventually found all the books they wanted, while managing to cut down two more of the book wizards, leaving just the conjurer up and fighting by the time they got out of there. Some other amusing highlights of the fight.
Vaz’em climbing up on top of the bookshelves and leaping from one row to the next, chasing after the floating animate tomes so he could claw them to death as nature dictated, damnit!
Cid fireballing several of the tomes, only to be severely disappointed when the books didn’t burn well, leading to Hazmarduk taunting him about what kind of wizard *doesn’t* fireproof his library (they all had a bunch of Protect Fire points from alchemical treatments, although they did take 50% more fire damage, so they would have burned eventually if Cid had kept fireballing them).
Poor Cid also nearly died from all the damage, so he retreated into the hallway outside, only to get temporarily locked out of the fight after Hazmarduk slammed the doors shut and Arcane Locked them again, cackling all the while (Glorio just used another Chime to knock the doors back open on his next action).
A summoned Lantern Archon followed Cid out into the hallway, leading him to use a Shocking Grasp to obliterate it – too bad they’re immune to electricity! (Cue more bemused laughter from Hazmarduk). It didn’t survive the falcata critical damage though, which was a lucky break for Cid as on its next action the Evoker was going to use a spell to cause the lantern archon to explode, dealing a hefty amount of damage to anyone in the area (i.e. Cid, which might have been enough to kill him on a max damage roll at that point).
Leaving the conjuror book alive, the party retreated from the library, and the tome chose not to follow (it was starting to run low on spells and the hallways had low ceilings, meaning it would have been forced into melee in short order). Still, the party had taken a hefty beating from that fight, which is exactly what these fights were intended to do (drain off party resources). The damage all got fixed up in short order thanks to wands, but those wouldn’t last forever and who knows how long the party would end up trapped in this place, so there was at least some tension.
That tension faded a good bit with the encounter down the hall - the trophy room – but it seemed like a reasonable act at the time. So the party kicks in the door (or rather Glorio blasts it open with another Chime) and see three displays lined up around the room with statues of adventurers (dying horribly) fighting stuffed animals – a massive dire tiger, a sea kraken, and a massive fire snake. The hunters dying to the dire lion had an efficient quiver with some ghost-touch arrows, and some undead bane arrows, the kraken’s eyes were gems, and the fire snake’s pelt was worth quite a bit on the open market. Well, the party smelled a trap by this point, and managed to notice from the doorway that the dead stuffed dire lion seemed a bit more lively than its fellows (it was in fact a dire lion Fast Zombie).
The fact that they managed to detect the waiting zombie before it acted meant that they were able to come up with a plan prior to getting inside the room (at which point it would have pounced on one of them and Hazmarduk would have filled the room with an obscuring mist, leading to a cat-and-mouse fight around the room where the dire lion would charge in, pounce someone, and then run away through the fog to reposition before charge pouncing again). I was . . . a little concerned as well that a dire lion pouncing on the wrong person would lead to a death (especially given how badly the books had just mangled them), so I decided it was time for a little DM mercy. Also it was getting late and while I wanted to finish a second room playing out a game of cat-and-mouse would have taken a long time at this level.
So Glorio grew a spine, realized that the dire lion could barely do anything to him between his high AC and DR 15, and so he volunteered himself to go in and act as a decoy while the party rushed around and fetched all of the items. Given that Hazmarduk HATED Glorio, the opportunity to feed him to the lions was too much to resist (especially with Glorio taunting him the whole time), so the dire lion focused on Glorio pretty much exclusively while the party ran around and fetched the items. It probably should have grappled him (forgot about that part) to keep him from leaving the room after the party was done, but I forgot about that feature of the ridiculous dps-machines that giant cats are, so Glorio made a speedy exit from the room, the party slammed the door shut, and the lion was trapped.
I can’t remember if there was anything stopping Hazmarduk from just opening the door up for it and having it run out into the hallway after them, save I was trying to avoid the annoyance factor of a hallway fight. And the lion would have been much less effective in the narrow hallways where there was no room to maneuver and it would have just turned into trading full attacks with Glorio/Oliver while the rest of the party hammered it from range – boring! So pretty much all of the fights were contained into their own separate rooms, which this night worked out really well for the party between the last book wizard letting them go and managing to run past the dire lion zombie, grab the magical gear, and gtfo.
And that was the end of the session, with three rooms down, and only one encounter room remaining on the party’s current side of the manor – the ritual room. But this was not a typical magical spell casting room, oh no . . . it was used for a much, MUCH darker purpose.
+1 on hearing about another take on CoCT.
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They were books the entire time. Unable to turn into human form - basically Hazmarduk either awakened books, imbued enough magic into the magical tomes that they became sentient on their own as a side effect, or he tortured a bunch of wizards and shoved their souls into books so they could be his magic-item making slaves for eternity. Given how much of a bastard he is, it's probably option 3.
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Hoo boy, I'm glad this is popular. Well, I'm narcissistic enough to do share!
But in order to do so, I have to take you through some of the carefully masterminded plots I've made in order to give my players the illusion of choice. I'll try to make this a synopsis and not a full blow treatment of my script, however, for economy purposes. ;)
So, as I've said before, my party is a ragtag group of adventurers. Two of them (I recently had an extra addition to the party, more on her later) have played the story before. Awakened as I was by your own retelling, Inspectre, I made vast changes whilst preserving the original plot in order to keep them on their toes.
I'll begin with a proper introduction of my big damn heroes and their backstories, who I have tied to the main plot. Once more I'll remind you that I play CotCT on a homebrew setting, so I will not disclose detailed information about the Gods or landmarks, etc, as to not make this tiring or jarring.
Kumei - LN Rakshasha-Born Kensai Magus: Kumei was born in my version of Japan, a bastard child of a Shogun. A chain of events forced him to abandon his homeland aboard a ship along with Lonjiku Kaijitsu and his pregnant wife, who had stolen a powerful artifact from the Dragon Emperor. Kumei and Lonjiku tried to use the artifact, but it backfired; a chaos storm formed around the ship and they were both lucky enough to be displaced to the mainland through some teleportation effect. They stayed in the town of Sandpoint until Kumei decided he had to advance in his magical studies. He left and visited Korvosa's Academy of wizards, but obtained a huge fiscal debt for his troubles. He approached an adventurer's guild (secretly run by a cult of Norgober) who told him that they would take care of his debt if he took care of the death cult to the east for them... And that's how Kumei met:
Arasmes - NE Half-Elf Rogue / Shadowdancer: Arasmes was also born a bastard, albeit in a High Elf society. He was ridiculed, shamed, pushed over constantly. He was not as graceful or as intelligent as the Elves, who kept harassing him. After he lost his childhood friend and crush to one of the Elven Princes, Arasmes went on a killing spree - he killed the prince, his band of followers and -almost- his friend, before deciding to flee. He boarded a ship to the mainland and didn't look back. Not speaking the language, he finally stumbled upon a man who decided to teach him the ways of Norgober (the same man Kumei met). After a year, it was time for Arasmes to pay back his debt; deal with the death cult to the east...
I began the game with the above and, over the course of a few sessions, took them to level 5. For those that haven't played Shadowfel Keep, here's a brief summary along with how I tied it to the main plot.
Dubbed the Heroes of Haven (the village that had sent them after Kalarel in the first place), the heroes returned to Korvosa. As they approached, the palace bells began ringing mournfully; King Eodred was dead.
As you can see above, I've also included minor plots from Jade Regent and Rise of the Runelords, who I had previously campaigned. Matter of fact, one of my PCs in RotR, actually married Ameiko. I also plan on running 2nd edition adventures (instead of Scarwall, since my PCs prefer RP compared to dungeon-crawling) and minor modules.
As you probably got, I detailed all the above, since it is tied in to the later plot so I can make better character arcs.
For instance
Now, to address the NG/NE issue: it's not an issue. Arasmes is evil only in regards to his ruthlessness and malice. He relishes in killing (but not slaughtering) and does so in silence, rather than screams of "Blood for the Blood God" and has, matter of fact, made quite a few in-game conversations about what killing means to him with Aleysia, who looks at the world with doe eyes and tries to get what living means. Arasmes is a cynic where she is hopeful. She helps people and, if it suits, him, he aids her. Such as the case of my above post concerning Majenko. But more on that later!
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Right! Moving on to when our heroes enter Korvosa - the only thing that's changed since the last time we met our team is the addition of Elias, a half-elf TN druid who joined the party right before they delved into the Shadowfel Keep. His purpose; to defeat the forces of undeath.
The Heroes of Haven (HoH for short) rush to Korvosa and reach it just as the palace bells strike. A gypsy fortune teller sings a somber song that ends with "when the bell strikes seven, the king's in heaven". And it does strike seven. The citizens fall to their knees in mourning while visitors to the city rush to enter the city walls. The guards try to limit entrance to the visitors by searching the traders, delaying our heroes. By the time they pass the walls, nightfall has come.
Aleysia has the idea to ask the sergeant of the guards, (Grau) what the fuss is all about, and he explains that, after a ruler's death, it is customary for the city to enter a mourning period, which means that anyone that enters the city will be one of the last ones to do so for an entire week, since the gates will be closed for said period.
But as they converse with Grau, a shadow looms on the end of the main road. A group of rioters, organized in the hours since the King's death by a rabble-rouser (an acolyte of Urgathoa who has enthralled them and has sent them after the guards in order to "protest"). The excuse for all this? To send the B@$@# Queen back to her country.
As the rioters charge, Grau, who has been drinking vodka from his waterskin all this time, orders the guards to fire upon them. Certain that this will end in bloodshed, our heroes have various responses. Aleysia casts web so that they don't reach the guards, Elias casts Entangle on the streets and, while Kumei and Arasmes wait around, uncertain of whether they should main the rioters, Oliver charges forward and tumbles around the rioters, reaching the rabble-rouser and kicking his ass through a lamppost - literally (a scene taken as-is from the Matrix Reloaded). He dumps his unceremoniously at Grau's feet and urges the party to move on.
As they move forward, they find out where the riot began: the "Inn Closest to the Gate" is burning. People are trying to quench the flames and, obviously, Aleysia wants to help, but is convinced by her team that they can't do anything here.
Finally, as they move forward, they stumble upon other rioters; dead ones. Matter of fact, as they inspect the scene, the rioters here have been maimed, hanged by posts or brutally crushed.
As they move forward, weapons drawn, they see the cause of this mayhem; the Hellknights have been unleashed. Three of them, banners of Asmodeus planted around them, have made the rioters take a knee as they either execute or maim them for acts of treason, vandalism, theft, etc. Knowing what the Hellknights are and what they can do, Kumei and Oliver urge the others to leave the scene. However, the rest of the team wants to help the rioters. As they stealthily and hurriedly debate what to do, however, another challenger entered the fray by shooting concussive arrows at the Hellknights. A man draped in a tattered black cloak baring a skull mask, fully equipped to take on any poor soul that comes his way; the Specter of Korvosa (my version of Blackjack, a fusion of the Punisher and Batman. Despite being ruthless, he is still a good man.)
As the Hellknights and Specter face off, the HoH suddenly have a new decision to make. Help the monstrous followers of Asmodeus (I based the description of the Hellknights on Warhammer 40k's Blood Gorgons) or the devastatingly efficient Specter. The only one to take action was Oliver, strangely, who put on a cowl around his face and charged the Hellknights. The others, wisely, chose to stay back. By the time Oliver reached them, Specter had taken out two of the Hellknights and was in melee with a Hellknight Enforcer, their leader. And so a battle begun between them, with the Enforcer almost slaying Oliver. Distracted as the Hellknight was with that, Specter dropped him with his dual-wielded attack.
Oliver and Specter then discussed about what Specter was and why was he doing this, to which Specter responded gravely with "Knights are supposed to protect their city, not fail it" (Yeah, I did an Arrow reference as well - Oliver's player is a massive fan), before dimension door-ing away (Cape of the Mounteback).
Oliver went back to his team and the whole lot of them decided to head to the one place they knew; the Black Crane (an Inn/Adventurer's guild fronting for the Cult of Norgober).
After resting, the team met up and started planning on how to stop Gaedren... But more on that later!
I don't think I'll have the time to post more of my version, so in case I don't do so, have a happy new year!
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Ok, I've run into this thread a few days ago, and I actually just started running a CoCT campaign!
So, I wanted the opportunity to thank you, Inspectre, for the amazing inspiration you provided. This is awesome! Also, noted the RWBY soundtrack during Andaisin's fight, and GITS OST. It appears you and I have the same taste in music.
UnArcaneElection, same to you, especially for the music advices.
I've not yet read everything, but so far...
The idea that Ileosa is good.
Most of book one, but the tricky part if that I took the campaign in stride after the former DM dropped out, so Lamm was already dead, and I had to work around that.
Andaisin and Glorio Arkona plotting.
Starting with Book 3, I think it will diverge quite a bit, but I'm essentially stealing half your ideas for the first two books.
Essentially, I want the gangs of Korvosa to have a greater role, so I used pre-existing ones, like the Catsdew Lofty, and created new ones, like the Moth gang and the Whalers. I'm thinking about turning Book 3 in a city-wide (or Old Korvosa wide) gang-war, in the aftermath of the plague.
Also, I'll try to have a better role for the Grey Maidens, and make them properly badass. I love them, to be honest.
No other ideas so far, but I just picked it up.
Also, I noticed you had a Hell's Rebels/CoT mashup thread, I'll be reading that too as I'm also DMing Hell's Rebels.
Once again, thanks a lot for the inspiration:
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Sevejar – Sounds like you’ve got an interesting crew there! I picked up on Longjiku as a reference to Rise/Jade due to him being Ameiko’s father. Is that still the case in this game or did you just name drop him to use as a skin for this thief character in Kumei’s backstory? I’m just curious if they knew who he was and rolled their eyes like “oh, that crazy Longjiku, up to his old tricks” or if this was essentially a “backstory” portion of Longjiku’s story, where he and Kumei crossed paths years ago before Kumei wandered off and Longjiku settled in Sandpoint. Don’t think I also didn’t notice Kumei’s sub face there – you certainly don’t have to make him a family relative of the Arkonas, but I certainly hope you play up that ancestral connection when the time comes! Like the use of Shyris – I had debated myself with who to make the Emperor of Old Korvosa – if you read back through the Book Three write-up you’ll see that I sort of compromised, with keeping Pilts around but basically as a figurehead – the *real* Emperor was effectively Adonis Kreed, who’d set up a new figurehead whenever Glorio off’d the current one (Pilts being merely the latest puppet head). I was sad that I didn’t get to use Devargo at all, as I had plans for him as well but largely the plan was for him to be “neutral”, a third-party caught in between Arkona and the Empire. I have a new plan for him now though with Vimanda in charge – and it’s evil, of course.
Love the use of the Hellknights and as a backdrop for introducing Blackjack/Specter. Your group’s reaction sounds relatively similar to mine, albeit at least Oliver tried to make friends. My party pretty much decided they didn’t like Blackjack on the spot and made trouble for him more so than helping disrupt the brutal Hellknights.
If you have the opportunity to post more about your game now and again I’d love to hear about it of course, but I’m just glad to see my crazy ideas have inspired some people to have some crazy ideas of their own. Curse is a pretty malleable campaign, so it’s pretty much just a question of what you want to focus on. Since you aren’t planning on using Scarwall I’m not sure if you’ll use Book 4 either since it’s mostly set-up to get into Scarwall, but if you *do* take the campaign outside of Korvosa I heartily recommend expanding and playing up Kaer Maga, which is criminally underused in the AP. Especially as an anarchy-infused counterpoint to Korvosa, which should *really* make them appreciate their home, even with its recent woes (seriously, I don’t know why somehow hasn’t just burned Kaer Maga to ground by this point, by accident if nothing else).
Okiba – You’re very welcome! Very glad to see people getting some useable ideas out of my work. While it was intended to at least loosely follow the entire AP, Book 3 & 4 have pretty much just thrown the AP books away, which is fine by me as it’s all worked out in the end, more or less. Still, even if my crazy game has gone off in the complete opposite direction, hopefully you can find a few bits and pieces still here and there to spice up empty corners without completely demolishing the AP’s tracks as I did.
I’ll certainly be interested in hearing how the plot point of Ileosa as a good/neutral person works out. If any of your players know anything about how Curse is “supposed” to go, that will certainly throw them for a loop. I wish I had done some more with the various gangs as well – I used the Rat Teet’s Boys a little bit as Lamm’s wererat allies in Book One, as well as the Dusters, but there was quite a bit going on already so I wasn’t able to develop it much further than 1-2 encounters. I had planned on there being a number of survivor gangs in Old Korvosa that the party could have crossed paths with, but they got such a late start in Old Korvosa that focusing on just the big plot points had to be done (and even there the jerks jumped ship on me!)
I did indeed put together a couple posts on a Hell’s Rebels/Council of Thieves mash-up. Sadly I got busy shortly thereafter and with any sort of new game a LONG ways off (we’re going into our FOURTH year of Curse now and we’re still pushing through Book Four o_O) I stopped posting in there. If you’re interested due to running a Hell’s Rebels game though, perhaps I can get back into working on that. The other positive is that the last 2 books of Hell’s Rebels is out now, so I could buy those two to continue my plotting. I still think you could weave those two APs together in a relatively seamless fashion, although I still don’t have a clean solution for the deep cultural differences between Kintargo and Westcrown. Meh, it’s not like I haven’t scrawled outside the lines to the point that I’m coloring my own handmade picture!
Anyway, on with the next session, where-in the party learns the depths of Hazmarduk’s depravity. I feel that I should post a warning here that the following encounter in the ritual room was very squicky, although more in implications than graphic descriptions. If you are bothered by such things, especially if pregnancy/babies are involved, you will want to skip the ritual room spoiler below and move on to the Second Half spoiler. Just know they fought some monsters, and a haunt, and it was quite illuminating on just what sort of monster Hazmarduk really was.
So we start this session with the party breaking into the last room of interest on this side of the Arkona rural manor. There were a couple other rooms in this area, but I didn’t have any particularly good ideas for them so I just left them empty on the map, with just the doors visible to the players to give the illusion of a manor bigger than I had detailed (considering the number of empty rooms in most published dungeons, I don’t see the problem with that – although I did have ideas for those two rooms – one a stable, and the other a sort of conference room, where a ghostly image of Hazmarduk would have appeared in the throne made out of bones at the head of the table to taunt them).
The room left of interest, however, was a room generally only used for special rituals by the Arkona family under Hazmarduk’s rule. Glorio had left some more magic items there (if I remember correctly some golden religious implements, such as a mask, and some more anti-ghost stuff in there like Corpse Dust, which could make Hazmarduk corporeal), so the party was interested in continuing their exploration and looting.
They opened the sealed door with another charge from Glorio’s Chime to reveal a decently sized religious chapel, complete with an altar at the back of the room. Unlike most in-house chapels that manors this big sometimes had, however, was the fact that there was a large open pit beyond the altar, and the black stone of the altar itself featured shackles and was coated in rust-colored rivulets (dried blood). So, this was an evil chapel dedicated to nefarious purposes, a fact made only more clear as their presence and Hazmarduk’s growing influence over the house disturbed something in the room’s spiritual fabric.
Whispers filled the room as the party cautiously filed into the room, swiftly turning to shrill feminine screams of pain, undercut by a rhythmic murmuring chant. Shadows danced in the light, and partially solidified to form shadowy figures seated in the pews, ghostly afterimages that had been carved into the room’s soul by the atrocities committed here. The pews were full of these cowled, chanting figures, who the party eventually managed to make out were chanting “Mother of monsters, bless the child, mother of monsters, bless the child”. Even Rholand bombed the follow-up religion check to identify who this was referring to (Lammashtu, who seemed fitting for this sort of pervsion even though the rakshasa probably only worshipped themselves usually). These were not actual ghosts, but a haunt, a spiritual recording of sorts re-enacting an event that happened in the distant past. As such the party’s ability to interact with the scene was minimal, but it was nonetheless informative to them.
Up front at the altar, a ghostly woman was chained down to its surface, writhing and heaving in the final moments of giving birth. Standing next to the altar was the “high priest” of this affair, his face covered by a golden ritual mask (this was actually an echo of Hazmarduk himself, as he, um, liked to be very hands-on with these rituals given his personal stake in matters). As the chanting reached a crescendo, along with the woman’s agonized, terrified screams, the high priest motioned for silence, and picked up a large gold-plated ritual knife. Without much further ceremony, he used this blade to cut into the woman’s stomach, disemboweling her in the C-section from hell. The woman died almost immediately, and shortly thereafter her cries were replaced by a pair of thin wails from her butchered remains as two baby animal heads – one fox, one tiger – emerged into view. Vimanda and Bahor (Glorio).
This was how they were brought into this world, the same way most of the rakshasa part of the Arkona family came into this world Glorio/Bahor explained with clear disgust in his voice. Hazmarduk considered the rakshasa’s relatively small numbers to be a problem, and so he had pioneered several unique ways to expand the rakshasa population.
This was his favorite method – impregnating human women and encouraging the evil outsider spirits of rakshasa to come claim the baby’s body before it was born – new rakshasa spirits or old ones seeking rebirth, it didn’t really matter to Hazmarduk. Once the birth was complete, of course, the human mother was a liability, and so this was also an efficient method of disposing of any witness to the Arkona’s true nature.
The last part of the haunt’s scene played out then, with Vimanda and Bahor being plucked up and presented to the family, while their mother’s body was rolled off the altar into the pit behind it to join the other slain women before her. Now closer, the party could see down into the pit and see that its bottom was littered with the bones of countless people – both adult and infant.
Hazmarduk’s method, while somewhat effective at boosting the Arakona ranks, nonetheless had a low overall success rate in bringing new rakshasa into the world. The rest were half-breeds, rakshasa tainted in the same way as the Rakshasa sorcerer bloodline or even Vaz’em, but not true rakshasa. And since Hazmarduk had no interest in such, any babes that did not turn out like Vimanda and Bahor were marked as failures and immediately thrown down into the pit to join their mothers.
This was the sort of casual, methodical, depraved evil that Hazmarduk was capable of. And it was also, among many other reasons, why Bahor one day decided to rebel and not just overthrow his father, but bind his spirit to this place so that he would be forever denied the opportunity of reincarnation so that he could start his evil all over again in some other place and time.
That rebellion wasn’t working out as well as planned, as Hazmarduk the ghost got involved now and began his own haunting of the room. He called out to the room’s guardian, and in response the sizable pile of bones at the bottom of the pit rumbled, shifted, and stood up. A bone golem, assembled out of the bones of countless slain mothers and their babes deemed “failures”, arose to confront the party. Hazmarduk also interfered in the otherwise relatively straight-forward battle, as he had in previous rooms, by twisting the haunt and attempting to solicit members of the group into reenacting the awful scene.
Trinia and Ronda were hit with a Suggestion to go lie down on the altar and shackle themselves to it – Ronda passed but Trinia failed her Will save, so she dutifully hopped up onto the altar and shackled herself down to it. Cue the party cracking some jokes about “this not being the time for kink, Trinia” and similar lines. The laughter pretty much stopped after Vaz’em narrowly passed a will save on the following round, and I revealed that *if* he had failed instead, he’d have been overcome with the compulsion to go over and rip out Trinia’s guts (coup-de-grace, which coming from a ninja would have killed her with 95% certainty).
Of course, the party would have been given the opportunity to stop him since Vaz’em would have had to quite obviously go over to the altar and pick up the ritual knife, which was meant to be the challenge for this fight – half the party fighting off the golem and the other half fighting to keep poor Trinia/Ronda from getting sacrificed. Thanks to some lucky Will saves, though, that didn’t happen, allowing the party to concentrate their full weight onto the luckless Bone Golem, who at the end of the day was a CR 8 fighting a full party of CR 9s. It got reduced back to a pile of bones *very* quickly, preventing the haunt from getting another chance to overwhelm Vaz’em’s mind, and so once again Trinia escaped certain death. Although now that she was getting a real taste of just what her suggestion to rob the place had gotten them into, she was understandably shaken afterwards.
The party looted the room and got the heck out of there before any more horrors could reveal themselves. Glorio got the corpse dust from a compartment in the altar, and the party got the ritual mask and knife and a few other baubles to sell for cold hard cash if they got out of there alive. Also as part of the ritual mask, a Shifter’s Headband of charisma +2 was able to be separated out from the gold ornaments, something that Rholand would perhaps find useful, assuming he could overcome his distaste at what it had been a part of.
Moving on from the ritual room, the party turned back to explore the other half of the manor. As they traveled back the way they came, however, they heard a loud crash as doors were forced open, and Hazmarduk voiced his amusement that it appeared he had some *more* visitors. Sending Vaz’em to scout ahead, the party discovered that a party of ogres had broken into the ballroom, presumably coming from the room to its north (and presumably from the outside into that northern room). They were just bumbling around, clearly looking to loot the place for their “boss” as the party was interested in looting it for themselves.
The party had no interest in getting involved with a bunch of fatally curious ogres, and so quietly wished them good luck and hoped Hazmarduk would get distracted and go bother them for a while. Meanwhile, they looped around to another hallway and returned to the lobby, sneaking past the still-open doors leading into the ballroom, and entered the next room to the immediate west of the lobby – the art gallery.
Built a little bit like a maze with exhibit walls blocking off sight to areas here and there, the art gallery had several valuable paintings as well as several mannequins situated beneath glass cases. Said mannequins were wearing various pieces of magical gear, including a pennon of battle, a stalker’s mask, and an amulet of natural armor. Of course, the cases were trapped, and as soon as one of them was broken into, thick clouds of gas billowed out into the room. This was pretty much a remix of one of the rooms in Book Three Arkona Manor, complete with a Belkar (evil air elemental thing) getting loosed form another case by Hazmarduk as the room started to fill up with smoke.
Belkar Battle Theme – Can’t Sleep Can’t Breathe by Ditigal Daggers (Nightcore Remix)
So, the intent was for the belkar to be a pain in the butt, doing hit-and-run attacks through the smoke and using the walls to confuse and elude the party. Unfortunately it got locked down into melee in fairly short order, and while the walls prevented Vaz’em from easily circling around and fileting it in one round, it was still just a matter of time. Still, the Belkar did have one fun trick – it could crawl inside someone’s lungs and tear them apart from the inside out, while the unlucky victim could only gasp and cough, making Fortitude saves to expel the Belkar. I’m not sure that the intent of the ability was to also make the Belkar untargetable while its victim was choking to death, but that’s how I ran it to make it a particularly nasty ability.
Of course, once again, luck was with the party, the victim (either Vaz’em or Cid I believe) made their fortitude save to expel the Belkar from their lungs, and then they pretty much curbstomped it before it got the chance to do much of anything else. Oh well.
The party gathered up the rest of the loot from the display cases, Glorio found a scroll of Heal and Ghostbane dirge he had hidden plastered to the back of several otherwise worthless paintings hanging in the exhibit, and the party moved through the exhibit and into the hallway beyond. They had more than enough gear now to deal with Hazmarduk, but since they were doing well so far (other than the books mages, and to a lesser extent the ghosts during the Battle of the Bards, they pretty much had roflstomped all of the other fights), they decided to press on upstairs to get as much loot as they could. Also driving them forward was the acknowledgement by Glorio that Hazmarduk had likely seized control of the clay golem Glorio had placed down in the basement to ensure nobody messed with Haz’s bindings. Of course, since the golem was actually a Thassilon artifact that Hazmarduk found and got running again, he knew exactly how to take control of it again, so it would probably try to stop them from getting to him.
Fortunately, Glorio had prepared for this eventuality, and thus the following rooms had items mostly designed to deal with the golem itself. Namely, an adamantine Warhammer used by Hazmarduk’s own father, and an ancient thassilon control rod for the golem that should allow Glorio to contest Hazmarduk’s control over the golem. The last room held some potions of water breathing and such, which would be needed to traverse the flooded corridors of the basement (Glorio *really* had tried to keep everyone out of the basement). The party decided they didn’t need that so much, or perhaps they scouted ahead or learned that the basement was no longer flooded for some reason – I can’t quite remember now. Either way, the following week’s session was dedicated to those last two rooms before they ventured down into the basement to confront Hazmarduk. For now though, we ended the session at this point.
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Don’t think I also didn’t notice Kumei’s sub face there – you certainly don’t have to make him a family relative of the Arkonas, but I certainly hope you play up that ancestral connection when the time comes! Like the use of Shyris – I had debated myself with who to make the Emperor of Old Korvosa – if you read back through the Book Three write-up you’ll see that I sort of compromised, with keeping Pilts around but basically as a figurehead – the *real* Emperor was effectively Adonis Kreed, who’d set up a new figurehead whenever Glorio off’d the current one (Pilts being merely the latest puppet head).
You caught up pretty quick indeed, amigo!
That's the basic gist of it, anyway. There is also a cool scene in mind, where Kumei finds the artifact, which is bound to him even after all the years of meddling with it, but I haven't yet developed it wholly.
The fluff of Castle Spulzeer is way too long to write here, but I welcome anyone to google it. It is an amazing adventure and very story-driven!
I'll try to post bits and pieces of my own story when I get the time and would love to hear your thoughts on them!
Can't comment on the last piece of your story at the moment, but in one sentence, Harmazduk is a badass!
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So this session didn’t have a lot of especially interesting stuff going on in it, save that it was the start of the story of The Hammer, a sort of running joke as Oli started his own little religion around the adamantine Warhammer he looted from the next room. I’ve indulged him in this delusion by creating a mysterious backstory for said Hammer, implying that it had quite the history. But more on that in a little while – first, they had to get said hammer.
So the party moved on from the art gallery to the weapons gallery/armory, a relatively small room where a number of large wooden mannequins held weapons and armor for use by the manor’s guards. Of particular note was the suit of armor standing at the back of the room, a suit of full plate mail with an especially fine engraved breastplate. The party was expecting some sort of “statues come to life” moment, and they were disappointed as Hazmarduk snarled “Wake up, Old Cougar” (his mocking nickname for his own father) and the suit of full plate stirred to life. Another dullahan, like Lamm was, only with feats around wielding an adamantine Warhammer and Sundering weapons/armor rather than dual wielding blender.
Old Cougar had a few surprises, such as having a Shocking Grasp attached to his Imbued Breastplate and an animated shield (courtesy of Hazmarduk), but he was still just one CR 7 against a full party with no distractions. So he got diced pretty quickly, after denting Oliver’s breastplate (landed only one good Sundering hit that dropped it down to about 3/4th HP, which wasn’t enough to actually do anything like give it the Broken condition), and pounded a hole in the floor in Oli’s square, but he made his Reflex save not to fall down into the basement. The mannequins also animated and swiped at people that got too close, but they had limited reach and by staying in the middle of the room the party made it pretty much a non-issue.
There was pretty much no question that Oliver was getting the hammer, and as he slung it across his back Cid considered the breastplate, but he already had a mithril one that he liked better so I don’t think he ever put the imbued breastplate on – he certainly never used its ability from what I can remember if he did!
Moving on to the next room, they entered a combination museum/research lab, where a great number of Thassilon artifacts were stored. Glorio explained that Hazmarduk had more than a passing interest in all things Thassilon, probably in a search for powerful artifacts, and so had dedicated this decent-sized room to serve as a warehouse of artifacts that he had recovered and as a place where he could study them. Or rather, since he was a very important rakshasa, have other people study them for him. One such individual was still here, or at least his remains were, slumped over a desk in the back corner of the room. A gold ring glimmered on one of his fingers, and a metal shackled encircled one wrist.
This was Sir Ingram Kingsman, a notable Thassilon researcher than Hazmarduk had hired (read: kidnapped) to serve as his primary researcher on the Thassilon artifacts he had. The man had been left literally chained to his desk, with a ring of sustenance to provide for his food/dietary/sleep needs. When Glorio had killed Hazmarduk and abandoned the manor, he decided to leave Sir Ingram here alone, to die of old age (or more likely, until he managed to slice his neck open with a pen and bleed out).
Once again, the party was expecting some sort of fight, and they got it after the “skeleton” suddenly stirred to life with a shriek. Apparently Sir Ingram’s spirit had been trapped in this manor too, and now he was a Crypt Thing, a particularly obnoxious teleporting-undead. He was still “stuck” in his chair (most Crypt Things tend to be seated on some sort of chair or throne from what I can remember of past ones, so it fit), but that didn’t stop him from teleporting past the party’s front line as it ran over to beat him down. He reappeared right next to Trinia, raking her with his claws (she was the most lightly armored member of this party, and it fit in with the running “joke” I had of basically torturing Trinia mercilessly in a Break the Cutie (yay TV Tropes!) sort of way).
The party didn’t appreciate that much, nor Sir A%@+%@% teleporting (quickened Dimension Door, actually) out of their carefully planned flanking positions. When they ran back towards him again, he used his most powerful and situational ability – teleporting burst, which teleported everyone *else*, to a random spot at a random distance away from him. Usually Crypt Things are set up to teleport people into dangerous place, such as an acid-filled vault or whatever, but here I just used all of the different rooms on the first floor. Which would have split the party up quite nicely . . . had anyone but Oliver failed his Will Save to not be teleported.
Ironically, however, Oliver *did* get teleported to some place dangerous – he got teleported into the kitchen, a previously unexplored room to the north of the ballroom. A room that was now inhabited by some ogres, looking for loot in the cabinets. The ogres looked at the suddenly appearing Oli. Oli looked at the ogres after suddenly reappearing. Then Oli brandished his new adamantine Warhammer, shouted “BOW DOWN TO THE HAMMER!” and went to work. He made rather short work of the two CR 3 ogres, and then emerged into the dining room attached to the kitchen to find that he was just north of the ballroom. Unfortunately, standing in between him and the ballroom (and the way back to the rest of the party) were another three ogres and an ettin. “BOW DOWN TO THE HAMMER!”
This time it didn’t work out so well for Oli, as while the ogres had only a small chance to hit him (something like 15 or 16+ on a die roll), they still really hurt when they did hit, and they got a couple lucky hits in. Oliver managed to drop most of the ogres, but eventually he went down as the ettin moved in and pummeled him with its two dual-wielded flails. Fortunately for Oli, the survivors of the Hammer attack did not get much time to consider what to do with him.
Having finished off Sir Ingram shortly after his teleporting burst attack failed to do anything but get rid of Oliver, the party split up and started looking for him. He followed the sounds of battle and Oli’s shouts of “BOW DOWN TO THE HAMMER!” back to the ballroom, where they arrived just after he fell. The ettin, being somewhat smarter than your average giant humanoid (I made them slightly smarter than normal to give them some contrast to the ogres – and also to qualify them for Improved Trip to go along with their new flails). Seeing Cid and the rest of the party swarming into the ballroom, the ettin shouted at them to stay back or he’d squish the angry little man, dragging oli back towards the dining room with one hand while menacing him with his other flail-equipped hand.
Here we made a bit of a DM goof, as Cid and I forgot that Dimension Door ends your turn immediately, so that you can’t teleport *AND THEN* attack (to be fair Sir Ingram was doing it with his quickened dimension doors, but that was supposed to be a monster ability so that the crypt thing wasn’t completely useless). So rather than negotiate, Cid simply dimension doored over to behind the ettin and attacked, cutting its heads off as Oli had already done a number on it with his new hammer. Rholand healed Oli up, and he seemed none the worse for wear . . . except now that he had an even greater fascination with his new hammer (Oliver’s player explained this as that Oli got a bit of brain damage from getting smashed to the floor with giant clubs, and so now he actually believed people were supposed to be bowing down to the hammer, it no longer was just an intimidation tactic, Oli actually believed it himself!)
And that was pretty much the session, with the party deciding not to waste time exploring the last room with items (the interior garden, which featured a Huge water elemental in a fountain, and a huge animated object elephant statue – another homage to the encounters in the main Arkona Manor in Book Three). They could have escaped the manor at this point as well, climbing out of the large windows that the ogres had smashed in to enter the manor, but decided not to leave as that would mean allowing Hazmarduk to get free entirely. And if he did, they would of course had to deal with him sooner or later as there was no chance he wouldn’t come after them/Glorio/Vaz’em. Much better to deal with this problem permanently while it was still a “simple” matter of repairing the runes binding Hazmarduk and rendering him completely powerless, instead of able to affect things like the manor by possessing it. So down into the basement to confront Hazmarduk and his pet clay golem they went.
First of, sorry it took such a long time to answer. For once, I have a better excuse than just my laziness, I was caught in the semester beginning and moving to a new place.
Regarding Book 3 & 4, there are some bits and pieces that I will certainly use!
That being said, the idea is great and I'm sure I'll use it.
Also, since I finally caught up with your story (which is awesome!) I realize that Book 3 & 4 are much more influenced by what your PCs are and by their personal interests and stories. So I'm not planning that far ahead, apart from the whole "Gang wars" aspect, and I'll see where it goes in the first two books.
For Hell's Rebels and Council of Thieves, don't rush! I'd be interested if you do play that eventually, but I'm caught in my own campaigns, so I won't be starting a new one any time soon. The thoughts you already posted there are already useful.
About my own CoCT campaign...well, I guess first off I need a disclaimer. It's a bit of a different format, because it's a play-by-post game, and I wasn't the DM at first, I picked it up after the original DM dropped out, so I had not control over the events.
Sagacius Zandu: a CN (former CB) human Bard (Detective), Sagacius is a bastard, born out of wedlock from a Varisian dancer and the head of House Leroung. Now that Eliasia has become the matriarch of House Leroung, he is working as an unofficial "agent" of the House. His fiancee, Lylia, has died of drug overdose, because of Lamm, and he had since then been seeking revenge. He has contacts in both the criminal underground and the nobility, despite not being as adept with a blade as others.
Mery "Doigts-d'or" (Gold-fingers): a CN halfling rogue, Mery is coming from Osirion, but has always been a traveler. He fled his small town with dreams of greatness, but had to pick up survival skills such as pickpocketing since he arrived in Korvosa. His first Korvosan friend, an other halfling named Anna, has been stabbed in an alley by Lamm's men. He is always the socialite, and honestly can't stop running his mouth, but that also makes him great. He recently has developed an interest in the arcane arts, awakening latent powers and becoming an Arcanist.
Rakyel the Bonereader: a CN human Oracle of the Bones. He was one of Lamm's lambs until he tried to escape, but was caught by one of the crime lord's brute, beaten, and left to die in a burning building. Fortunately (or unfortunately), his oracle powers manifested themselves and he survived the fire, but is ever since constantly burning (Blackened curse). He has been taken in by the church of Pharasma, and even though he has become a gravedigger, he has left the Church. He keeps a friendly relationship with them, though, especially Keppira d'Bear, whom he goes to for advice. Yet when the opportunity presented itself, he wouldn't let Lamm harm anyone else.
Gracchius Patronicus: a CN (sensing a pattern here?) human Swashbuckler. He is a latecomer to the group. Raised in a varisian caravan, where he learned swordsmanship, he is looking for his sister, Esmeralda, accused of a crime he is certain she didn't commit.
Ninaerthil: a NG half-elf urban ranger. One of Vencarlo's student, he was a few years younger than Sabina, Cressida and Grau, but still realized something was wrong. He is also from a poor family, and has come to consider that the main issue of the city is the nobility who is exploiting the people (Yeah, communism!), but when his young cousin disappeared, he agreed to help his aunt look for him...and learned he had been kidnapped by Lamm.
Sorina Vacaresco: a CG varisian Witch, Sorina and her husband Razvan have been despairing for months to find their young son Stellian. Razvan, unemployed, and Sorina being a cartomancer, they were also struggling to make a living and support themselves and their daughter. Until one day, while performing Harrow reading, she found an extra card giving her a new lead. She is often silent, but her interventions are quite insightful.
So that's my group! I can post some more details on where they are so far.
Ileosa's being "nice" and a good but grieving person has gone quite well! I could tell they were surprised, though, and it's only the beginning! They've only met her once after all.
I also needed an advice on something that I don't know how to use...
Sorina's son, Stellian, was indeed kidnapped by Gaedren Lamm, but they didn't find him in the old fishery, and for good reason.
He was taken by an other kid, Gray Mouse, actually an agent of House Arkona, who noticed Stellian's divination powers and thought he would be of use to his master. This was built up by the previous DM, and has become the core of Sorina's arc, so I can't just give up on it, but I don't know what to do with it...any ideas?
I realize that Book 3 & 4 are much more influenced by what your PCs are and by their personal interests and stories.
It's the way it should be, to be honest. PCs should be more invested in the story. The background in CoCT is a double-edged sword; on one hand, it is awesome; on the other hand, it is in love with itself and its NPCs. The PCs are supposed to be catalysts, the ones that tackle the entire thing by force (with Serithial and their gear, they are almost God-level by the end of the adventure). Hence why Inspecter and I try to tie them as much as possible to the adventure, with the assumption that they want to be the protagonists.
Your PCs seem great. Hopefully, if they aren't the CS (read; chaotic stupid) type, they will take you through a great adventure.
For Sorina's son, I would hint ever so slightly that he is still alive. Perhaps through the shapeshifting dagger the PCs find in Orek's possession back in All the Worlds' Meat? Maybe Glorio sends teeny little messages to her? That, along with haunting messages from Zellara, should be more than enough to have her go through the adventure. And, finally, at Book 3, you can have your heartwarming reunion, when the PCs find Neolandus, Vencarlo and the young(?) boy in the moving dungeon thing, only for it to be more heartwarming when she needs to leave her boy behind in order to head to the Shaonti lands. Perhaps they leave him in the same ranch Trinia has been staying at.
Dunno if you like it as an idea or if it fits with your group and storytelling, but it's the way I would do it.
If no one minds reading my own tales...
After a hefty attempt to meet Devargo, the Heroes of Haven (HoH for short) bribed their way into a meeting with him. He toyed with them for a while (asking for a night out in Aleysia AND 10,000 gold in exchange for the information) until finally he was intimidated into playing a game of Knivesies by Oliver, who lost his patience the moment Devargo fooled with his step-sister.
The game was quite fun despite the blood and finally Oliver won by tripping Devargo to the floor. None dared talk and, finally, Kumei broke the silence by asking "what now".
The Spider King, in all his furious elegance, told them that the last known location for Gaedren Lamm was in a WERE-house (hinting that he knew that my version of Gaedren Lamm was a were-bear) a few blocks from there and that he also tossed them one more hint in there just in case (look above).
The HoH, baffled, were about to leave when Majenko asked them for help. After a new round of (failed) negotiations and the Spider King asking for exorbitant prices, the PCs had to practically carry the aggravated Aleysia and Oliver out of there, since they were about to attack the Spider King in retaliation for the small creature.
The PCs healed up and moved to the warehouse, where they found out a small army preparing for *something*. After the onslaught, they wrangled the survivors and asked where Gaedren was, to get the reply that he was on his way to the Hellknights' prison in order to break free the worst criminals in there. They also discovered child-laborers in the basement. Kumei almost raged then and there; he had every survivor executed, despite the Good PCs' objections. That put a small strain in the party, but nothing serious.
Knowing that Gadren heading to the Prison meant trouble, our Heroes immediately rushed after him...
Sevejar - thanks for the ideas. Did not think about using the dagger. These sounds like good plans, honestly, I just have to handle it with care so they don't rush into it too fast. But I only have to delay that until Book 2. Once the events are in motion, there will be no leaving the city anyway.
Mine are also just about to meet Devargo! But I should probably start at the beginning, when I find time to actually write it down.
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Okiba – Yeah, coming off of Wrath of the Righteous I can see how you would be all demon’d out. Mostly I only used demons because they’re non-existent in Curse, and I wanted to mix up my evil outsiders so it wasn’t *just* devils the party was fighting. You could always use some sort of elemental, construct, or even fey (now there’s an interesting choice!) army in order to inject some of those into the campaign, as those are all monster types that are largely underused in Curse.
And yeah, Book 3 & 4 have very much consisted of personal issues for the PCs rather than pushing the main plot along. That has had a cost in focus and speed, but everyone seems to be enjoying themselves so whatever! I’m not sure I explicitly called this out in previous write-ups, but in Book Four each PC gets their own “I’m special!” plot line, focused just on them. This whole Arkona summer manor was Vaz’em’s special plot line, and in another couple sessions you’ll see the reward for completing it (it’s a big one). When they got to Kaer Maga I also gave each PC a free story feat that seemed appropriate for them, and for convenience sake let their “I’m special” quest complete the conditions to boost the story feat (Vaz’em’s got his boost retroactively). Good luck with all of the Chaotics in your party as well, ouch! I was somewhat worried about Vaz’em’ and Oliver saving everything back when it was just the two of them, along with Cid when he first showed up as he was a hardline Hellknight supporter. But the first two books are pretty much “do it or you’re going down with your city”, and they’ve since adopted some heroic traits. If nothing else, the entire party is *very* motivated to storm Scarwall and get Serithiel so they can rid the world of Kazavon!
As for Stellian, how much of an a@+%%@& are you planning on playing Bahor/Glorio? He could, once he hears of the PCs at the end of Book Two, approach the PCs with an offer of handing Stellian over in return for their cooperation in dealing with the chaos/other gangs in Old Korvosa in exchange for his aid. Perhaps that’s even one of the hooks that can get them over to Old Korvosa, although you’ll need to be careful not to overshadow the Neolandus angle. Bahor can play it off that he was merely helping the poor boy, and had only learned recently of his familial relation to Sorina recently. Until then, he was merely keeping the child safe – it’s dangerous out there between the plague and the gangs in lawless Old Korvosa (whether it’s true or not).
I would suggest having him hand over the boy sooner rather than later though, that way you can have an emotional payout *before* having to go through the whole Villified Labyrinth (and risk having getting their son back overshadow the Neolandus/Vencarlo reunion). It could also give Bahor a positive light in the PC’s minds, which you can either play off in future manipulations by him, or to magnify his “face” to heel turn when he tries to murder them all shortly thereafter (depending on whether you want the PCs to actually fight Bahor or not).
More importantly, getting the reunion down sooner lets you make use of my other idea for Stellian. Since the boy has some divination ability, play that up and have him affected by Kazavon’s presence similar to Salvatore Scream and the other artists. That will let you foreshadow that there’s another figure behind Ileosa, and provide some shady details of this figure before the gigantic infodump that happens in Book Four. Creepy things, like children sketches of an immense shadow looming up on the wall behind the Crimson Throne, or a child’s rendition of Scarwall’s bleak walls with stick figures representing the entire party standing before it.
Sevejar – And there goes Kumei’s NE streak, expressing itself as mercilessness toward enemies. Perfectly “acceptable” outlet for his evil tendencies. Devargo is always a pretty interesting character as he’s an evil jerk, but a gracious one. I wouldn’t be surprised if your party storms his boat to kill him and rescue Majenko at some point though.
So, the important bit that of magic that Glorio retrieved from the Thassilon study room was the control rod for the clay golem down in the basement. While he couldn’t take full control over it, as it would still regard Hazmarduk as its master, Glorio could still use the control rod to fight Hazmarduk for control of the golem while the party beat the stuffing out of it.
With the upstairs cleared out (all but the courtyard garden, guarded by a huge water elemental and an animated object stone elephants that just had a cache of water breathing potions), the party decides that it was time to go after Hazmarduk. As they descend down into the basement, they quickly realize that the water breathing potions would not be needed after all – the basement had been drained of water, leaving only a muddy floor. This wasn’t something that likely could have happened naturally, which was meant as a big hint that somebody had come down here ahead of them to drain the water. That “hint” pretty much became a “definite yes” in a few minutes, but more on that later.
The chamber they had descended into was relatively featureless besides the squelching mud everywhere, and so they moved on to the next room, a cavernous hallway supported by numerous stone pillars. Standing at attention waiting for them on the other end of the hallway was a massive androgynous figure in heavy armor made out of clay – the (armored) clay golem. I didn’t think a normal clay golem would be enough of a challenge, especially with the advantages they now had (control rod + adamantine hammer – actually a two-handed Lucerne hammer, not a one-handed Warhammer now that I think about it). I also figured making it armored would give Rholand a tactical choice – target the golem with his object destruction power to nuke the golem directly, or target the armor to make it easier to hit (*sigh* he chose to just nuke the golem).
The golem, being of ancient thassilon construct, had endured being submerged in water for the past years without much trouble, and came to life as the party approached. It was clearly under Hazmarduk’s control as it moved to block their path, and given it was a mindless construct there was no reason to attempt negotiation. Battle was quickly joined, with Glorio using the control rod to attempt to overcome Hazmarduk’s control and cause the golem to just stand there and do nothing while it was demolished.
I used a simple method here – the golem rolled two will saves, representing the conflict between Glorio and Hazmarduk. If it passed both, it got to take a full-round of actions, which is scary when it can Haste itself pretty much at-will. Passed only one, it was staggered – greatly lowering its potential DPS – and if it failed both it would just stand there for the round. The party got lucky with the golem being staggered more often than not, and I think even one round the golem just stood there. Even so, clay golems have one hell of a scary ability – Cursed Wound, which means any damage they deal can only be healed by Cure spells, *and* the spellcaster has to make a DC 25 check or the spell does nothing! Ouch! It managed to land a couple solid hits on Oli, dropping his max HP from just over 100 to about 70 or so.
As they’re beating on the golem however, a lightning bolt suddenly streaks down from the raised platform at the back of the room (where the door leading deeper into the basement was). A humanoid creature with the head of a toucan is revealed as the invisibility magic fades – a rakshasa named Carnochan. Carnochan explained that Vimanda had sent him and some others to come here and free her father (and/or enslave him if that was an option, but obviously Hazmarduk didn’t know that little bit), and that Bahor was out. And by out, Carnochan meant dead as soon as the rest of the party had been dealt with.
Unfortunately for Carnochan, James Jacobs’ sidebar commentary on rakshasas having glass jaws proved to be a pretty accurate one. While he got maybe another round to pepper the party with arrows, Cid and Vaz’em broke off from the clay golem to go running up the stairs on either side of the room after him. He turned invisible in an attempt to get away, and managed to get far enough away to escape Cid and Vaz’em, but like Gaedren lamm before him Carnochan didn’t retreat nearly far enough. Rholand summoned a Hound archon, who managed to find the rakshasa with its scent, everyone closed in around him, and Cid landed one of his infamous Shocking Grasp crits. Boom, 99 damage in a single blow, dead rakshasa with a broken glass jaw. Meanwhile, Oli finished pounding the clay golem to gravel.
The party gathered themselves up, now aware that they had to hurry before whoever else Vimanda had sent succeeded in removing the binding magic keeping Hazmarduk prisoner and keeping him from killing them all with hit-and-run attacks as a high-level ghost sorcerer. Rholand made a couple of attempts to heal Oli’s wounds, but failed all of his checks and all of their low-level, cost effective wands didn’t have the caster levels to overcome the curse at all. So Oli was going to be low on HP for the rest of the dungeon (although thankfully not critically low).
The door on the raised platform lead to a small connecting corridor, one going north and the other going south. Both would lead to the next room beyond them, near the center of the basement where Hazmarduk’s spirit had been bound. To the north was Hazmarduk’s summoning chamber, where he conjured and bound a variety of outsiders to serve him (including Cassiopeia prevoiusly and the room’s current occupant, a rather annoyed Hezrou). To the south was Hazmarduk’s laboratory, where he dissected and spliced various monsters together for research and his own amusement.
The party ultimately chose the research laboratory, which allowed them to bypass the encounter with the hezrou (which wouldn’t have stayed bound for long, as it picked up a broken pillar that had fallen into its circle to smash its way free and wreak havoc after hazmarduk promised it freedom). Instead they entered Frankenstein’s laboratory, several torture racks and massive metal slabs covered in runes and shackles, with numerous tables near each holding surgical instruments atop them. Along the north wall was also a set of shelves containing various items that Hazmarduk had crafted or had made by his magic book assistants. The party looked around to see if there was anything valuable, and I quickly rolled up a scroll containing some spells that I thought would be appropriate – Temporary Ressurection, Stoneskin, and Resist Energy – Electricty. The party also found a wand, with a tag dangling off of it. Rholand read the writing on the tag, identifying it as a wand of Cure Serious Wounds – and setting off the Explosive Runes written on the tag. Yet again, I managed to nail poor Rholand with that spell . . . he wasn’t happy about it. But Hazmarduk thought the irony of getting blasted while having a wand of cure wounds in hand was hilarious.
Also of note was that alcoves had been carved around the walls of the room, and a number of them were filled with ice. What was frozen within was unclear and distorted by the ice, but it was clear that a creature was inside each block. Hazmarduk taunted the group with the information that he had already released and sent on several of his creations to Vimanda’s care. But since they were so interested in his creations, perhaps they would like a demonstration? And right on cue, the three remaining blocks of ice began to melt. The largest block of ice melted first as that was the one Hazmarduk triggered first, but the party was aware that the others would soon follow. Steam filled the room from the massive chunk of ice that flash melted in seconds, and the party could hear something emerging from the steam cloud as it began to dissipate . . . which is where we ended the session, as I needed time to create my own custom monster for this next fight!
If the party had somehow gotten TPK’d on the ground floor against one of the encounters designed to wear them down, in true horror movie fashion I’d have arranged for them to be dragged downstairs into the basement by Hazmarduk. Maybe by some skeletons or something since he currently lacked a body to do anything by himself with. Anyway, the point is that I had a logical plan for what to do if the party had TPK’d here, as Hazmarduk had no interest in killing them – at least not right away.
Instead they’d have all woken up in the basement, stripped naked and chained up. They would have then been forced to complete several Saw-style “games” before being able to escape, overpower their skeleton jailors (I mean, they’d be regular skeletons against 10th level PCs . . . not going to be a win for the skeletons), get their gear back, and finish the dungeon. Ideas I had for such “games”:
- Two characters are shackled together in a room that’s slowly filled with water. They have to somehow navigate a series of gymnastic challenges, such as walking across a narrow plank and jumping across gaps, while shackled together. Or maybe it was something like they only had enough keys for one of them to get free, and that one had to go get keys to save the other before the room flooded. It was something like that.
- One character is bound in front of an array of crossbows, with strings tied to their triggers that lead back to the second person. At the end of each string is a key, only one of which matches the locks of their chains. So the person would have to pull down the keys one by one, while the other gets peppered with crossbow bolts aimed at various body parts (shoulder, leg, knee, foot, etc.) Possible other inclusion is a mural behind the string puller that somehow gives clues as to which key is the right one, but since the string puller can’t see it, the target has to communicate. Good luck with that since they’d both be gagged!
- Last one is two characters chained together but with a long length of chain between them. Said length of chain is fed through an eyebolt in the middle of the room. By pulling almost the entire length of the chain through the eyebolt, the person on one side of the room or the other could reach their back wall where the keys were. However, that would mean that the other person would get dragged to the middle of the room – where a hungry zombie dog was waiting to chomp on their nethers.
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So, as the icy mist cleared, Hazmarduk’s creation was revealed – a towering serpentine creature with two heads. Hazmarduk called it a Bashir, a twisted freak of nature that had the head of a basilisk bolted onto a behir’s body (along with the original behir head). But this was not some sort of zombie of stitched together parts – it was an actual new “a wizard did it” freak of nature living monster.
The Bashir was basically my attempt at incorporating some of 4E D&D’s boss monster mechanics into the game, and so the monster got both a full-round action and an additional standard action to balance out the action economy of a full party versus one monster. How it worked was that each head got its own initiative count. At the start of each round the heads would struggle for control of the abomination’s body, the winner would get a full round of actions while the loser would be limited to a single standard action on its turn. Generally whichever head was in control took an additional penalty to the check based on how much damage it took (basically the other head getting a bonus to its roll from “hey, you’re sucking it up! My turn!”).
Unfortunately the Basilisk was much less impressive when it got to take a full round of actions, as it lacked the nasty full attack that the Behir possessed (Bite -> Grab, tear poor PC to pieces with 6 follow-up leg attacks). The Basilisk head did have a cool Gaze attack though, a schtick-swapped ability with the Behir where it would look at someone and zap them with a bolt of electricity for 7d6 damage. Meanwhile the Behir itself had a breath weapon that pelted people with small sticky rocks, that Slowed, then Dazed if already Slowed, and finally Petrified if Dazed (its blood would have been sufficient to unpetrify anyone, assuming the whole party didn’t get turned to statues). The Behir could also Swallow Whole people, which had a similar effect of its breath weapon in that it did some minor damage and slowly petrified anyone caught in its gullet over several rounds.
The Bashir also had a metric ton of HP, as each head had its own HP pool that damage went to while it was the dominant one. This massive HP pool did have a slight weakness, in that every time the Bashir was hit it gained 1 point of bleed on that head (so dominant head hit 5 times, 5 bleed, which continued to stack up, and continued to tick bleed damage onto that head even when it wasn’t the dominant one).
I’m not sure it was a particularly amazing fight, but the thing didn’t immediately crumple like so many other opponents had done, and I still think it was a cool experiment. The fight did take most of the night, however, and so we pretty much concluded the session immediately after the fight was over. Which was fine with me, as I also needed another week to get the Hazmarduk fight ready due to the fact it was going to be rather messy.
With the party’s way clear into the (effectively) final chamber where Hazmarduk was bound, it was time to end this haunted house ride . . . after it had taken nearly 2 months, which was *much* longer than I had thought it was going to take. Oh well, I was overall pretty pleased with most of the manor and its encounters, even if the party tended to roll right over them and barely even notice the fight!
First of, thanks for the new stories! You are quickly becoming my main source of inspiration.
I've taken a look at the other types of outsiders, and the fey are out, unfortunately...I didn't find a way to reconciliate their malicious nature and serving someone. Elemental...maybe. Constructs, certainly, but I think too many of them would get old.
If I don't find anything though, I might use Asura. I have a soft spot for them, and I might find a way to use their hatred of gods as a good motivation.
Regarding Bahor, I'm going for the classic rakshasa angle, but he might consider a genuine alliance with the PCs. And his sister will do the same, as long as one has not eliminated the other. It will become a gambit pile-up, I'm afraid.
I love th "I'm Special" quests! I'll make some of those, but so far I do not have enough to work with.
Didn't think of using Stellian as foreshadowing. Idea noted, thanks!
Regarding the manor, that must really make for a fun dungeon! Not my group strongest point, but I might adapt the idea. Fitting it into a PbP might be a challenge, though.
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Another option would be to use Aberrations, especially if you play the Cult of Rovagug angle (as pawns lured to the city by Domina). That was what I had hoped to do, but ultimately there didn't seem to be enough useful aberrations to throw at the party for their level range at the time. Still, Chokers and that one Gug did make an appearance, so there are some that could be employed as shock troops/living weapons by the cult.
Regarding Bahor/Vimanda, that tends to be the default state of things anyway. Unless the party just shrugs and adopts a "kill 'em all!" mentality, they will probably end up working alongside one or the other to get through Arkona Manor (assuming they don't chicken out and bail like mine did!). I think it is useful to try to keep them as manipulators and NPC "allies" that try to stay on the party's good side, going for the long game rather than the inevitable betrayal immediately after they've outlived their usefulness (this also lets you keep them rolling as a recurring character, which is always useful to have).
Yeah, creating "I'm special!" quests definitely needs to be something that serves as an outgrowth of who your PCs are and what they've done, so you need a good bit of history to work with (hopefully your PCs survive to maintain a stable cast of characters!). Book 4 does seem to be a good place to slot that, or perhaps Book 5 if you decide to remove Scarwall.
I suspect there will be more individual PC focused things going forward in my own game as well - the Book 4 quests were an outgrowth of Cid's player deciding that he wanted Cid to become a paladin (basically pulling a Cecil from Final Fantasy 4, going from a black knight to a holy warrior). Vaz'em's quest also gave me a second chance to drop the "you're half rakshasa/Arkona's son" bomb. Didn't seem right to focus just on those two, and there was plenty of material I could weave into personal stories for Rholand & Oli.
I think the dungeon probably went on longer than I had expected, but that was the intention - to have a sizable list of encounters that the party could do/not do, and would need to balance the rewards from those encounters with their dwindling supplies. Sadly, the fights weren't quite draining enough to make them reconsider doing most of them, but that was alright too as it meant I used 90% of the material I made.
If you want to do something similar, I would cull most of the filler encounters and replace them with ambiance, maybe a few simple traps (Hazmarduk sending a chandelier crashing down on someone's head, etc.) Especially in PBP you don't want to bog the party down with an excessive number of choices or combats in a row. I would definitely keep the Cassiopeia encounter, as that was frankly the best encounter from this bunch in my opinion, especially if the party has a Bard or someone with the Perform skill and can do the "battle of the bards" set-up (if Trinia is with them it could also just be her, with the party fighting to keep the ghosts off of her).
If you have a group with strong stomachs or can suitably tone down the nature of the encounter, the ritual birth room is also a very good encounter for getting across how much of a complete monster Hazmarduk is. That one you really have to judge how far you want to push your group's comfort level though, as even the implication of what was happening in that room is just . . . seriously f*%~ed up. I wonder about myself sometimes for being able to come up with this horrible s$&$. So, only use that one if you're sure your group will roll with it and not go *record scratch* "What the hell is wrong with you DM!?"
You might also keep the thassilon relic room with the crypt thing, just because those things are fun, although a headache to DM without a full map to work with (you could always limit the teleport effect somehow, or maybe it just teleports people into coffins/death traps within the same room. For the slight backstory it gives on Hazmarduk (and the adamantine weapon), you could also consider the Old Cougar (Hazmarduk's dad rakshasa reduced to a dullahan) fight although the poor guy really needs some help if you don't want him overrun and curbstomped immediately.
The book wizards could be used as strictly a roleplaying encounter and source of information - or a tough fight if your players are getting a little too uppity, given the pasting they gave my party, heeheehee!
I would probably limit the basement to an encounter with either the clay golem (as a reason for gathering the equipment from the other encounters), or some sort of freaky mutant monster that Hazmarduk created, rather than both. And then of course the encounter with Hazmarduk himself, although you could always just make it a typical haunted house that the party escapes from rather than going on to kick the house's ass!
Hum...I'm not too sure when I'll do those character-specific quests, but since I really don't like their treck in the Cinderlands, Book 4 seems like a good plan.
Regarding the haunted manor, I'll take notes and stash them somewhere, but I won't dwell on it for now, as I don't know if I'll even have the opportunity to develop that somewhere.
Also, Aberrations sound interesting, I might make a mix of that and constructs, with maybe some outsiders serving as officers, or something.
Speaking of which, I am also considering completely changing Togomor (which I don't like), and replacing him with a Gravewalker Witch heavily inspired by the Paizo iconic Villain, Nyctessa, who is a Dhampir Necromancer originally.
Anyway, I'm not in trouble for time, they are still before the coronation, trying to negotiate with Barvasi. I'll post how it went when the scene is done.
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One thing I forgot from last session – while they were battling the Bashir, the other two ice blocks began to melt, which would have freed a mutilated medusa (snake hair cut off and replaced with metal) and a Tendriculous to join the fight. Vaz’em shut those down by disabling the magical runes melting the ice – a pity, as the Medusa might have been convinced to aid them. Hazmarduk also taunted the group with the knowledge that he already sent two of his “pets” on to Vimanda for her use with his blessing. The exact nature of these two was left a mystery for now, partially because I didn’t have a good idea for what they were, although eventually Vaz’em found out from another source (more on that in, oh, twenty sessions or so).
So more than ready for the final battle, the party cast their last buffs and then entered the room that had been converted into Hazmarduk’s cell. While the room appeared to have been used as another workshop or perhaps library given the shelves lining the back wall, the room was now dominated by the massive series of runic circles etched into the floor at the room’s center. Lying in the middle of those concentric rings was the skeleton of some sort of half-man, half-tiger, a sword buried in its ribcage. Floating above that corpse was an ethereal Hazmarduk in all of his tiger-headed rakshasa glory. Standing next to the skeleton within the circle, working away at dispelling the runic circles in sequence, was an old friend – Rolth (who if you recall had been captured and imprisoned by Bahor – apparently Vimanda had found another use for the necromancer). And standing in between the party and the rest of the room was a crocodile headed man – Nudhaali the rakshasa. Nudhaali and Bahor/Glorio exchanged words, with Nudhaali taunting the outcast Arkona that his sister was a much better leader than he ever was. Soon, with Hazmarduk’s help, they would *rule* Korvosa, not skulk around in its shadows picking up scraps! Rolth was clearly not as enthusiastic about his new role as magical lackey tasked with freeing an ancient evil spirit, but he didn’t have much choice with Hazmarduk standing right there so he kept working away at dispelling the runes while Nudhaali raced into melee.
Hazmarduk – In My Head by Pale 3 (Matrix Revolutions Soundtrack)
Well, as Bahor/Glorio promised, things didn’t end well for Nudhaali as he got swarmed down as the party stormed the room. But he bought valuable time for Rolth, who erased another runic circle as Hazmarduk cackled and threatened the group. Nudhaali almost didn’t go out alone, either – I had been mixing up the rakshasa weapons to give them a more exotic/non-standard feel and thus Nudhaali had a heavy pick (helping with removing the runes by the brute force method of gouging them out of the stone). Well, Nudhaali got a critical threat on Cid, and that’s seriously bad news when the weapon in question is a pick (one of the only weapons with x4, like the scythe). Fortunately for Cid, Nudhaali cratered his critical confirmation roll, and so Cid did not take 80-some damage (which would have killed him instantly and left a giant hole where his heart had been)!
As Nudhaali fell, Hazmarduk roared and attempted to summon reinforcements, using his most powerful spell – Summon Monster 8, in an attempt to bring over that Hezrou the party had skipped (or another just like it). As he began to work the magic, however, magical runes burst into existence in the air around him, matching those carved into the circles. Those runes closed in and burned into Hazmarduk’s ethereal flesh, causing him to howl in agony (and narrowly disrupting the spell!) And so the circles’ effect on the combat was revealed – there had been a total of 8 circles around Hazmarduk (6 now). Each one suppressed a level of his spell-casting abilities – so with 2 circles gone he could cast 2nd-level spells or lower without harm. Anything higher than that triggered the runes, burning him and potentially disrupting his spell.
Being a sorcerer with meta magic (which apparently was a cheap workaround tactic, as a Maximized Empowered Scorching Ray was still considered 2nd level by the runes), Hazmarduk could still be a deadly threat even with only 2 circles gone, as he switched to blasting the party with meta-boosted Scorching Rays and Magic Missiles. Rolth threw up a Wall of Ice as Nudhaali fell to slow the party down, and followed it up with a Ghoul Army spell (the ghouls by this point were less than ineffective, but they still got in the way and could menace the party’s back line.
Then Rolth dispelled the third runic circle, and s!~! got real in a hurry. Hazmarduk started pumping out Maximized Intensified Fireballs, dealing something like 90 fire damage on a failed save – for most of the party this was basically “save or die” territory. The party miraculously survived the first one, except for Ronda who got caught in the blast and had always had a frail Constitution. So she burned up into negative Con and died pretty much instantly. Score another companion animal/cohort kill for the DM!
Aware that time was running out for them all if Hazmarduk started chucking those out willy-nilly, the party pretty much dogpiled on him. As a ghost, Hazmarduk had none of the typical rakshasa immunities, and the gear that the party had acquired pretty much neutralized his incorporeal “I take half damage from everything!” ghost defense. Glorio helped out by shouting at Vaz’em to pull the sword out of Hazmarduk’s ribcage, and taunting Hazmarduk to get his attention. It was enough to indeed get Hazmarduk’s attention, and despite the runic circles burning away at him, he made the concentration check to toss a Finger of Death followed up by a quickened Scorching Ray at Glorio. The exiled head of House Arkona made his Fort save, and thus any sort of faux-touching good-bye between father and son was averted (I say faux because nobody trusted or liked Glorio/Bahor – Vaz’em just kept him around because killing him would have made it too easy for him – he had to earn his redemption).
Vaz’em then pulled out the sword, and another presence flooded into his mind – the sword was intelligent! It introduced itself as Hazaali, Fang of the Tiger Lord, and it was a formidable short sword indeed (and Vaz’em’s end of quest reward). It wanted these items to be *really* special and tailored to the party, so each reward was really powerful – around a +6 priced weapon (~70k GP) plus some extra benefits as icing! Hazaali is detailed below.
Since Hazaali was the blade that killed Hazmarduk, while he was not extra vulnerable to it he did take full damage from its attacks, making it a more attractive option than his claws. Between that and the blows raining down from Cid and Oli, Hazmarduk’s hit points dropped rapidly. As his ethereal form began to disintegrate, Glorio reached out and worked some sort of magic, calling upon the runic circles on last time. The circles rose up into the air, collapsing in around Hazmarduk to bind him – and then dragged him into Vaz’em. The catman screamed as runic tattoos burned into his body, and Hazaali’s presence in his mind was joined by another – Hazmarduk.
Glorio apologized for what he had just done, but argued that it had been necessary – Hazmarduk was going to escape the runic circles, and as a ghost he’d reform long before Bahor could remake the circles. Binding Hazmarduk’s spirit into Vaz’em’s body was the only way he could keep the Arkona progenitor contained. And so Vaz’em became Hazmarduk’s new jailer – fortunately Hazmarduk’s presence was completely harmless, although that did not prevent him from being an insidious whisper in Vaz’em’s mind, offering him all sorts of aid and advice and promising more if he would just let Hazmarduk out. Vaz’em was surprisingly chill about this unexpected new duty, although that didn’t mean he didn’t mentally add it to the tally of things his father had to atone for.
Before he was fully chained to Vaz’em’s own essence, Hazmarduk enacted one last spiteful plan, turning himself into a Load Bearing Boss (to use the TVTropes phrase) by causing the manor to begin to collapse down on their heads. Rolth, now free of Hazmarduk’s influence, was perhaps not enthusiastic to join the party, but neither did he have any desire to pick a fight at this time. In another surprising move that was both merciful and pragmatic, Vaz’em offered to hire the necromancer, provided he served loyally and didn’t do anything Vaz’em would not approve of (like releasing a city-destroying plague maybe?). This was a monumentally bad idea, of course, because Rolth, but nobody really wanted to argue while the place was coming down on their heads.
So Rolth in two, the party fled the basement via a secret passage out of the basement that Glorio knew about. This secret passage, conveniently enough, led out into the illusionary well and stream flowing through the forest (where the leucrotta and friends had been hiding during the party’s approach). With a sizable portion of the forest around the manor sinking down into the growing crater, however, everybody was interested in getting as far away as possible, so they had no further issues fleeing from the manor and manor grounds. And we ended this session with that successful escape, and me already starting to plot how Rolth would bite all of them in the ass for letting him live. Unfortunately for Rolth, somebody in the party already had quietly decided they didn’t like Vaz’em’s terms of employment, and decided to do something about it.
So, Hazaali was an intelligent magical short sword, although I tended to downplay his talking as I already had more than enough characters to manage, thank you very much. Stat-wise, Hazaali was a +3 Stalking Bane (Lawful Outsiders) Short sword. Basically it was the sword of the current head of the Arkona household (at least until Glorio left it shoved in Hazmarduk’s ribs), a sign of his dominion over the other rakshasa because the blade could cut them down like no other blade. However just focusing the sword on native outsiders would have made it rather limited in use (basically just rakshasa and things like tieflings/aasimar, which hadn’t really made an appearance), so I decided to make it functional against any lawful outsider, from archons down to devils.
Since the bane property boosted it to +5, this meant that it could bypass any alignment-based damage reduction, something that vaz’em would really come to appreciate as devils continued to make an appearance – and likely will continue to make appearances through the rest of the game. The Stalking property meant that Vaz’em could get up to an extra +3d6 worth of damage on his first strike if he spent time analyzing his target – and since Hazaali was intelligent, it could use its own single action a round to activate that property (Vaz’em hasn’t really taken advantage of this much though, as he tends to just join Oli & Cid in wading in rather than skulking around the outskirts of a fight).
In addition to its static abilities, Hazaali also had a number of spells/special abilities imbued into it that it could activate once per day. Each set of spells/abilities was paired, and only one of the two could be used – leaving the door open to some tactical choices rather than just “use everything!”. There were three pairs of spell levels, basically pairing off 1st – 3rd level spells, and a capstone ability. You might notice a theme to most of them (hint: they basically allowed Vaz’em to pretend to be a rakshasa!)
1st – Expeditious Retreat/Shield
2nd – Detect Thoughts/Alter Self
3rd – Suggestion/Ki Leech
Capstone – Gain DR 15 Good/Piercing *or* Spell Resistance 25 for 1 minute
Whoa, I've got to get caught up! Nothing since December 21, and all of a sudden a whole bunch of stuff starting on December 30! I'll catch up when work isn't hosing me so bad (probably going to have to wait until at least next Sunday).
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Wow, if only I was that motivated...and that good of a story teller when writing my own campaign logs...
That said, I have a few questions!
Was Nudhaali only a rakshasa with a pike? It seems that at this level, he wouldn't be even remotely dangerous (apart from a crit, but still).
Regarding Hazmarduck, he could have attempted to cast his high level spells despite the runes, right? Taking the damage didn't mean he was failing automatically, only that he had to make a concentration check. Did he try that, or decided to play it "safe"?
As for my replacement for the demons, I have found it! I'll go down the aberration path.
So far, I thought they would be to weird to make a proper army, until I went back into my Horror Adventures and discovered the Hive. Which would make great soldiers, although a bit feral.
So, the hive is great for many reasons.
First, they would make a good army, and while I only have three official examples (larvae swarm, warrior, and queen), they should be fairly easy to adapt into a multitude of versions, a bit like the zerg from Starcraft.
Second, they are artificial creatures made with fleshwarping. As it happens, I wanted to find a place for a mad scientist attempting to create a new "a wizard did it" killing machine, so it fits perfectly.
Third, one of the PC quit before I took the campaign over from the former GM, so his character is still hanging in the city, but I didn't know what to do with him...and he his an alchemist obsessed with his experiment. I think he will ally with Andaisin to help develop Blood Veil in exchange for a laboratory and test subjects, that the PCs will encounter in Chapter 2. Maybe he will replace Ramoska and his spawns? Not sure yet.
Fourth, my chapter 3 will likely have gangs fighting it out in Old Korvosa. One of them will be kidnapping people, not to call demons, but to use as living incubators for the hive larvae.
I even like the idea of the lighthouse being turned into a giant hive. The only issue is that it's far less spectacular, but I'll find a way to make it so.
Finally, I even have a theme song:
Lusus Naturae - RWBY soundtrack
What do you think?
And last thing: as part of my PCs exploring their background, I plan on having my oracle's mother part of the same group that went to Scarwall with Gaedren and Rolth. Specifically, a dead paladin of Sarenrae, that he'll have to free from Scarwall's bonds.
Apart from my own thoughts, I really liked the fight with Hazmarduk! Seemed really climactic! I will keep following this closely, it's always a great read!
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Nudhaali was "just" a rakshasa with a heavy pick, yes. But I rearranged his feats and spells around to support him being an unpleasant lout and brute. A normal unaugmented rakshasa is pathetic in melee to start with - oh no, +16/+11 with a +1 kukri for 1d4+4 damage, 2d4+8 if he crits! The horror, the horror! (with an extra claw and bite for who-the-f@+$-cares damage).
So, Nudhaali had Power Attack, Vital Strike, Improved Critical - Heavy Pick, Cleave, Shield of Swings for his feats. Which meant his melee was more like +16/+11 for 1d6+7 *or* +13/+8 for 1d6+16 (-3 To-Hit, +9 Power Attack for using Pick Two-handed), Crit on 19-20/x4. Which is what nearly happened to Cid - eating 4d6+64 damage on a crit is "f$@# you, you're dead" damage.
That being said, he was mostly meant as a muscle roadblock, not the main attraction of this fight, so it's alright if he just got punched in the face and died without doing a ton of damage.
And that is correct - Hazmarduk could have cast his most powerful spells if he made the concentration check - which he nearly did when he opened the fight up by trying to summon a hezrou (Summon Monster 8). But he ate like 25 Force damage (it was something like 6d6 or 7d6, one d6 for each spell level above his allowed "max" and I rolled pretty high) from trying that. Largely, it was an excuse so the 15th level sorcerer ghost-rakshasa didn't absolutely murder the party by spamming something like Finger of Death at them over and over again. Or just keep summoning Hezrous to curbstomp the party for him. Either/or. Given his metamagic'd fireballs did something absurd like 90 damage in a 20' radius, he didn't really need his higher-level spells (just the higher slots for the metamagic'd stuff) to lay waste. As the fight went on and he got more desperate/pissed off, he used a few higher-level spells though (like the Finger of Death on Bahor - he was willing to eat another 20 damage to try and kill off his murderer).
Cool find! Honestly, this sounds very similar to one of the subplots that I ran just before the whole lighthouse scenario, namely the leukodaemon Lord Bile that escaped Andaisin's clutches and started up a daemon/Blightspawn army by kidnapping people and injecting them with potent diseases, turning them from normal people into Plaguetwisted abominations.
You could even do something similar here if the leukodaemon escapes (or the party lets it leave - seriously, that thing will almost certainly kill at least one person if they fight it. Harm is an absolutely brutal spell, and it's breath weapon and various other abilities aren't weak either. Have the thing be trapped in Korvosa (since it's not summoned, it's physically here, and needs Plane Shift to get back home to Abaddon . . . which is something it can't do on its own), and get hired by this mad scientist character to work as a partner at turning people into disgusting bug creatures (you could throw in some blightspawn as officers/casters - they're only CR 5 but have some nasty abilities/spells.) You can even replace the fight with the Proteans at the top of the lighthouse with a fight against the leukodaemon, and maybe a small cadre of other daemon bodyguards (or more Hive critters).
Then just replace Ezram (who was always meant to be a one-encounter gimp that died, rather than a recurring nemesis when I first designed him) with this mad scientist guy, give him some lackies, and voila! You have your new lighthouse - a climatic fight inside with the Hive and the mad scientist while Lusus Naturae plays (very nice choice for this sort of opponent - I've been looking for a place to use it in my own game). And then at the top, the fight with the true heart of this horror - the evil outsider that they let go several levels ago at the end of the previous book! That'll bring things full circle nicely, and should make them pale a bit to learn what their self-preserving "mercy" cost Korvosa. You could even use it in a similar way that I used the Imentesh, in that the leukodaemon due to staying in Korvosa so long as become attuned to Kazavon's presence, and actually in its own sick way thinks it's *saving* the city from the far, far worse fate barreling down on it.
And while it's no God in Fire, feel free to hit them with The Lost Shepherd by Coheed and Cambria, which was my planned musical theme for the leukodaemon. It's very menacing and fitting for a rotting plague-infested daemon.
Nice idea! I actually had a similar plan, with a half-elf paladin of Iomedae . . . or Abadar - one of those lawful gods :-p who was Parashial's latest child before Oliver, who went to Scarwall in an attempt to gather intel on what was going on for him. The party got captured, the fourth member who was a bit of an arse to begin with got full-on converted to Kazavon worship, and consummated his loyalty by brutally torturing said paladin to death. That actually pissed Rolth and Gaedren off, to the point that they in turn murdered the traitor after Scarwall let the three of them go with some metal to bring back to Korvosa for the crown.
Of course, i'm planning on Oliver having to decide if he's willing to deal with his half-sister, or just mow her down mercilessly alongside the rest of Gaedren's party during the inevitable third fight vs. Gaedren.
Also, I never ended up getting to use this musical theme for Rolth (I forgot to use it during the big brawl in Book Two :( ), but this one really works for him I think. Or any necromancer, for that matter. Life Burns by Apocalyptica.
Oh, nice catch on the theme songs! This is also a really good plan, I may have the mad alchemist using the daemon as is right hand, which would make for a good fight!
I'll put it aside for now, though, because it really depends on what the PCs are doing with the Leukodaemon. But there is a solid foundation for my chapter 3 plot! Thanks!
I'll borrow the theme for Rolth, too.
Okay, I finally got caught up. Good to see that you have successfully inspired 2 more CotCT GMs! I say, Paizo should have hired you to do Curse of the Crimson Throne Anniversary Edition . . . .
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So with business within the manor concluded (and the manor itself a giant crater in the middle of the forest), the party heads back to their horses and Oliver’s gnome minions, Righty and Lefty, who had been left behind to guard the horses. As they approach the road, however, they can hear the sounds of battle ahead. Racing forward, they reach the road in time to see another group of ogres + ettin leader battling an older man wielding a bastard sword while on horseback, as well as a young Shaoti brave (of the Skull clan). The two seemed to be holding off the ogres, keeping them from Righty/Lefty and the group’s horses. As the party moves in to help, a third heavily armored figure comes charging in on horseback, skewering the ettin from behind with a lance. I didn’t bother creating a new token for this knight since the surprise wouldn’t last long, so the party knew immediately that this was Cressida Kroft. Trinia shouted in relief as the last of the ogres fell, and the Horsemen of Harse were reunited.
Introductions were made for the two new people – Jasan was the name of the older man, and the Shaoti brave was called “Thunder” by the group. Apparently Thunder only knew a little Common, the result of Trinia’s tutelage, and she in turn had been learning Shaoti from him (explaining how she learned that language since the party saw her last). As Trinia had mentioned way back at the start of the manor trip, the rest of the Horsemen had been out hunting the leader of this ogre/ettin army – a dragon who went by the name of Zareem! Yes, it was the same red dragon they fought back in Book 2, who got rescued only by the presence of his much bigger, scarier brother. Apparently he hadn’t learned anything from the last time he got his ass kicked, and was back in the land pirate game.
On the way back to Harse the two groups exchanged stories of what they had been up to. Kroft had become an adventurer, hence her presence here, and had discovered that being her own boss was actually appealing . . . although there was an edge to her behavior (which got a lot worse once they got back to town – more on that in a bit). Thunder was just sort of an ignorant youth off on a coming-of-age journey to find himself, or some such – nothing particularly of interest there. I did try to play up in conversation that he was sort of a jackass if you could actually understand what he was saying (Ronda could also speak Shaoti), but nothing really came of it.
Jasan was an interesting case though – although he had a family on the nearby Blackbird Ranch, and was a friend of Vencarlo, Cid was very suspicious of him. He theorized that Jasan was in reality the missing Duncan Almson – the second-in-command of the Order of the Nail when it was founded by General Leo Astares - which was a cool idea (that I decided to run with as I never got the chance to have Duncan show up in Book 3). There was no basis for his theory though, besides “somebody’s got to be Duncan”, and Jasan was old enough to fit the bill. So for now, Cid kept his theory to himself (despite mentioning it OOC so I had time to mull it over and decide “eh, why not?” to throw his player a bone).
So the party got back to Harse – Jasan said his goodbyes as he was returning to his ranch and family, and Thunder wandered off somewhere because I didn’t have very many interesting ideas for him. Rolth didn’t want anything to do with the group (especially with Kroft giving him funny looks like “where have I seen you before . . .”) so he also went up to his room in the inn. That left the party with just Trinia and Kroft, which took a surprising turn for the ugly as Kroft started drinking.
Apparently Kroft still had a thing for self-destruction, only this time using booze instead of sleep deprivation. She was a rather mean drunk too, and picked Trinia as the target for her attentions, basically calling her an ignorant brat that was always getting into trouble. She also dropped *the* bomb – that she hadn’t been one bit fooled by the “Natiri Brosa” alter ego, and she knew that she was speaking with Trinia Sabor. This was something that Trinia had expressed fear over to the PCs a number of sessions ago, as she still remembered Kroft being the prosecutor at her trial and assumed Kroft would drag her back to Korvosa or maybe even summarily execute her if she found out her identy.
Panicked and crying, Trinia ran out of the tavern – Vaz’em followed to comfort her, and managed to get her calmed down and convinced her that she didn’t need to be afraid of Kroft – if Kroft was going to do something, she’d have done it by now. Meanwhile back in the inn, Cid had had enough of Kroft’s drunken bitterness, and asked her if she wanted to “take it outside”. Kroft readily agreed – she had been trying to pick a fight with someone, and in typical self-destructive fashion was just going to stand there and let herself get beat up by Cid. Ironically, Cid was planning the exact same thing, so it was going to be one hell of an awkward fight with them both just standing there ready to play punching bag for the other one. Unfortunately Rholand had to be goody-two-shoes and spoil the moment by putting his foot down and declaring that no one was going outside to fight and broke it up, managing to convince Kroft to go up to her room at the inn and sleep it off.
We pretty much ended the session there as all of these conversations had taken quite a bit of time, and I was running out of steam anyway. Largely, I was trying to buy myself time to put together the next plot point, dealing with Zareem and his land pirates once and for all, so “wasting” a session on a whole lot of talking was just fine with me. Unfortunately, putting together the manor dungeon had taken a lot out of me, and real life was just kicking my ass at this point. I was hovering on the brink of what was basically a nervous breakdown, and after the following session I threw in the towel for several months until I managed to piece myself back together enough to continue running CotCT. Fortuitously, Oliver’s player agreed to run a brief homebrew D&D 4e game as a stop-gap until I managed to recover. I’m not going to cover that game here since it had no relevance to the CotCT game, and frankly while it was nice to be a player for once I was a really terrible one (owing to the fact that I was basically brain-numb for the couple months that the game was running).
In between this session and the last one before the breakdown (but only for a while!), there was one other matter that was resolved.
So Vaz’em had been a pretty nice employeer to Rolth. He had spared his life, gave him some simple but quite reasonable ground rules to follow (basically – “don’t kill people and turn them into undead unless and I say it’s okay”), and even gave him a sack of money as a sign-on bonus to be Vaz’em’s lackey. In return for this, Rolth was going to teleport the group directly to Kaer Maga once they were ready to leave Harse. That was the plan, anyway, but of course it wasn’t what Rolth of all people was going to do. Because it’s f~%#ing Rolth and he hated the group’s guts for everything they had done to him throughout the past three books (namely killing his apprentice Vreeg, his adventuring buddy Lamm, his girltoy Jostilina, his employer Andaisin, foiling his plans, and causing him to get imprisoned by Glorio and then used as an expendable tool by Vimanda). So he *was* going to betray them, and pretty much immediately.
My plan was for him to teleport only half of the party, and not to Kaer Maga but instead right outside the gates of the capital city of Nidal. Then either try to kill whoever he had just teleported with, or teleport back to Harse and kill the two people he left behind while leaving the other two behind in Nidal. Which wouldn’t have been a hopeless scenario for them – I had planned for Laori and Sial to walk out the gates on their way to Kaer Maga at around that exact same time, and they would have been able to reunite the party (thanks to a teleport from Sial).
Regardless, the point would have been clearly made – don’t trust insane jackass necromancers, and especially don’t try to hire them to work for you, after they’ve been your mortal enemy for the past half of an entire AP.
But see, as I mentioned earlier, a member of the party already had a serious issue with Vaz’em hiring Rolth, and they were determined to nip this issue in the bud. And so that night, after everyone had gone to sleep, Oliver had his gnome lackeys discretely climb up to the window outside Rolth’s room and disable it so it couldn’t be opened. That done, he gathered up Ronda to pick the lock on Rolth’s door, with the plan of barging inside and taking the necromancer out before he even knew what was happening.
There was just one snag in Oliver’s plan – a drunken Kroft showed up at this point. And she made it very clear that at this particular moment, she was drunk enough to have no problems whatsoever with spending the night with Oliver – in his room or hers. But Oliver was a man on a mission, and despite explaining that he was very, very tempted by that offer after spending most of the first half of the AP trying to court her, he couldn’t do that tonight. Kroft made it clear that she wasn’t willing to take a raincheck on this midnight rendezvous, but Oliver was resolutely, and remorsefully, firm that he couldn’t tonight. So Kroft went away drunk and disappointed, and Oliver got back to work.
I wish I could say that an epic battle worthy of Rolth’s stature ensued after Olvier broke into his room, but sadly that would be a lie. Oliver broke in, got a surprise round grapple on Rolth, and it was all downhill from there. I’m not sure if it was because I didn’t realize at the time that Dimension Door was vocal only and thus no concentration check to cast while grapple was needed, or if I had decided that Rolth didn’t have a dimension door ready at this point (as he had used a number of spells during the fight beneath the manor, including I think one dimension door – which resulted in him getting teleport-trapped in a cell along the party’s exit route, which was when Vaz’em decided to show mercy, extracting him from the cell in exchange for Rolth’s acceptance of being an employee again).
Anyway, Rolth was grappled, he tried to cast a spell, failed the concentration check, Oliver pinned him next round, Rolth failed to roll the natural 20 or so he would have needed on his CMB check to break free of the pin, Oliver tied him up and gagged him, and then cut off Rolth’s head without any hesitation. Even after he mentioned the name of Taira (the half-elf paladin daughter of Parashial that had gone with him and Lamm and that other asshat to Scarwall) at some point in their struggle, which Oliver had heard before but knew next to nothing about.
And so, having forgone a night with Kroft or any answers as to who Taira was, I decided that Oliver had earned success in his mission. And the only thing he wanted from that mission was to see Rolth dead. So . . . Rolth died a completely anti-climactic death and went on to join Lamm in Scarwall to await the inevitable Round 3 against the party.
Oliver snatched up the purse of coins that Vaz’em and given Rolth, left everything else (which could have been trapped in some way – and indeed his extensive collection of journals had Firetraps and the like cast on them – and forced open the window from the inside and hopped out into the night.) This left a big mess for the group to solve in the morning, as Vaz’em attempted to solve Rolth’s murder, eventually concluding that it was some sort of warning from the Red Mantis despite it not matching their MO at all and quite heavily armored footprints being left in the mud walking away from the scene of the crime). And even after Oliver handed Vaz’em the sack of coins back and explained that he had “found it somewhere”, it still didn’t quite seem to register that Oliver had just gone in and straight up murdered Vaz’em’s new hire. Which was just as well since it avoided a potential in-character argument between the two oldest members of the Grey Thugs, our heroes. Which would have been especially ironic given the face palming that would have followed Rolth’s sudden but inevitable betrayal in another couple session had he lived.
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After the following session I threw in the towel for several months until I managed to piece myself back together enough to continue running CotCT. Fortuitously, Oliver’s player agreed to run a brief homebrew D&D 4e game as a stop-gap until I managed to recover.
I'm glad to hear you're doing better now. Judging from the way you adapt this story and transcribe it into these long summaries, I gather you might be a bit of a perfectionist (hmm, sounds familiar ...). That can take a great toll on your personal life sometimes and then, it is sad to say, your hobby is probably one of the few things that can 'move' to give you some more breathing room.
I'm happy for you that a friend picked up the DM's glove for a time, so you could continue to meet with your group and still have some fun, even if it was in a brain-numb state.
I enjoy reading your stories, so I hope things go uphill from here. Here's to 'happy days' ahead.
Thanks! The good news is that this happened back last winter, so I can safely say that there was a happy ending. We got started back up around the Spring time of last year, and have been trucking along ever since. We're getting "close" to wrapping up Book Four, at which point I will take another break and Oliver's player will run a follow-up game while I prep for Scarwall.
That was actually the *original* plan, I just had a breakdown about a year and a half before schedule, so he had to throw something together with no notice, heh. Once Book Four is complete I also plan to let my players in here, so they can tell you all about their experiences going through this twisted nightmare of a game! :D
(We are almost to Session One Hundred Thirty at this point. Let's just say that when they got to Kaer Maga we got a little side tracked by that gloriously f#%~ed up city).
Well, that is good to hear! Balancing everything can be hard. This is great, but don't ruin your health doing it. :)
Although I understand the drive, I have trouble getting away from my own campaigns.
Even if she's a mean drunk, I still think that someone needed to let Trinia know she had better improve her disguise skills. It's harsh at first, but I'm sure it'll save her later on.
I found Rolth was a little underwhelming, truth be told, and in order to make him more of a threat individually, I made him Cabalist Vigilante. Turned Jolistina (well, the equivalent of her, anyway) into a Serial Killer Vigilante as well.
Get better, and restore your health.
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Thanks for the well wishes everyone – but as I mentioned, that was all in the past and I’ve been happily running the rest of Book Four since that breakdown happened over a year ago. Getting relatively close to the end of Book Four finally too – just a couple more plot points to go and then it’s on to Scarwall! *DM grin*
So the party woke up the next day to the mystery of Rolth’s death. As mentioned in the last write-up, Vaz’em did some investigation, was completely bamboozled at Oli’s rather shoddy workmanship as far as assassination went (and he still had it in his head that an enemy, like the Red Mantis, had done this). Eventually it gets cleared up, and they shifted to the looting. Nobody really wants anything from a necromancer though, and Rolth didn’t have anything *really* interesting as far as gear.
Upon discovering Rolth’s enormous collection of leather-bound journals, and that they were all trapped, Vaz’em decided that it wasn’t worth the bother and never touched them again. And thus Rolth’s journals, a treasure trove of information about his experiences in Scarwall (and thus advance knowledge of what awaited them), and my last best chance to get some of the “Domina hired Gaedren and Rolth to go into Scarwall” backstory out into the open in front of my players’ eyes, faded into nonexistent forgotten junk. Meh, their loss, heeheehee.
While that was going on, Kroft woke up, remembered what she had done, and pretty much immediately regretted her life. Quite contrite, she approached Rholand and apologized for her behavior the previous evening, and asked if Trinia was alright. Rholand was not a complete ass and accepted her apology – no mention of her offer to Oliver was made, and since we had covered that in a private session to cover up the fact that Oliver killed Rolth no one ever knew about that part (until recently, heeheehee). You can assume that Kroft was rather tight-lipped and awkward around Oliver for a while afterwards though – although now with a clear head, she was very much grateful he hadn’t made everything EVEN WORSE by taking her up on that offer.
As for Trinia, I *think* she had spent the night in Vaz’em’s room, but get your head out of the gutter because their relationship was strictly platonic (at this point anyway, heeheehee) and Vaz’em was a purrfect gentle-cat-man. He also tried to give her some advice I think on toughening up and getting better at disguising herself though, because yeah, a red-haired wig and “Natiri Brosa” was not working (the DM, on the other hand, found the whole thing hilarious, along with making Trinia one of his absolute favorite chew toys to throw around like a rag doll).
All this talking took up a bunch of time, which was a good thing for me because this was when the steam finally ran out. The last event I had before our hiatus was Jasan coming back to town, beaten to within an inch of his life and bound upright to the saddle of his horse. The party cut him down off the horse pretty quickly and Rholand patched him up. From there Jasan explained what had happened to him.
To make a long story short, Zareem’s land pirates, reinforced by that enraged family of manticores that had been terrorizing the region and burning down farmsteads, and finally come to the Blackbird Ranch last night. Jasan got his ass kicked, his wife and two kids were taken prisoner, and Jasan was sent back to Harse with a message from Zareem. It was basically “turn over the magic items and other valuable things you found in Arkona manor, or this man’s family dies horribly. You have until noon to comply, and then they die and we take everything by force.” Zareem may have also buzzed the town at some point, roaring much the same thing.
Of course, having just escaped the haunted death trap of Arkona manor, the party had no intention of handing their stuff over to a dragon whose ass they kicked (with Gwen’s considerable help!) all the way back in Book 2. Thanks to the Horsemen of Harse’s scouting trip the other day, they knew where Zareem was holed up – an old cave network deep in the forest. No doubt Jasan’s family was being held there until their execution (or whatever worse fate a bunch of ogres & ettins dreamed up). The party didn’t have a lot of time to get there and save the day, and so they left town pretty much immediately.
Jasan naturally wanted to go with the party, but they managed to convince him that he was in no shape to fight right now even with magical healing, and it was a better idea for him to stay in town with Kroft and ready the village’s defenses against the upcoming attack. What was likely to happen was that the party would pass the bulk of Zareem’s forces as they traveled to Harse, resuce Jasan’s family from the land pirate base camp, and then hit Zareem’s new army from behind while the Horsemen of Harse and the town’s militia (plus the squad of Grey Maidens) held the line and served as the anvil to the party’s very big hammer.
It was a tall order for an isolated town to stand up to an army of ogres with manticore & dragon support, but Kroft had some ideas and the full adventuring party of the Horsemen at least gave the town some hope of holding on for a couple hours while the party raced out to these caves and back.
And that was pretty much where we ended things, with the party setting out for the caves. I had no work done of these caves, nor on the defense of Harse which I had imagined in my mind as a grand battle, similar to Book Three’s closing where the party waded through several literal blocks of city map filled with demons. It was a whole lot of work, and I just didn’t have it in me between my issues and the drain that making Arkona Manor had been. So we closed up shop for a few months, Oliver’s player ran a fill-in game of 4E, and I eventually recovered in the spring. And when we finally got back into the swing of things, I had decided that in addition to meeting their old friend Zareem, it was time to start lying the groundwork for Cid’s “I’m special” quest, in the form of some old friends of his from Korvosa catching up to him . . .
Also Okiba, sadly this music was not available to me at the time of Book Four's opening, but given the similar theme I would highly recommend using Let's Just Live from RWBY volume 4 OST (when it comes out in a couple more months) for when your party is fleeing Korvosa for their miserable lives, heeheeheehee.
Or, if you want something more epic and instrumental, how about something like We Fight On from Dragon Age Inquisition (do be careful about spoilers for that game in the youtube comments if you care about such things)?
Thanks for the musical advice, I didn't think about Let's Just Live.
I could just use the whole OST, honestly...
Thanks for the spoiler warning, which I do care about, but as it happens, I've played that game way too much already. :D
My party is finally getting out of their meeting with Devargo! I'll probably post a summary once they wrap it up.
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So, after a several-month hiatus, I managed to piece myself back together enough that I was capable of running a game. I was still on shaky ground though, due to the fact that I had thrown in the towel over the fact that I had set myself up for an enormous amount of work with Zareem attacking Harse with an army of ogres, ettins, and manticores. That problem was only compounded by the fact that there was no map of Harse that I could easily copy, because like everything else *but* the Shaoti, it got glossed over in Book Four.
But I was better, and though I didn’t manage to get Harse all detailed up in time for this game, I did manage to come up with what I thought was a good “on the road” encounter that made a lot of sense for the story, and would work well as a warm-up for the party getting back into playing Pathfinder. I was successful in that . . . for a certain definition of “success” anyway.
So the party – and just the party at this point since Ronda was dead (Oliver was planning on rezzing her) and Trinia was back in Harse – are traveling through the woods towards Zareem’s cavern base (on a map I had jokingly labeled “Somewhere in the woods where no one will hear you scream” – my players found it amusing, and after the session, apropos). Suddenly, a wall of ice forms around the party, mostly behind them and to one side, boxing them in at least partially. A harsh raspy voice called out to them from the woods ahead, it’s owner still unseen (Bone Devil using its Invisibility) as it told Cid that it was time to pay his debts and if he surrendered the rest of the party would be spared.
Cid being Cid, he told the devil to go back to Hell and that was pretty much the end of negotiations. Two dog-headed devils (Houndmaster devils, my own creation) with bows appeared from the trees just behind the invisible speaker’s general location, each straining to hold onto the chains around the three necks of their pet cerberi. With Cid’s refusal to surrender, they let go of the chains and the miniature versions of Cerberus raced forward. So let’s see – two custom devils (~CR 7), two Cerberi (CR 7, although I treated them as being summoned by the Houndmaster devils), and a CR 9 Bone Devil. Seems like a fair fight, fight?
Well, on the first round of combat, while the Cerberi charged in, all three of the other devils summoned in some more friends. And they got some pretty high rolls on how many buddies they called in! The Bone Devil brought in 5 Bearded devils, and the Houndmasters each summoned 4 hellhounds. Suddenly the fight was against a Bone Devil, 2 Cerberi, 2 Houndmaster devils, 5 Bearded Devils, and 8 Hellhounds. Those were a lot worse odds. But I had seen my party tear through monsters, including ones that I thought would put up an impressive fight (such as that damn worthless Gug). And most of the bad guys were summoned monsters of the trash CR 3 & 5 variety.
Rholand got the hint and immediately tapped Oliver with Protection from Evil 10’ Radius – unfortunately that meant that he couldn’t attack the swarm of summoned monsters since they would be held back out of reach, but it did make him a good blocker for the rest of the party. Except that Rholand decided one Circle was enough and didn’t tap Cid with one (or if he did he used the regular Pro. Evil which wasn’t enough with bearded devils armed with glaives which circumvented that). Oliver advanced with the intention that the rest of the party would follow along behind him, but that didn’t happen as the Bone Devil summoned another wall of ice immediately behind Oliver, cutting him off from the rest of the party and leaving only a small gap in the box now surrounding the party.
The walls of ice didn’t bother Vaz’em much, as he scampered invisible up one of the walls and started circling around the fight to sneak up on the Houndmaster devils and ruin their day. Meanwhile Oliver was trapped against the wall of ice by the swarm of hellhounds that surrounded him, preventing him from moving as that would break the benefits of the Magic Circle. Well, the hellhounds breath is a 15’ cone, so they *all* lit him up, while 3d6 fire is not impressive at all this level, 3d6 times 8 certainly is! And with his reduced health still from the clay golem (that had continued to resist all attempts at healing it), Oliver was in a bad way inside his little bubble.
Meanwhile, Rholand and Cid were still cut off from everyone else in the middle of the ice wall box and the bearded devils and cerberi were coming for them. Cid stepped up to block their way, trusting in his mirror images to protect him (that was a mistake). Since he was their primary target, the devils were happy to swarm around him as the gap in the wall was still 15’ or so, enough room for them to get in and surround Cid from all sides, taking the AoOs from him to do so.
Cid’s second mistake was in not refreshing his dwindling mirror images on his next turn, instead choosing to spell combat up a shocking grasp to obliterate a bearded devil with (something like an 80 damage hit). Unfortunately for Cid, there were still plenty more where he came from, and a couple hellhounds broke off from surrounding Oli to go surround Cid instead and breathe some fire on him. With flanking bonuses, the devils had decent odds to hit Cid despite their relatively low hit dice, and one of the bearded devils managed a really nasty hit with a glaive (x3, very reminiscent of Lora now that I think of it, heeheehee).
Cid went down, and the last bearded devil wasted no time in stabbing its glaive down into his head, sending the ex-Hellknight back to Hell (or rather the private demi-plane of Bel-whatever-zga) for judgement. The Cerberi spend their next actions tearing out Cid’s guts, and the Hellhounds each pulled off a limb, because they *really* didn’t want him coming back again (too bad they forgot about Reincarnate which doesn’t need an intact body, hint hint!) The Bone Devil teleported over and appeared to tear off Cid’s head and fling it at Rholand, taunting the oracle about what he was going to do now to fix this.
Meanwhile, Vaz’em had made it to the Houndmaster devils, and got to try out Hazaali. The blade snarled as it bit into the devil’s flesh, cutting through it as easily as any other flesh (huzzah +5 vs. Lawful outsiders!). The devil screamed as Vaz’em pretty much destroyed it in one or maybe two rounds. It went down, bleeding out from its own wounds. The other Houndmaster devil ran over to stabilize it, and teleported out with its buddy (mate?) in its arms to go get it some healing back at the main group of devils/Korvosa/somewhere else. Normally devils can’t teleport with much weight, like a body would be (to keep them from teleport kidnapping people, I guess?) but I offered the party that option, and they took it since it got rid of both Houndmasters.
With Cid dead though, the rest of the devils pretty much just left, and those that didn’t like the hellhounds Rholand, Oliver, and Vaz’em dealt with or they ran away and we handwaved the rest of the fight (don’t quite remember). Regardless, Cid was now dead (again), and this time it would be considerably more difficult to bring him back to life given that he was in six different pieces or so.
This was when Hazmarduk began his long campaign of trying to corrupt Vaz’em, by reminding him of that scroll of Temporary Ressurection, which would allow him to return Cid to the land of the living – for about 24 hours. Hazmarduk knew of ways to extend that time limit, which he offered to teach Vaz’em in exchange for letting him possess the catfolk ninja for a night of debauchery in his body. Vaz’em didn’t go for it . . . but he didn’t say no either, as he wanted to keep the party’s options open (they ultimately decided to use the Temporary Ressurection scroll to bring him back and then got a scroll of Reincarnate to bring him back after he died again. Even though technically thanks to the Temporary Ressurection Cid would have a freshly dead but intact body they could have revived).
Anyway, in a moment that was ultimately destined to be retgoned out in the following session, I had DeVries, Cyrus, and two Hellknights show up looking for Cid. They had been tracking the devils chasing after him, and basically wanted his side of the story in Vox’s death (instead of assuming he was guilty of her murder). Ultimately though the scene didn’t seem to make much sense without Cid there, nor did it make sense how they found the party out in the middle of the woods, so I excised it and told the party that it never happened during the next session (I had other plans for the Hellknights, but at least now the party knew they were in the area).
We ended the session with the battered (at least Oli was pretty beat up) party standing around Cid’s mangled body. While Cid’s death was rather unexpected (I think you can begin to see a pattern here of Cid overextending and immediately getting crushed for it), it actually gave me an opportunity to advance his “I’m special” quest in a new and unique direction, as you will see in next session’s write-up. Suffice to say, after I had some time to think about it, I came up with a better idea than just more devil torture during Cid’s brief time in the afterlife.
Reading you, I sometimes wonder if I'm too soft on my players. I haven't had a death in the last two years, and I DM every two weeks.
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Me either. Oh, wait, no, I killed a PC that I was playing a few weeks ago. First session, too. So, in 18 months, the only player I've killed was my own.
I mean, I would not kill them for the sake of killing them, but I wonder if the challenges they encounter are...well, enough of a challenge.
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Been reading through this thread for the past few days and to be frank Inspectre, you've inspired another one.
There's no telling whether I'll ever get to actually run it, but I'm slowly piecing together a framework for a thoroughly modified (set in Eberron, for starters) CotCT game and plan to steal several of your ideas in the process - to begin with, upping Gaedren's role as a central villain for Book 1 and likely making "Ileosa" (may change out her core character, depending on exactly where I set it, but her role for the campaign will be mostly the same) a more good-natured person before being possessed by Kazavon.
Got several more ideas of my own, but it's going to be a lot of work regardless, especially since I'm strongly tempted to make "Ileosa" the newly crowned Queen of Breland (one of the five major nations of the setting) rather than a mere city-state like Korvosa. But I'll save the details for another thread, assuming I ever get around to writing it up, as I don't want to hijack your's overmuch.
Regardless, thanks for sharing your campaign write-ups. I greatly look forward to the next update.
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Hey all! Still around, you can call off the search and rescue dogs! Just been a busy couple months that have not left me with much spare time or energy to devote to writing up journals. Game is still going quite strong though, and we are finally, FINALLY, almost to the end of Book Four - just got two plot points left to wrap up (which at our current pace will still take FOREVER!) at this point. Then I get to take another break for a couple months while Oliver's player runs another game so I can devote my full DM attention to prepping Scarwall *rubs hands together gleefully*.
Okiba -
Well, if I remember correctly you’re running a Wrath of the Righteous campaign – your one and only hope for maybe killing/dropping your PCs to 0 HP was back in Book 1. Past that, if the horror stories I’ve heard of that AP are right you’ll be lucky if you manage to keep them from getting bored as they effortlessly curbstomp their way to victory past Book 2 or so. And to think I was half-tempted to run that one when we were just in the early planning stages, only to ultimately settle on Curse of the Crimson Throne! Dodged a real bullet there – I think I would have stopped DMing Pathfinder and never, ever came back if that was my first experience DMing it!
I don’t really set out with the goal of killing PCs, but I do intend for things to be scary and challenging, and I don’t pull punches and very rarely fudge things one way or the other (the only big exception I remember was letting Oliver live way back in Book 1 when he “should” have died to the ooze swarm thing). I do, however, have contingency plans upon contingency plans in the back of my mind to pull out should things go “off script” one way or another. The PCs have various friends who could help out with a rescue or Raise Dead; I’ve brought enough bad guys back through various means that it’s no longer a surprise when nobody they’ve killed actually *stays* dead.
But my players damn well know to be scared and take their situation seriously because I *will* kill them, I will destroy everything and everyone they’ve ever cared about, and I will hold it as entirely their fault for failing (or doing something stupid). It keeps them from getting too big for their britches (at least past the “let’s mock the bad guy” phase) and they know that anything they do succeed at is theirs – I don’t “give” them anything (but pain, lots and lots of that for free!). It also helps to throw the CR booklet out over your shoulder and just “eyeball” it, especially once you’re past the low levels – generally if there is a way out, your players will manage it either through brute force, lucky rolls, or some surprisingly clever plan. Not an excuse to throw a god at them while they’re 5th level or anything, but provided you give them time to prepare or don’t hammer them with repeated encounters until they break, players can punch above their weight class with surprising frequency. The opposite is also true of course – you can overdo it (see Andaisin), or the dice simply go badly one fight. It helps to have back-up plans and trap doors out of a TPK in mind should you press too hard.
You should also keep your players’ desires in mind as well, of course. Some people prefer an easier game where they get to be the hero curbstomping their way to great justice. And there’s nothing wrong with playing that way provided your expectations as DM also line up with that. I am fortunate in that our crew is a bunch of masochists who don’t seem to mind overly much when I use them as a chew toy.
Taks –
LOL! Was your own PC death due to bad luck or bad plan? :-D
UnArcaneElection –
They do indeed still have Rolth’s journals, I guess. They were trapped with I think a Firetrap and some poison needles, which Vaz’em identified during his study of the books. But I don’t think he bothered messing with them any further than that for some reason. Maybe he thought the fire trap would blow the books up, rendering it a fruitless effort to open them? I’m not really sure.
And yes, the Hellknights certainly could have shown themselves at the moment of Cid’s demise – but I came up with a better use for them in a following session, as you will see in another couple updates!
domicilius –
Always a pleasure to hear that my deranged ramblings have inspired another convert! Welcome brother! ^^
Hope the game manages to go a little bit longer for you this time – you need to at least get them to a point where you can have Andaisin rant at them a bit! I *so* enjoyed playing her as an over-the-top comic book style villain, complete with outlining her plan to the party, boasting that there was nothing they could do to stop her, and then cackling maniacally as she walked away to leave them to their deaths.
Course, in my campaign her overconfidence wasn’t entirely unwarranted – if I had to do it again I would tone her buffs and level down a bit (she was 12th level with every clerical buff in the game running), but keep the mythic (probably the agile mythic simple template rather than actual mythic ranks, giving her two full turns each round). That should give her enough power to slap the PCs upside the head to let them know that s%#* just got real, without completely overwhelming them. If you pace the fight better than I did, you should be able to get her to stand back up as a Daughter of Urgathoa (probably the coolest part of the fight as-written), instead of having an exhausted party that makes you just hand-wave that second phase. :-/
The best part about using Gaedren as the big bad guy of Book 1 is that you can really fake your players out by making them expect the fight with Gaedren to be the climax of Book 1 – only to segue into the rest of the material once he’s dead. Of course, your players have already seen all of Book 1, so they’ll probably go “oh, it’s time for the actual Book One now” – which just means you’ll have to change up the rest of Book One a bit to foil that expectation as well! Bringing up Rolth, Andaisin, and Vreeg a little bit so that the players are aware of a wider conspiracy beyond Gaedren could work (assuming they’re providing him with support). Regardless of whether Ileosa is corrupted good or her usual B~@+& Evil self, you could also play games with her, having her show a personal interest in the party and getting involved in post-Gaedren events to keep the players off-balance as to just how much of the original Book One you’re actually using.
I don’t know if you use music during your game to enhance the mood (which it can do, but it can also easily serve as a distraction), but I will post my support one more time as Anarchy by KMFDM as the definite theme song for big bad anarchist Gaedren Lamm (warning, one f-bomb present about a minute in). From the first time I heard it while looking around for a theme for Gaedren, I knew that it was his theme, nasty dirty unrepentant anarchist that he is.
Veltharis - Good, good! I will look forward to reading that campaign journal someday if you ever do manage to get the game off the ground. I’m not terribly familiar with Eberron, but I know it tends to favor intrigue, magitek-punk sort of games, so something like CotCT should fit in style fairly well. If you really want your players to piss their pants, put Scarwall in the Mournland (did I get that right?). Not being able to heal up while getting swarmed by undead gribblers ought to make them think twice about their life choices.
So, in the previous session, Cid got killed by a pack of devils hunting him (actually an advance force – the devils had sent an entire small army, guided by a retriever named Zarix, to hunt him down. That’s how badly they wanted him dead and to stay dead). His body got torn apart by the devils before they left, making a Raise Dead impossible . . . but they didn’t think about a Reincarnate, nor the Temporary Resurrection spell that Vaz’em now had. Of course, Vaz’em could use the scroll himself, and at a level 7 spell attempting to Use Magic Device it was risky even with his considerable skill bonus.
Enter Hazmarduk, who whispered in Vaz’em mind a simple offer – one night of freedom in exchange for his aid in casting the spell off of the scroll and rescuing Cid’s soul. He even sweetened the deal by promising that he knew of ways to extend the duration of Cid’s temporary body beyond the normal 24 hour limit. All Vaz’em had to do was temporarily suppress the runes now seared into his body, and Hazmarduk would take care of the rest. He promised not to do anything grotesque or particularly murderous, and at this point my own plans were pretty mild – Vaz’em was just going to wake up in bed the next morning next to Trinia, as grandfather Hazmarduk had noticed his grandson seemed to care about the worthless little tramp and was going to force the issue. Vaz’em’s player was always the paranoid sort to begin with, and he smelled the trap coming so he made grandfather Hazmarduk promise specifically not to even approach Trinia while having his “play time” (party members and such were similarly explicitly off-limits).
I don’t quite remember how the agreement was reached, but ultimately Vaz’em somehow managed to weasel out of letting Hazmarduk get a whole night to run around in Vaz’em’s body. At the same time, he convinced Hazmarduk to cast the Temporary Ressurection scroll as a freebie (Hazmarduk obviously agreed in the hopes that he could convince Vaz’em to trade play time for extending the spell’s duration so Cid didn’t die 24 hours later). With Vaz’em concentrating, Hazmarduk was able to squeeze his essence out of Vaz’em’s body temporarily and into his new weapon Hazaali, pushing the weaker minded intelligent item’s mind aside to take control. And then using the sword’s power of speech, Hazmarduk cast the spell and the earth welled up, creating a new Cid-shaped body that slowly came to life.
Meanwhile, Cid was enjoying a much different after-life party than the last one he had. I wanted to mix it up for him, and this seemed like an excellent opportunity to kick off his “I’m special” questline, which as I believe I mentioned once before was pulling a Cecil from Final Fantasy 4, renouncing the darkness and becoming a paladin. So rather than wake up in a barren wasteland or some sort of torture dungeon, Cid opened his eyes after death to find himself lying on a carpeted floor, a warm but not searing breeze caressing his face. Kneeling beside him was a woman, her features obscured by a heavy cloak and a leper’s iron mask.
Theme Music – Falling Apart by Papa Roach (Yes, Cid’s player appreciated the irony of the song’s title with the fact that his body had just been ripped to pieces).
The woman spoke kindly to him, reassuring Cid that he was in no danger here and that she had intercepted his soul in transit to Hell. She introduced herself as Eurydice (her mythological namesake was a *very* convenient happenstance!) and explained that she had brought Cid here because she believed that he deserved a second chance. She knew that Cid had done something to damn his soul, and patiently nodded as Cid filled in the details.
Despite the difficulty in breaking an infernal contract once signed, Eurydice seemed confident that she could help Cid escape his fate. But in order to do that they needed to meet face-to-face, and not in this post-death dreamscape. If Cid could manage to reach her, Eurydice would free his soul. All he had to do was find the Valley of the Ascendant Spire. But before Eurydice could explain any further, Cid suddenly felt his soul slip away, and he was pulled out of the dreamscape and into his new body. But he had an objective now, and apparently a powerful new ally who was willing to help him (given the party was fleeing for their lives from everything they had ever known, any and every would-be ally was important right now!)
The session concluded with the party continuing on their way towards Zareem’s lair to finish their current mission of rescuing Jasan’s kidnapped family. And as they headed on through the forest, they shortly came across a great army trudging their way through the forest, knocking over every tree in its path (making it very easy for the party to see the army before it saw them). Creeping forward, Vaz’em watched as a familiar large family of manticores flew overhead, led by an equally familiar red dragon punk – Captain Zareem, land pirate extraordinaire. Below, a sizable army of about three or four dozen ogres marched along, led by another dozen or so ettins, and with an equally familiar group of owlbears as pack animals/siege weapons.
Bringing up the rear was a small group of ogres, dragging several battered men, women, and children along at a pace the ogres clearly thought was too slow – Zareem’s hostages from ranches surrounding Harse, which included Jasan’s family. It looked like they wouldn’t need to go to Zareem’s cavern hideout in order to rescue Jasan’s family after all, but there was the small snag that they would have to wade through Zareem’s entire new army to do it. Fortunately, Zareem just as conveniently shot himself in the foot at that moment, as he called for the hostages to be left behind in order not to slow down the army. If the ogres left behind to guard them didn’t hear from Zareem by nightfall, they were free to eat the hostages.
Technically, this might have been a shrewd plan normally by Zareem – dragging the hostages out to some random part of the woods and leaving them instead of with his army or back at his base where they could be found and rescued. Unfortunately, that random spot in the woods just so happened to be right near to where the party was watching his army pass on its way to Harse, so this little “clever” plan backfired on him.
Once the rest of the army moved on, Vaz’em went down alone while invisible, gutted one ogre in the surprise round, killed the second before it could react, and that was the end of that. They cut the hostages free, confirmed that Jasan’s wife and children were among them, and then headed back to Harse with the lot of them. With the slow pace of Zareem’s army due to smashing a route through the forest, the party easily managed to get back to town ahead of the army. All that remained now was planning for Harse’s defense, which was left to the following session (as I continued to get my DMing legs back under me, and bought some more time to sketch out a map of Harse – not provided by the AP – in order to run a massive battle in its defense).
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Veltharis - Good, good! I will look forward to reading that campaign journal someday if you ever do manage to get the game off the ground. I’m not terribly familiar with Eberron, but I know it tends to favor intrigue, magitek-punk sort of games, so something like CotCT should fit in style fairly well. If you really want your players to piss their pants, put Scarwall in the Mournland (did I get that right?). Not being able to heal up while getting swarmed by undead gribblers ought to make them think twice about their life choices.
That's an accurate description of the setting, I'd say.
Putting Scarwall in the Mournland (yes, you got it right. :p) is certainly tempting, but that would make its current state quite a bit more recent than in the main campaign, as the Mournland only came into being ~4-ish years ago, depending on when you set it. Can certainly still work, but might need to tweak the timeline a bit - or maybe invert the backstory: with Kazavon and his army laying siege to "Scarwall" long ago and the heroes that finally kill him being among its defenders, making the fortress a long-standing heroic landmark and national monument, as well as where some Kazavon-related artifacts were sequestered away, until the Day of Mourning twisted it into its current state. Could definitely be used to play up the Silent Hill aesthetic you've mentioned you're aiming for - doubly effective if any of my PCs were Cyran refugees, who might have reason to be familiar with the place as it used to be.
Regardless, it'll be a quite a while and a whole lot of work before I could even think of running it, much less writing it up. The recently announced War for the Crown AP also throws a wrench into things, as that would ALSO be something I'd set in Breland (only one of the Five Nations that's has a significant succession crisis looming on the horizon) and don't really want them to overlap. Might wait to see how that one plays out and maybe look into mashing them together somehow. :/
Welcome back Inspectre! I was about to hire a party of adventurer to go look for you, but it seems I can call them back now.
Wrath of the Righteous
I just finished it a few weeks back, but yes, I would have had a lot of trouble even mildly threatening the PCs if I had followed the guidelines. I actually rewrote the entire set of encounters, and about 25% of the campaign, and managed to have actually quite a lot of fun...and put them in difficulty more than a few times!
First important thing, except for one of them, my players (at least this group) are not powergamers, except for one who took more of a support role (with a Honor guard cavalier/Marshal build), so it avoided the worst excesses.
Second, I banned a couple things, especially multiple standard actions, to avoid the nova syndrome.
After that, I mostly focused on building encounters that would be challenging by being non-conventionnal.
When they fought Jerribeth, a mythic Glabrezu masquerading as an elven noble, I had her kidnapp one of the NPCs they grew attached to, Anevia Tirabade, beforehand. So when they reached her and started the fight (Jerribeth attempts to turn them against a rival didn't work), they had to fight both Jerribeth and a dominated Anevia, who was fighting naked but for her weapons. Why? Well, they had to find a way to stop her and neutralize her without arming her despite and extremely low AC (14, I think), while fighting a powerful demon who didn't care who was in the crossfire.
When they fought Xanthir Vang, a Worm-that-walks wizard (and father of one of the PC), I relocated the fight to the cathedral nef, where he had taken the liberty to trap the place with word activated glyphs of warding, resulting in a dynamic battle against him and his cronies, while avoiding the explosive stones.
I reworked most of the encounter along those lines, trying to push them towards creative solutions with more or less success...
I had a lot of fun with Minagho, a Lilitu demon with Rogue levels that the player consistently foil for the first four chapters. So I took the suggestion of having her harass them in the city of Alushynirra, where they try to get an audience with Nocticula, but I took it much further. She planned ambush, stabbing them from the crow, shooting at them from distant rooftops, attempting to poison them, turn the crowd (a crowd of mostly demons!) and the guard against them by spreading rumors and paying off people, and generally remaining incredibly slippery. They had to get a scroll of dimensional anchor to finally corner her, and even then she remained very dangerous.
So I believe it's possible to actually put the PCs in danger in this campaign, but it's probably more work than it is worth.