So this is a bit of a follow up to a post made about one year ago by Trinam. Just going to drop a link to it here.
https://paizo.com/threads/rzs2v5jk?In-which-my-party-destroys-the-Choking-T owers
Hi, I'm one of the players in his group. Specifically, I'm the annoying psychic catfolk that keeps insisting on making friends with everyone, and managed to smack Xoud with a charm spell to completely skip the Choking Tower.
I am happy to say the shenanigans did not end on that day. Trin was supposed to post this, but forgot so now I'm doing it!
But we ruined more dungeons.
So the Valley of the Brain collectors, fun times were had there. Mostly in two places. The Dominion Drop Ship was fun. We saw the ship partially submerged in water... And here's the thing. Our party is stupidly paranoid. It is not uncommon for us to sit there and spend an entire session planning out how to handle a situation (And then promptly throwing that plan out the window 5 minutes into the next session and winging it)
So when we were like. Oh, you want us to swim? Forget that. The ranger has an adamantium chainsaw. We'll just make our own entrance. And so we sawed through the back of the dungeon, walked into the boss room first, and fought the giant brain. To his credit, he screwed me over pretty hard. Even with mirror image managed to grapple and pull me into the thing. 1 and 7 chance and he got me. Then the rest of the party got him and we were free to now explore the ship. Only to open the door, encounter a guard who was... Well very concerned that we were coming out of the room with the now dead brain.
And then I made the dumbest bluff check of my life when he demanded to know what we thought we were doing.
"Oh I'm just an illusion spell. I'm here to distract you while we launch a sneak attack on you through the other door."
Thanks to the cleric's obsessive need to constantly cast Guidance nonstop when not in combat I beat his sense motive by 1 point. So this works, and lets us rush in and surprises him from this side.
And then the wizard abuses summons to pretty much scout the rest of the place and let us pretty easily kill everything and take their stuff.
HUZZAH! Not a full dungeon bypass, as even though we skipped it at first, we ran through it backwards for loot.
But then came the Dominion Enclave. We got the Robojack, and we gave it to our oracle who's our tech girl and were ready to fight the annihilator. We were not ready... To encounter flipping Hellion alongside it.
So our plan is to take control of the annihilator and sick it on Hellion and the rest of the Dominion. That doesn't work. It makes its will save in round one.
Plan B.
Flip it! I point at the annihilator and go "Reach Plane Shift."
Trinam: What?
It fails its save, and the annihilator poofs off to the plane of fire and is now 100% someone else's problem. XD
That just leaves us and our good friend Hellion, someone we've really been looking forward to killing for a looooooooooooong time. Even my character who is usually full on team friendship wants this guy to go down.
Except... Hellion has basically been turned into a glorified guard dog, having gotten hacked by the dominion and forced to defend the entrance. He is not happy about that, but can't disobey so has to fight us even though he knows we already kicked his tail once. So in theory this is where his story ends.
Except.
Me: "Hey... So you can choose to fail a saving throw right?
GM: "I don't like where this is going."
So me being the scumbag psionic bard-type cat I am start talking to Hellion, and ask it if it's orders forbid it from refusing the effects of a spell that it perceives as helpful.
It turns out, if Hellion perceives the spell as a benefit he is not contracted to save against it.
So then I say... Hey Hellion, how about we use this Robojack on you and give you the orders to take revenge on the Dominion for trying to enslave you! Hellion naturally likes the idea for revenge! And since giving him his freedom to take said revenge is technically a beneficial effect to him... He is allowed to purposely fail his save. And that was how a god joined the party.
So fun fact. Most of the enemies in that dungeon. They couldn't do squat to Hellion. Turns out construct immunities really help you out with a lot of the things you encounter here... And so Hellion just tears through the place with his dual initiative as we just walk after him and pick up all the loot. Eventually, he gets to the boss and with the party's help completes the order given to him by the robojack.
But that means now he's free free, and can fight the party. And he grapples our android cleric but she's got this!
I helped a bit, tossing out a reach freedom of movement to help her break the grapple. Meyanda punches Hellion while our cleric pulls out a lightning trident and stabs him and they by themselves just freaking murder this god.
And then make out on his corpse.
Or at least did awkward android romance things.
Then we encountered Casandalee, and all of us non tech savvy people stared around like "Uhhhh what do we do with her?"
Luckily our kitsune oracle is there to enlighten us uneducated savages on what we were looking at and free her.
So now we plan to deal with unity, and we head to Starfall.
I missed a session here, so I don't know how the drug warehouse adventure went down. I just know the party completely wrecked it. But I was back for us to infiltrate the night market.
Which turned into a giant cluster truck because of all the other people still involved in the campaign.
Sandvil Tret was there with Seerath.
Malin the Prophet was there with the worm that walks who's name I forget.
A second Casandalee referred to as Casandalee B was there with Malin
Shade from the Technic League shows up
And a dwarf from our ranger's backstory is there to force her to go down.
So things get hectic, when Malin and Sandvil both want to steal the tech items from the market. But then Shade shows up and tries to charm the merchant, who makes his save and sicks his guards on her. she sicks her guards on him, Malin and Sandvil get into a fist fight (which may have turned out to be faked but we boogied out before learning more about that) and it's just a giant mess of a fight.
The party joins in, intending to kidnap Shade to try to get information on the Technic League. The wizard throws our a reverse gravity removing her guards from the fight. Not to be outdone, I throw out my own new spell.
Enemy Hammer.
It lets me grab an enemy and throw them... And so I threw Shade out of the pavilion at her own people, and right into melee with Casandalee B and within range of our ranger.
Shade did not have a good night.
Shade gets knocked out, our oracle turns invisible and grabs all the merchandise during the fight, and then me and the wizard pop teleports to get the entire party out of there while other people are still fighting.
So that went well for us. Then comes the stupid part where we managed to outwit ourselves a few times by being too paranoid.
Basically we kidnapped Shade to get info on Zernebeth because we were going to help her form a splinter group in the Technic League and take over, but it turned out Shade worked for Zernebeth so oops we beat up a person on the side we were trying to temporarily join. Then her comm unit went off, and I sort of lied a lot pretending to be someone else to cover the kidnapping, and while worried they might use locate object on the comm we teleported all the way back to Scrapwall to interrogate Shade to make sure our hide out in Starfall wouldn't be found. We are paranoid. Shade is... Uncooperative, but hey I always pack a Persistent Charm Monster at this point, only for her to call us idiots anyway which we were because the person on the comm was Zernebeth the one we wanted to talk to and just pretended to be someone else before trying to hide the comm in Scrapall.
OOPS
So we call her on the comm, pretend to be an enterprising mercenary who just happened to find the comm link after the fight. But she interviewed the guards of the merchant so knew about the party involvement. We... Did a bit of misdirection here she found out some things we didn't want her to know... But we also threw Malin and Sandvil under the bus blaming Shade's death on her. In reality we turned Shade over to the resistance who executed her.
So... That was an awkward conversation.
Eventually Zernebeth tasks us with persuading the Black Sovereign to break his ties with the current leader of the League, but he's controlled by being kept on drugs. Good thing we destroyed that warehouse. We go to the castle disguised as tourist to go to the public sections and learn the layout. We run into his consort or queen or whatever you'd call her, who wants us to either convince him or kill him.
So we get an idea. Let's just heal him of his addiction and mental problems. That would take years of therapy in the real world! But we're level 13 we are practically demigods. One Heal spell can take the place of years of hard work and therapy.
But how to do it? First we consider using a reach Heal spell to snipe him from the crowd, but it has a few risks. What we eventually do instead, is stay in the queen's bedroom to night, throw up invisibility go to the throne room where the sovereign is asleep on the throne, and just poke him with Heal. After it takes, we teleport out to wait to here how it goes.
And I'm pretty sure we skipped a dungeon and a ton of fights like hill giants doing this. The now sober sovereign having come to his senses is pretty angry at the league and goes full barbarian on them. By the time we come back, him and his own guards have cleared out all the fights we were meant to do! And we got a favor from him to cause riots so we can sneak into the Technic League compound!
Though, after seeing the loot he had on him, slight tinge of regret for healing him. Because we are so freaking poor because we keep making friends with people instead of taking their stuff.
But now we have a powerful ally! Huzzah!
And that's where we're up to now.
...it's named 'starfall.'
Shatterstar is what you guys did.
...it's named 'starfall.'
Shatterstar is what you guys did.
In my defense, I did miss the session where we actually first went there so never heard the town name!