Hey-la-di-la, the B-team's back.
I heard it here:
Back in the Saddle - Prepping to Return to the GM's Chair for some Swords & Wizardry Light
S&W Lite and White Star - I've played them both. I'm not sure if I'll get to dust off Mirado and Velo Kalavas or need new PCs. I'll imagine Mirado shaking the dust off of his ogre head flail and put a fresh edge on Woundlicker.
If I need a new PC, it's tempting to run something that isn't a human fighter.
No, just kidding. I love human fighters. Maybe because I spent so much time as a kid running everything but - elves and half-elves, mostly, and lots of multi-class types the rare times I got to play. Humanoids in Gamma World, never anything but. Vrusk in Star Frontiers. Elves in Elfquest (well, duh). I wanted some of everything, with lots of powers. These days, I want none of anything, and no powers. Just asskicking and seeing what the raw basic system of the rules brings to that to make it fun and interesting.
Besides the raw fun and interest of fighting that is. I just flat-out like combat.
Anyway, I digress.
The B-Team will be back again in December or January, and I for one feel way overdue for a session.
Showing posts with label Southern Reaches. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Southern Reaches. Show all posts
Monday, November 14, 2016
Wednesday, January 20, 2016
Spoilers of the Mad Archmage
So that is what's up with those hobgoblins in the corner of level 3 of the Castle of the Mad Archmage.
Surprise Kills Obmi
Interesting.
Me, I know him from the Gord books, and of course G1-3 originally.
The Repulsor Ray story I know from Gary Gygax's Dragon column.
I didn't realize we'd skated so close to it.
We probably weren't going back, either.
Oh well. Let's just say we heard about what's there from rumors in town.
Surprise Kills Obmi
Interesting.
Me, I know him from the Gord books, and of course G1-3 originally.
The Repulsor Ray story I know from Gary Gygax's Dragon column.
I didn't realize we'd skated so close to it.
We probably weren't going back, either.
Oh well. Let's just say we heard about what's there from rumors in town.
Saturday, April 11, 2015
Southern Reaches: Session 11 - Castle of the Mad Archmage 8 - Ogres, Giants, and Illegal Barricades
Last night we played another session of the Swords & Wizardry B-Team, GMed by Erik Tenkar, in the Castle of the Mad Archmage.
We had three players last night - me, Douglas Cole, and Tim Shorts. We hadn't managed to get a session in since January, which was with the same trio.
Naturally Doug posted a summary so fast the virtual dice weren't even done bouncing from the last roll. It's excellent - go read it.
Swords and Wizardry - You can't roll a ballista up a 5% slope
Erik Tenkar discussed it as well, about how he turned it up to 11.
***
Characters
Minister the Morale-Breaker, Half-elf 5/4 Cleric/Magic-User (Tim Shorts)
Mirado Giant Slayer, Human 6 Fighter (me)
Rul "Woodknocker" Scararm, Human 6 Fighter (Douglas Cole)
We bought potions in Town and headed back to level 3, after a long discussion to pinpoint what the heck level we left off on.
We headed to some partly-explored tunnels near where we'd fought the giant and killed off the Grateful Undead. We ended up starting next to some stairs down we'd found.
We opened one door - the second we'd tried for the day. The first defeated us, despite the three of us all having ST 17. The door we managed to open had some non-hostile seeming zombies in it. Mirado said, "Hail, rotting denizens of the underworld!" but they didn't respond. What the heck, yo, Gary sent us. We closed the door, which is Mirado's SOP for anything that isn't made of, or carrying, money.
We found a secret door, which as far as we could tell, led nowhere except a short tunnel. We assumed there was a secret door on the other end, but the dice assured us that there wasn't.
The next door was a bit further on. In it we found a wild-haired Beethoven-looking bust stood in the room, and offered us a word puzzle. It was trivial enough so Mirado answered it, and we received a brass key. I made off-topic "in C Minor" jokes, here. They didn't fly. Tough crowd.
We moved on, kicked down doors and finding little, until we stumbled across a stunjelly. We cut it apart in a few rounds, but not before it paralyzed poor Rul. We dragged him back and used him as a clothes rack in the Beethoven room until we was unparalyzed.
Next, we blundered into some orcs led by an ogre, who weren't surprised by us because they opened the door while we stood around wondering why "5" is the only number we get when we need a 1-4 on a d6. We won initiative and pretty much butchered them. In about two rounds we'd killed the ogre, killed six orcs, put three to Sleep, and convinced the other three to surrender.
We dragged the lot into their room, and looted them. Mirado attempted to convince the orcs to follow us. It worked, sort of, but when Mirado woke the sleeping lot they weren't convinced that Mirado was the chief. "A" chief, they said. Nope. Off with his head. Next? Same thing. Off with his head.
For some reason, the other orcs didn't think Mirado was being very leader-like and fled. One revealed a secret door, leading to the place we'd assumed there was one.
We continued on and followed one screaming orc to some stairs down. But then, a hill giant, two ogres, and a bunch of orcs burst out of a room ahead of us.
Minister fireballed them, wounding the three big guys and toasting the three or five lead orcs (I can't remember now). Mirado put a throwing axe into the hill giant. Then it was melee time.
Melee went badly, but not terribly. Mirado relentlessly refused to a) be hit and b) be hit, which helped a lot. It was close, though, to a TPK. First, Minister went down after horribly wounding an ogre with his morningstar and then his Magic Missile spell. The hill giant went down, but then so did Rul, and Mirado only won the fight with a small amount of HP left (about 16) and a simultaneous strike with the ogre.
The orcs never did enter the fray, cowed by our mighty magic, probably. Mirado kept threatening them with death if they approached. He fed a potion to Minister, who then fed one to Rul. Mirado almost went to take them on, but decided in the end not to. He's convinced to his soul that they had more loot in that room. As it was, Mirado took the giant's head and some gems and a belt worn on his arm like an armband. Turned out later to be a HP-boosting Belt of Fortitude.
We retreated to the surface to recover.
The (real world) night was young, so we went back in.
The orcs had barricaded off the ways to their area. We made jokes about leaving a note telling them the barricade was illegal and needed to be removed. We then tore another one apart. We found seven giant centipedes in the mess. That was actually worrying, since a failed save would kill one of us. We still managed to kill them off, with only a bite to Minister, who was able to shrug it off.
The orcs had set up a gigantic siege engine to shoot at us. They missed (a 17, against Mirado's AC 18), and ran. We torched it with flaming oil and hacked the rope off of it, too, for good measure. The orcs tossed a spear at us, too, as we moved in to where they'd been with the giant - empty. Okay, more searching - empty orc barracks, empty rooms, and not much of anything.
We eventually found a room with three statues. Rul and Minister went in to search, the door shut on them, and one statue turned out to be a mimic. They pretty much beat the heck out of it, and Mirado was unable to get back in (truth is, I had a 1-in-6 chance to open the door, and each check was a 1-in-6 chance of wandering monsters. So, no.) Rul and Minister did fine, and opened the door after all of that.
We found only a couple more places - some dead ends, a room with a lurker above that we dealt lots of damage to before it grabbed Rul and started to smoosh him. We finished it off, though.
We kicked open one final door, and the walls were adorned with olde tyme theater masks, which began to speak to us. Mirado handled this in the traditional fashion - he closed the door. Erik shared the puzzle with us, since we'd abandoned it. We headed home.
***
All in all, fun session. Almost getting killed in the ogre-and-giant brawl was excellent stuff. Lots of fun. What I game for, besides the fun of hanging out with people I liked a lot.
I really wanted to attack the orcs, but with both of the others down, it seemed like a bad idea. But it felt like it was a good time to crack their morale and rout them and get more treasure. Mirado did take the giant's head, so I should uprgrade my "head-flail" perhaps, don't you think?
I had a good claim on the Belt of Fortitude, but I need +6 HP a heck of a lot less than Minister needs +5. Any doubt on that score was settled when Doug chimed in too saying Minister needed it. So over his objections that a front-line fighter should get it, Minister was given the belt. Good thing - that might make the difference between life and death for our life-saving cleric/magic-user. This only serves the make the every-man-for-himself magic item jealousy of some of the old-time game stories sound weird. We're team players to a fault.
The spell progressions for clerics in S&W are just weird - level 5, you have level 1 and 2 spells. Level 6, you get 1,2, 3 and 4th. Level 7? You get up to 5th. 6th level spells wait for level 11.
Single saving throws, ascending AC, and match-or-exceed AC using Attack Bonuses = a really simple system. The "roll low for doors, high for most other things" drives me nuts. I still like the door solution I suggested.
As always, we goofed on the Castle of the Mad Archmage, but we keep coming back to it. There is fun there, even if part of it is us making 5% slope jokes and filling "covered with two feet of dung" and adding ". . . in clown suits and carrying ukeleles" to the end of monster descriptions. Maybe partly because of.
We had three players last night - me, Douglas Cole, and Tim Shorts. We hadn't managed to get a session in since January, which was with the same trio.
Naturally Doug posted a summary so fast the virtual dice weren't even done bouncing from the last roll. It's excellent - go read it.
Swords and Wizardry - You can't roll a ballista up a 5% slope
Erik Tenkar discussed it as well, about how he turned it up to 11.
***
Characters
Minister the Morale-Breaker, Half-elf 5/4 Cleric/Magic-User (Tim Shorts)
Mirado Giant Slayer, Human 6 Fighter (me)
Rul "Woodknocker" Scararm, Human 6 Fighter (Douglas Cole)
We bought potions in Town and headed back to level 3, after a long discussion to pinpoint what the heck level we left off on.
We headed to some partly-explored tunnels near where we'd fought the giant and killed off the Grateful Undead. We ended up starting next to some stairs down we'd found.
We opened one door - the second we'd tried for the day. The first defeated us, despite the three of us all having ST 17. The door we managed to open had some non-hostile seeming zombies in it. Mirado said, "Hail, rotting denizens of the underworld!" but they didn't respond. What the heck, yo, Gary sent us. We closed the door, which is Mirado's SOP for anything that isn't made of, or carrying, money.
We found a secret door, which as far as we could tell, led nowhere except a short tunnel. We assumed there was a secret door on the other end, but the dice assured us that there wasn't.
The next door was a bit further on. In it we found a wild-haired Beethoven-looking bust stood in the room, and offered us a word puzzle. It was trivial enough so Mirado answered it, and we received a brass key. I made off-topic "in C Minor" jokes, here. They didn't fly. Tough crowd.
We moved on, kicked down doors and finding little, until we stumbled across a stunjelly. We cut it apart in a few rounds, but not before it paralyzed poor Rul. We dragged him back and used him as a clothes rack in the Beethoven room until we was unparalyzed.
Next, we blundered into some orcs led by an ogre, who weren't surprised by us because they opened the door while we stood around wondering why "5" is the only number we get when we need a 1-4 on a d6. We won initiative and pretty much butchered them. In about two rounds we'd killed the ogre, killed six orcs, put three to Sleep, and convinced the other three to surrender.
We dragged the lot into their room, and looted them. Mirado attempted to convince the orcs to follow us. It worked, sort of, but when Mirado woke the sleeping lot they weren't convinced that Mirado was the chief. "A" chief, they said. Nope. Off with his head. Next? Same thing. Off with his head.
For some reason, the other orcs didn't think Mirado was being very leader-like and fled. One revealed a secret door, leading to the place we'd assumed there was one.
We continued on and followed one screaming orc to some stairs down. But then, a hill giant, two ogres, and a bunch of orcs burst out of a room ahead of us.
Minister fireballed them, wounding the three big guys and toasting the three or five lead orcs (I can't remember now). Mirado put a throwing axe into the hill giant. Then it was melee time.
Melee went badly, but not terribly. Mirado relentlessly refused to a) be hit and b) be hit, which helped a lot. It was close, though, to a TPK. First, Minister went down after horribly wounding an ogre with his morningstar and then his Magic Missile spell. The hill giant went down, but then so did Rul, and Mirado only won the fight with a small amount of HP left (about 16) and a simultaneous strike with the ogre.
The orcs never did enter the fray, cowed by our mighty magic, probably. Mirado kept threatening them with death if they approached. He fed a potion to Minister, who then fed one to Rul. Mirado almost went to take them on, but decided in the end not to. He's convinced to his soul that they had more loot in that room. As it was, Mirado took the giant's head and some gems and a belt worn on his arm like an armband. Turned out later to be a HP-boosting Belt of Fortitude.
We retreated to the surface to recover.
The (real world) night was young, so we went back in.
The orcs had barricaded off the ways to their area. We made jokes about leaving a note telling them the barricade was illegal and needed to be removed. We then tore another one apart. We found seven giant centipedes in the mess. That was actually worrying, since a failed save would kill one of us. We still managed to kill them off, with only a bite to Minister, who was able to shrug it off.
The orcs had set up a gigantic siege engine to shoot at us. They missed (a 17, against Mirado's AC 18), and ran. We torched it with flaming oil and hacked the rope off of it, too, for good measure. The orcs tossed a spear at us, too, as we moved in to where they'd been with the giant - empty. Okay, more searching - empty orc barracks, empty rooms, and not much of anything.
We eventually found a room with three statues. Rul and Minister went in to search, the door shut on them, and one statue turned out to be a mimic. They pretty much beat the heck out of it, and Mirado was unable to get back in (truth is, I had a 1-in-6 chance to open the door, and each check was a 1-in-6 chance of wandering monsters. So, no.) Rul and Minister did fine, and opened the door after all of that.
We found only a couple more places - some dead ends, a room with a lurker above that we dealt lots of damage to before it grabbed Rul and started to smoosh him. We finished it off, though.
We kicked open one final door, and the walls were adorned with olde tyme theater masks, which began to speak to us. Mirado handled this in the traditional fashion - he closed the door. Erik shared the puzzle with us, since we'd abandoned it. We headed home.
***
All in all, fun session. Almost getting killed in the ogre-and-giant brawl was excellent stuff. Lots of fun. What I game for, besides the fun of hanging out with people I liked a lot.
I really wanted to attack the orcs, but with both of the others down, it seemed like a bad idea. But it felt like it was a good time to crack their morale and rout them and get more treasure. Mirado did take the giant's head, so I should uprgrade my "head-flail" perhaps, don't you think?
I had a good claim on the Belt of Fortitude, but I need +6 HP a heck of a lot less than Minister needs +5. Any doubt on that score was settled when Doug chimed in too saying Minister needed it. So over his objections that a front-line fighter should get it, Minister was given the belt. Good thing - that might make the difference between life and death for our life-saving cleric/magic-user. This only serves the make the every-man-for-himself magic item jealousy of some of the old-time game stories sound weird. We're team players to a fault.
The spell progressions for clerics in S&W are just weird - level 5, you have level 1 and 2 spells. Level 6, you get 1,2, 3 and 4th. Level 7? You get up to 5th. 6th level spells wait for level 11.
Single saving throws, ascending AC, and match-or-exceed AC using Attack Bonuses = a really simple system. The "roll low for doors, high for most other things" drives me nuts. I still like the door solution I suggested.
As always, we goofed on the Castle of the Mad Archmage, but we keep coming back to it. There is fun there, even if part of it is us making 5% slope jokes and filling "covered with two feet of dung" and adding ". . . in clown suits and carrying ukeleles" to the end of monster descriptions. Maybe partly because of.
Saturday, January 10, 2015
Southern Reaches: Session 10 - Castle of the Mad Archmage 7 - Three Sought Adventure
Last night we played a session of Erik Tenkar's B-Team game. It was a long break since last session because of Erik's job. For a probably more complete summary, check out Doug's summary over on Gaming Ballistic. You can also read Tim "Minister" Shorts's explanation of why he rolled so few ones over at his blog, Gothridge Manor.
Characters
Minister "the Tick Master", Half-elf 5/4 Cleric/Magic-User (Tim Shorts)
Mirado Music Critic, Human 6 Fighter (me)
Rul "Woodknocker" Scararm, Human 6 Fighter (Douglas Cole)
Only three of us made it to the session, and I was late (actually, I was early, but G+ didn't pop up any of the invites to join the Hangout, so they sat in the background even as I messed around on G+ looking for the invites.)
We discussed the arena level but decided we weren't too excited by it. Also, that there was too much risk of encountering a group of lethal, organized foes without having Joe D's fireballs to help us out. Deeper was even riskier. So we went back to level 3 (the level of "damaged by pink") and decided to play explore-the-unexplored. The more doors we kick down, the more loot we find, the more XP we gain.
So we went right down to level 3 and started poking around places we'd missed before.
We blundered right into a group of duergar - grey dwarves. We surprised them and plowed right in, quickly putting one down and wounding more. But even as that happened, the doors on either side of the room opened up. To the right were six duergar with light crossbows, ranked to fire. To the left was a plate armored boss duergar. Minister immediately put the six to the right to sleep, and Rul and Mirado continued to melee the group in front of us. The boss duergar attacked Minister, who tried to use Hold Person on him . . . but to no avail. We tripled up on him and generally missed a lot, as did he. Eventually we landed a few blows and put him in a bad way. He tried to shapeshift into a larger form, but just as he did so we finished him off. He melted into a pile of half-shapeshifted goo.
Mirado, who'd been wounded several times in the fight, slit the throats of the sleeping foes. (Tenkar suggested he may have to revisit non-combat kills for Woundlicker, Mirado's sword, and if so I'll wake them up one by one next time and kill them in single combat if I have to. Personally, "I can kill this sleeping dude to get 1 HP back" seems exactly what blood-drinking swords are supposed to do to your sense of right and wrong.)
These guys has a lot - 50 gp but also 23 gems! Even if they're only around 100 gp each that's a sizeable haul.
We left them after taking the loot and the leader's weaponry, just in case, we headed to new areas. We found a room with three dessicated corpses. Minister went in to look, and a giant tick dropped on him and bit him. We jumped in and helped by attacking it, but it kept sucking blood out of poor Minister. Erik ruled that we could attack at -4, or risk hitting Minister on any 1s. We attacked straight-up. Once it was dead, Mirado ripped it off of Minister along with a chunk of Minister's flesh. Oops. Mirado is not Mirado the Healer.
From there we found a secret door, and opened it up. A spiked ball swung to head level for Mirado, but he ducked it with ease (I think I rolled a 20 on his saving throw.) Inside we found a chest. We looped a rope around it and dragged it out, making a hell of a racket. It attracted a "verlang giant," which based on its combat stats I think may have been what Joseph Bloch is calling a Verbeeg. It attacked, and we slugged it out with it. Rul put an arrow into it, Mirado slashed him twice (and took a hit in return), and then Minister unloaded the 7d6 Lightning Bolt spell we'd found on a metal scroll last session. Zzap. The giant rolled a 20 on his save, but that spelled 14 damage to it. We finished off the comically charred giant and looted him of the basically nothing he carried.
We couldn't pry open that chest, and later failed to kick down innumerable doors despite three tries at STR 17. Yes, we're all STR 17. We figure Minister spent his time in the Academy of Magic's gym working on his squat, dead, and bench, and put the smart kids in headlocks and gave them noogies until they agreed to teach him spells and do his Magic Missile homework.
In any case the chest resisted all of our opening attempts, so we hammered off the lock with Mirado's pick. Inside were 8871 sp, which is 88.7 pounds of silver. We divvied it up and moved on.
We walked down one corridor and found ourselves teleported to another. Some exploration off of that found us a way back to a familiar area, but also some new rooms. One section had some giant rats - we quickly slammed that door shut and moved on. Unlikely the rats have anything worthwhile, and they aren't worth much XP either.
We did find a room that looked like a doctor's waiting room gone bad. We joked that there were old magazines with a misspelled name on the label ("This one is to Mack Archmage.") At the end of the hall where this chamber was situated was another door, which opened with ease.
We opened the door and in it was a doctor's office looking room, with a bat-winged horned red skinned woman wearing a skimpy little "sexy nurse" outfit. Mirado immediately said, "Helloooooo Nurse!" It had about the same effect as when Yakko does it.
She asked if we had an appointment. We said no. She said we could make one now, and even as Mirado was backing out Rul said his name was "Lurr, with one err and another err." She said we could see the doctor now, and another door opened. Mirado kept backing out even as Lurr cancelled his appointment (despite clear threats of penalties from his insurer, Metal Cross Metal Shield) and we closed the door and took off.
We had a brief debate about whether she really was a succubus. Someone asked, would you put a succubus on level 3 of the dungeon? I said, "Yes!"
Mirado coined this rule:
Mirado's Rules of Megadungeoneering #73: No one puts a fake succubus in a "sexy nurse" outfit.
And this one:
Mirado's Rules of Megadungeoneering #74: The deeper you go the stronger the "megadungeon goggles" effect.
and:
Mirado's Rules of Megadungeoneering #11: A wooly rhino on level 1 is an illusion.
A little more exploration from here put us into a large room with a five-piece band of skeletons playing flutes, lyres, harps, etc. with a hat. Buskers. Undead buskers.
Mirado attacked, putting the flautist down. The others fought back, and managed to club Minister with a harp before Rul put down the remaining four with a single swipe of his undead-slaying sword.
We kept on, and found a room from which we heard partying noises. I joked it would be four groups of 99 berserkers.
Close. It was 50 berserkers partying it up with endless mead and a cornucopia roast boar served by 8 blonde shieldmaidens.
What an amazing fight that would be.
It wasn't to be. Mirado waded right in and asked for a drink and some boar. Brothers! He yelled. We're here!
That defused any potential problems, except when they mentioned a band and Mirado said he'd killed them. The berserker didn't want to let that go, but Mirado explained that a) the band had a flute player, and thus had to die and b) I love you man! I'm sorry! You're the best bro! And hugged the guy.
That worked.
We drank up for a bit and then left, seeking more treasure.
We eventually found it, stumbling across some ghouls. One slashed Rul and he resisted paralysis, and then we killed the bunch of them.
We did a little more exploration after this, but wound it down as it was getting late.
Good, fun session. We need more firepower to go deeper. We found a few flights of stairs (circular and normal) up, in case we want to visit level 2 again. And once we get more people on a delve we have a way down to level 4 or 5 or possibly deeper.
We took home 8504 xp (and 2095 gp) each, putting Mirado about 10,000 xp short of level 7. Maybe another two trips or one spectacular one.
***
Editing later: I forgot we also fought some giant blue-bottle flies, had a Magic Mouth spell riddle at us, and found rooms with rat dung. It was late and I was tired on Friday, so some of it didn't stick out so much.
Characters
Minister "the Tick Master", Half-elf 5/4 Cleric/Magic-User (Tim Shorts)
Mirado Music Critic, Human 6 Fighter (me)
Rul "Woodknocker" Scararm, Human 6 Fighter (Douglas Cole)
Only three of us made it to the session, and I was late (actually, I was early, but G+ didn't pop up any of the invites to join the Hangout, so they sat in the background even as I messed around on G+ looking for the invites.)
We discussed the arena level but decided we weren't too excited by it. Also, that there was too much risk of encountering a group of lethal, organized foes without having Joe D's fireballs to help us out. Deeper was even riskier. So we went back to level 3 (the level of "damaged by pink") and decided to play explore-the-unexplored. The more doors we kick down, the more loot we find, the more XP we gain.
So we went right down to level 3 and started poking around places we'd missed before.
We blundered right into a group of duergar - grey dwarves. We surprised them and plowed right in, quickly putting one down and wounding more. But even as that happened, the doors on either side of the room opened up. To the right were six duergar with light crossbows, ranked to fire. To the left was a plate armored boss duergar. Minister immediately put the six to the right to sleep, and Rul and Mirado continued to melee the group in front of us. The boss duergar attacked Minister, who tried to use Hold Person on him . . . but to no avail. We tripled up on him and generally missed a lot, as did he. Eventually we landed a few blows and put him in a bad way. He tried to shapeshift into a larger form, but just as he did so we finished him off. He melted into a pile of half-shapeshifted goo.
Mirado, who'd been wounded several times in the fight, slit the throats of the sleeping foes. (Tenkar suggested he may have to revisit non-combat kills for Woundlicker, Mirado's sword, and if so I'll wake them up one by one next time and kill them in single combat if I have to. Personally, "I can kill this sleeping dude to get 1 HP back" seems exactly what blood-drinking swords are supposed to do to your sense of right and wrong.)
These guys has a lot - 50 gp but also 23 gems! Even if they're only around 100 gp each that's a sizeable haul.
We left them after taking the loot and the leader's weaponry, just in case, we headed to new areas. We found a room with three dessicated corpses. Minister went in to look, and a giant tick dropped on him and bit him. We jumped in and helped by attacking it, but it kept sucking blood out of poor Minister. Erik ruled that we could attack at -4, or risk hitting Minister on any 1s. We attacked straight-up. Once it was dead, Mirado ripped it off of Minister along with a chunk of Minister's flesh. Oops. Mirado is not Mirado the Healer.
From there we found a secret door, and opened it up. A spiked ball swung to head level for Mirado, but he ducked it with ease (I think I rolled a 20 on his saving throw.) Inside we found a chest. We looped a rope around it and dragged it out, making a hell of a racket. It attracted a "verlang giant," which based on its combat stats I think may have been what Joseph Bloch is calling a Verbeeg. It attacked, and we slugged it out with it. Rul put an arrow into it, Mirado slashed him twice (and took a hit in return), and then Minister unloaded the 7d6 Lightning Bolt spell we'd found on a metal scroll last session. Zzap. The giant rolled a 20 on his save, but that spelled 14 damage to it. We finished off the comically charred giant and looted him of the basically nothing he carried.
We couldn't pry open that chest, and later failed to kick down innumerable doors despite three tries at STR 17. Yes, we're all STR 17. We figure Minister spent his time in the Academy of Magic's gym working on his squat, dead, and bench, and put the smart kids in headlocks and gave them noogies until they agreed to teach him spells and do his Magic Missile homework.
In any case the chest resisted all of our opening attempts, so we hammered off the lock with Mirado's pick. Inside were 8871 sp, which is 88.7 pounds of silver. We divvied it up and moved on.
We walked down one corridor and found ourselves teleported to another. Some exploration off of that found us a way back to a familiar area, but also some new rooms. One section had some giant rats - we quickly slammed that door shut and moved on. Unlikely the rats have anything worthwhile, and they aren't worth much XP either.
We did find a room that looked like a doctor's waiting room gone bad. We joked that there were old magazines with a misspelled name on the label ("This one is to Mack Archmage.") At the end of the hall where this chamber was situated was another door, which opened with ease.
We opened the door and in it was a doctor's office looking room, with a bat-winged horned red skinned woman wearing a skimpy little "sexy nurse" outfit. Mirado immediately said, "Helloooooo Nurse!" It had about the same effect as when Yakko does it.
She asked if we had an appointment. We said no. She said we could make one now, and even as Mirado was backing out Rul said his name was "Lurr, with one err and another err." She said we could see the doctor now, and another door opened. Mirado kept backing out even as Lurr cancelled his appointment (despite clear threats of penalties from his insurer, Metal Cross Metal Shield) and we closed the door and took off.
We had a brief debate about whether she really was a succubus. Someone asked, would you put a succubus on level 3 of the dungeon? I said, "Yes!"
Mirado coined this rule:
Mirado's Rules of Megadungeoneering #73: No one puts a fake succubus in a "sexy nurse" outfit.
And this one:
Mirado's Rules of Megadungeoneering #74: The deeper you go the stronger the "megadungeon goggles" effect.
and:
Mirado's Rules of Megadungeoneering #11: A wooly rhino on level 1 is an illusion.
A little more exploration from here put us into a large room with a five-piece band of skeletons playing flutes, lyres, harps, etc. with a hat. Buskers. Undead buskers.
Mirado attacked, putting the flautist down. The others fought back, and managed to club Minister with a harp before Rul put down the remaining four with a single swipe of his undead-slaying sword.
We kept on, and found a room from which we heard partying noises. I joked it would be four groups of 99 berserkers.
Close. It was 50 berserkers partying it up with endless mead and a cornucopia roast boar served by 8 blonde shieldmaidens.
What an amazing fight that would be.
It wasn't to be. Mirado waded right in and asked for a drink and some boar. Brothers! He yelled. We're here!
That defused any potential problems, except when they mentioned a band and Mirado said he'd killed them. The berserker didn't want to let that go, but Mirado explained that a) the band had a flute player, and thus had to die and b) I love you man! I'm sorry! You're the best bro! And hugged the guy.
That worked.
We drank up for a bit and then left, seeking more treasure.
We eventually found it, stumbling across some ghouls. One slashed Rul and he resisted paralysis, and then we killed the bunch of them.
We did a little more exploration after this, but wound it down as it was getting late.
Good, fun session. We need more firepower to go deeper. We found a few flights of stairs (circular and normal) up, in case we want to visit level 2 again. And once we get more people on a delve we have a way down to level 4 or 5 or possibly deeper.
We took home 8504 xp (and 2095 gp) each, putting Mirado about 10,000 xp short of level 7. Maybe another two trips or one spectacular one.
***
Editing later: I forgot we also fought some giant blue-bottle flies, had a Magic Mouth spell riddle at us, and found rooms with rat dung. It was late and I was tired on Friday, so some of it didn't stick out so much.
Saturday, November 22, 2014
Southern Reaches: Session 9 - Castle of the Mad Archmage 6 - Arena Blues
Friday was the S&W Southern Reaches B-Team. Here is my summary, to fill in the gaps left in my teaser. There are some other related posts:
Tim's Summary - We Laughed Like Manly Men Who Wore Flannel
Doug's Summary - Return to the Mad Archmage
Tenkar's Take - Castle of the Mad Archmage - Session Report "Whatever" - More Fun Than a Barrel Full of Drunken Monkeys!
Characters
Minister "Quantum" "the Pink", Half-elf 4/3 Cleric/Magic-User (Tim Shorts)
Mirado Gargoyle-Friend, Human 6 Fighter (me)
Rul "Rainbow Warrior" Scararm, Human 6 Fighter (Douglas Cole)
Rosco P. Coltrane, Halfling 2/3 F/T (Joe the Lawyer)
Bronan, Human 3 Fighter (Reece Carter)
We picked up two new characters this session - Joe the Lawyer running his Flailsnails guy (Flailsnails? It's kind of a bring-your-character-between-GMs game thing), and Reece Carter running a just-made-up 3rd level fighter. Apparently Tenkar forgot the highest level guys are 6th level, not 4th or so. Oh well. They'll just level faster. They successfully transited the 5% slope down without great mishap.
We headed right down to level 3, and did a little more exploring. There were a few doors on our maps we hadn't opened. The first one we went to we bashed open and found nothing but broken glass. Bronan searched it but found nothing.
A little more searching found us a room (labeled with a letter). I decided this was a bad idea so Mirado voted with his feet to go elsewhere. We found a door, and in it were stored orange cones and orange-and-white construction barrels. We decided we'll use them in the future to detour wandering monsters away from us. A detour sign pointed to a pit should do. We didn't implement that yet.
We kept looking. We soon found a way down, and took that. Finally! We've been trying to find a way down and back up for a while.
We moved down, and immediately there was a left, and down it we could see the steady glow of Continual Light spells. So Roscoe and Mirado snuck down - Roscoe with his thief skills, Mirado with his Boots of Elvenkind. We saw a blue-decorated room and some guys training inside. They were humans, and Mirado was confident that no human ever did anything evil, so we could negotiate. In we went.
The humans stopped training and casually summoned their leader and some reinforcements. In all, about a dozen human warriors in blue, two trolls (wearing blue tabards), and a half-orc in banded mail and blue, came out. We "negotiated," which tends to be very chaotic with our group. Roscoe yelled stuff from the back, Mirado and Bronan spoke from the front. The confused mess of negotiation and grumpy threats about sending guys out to kill the little voice yelling from the back eventually prompted two things - one, Roscoe came up with the rest. Two, Mirado got into some verbal sparring with the leader when he wouldn't take "we just want to get some information in peace" for a reason to be talking to them. Annoying questions like "How good are you?" and calling Roscoe a gnome was a bit too much. Mirado said he was the best, and nothing faced him yet and lived, which is possibly even true. The leader challenged Mirado, and Mirado wouldn't back down. We got down to dueling, to the death. Roscoe bet 10 cp on the half-orc leader.
We tied for initiative and Mirado shrugged off a Hold Person spell as he whacked the leader for 8 damage. The next turn, Mirado did 4 and took 8. Then it went downhill - Mirado couldn't hit to save his life. Then it was 6 damage, then 8, then 10. Mirado kept refusing the (generous) offer to yield until he was down to 15 HP, which is close to one turn's bad rolling from death. At that, Mirado yielded. The half-orc asked for his silver dagger as the yield price.
Cheap, at that. Mirado handed it over and acknowledged his loss. The rest of the party mostly hooted and made fun of Mirado for losing. Good thing the leader didn't ask for Woundlicker, because Mirado wouldn't yield that no matter what. Mirado changed his name to Mirado Blue Beaten, but reminded Rul that last time something challenged Mirado Rul ended up with a sword +2 vs. mammals, so there. The half-orc also healed Mirado 5 points, which is partly why Mirado doesn't resent his loss. Hey, he was more fair to Mirado than Mirado has been to anyone except those mail-armored men back in session 4.
We spoke to them some more, and they filled us in on some level 4 politics. Apparently this the Arena Level. There are five factions who send fight teams in for pay, or gambling profit, I was never clear on what, from whom. The green are lead by a gnome. The red had a minotaur, but they're hurting a bit. I think they have gnolls, too. The blue are the tops. The purple are weak, and least likely to "enslave" us. I don't recall anything about the Whites. We decided to go check out the Purple, as the Blue felt we weren't worth it for them, although they ranked Mirado as better than 1/3 of their members, equal to some of the middle-rank ones, and below the top 1/3.
We asked for them to show us the arena. They did, escorting us, somewhat oddly, through the White faction's door into the arena. Sure enough, it looked like an area, with a 1' deep layer of sand and spikes to keep the duelists from coming up into the three-deep stands. Not only that, but you can't cast spells in it. As soon as Mirado heard that, his interest in fighting in the arena dropped from "How much do we get paid?" to zero. No way. Leaving our escorts, who were about as useful as tits on a boar hog, we headed into neutral territory. We moved around the area, finding the entrances one by one.
We also found stairs down to level 5, but the GM wasn't ready for that so we backed off.
Right around this time we found a bookie, oddly empty, but with a live video feed (okay, a magic video feed) of the arena. Also, a metal door. We got right to that. Bronan was ready to kick it down, but Roscoe stepped in . . . and rolled a 97 on his Open Locks. He had a 53 to open it, so he used Luck to try again. 67. Nope. We all tried to force it to no avail. Bronan was ready to hack it down but, metal door. Now what?
Minister stepped up and used Knock, which is how it works - the experts try and fail, and then the mage steps up and solved the problem with a spell. Minister was hit with a curse, but shrugged it off. Good thing - he'd have lost HP every day until we put back what we found. Round these parts that's called a fatal curse with no escape clause. (I have to wonder if Remove Curse would work, and if not, why not.)
Inside was some money - 6000 sp, 4000 gp, 19 gems, and 2 pieces of jewelry. We took it all.
We kept exploring, and found stairs going down deeper than level 5. Nice.
We found a room with four entrances and a statue of the god of athletics. Ah, Arnold Schwarzenegger. There was a coin slot so Mirado put in a gold coin. Nothing happened, so he put in 9 more. Still nothing. That's okay, Mirado was just getting serious.
We went back, through a door, and down a short flight of stairs. The door at the bottom defeated us, but some acid from Roscoe weakened it and Bronan kicked it open. Inside were cages with stuff like bonesnappers, giant scorpions, and so on. There were also an elf and a gnome (I think) with a phase panther coeurling away. They demanded 10 gp to repair their door. Bronan offered 5. They asked for 15. Bronan started to berate them about being idiots who don't understand how bargaining works. They started to threaten us with their panther, and the situation started to turn into a threat contest. Mirado got sick of this stupid crap. They were clearly a tough fight with no obvious treasure, or point. So he said he'd paid 10 gp and we were leaving. We did, but the elf and gnome respected Mirado's willingness to deal and said that if we faced one of theirs in the area, Mirado should let them know ahead of time. Mirado agreed.
We explored some more, and found a gated off cave full of bats. We left that alone, but made guano jokes.
We found a room full of some odd shaped winged things - eye killers! We ran. Don't fight creepy Fiend Folio monsters if possible.
We found a door and went through, and found two tough skeletons. We killed them (although Mirado wasn't able to fit into the fight in the tight doorway, and just stood guard), mostly with Rul hacking, Minister throwing Magic Missile, and Bronan and Roscoe whacking away. Once they dropped, we found a 2' diameter copper disc on the wall with a 7th level Lightning Bolt spell on it. We carefully removed it, and Minister took it.
After this, it was late and we had no clear line to anything worth going to. We headed back to the surface.
***
- a bit under 5000 XP for loot, exploration, and fighting. We spent a lot of, well too much, time bs-ing. Fun, but it slowed down the gaming a bit.
- The first two rounds of fighting the half-orc, Mirado hit and did okay damage - 8 and 4. But then I never rolled above a net 16 again, and rolled a lot of sub-10 totals, which sucks since I have a +5 or 6 to hit. I won't lie, it was pretty frustrating and not fun but my luck just wouldn't turn, and I had no other tricks up my sleeve. Sigh. But I survived it, and the cost was pretty low. Those first two hits and saving throw were the only successful rolls I made the whole session! I rolled a lot of 6s on hit rolls, and 1s on initiative. I still think doors should roll high.
Still, a session gaming with bad rolls is still a good day, and I made it out. During the session Joe was talking about how he kept gambling in Rappan Athuk because it's imaginary money and he doesn't need it to pay the rent. That's how I feel about HP. I can get beat on by a flail, bitten by spiders, whatever, but it doesn't hurt me. I can have the fun of fighting without the consequences. Once I was down to 15 HP, I knew I was a double-damage crit away from death and gave it up.
- If I remember, Mirado is going to give 10 gp to the Arnie Statue every session and thank him for "Commando" and "Pumping Iron." Maybe for the commentary on Conan the Barbarian, too.
- It was good to have a thief - it's so much better than doing without via healing potions and Saving Throws. The loss of Joe the Lawyer's high-powered wizard, though, meant we didn't have a lot of destructive firepower in case we had to fight those trolls or the panther-handlers.
- Rolling gems and jewelry at the end is fun. My approach is to roll them before, but I use a hoard total approach, so I have to know what they are worth. For D&D, though, I like it. Too bad we didn't get any exceptional stones.
- not sure about the Arena. Mirado isn't excited about non-combined arms fighting. I'm not excited about going back to the bookie we robbed to try and place bets. Or dealing with secret masters and the politics of the groups. Maybe if we can pit them against each other, but really, it feels fight-heavy and loot-low.
Overall, fun session, but Mirado needs like 4+ like that to hit level 7 so I'm hoping we can loot more and explore more next time!
Tim's Summary - We Laughed Like Manly Men Who Wore Flannel
Doug's Summary - Return to the Mad Archmage
Tenkar's Take - Castle of the Mad Archmage - Session Report "Whatever" - More Fun Than a Barrel Full of Drunken Monkeys!
Characters
Minister "Quantum" "the Pink", Half-elf 4/3 Cleric/Magic-User (Tim Shorts)
Mirado Gargoyle-Friend, Human 6 Fighter (me)
Rul "Rainbow Warrior" Scararm, Human 6 Fighter (Douglas Cole)
Rosco P. Coltrane, Halfling 2/3 F/T (Joe the Lawyer)
Bronan, Human 3 Fighter (Reece Carter)
We picked up two new characters this session - Joe the Lawyer running his Flailsnails guy (Flailsnails? It's kind of a bring-your-character-between-GMs game thing), and Reece Carter running a just-made-up 3rd level fighter. Apparently Tenkar forgot the highest level guys are 6th level, not 4th or so. Oh well. They'll just level faster. They successfully transited the 5% slope down without great mishap.
We headed right down to level 3, and did a little more exploring. There were a few doors on our maps we hadn't opened. The first one we went to we bashed open and found nothing but broken glass. Bronan searched it but found nothing.
A little more searching found us a room (labeled with a letter). I decided this was a bad idea so Mirado voted with his feet to go elsewhere. We found a door, and in it were stored orange cones and orange-and-white construction barrels. We decided we'll use them in the future to detour wandering monsters away from us. A detour sign pointed to a pit should do. We didn't implement that yet.
We kept looking. We soon found a way down, and took that. Finally! We've been trying to find a way down and back up for a while.
We moved down, and immediately there was a left, and down it we could see the steady glow of Continual Light spells. So Roscoe and Mirado snuck down - Roscoe with his thief skills, Mirado with his Boots of Elvenkind. We saw a blue-decorated room and some guys training inside. They were humans, and Mirado was confident that no human ever did anything evil, so we could negotiate. In we went.
The humans stopped training and casually summoned their leader and some reinforcements. In all, about a dozen human warriors in blue, two trolls (wearing blue tabards), and a half-orc in banded mail and blue, came out. We "negotiated," which tends to be very chaotic with our group. Roscoe yelled stuff from the back, Mirado and Bronan spoke from the front. The confused mess of negotiation and grumpy threats about sending guys out to kill the little voice yelling from the back eventually prompted two things - one, Roscoe came up with the rest. Two, Mirado got into some verbal sparring with the leader when he wouldn't take "we just want to get some information in peace" for a reason to be talking to them. Annoying questions like "How good are you?" and calling Roscoe a gnome was a bit too much. Mirado said he was the best, and nothing faced him yet and lived, which is possibly even true. The leader challenged Mirado, and Mirado wouldn't back down. We got down to dueling, to the death. Roscoe bet 10 cp on the half-orc leader.
We tied for initiative and Mirado shrugged off a Hold Person spell as he whacked the leader for 8 damage. The next turn, Mirado did 4 and took 8. Then it went downhill - Mirado couldn't hit to save his life. Then it was 6 damage, then 8, then 10. Mirado kept refusing the (generous) offer to yield until he was down to 15 HP, which is close to one turn's bad rolling from death. At that, Mirado yielded. The half-orc asked for his silver dagger as the yield price.
Cheap, at that. Mirado handed it over and acknowledged his loss. The rest of the party mostly hooted and made fun of Mirado for losing. Good thing the leader didn't ask for Woundlicker, because Mirado wouldn't yield that no matter what. Mirado changed his name to Mirado Blue Beaten, but reminded Rul that last time something challenged Mirado Rul ended up with a sword +2 vs. mammals, so there. The half-orc also healed Mirado 5 points, which is partly why Mirado doesn't resent his loss. Hey, he was more fair to Mirado than Mirado has been to anyone except those mail-armored men back in session 4.
We spoke to them some more, and they filled us in on some level 4 politics. Apparently this the Arena Level. There are five factions who send fight teams in for pay, or gambling profit, I was never clear on what, from whom. The green are lead by a gnome. The red had a minotaur, but they're hurting a bit. I think they have gnolls, too. The blue are the tops. The purple are weak, and least likely to "enslave" us. I don't recall anything about the Whites. We decided to go check out the Purple, as the Blue felt we weren't worth it for them, although they ranked Mirado as better than 1/3 of their members, equal to some of the middle-rank ones, and below the top 1/3.
We asked for them to show us the arena. They did, escorting us, somewhat oddly, through the White faction's door into the arena. Sure enough, it looked like an area, with a 1' deep layer of sand and spikes to keep the duelists from coming up into the three-deep stands. Not only that, but you can't cast spells in it. As soon as Mirado heard that, his interest in fighting in the arena dropped from "How much do we get paid?" to zero. No way. Leaving our escorts, who were about as useful as tits on a boar hog, we headed into neutral territory. We moved around the area, finding the entrances one by one.
We also found stairs down to level 5, but the GM wasn't ready for that so we backed off.
Right around this time we found a bookie, oddly empty, but with a live video feed (okay, a magic video feed) of the arena. Also, a metal door. We got right to that. Bronan was ready to kick it down, but Roscoe stepped in . . . and rolled a 97 on his Open Locks. He had a 53 to open it, so he used Luck to try again. 67. Nope. We all tried to force it to no avail. Bronan was ready to hack it down but, metal door. Now what?
Minister stepped up and used Knock, which is how it works - the experts try and fail, and then the mage steps up and solved the problem with a spell. Minister was hit with a curse, but shrugged it off. Good thing - he'd have lost HP every day until we put back what we found. Round these parts that's called a fatal curse with no escape clause. (I have to wonder if Remove Curse would work, and if not, why not.)
Inside was some money - 6000 sp, 4000 gp, 19 gems, and 2 pieces of jewelry. We took it all.
We kept exploring, and found stairs going down deeper than level 5. Nice.
We found a room with four entrances and a statue of the god of athletics. Ah, Arnold Schwarzenegger. There was a coin slot so Mirado put in a gold coin. Nothing happened, so he put in 9 more. Still nothing. That's okay, Mirado was just getting serious.
We went back, through a door, and down a short flight of stairs. The door at the bottom defeated us, but some acid from Roscoe weakened it and Bronan kicked it open. Inside were cages with stuff like bonesnappers, giant scorpions, and so on. There were also an elf and a gnome (I think) with a phase panther coeurling away. They demanded 10 gp to repair their door. Bronan offered 5. They asked for 15. Bronan started to berate them about being idiots who don't understand how bargaining works. They started to threaten us with their panther, and the situation started to turn into a threat contest. Mirado got sick of this stupid crap. They were clearly a tough fight with no obvious treasure, or point. So he said he'd paid 10 gp and we were leaving. We did, but the elf and gnome respected Mirado's willingness to deal and said that if we faced one of theirs in the area, Mirado should let them know ahead of time. Mirado agreed.
We explored some more, and found a gated off cave full of bats. We left that alone, but made guano jokes.
We found a room full of some odd shaped winged things - eye killers! We ran. Don't fight creepy Fiend Folio monsters if possible.
We found a door and went through, and found two tough skeletons. We killed them (although Mirado wasn't able to fit into the fight in the tight doorway, and just stood guard), mostly with Rul hacking, Minister throwing Magic Missile, and Bronan and Roscoe whacking away. Once they dropped, we found a 2' diameter copper disc on the wall with a 7th level Lightning Bolt spell on it. We carefully removed it, and Minister took it.
After this, it was late and we had no clear line to anything worth going to. We headed back to the surface.
***
- a bit under 5000 XP for loot, exploration, and fighting. We spent a lot of, well too much, time bs-ing. Fun, but it slowed down the gaming a bit.
- The first two rounds of fighting the half-orc, Mirado hit and did okay damage - 8 and 4. But then I never rolled above a net 16 again, and rolled a lot of sub-10 totals, which sucks since I have a +5 or 6 to hit. I won't lie, it was pretty frustrating and not fun but my luck just wouldn't turn, and I had no other tricks up my sleeve. Sigh. But I survived it, and the cost was pretty low. Those first two hits and saving throw were the only successful rolls I made the whole session! I rolled a lot of 6s on hit rolls, and 1s on initiative. I still think doors should roll high.
Still, a session gaming with bad rolls is still a good day, and I made it out. During the session Joe was talking about how he kept gambling in Rappan Athuk because it's imaginary money and he doesn't need it to pay the rent. That's how I feel about HP. I can get beat on by a flail, bitten by spiders, whatever, but it doesn't hurt me. I can have the fun of fighting without the consequences. Once I was down to 15 HP, I knew I was a double-damage crit away from death and gave it up.
- If I remember, Mirado is going to give 10 gp to the Arnie Statue every session and thank him for "Commando" and "Pumping Iron." Maybe for the commentary on Conan the Barbarian, too.
- It was good to have a thief - it's so much better than doing without via healing potions and Saving Throws. The loss of Joe the Lawyer's high-powered wizard, though, meant we didn't have a lot of destructive firepower in case we had to fight those trolls or the panther-handlers.
- Rolling gems and jewelry at the end is fun. My approach is to roll them before, but I use a hoard total approach, so I have to know what they are worth. For D&D, though, I like it. Too bad we didn't get any exceptional stones.
- not sure about the Arena. Mirado isn't excited about non-combined arms fighting. I'm not excited about going back to the bookie we robbed to try and place bets. Or dealing with secret masters and the politics of the groups. Maybe if we can pit them against each other, but really, it feels fight-heavy and loot-low.
Overall, fun session, but Mirado needs like 4+ like that to hit level 7 so I'm hoping we can loot more and explore more next time!
Teaser of the Mad Archmage
Last night was a session of the S&W B-Team, run by Erik Tenkar. For Doug Cole's summary, see here. For my teaser of my later session summary, read on.
During the session.
. . . we found a way down to level 4.
. . . we found a bunch of colored factions who run fights in the arena.
. . . Mirado fought an unsuccessful duel with a half-orc faction leader, partly do to being outmatch but mostly because he couldn't roll above a 10 for most of the fight.
. . . blagged a bookie.
. . . ran from eye killers.
. . . killed some touch skeletons.
. . . found ways down to levels 5 and 6.
. . . negotiated with some guys who don't understand how haggling works.
. . . met a statue of the god of athletics, Arnold Schwarzenegger
. . . and somehow made it home alive.
Not a terrifically profitable session, and Mirado was basically useless after a brief stint of good rolls early. After that, no foe or no door was too weak for him to fail against. We did find a teaser in the form of a bunch of gems, but they only averaged out 200 gp each so it wasn't so exciting after all. Not a 10,000 gp one in the bunch! Oh well, next time.
I'll get a full report up this evening.
During the session.
. . . we found a way down to level 4.
. . . we found a bunch of colored factions who run fights in the arena.
. . . Mirado fought an unsuccessful duel with a half-orc faction leader, partly do to being outmatch but mostly because he couldn't roll above a 10 for most of the fight.
. . . blagged a bookie.
. . . ran from eye killers.
. . . killed some touch skeletons.
. . . found ways down to levels 5 and 6.
. . . negotiated with some guys who don't understand how haggling works.
. . . met a statue of the god of athletics, Arnold Schwarzenegger
. . . and somehow made it home alive.
Not a terrifically profitable session, and Mirado was basically useless after a brief stint of good rolls early. After that, no foe or no door was too weak for him to fail against. We did find a teaser in the form of a bunch of gems, but they only averaged out 200 gp each so it wasn't so exciting after all. Not a 10,000 gp one in the bunch! Oh well, next time.
I'll get a full report up this evening.
Saturday, September 6, 2014
S&W in the Southern Reaches: Session 8 - Castle of the Mad Archmage 5 - Screaming Kobold Skeletons and Rainbows
Our last session was 7/18/14, almost 2 months ago. Naturally, Doug "I'm blogging as we play" Cole has a complete summary up, and I'll write my perspective on what happened here.
Characters
Minister "Quantum" Morale-Breaker, Half-elf 3/3 Cleric/Magic-User (Tim Shorts)
Mirado Beetle-Battler, Human 5 Fighter (me)
Rul "Rainbow Warrior" Scararm, Human 5 Fighter (Douglas Cole)
Joe the Wizard*, Elf 5 Magic-User (Joe the Lawyer) * I don't know character's name.
We started out on level 3 of the dungeon, our GM handwaving the whole climb down in levels. Why not, after all, if the real game happens below?
We put our two fighters in from, Mirado on the front left, Rul on the right, slightly refused (armed with his bow), and Minister and Joe in back. Ironic, because they have better AC than either Mirado or Rul.
We immediately moved to the lizard man area we'd pillaged last trip, looking to see what had transpired and what we missed. Not a lot - a larder was found, but otherwise nothing. Exploring the area further, we stumbled across a pair of lizard men armed with whips and swords and tethering eight velociraptors. They loosen them, and we loosed a pair of Sleep spells. That did for the lot of them. Magic early and often was our mode tonight. We slew the sleepers and kept one lizard ma alive for questioning. His broken common made communication possible, but he had little to tell us. We tethered him up as a trap-triggerer and pushed him ahead of us.
The next area we found turned out to be the beetle complex. It had phosphorescent mold on the walls and boring beetles munching on it. We attacked the first group without hesitation. Rul handled initiative rolls, so we actual won initiative often.
Joe decided on Monster Summoning I, but it turns out it's a terribly weak spell in S&W, so Tenkar let him retcon that and use Web instead. That did it. We shot the beetles up for a bit with arrows and then lit them on fire. Our lizard man burned, too, which Mirado kind of felt bad about.
We found several more rooms of beetles. The next room has 6, which Joe blew up with a fireball. Three survived to attack him, but he fended them off and slew them as we charged up, with Mirado killing the last one. We found a charred corpse with some platemail (we took it, but it didn't turn out to be magical), a burned scroll, some gems (we lost two to the fireball), and a nice mace. And a few melty gold coins.
Naturally, there were a few more rooms of beetles, and we trashed them without magic. A dead elf gets use some gold, two potions (Levitate, Invisibility we later learn), and a glowing magical longsword that Rul eventually ends up with.
From there, we found a teleporter corridor (pretty easy to spot, actually, since we were a little spread out) and signs of more annoying map-busters to come. We found something like 100 pounds of silver coins, too, in a chest. We took them, naturally. So we moved back to explore some doors we'd discovered but hadn't gotten too.
We hit a mish-mash of rooms, including:
- a room with old dusty covered furniture. My brain immediately went to my Italian relative's houses with the plastic covered furniture in the living room, the stuff you never sat at anyway because the kitchen and dining room is where life happens. In it we heard crying, and found a kobold skeleton. Turning it and smashing it did nothing. We shortly found a doll, Minister gave it to the kobold (as Joe and Mirado moved way the **** back), and it stopped crying. Aww . . .
- we found a room with a bas relief of clowns that felt spooky. We left it, after bitching that spooky stuff should be "cthulhu" not "Ringling Brothers."
- we found a room full of moldy furniture. We immediately closed the door. I don't walk into mold-filled rooms in real life, and real life doesn't have violet fungi or yellow mold.
- A room with a bunch of skeletons, which Minister turns into dust with a 20 on his turning roll. Mirado checked out a chest in the room "carefully" but I rolled a 1 on my INT roll, so "carefully" meant "hit it with my crowbar." Poison gas enveloped us, but saving throws were on our sides (and Joe D had positioned himself "way the **** back" and was safe).
- we found a series of colored rooms. After green we found blue, realized it was a rainbow, and sought out the rest. One room we stumbled into was bright pink and caused 3d6 damage, no save, from pink. Sigh. We solved the puzzle of the rainbow rooms and earned +1 HP permanently each.
- we found a mated pair of gargoyles. Mirado was so happy the room wasn't pink or rainbow colored or full of moldy clown that we said "Hail friend!" and talked to the gargoyles while we checked out a neighboring room. Had they been lounging on a pile of gold, it would have been different, but as it was, Well Met Underground Stoners.
- we found an empty, unkeyed room, which put Circle of Iron
into my head. Think, Zetan's book.
- naturally, we found a big empty room. I guessed "teleporter" but it was an elevator. It ground down to what we estimated was level 6 or 7. We just sat in it for 24 hours and waited for it to go up, sleeping in shifts, standing guard, healing, etc. because we didn't have a way back up from level 7.
After the elevator, we hit one more room (it had some useless broken jugs in it, which we did nothing useful with), and then headed to town.
It was a pretty good haul, Mirado and Rul both made level 6 (as did Joe, and I'm pretty sure Minister is either 4/3 or 4/4 now). We got some nice stuff, too, and the game was fun as usual.
Notes:
We bs'd away a whole hour at the beginning. Fun, but next time I hope to only bs a half hour before we start killing. I like chatting with the guys but I like playing with the guys more.
I have a whole post coming up on COTMA and what I think of it. Suffice it to say, the Dungeon Robber aspects of it are getting to me a little. Not just me, either, but more on that latter in the week.
We usually keep left, and choose left over right. But someone compared Tenkar to right-wing talk radio so we decided, screw it, today we're going right. Solidarity with the GM, man.
We still need a thief. As I've said here and elsewhere, we're getting away without one with careful play and lots of HP, but it's a sub-optimal solution.
Joe did a spells memorized and magic item info dump on us. That was very useful. I'll do that next time, too, so other people know what tools we have. We don't want a "Why didn't you mention the holocaust cloak and wheelbarrow?" kind of situation here.
Once again, we found a better magic sword for Rul, that glows, is +2, and has a hidden special ability. So he's got a spare Longsword +1, +2 vs. mammals you can ask him about. I have Woundlicker, and it's unlikely I'd "upgrade" unless something vastly better came along. Having injuries be "just until I get into the next fight" is amazingly useful. Mirado took the Potion of Invisiblity to go with his Boots of Elvenkind, Rul now has three magical swords, and Joe took the Potion of Levitation. I felt kind of bad Minister was so useful this session but got little besides money to show for it, but it happens. Had we found a magic item he could use, he'd have gotten it.
I'm pretty sure the exit was part of a deal with the GM. We decided to sit and wait in the elevator until it went back up, and probably because it was nearly midnight I think Tenkar let us do it without consequence. After all, we were all looking to just head out, not continue play. If it was 9 pm, maybe he would have just said, suck it up and open the door, but it was late and the game changes as it gets late.
I made a completely inappropriate remark about the gargoyles that made everyone laugh, and earned 1000 bonus xp. Not bad. Not repeatable, really, or funny out of context, but in context, it crushed us with laughter for a while. Good times.
It was a really fun session, overall, and the bonus XP for exploration in the monthly game meant we're always getting better and can face more dangerous stuff each week without a grind. That's nice because we'd play more if we could, but honestly, we just can't.
Characters
Minister "Quantum" Morale-Breaker, Half-elf 3/3 Cleric/Magic-User (Tim Shorts)
Mirado Beetle-Battler, Human 5 Fighter (me)
Rul "Rainbow Warrior" Scararm, Human 5 Fighter (Douglas Cole)
Joe the Wizard*, Elf 5 Magic-User (Joe the Lawyer) * I don't know character's name.
We started out on level 3 of the dungeon, our GM handwaving the whole climb down in levels. Why not, after all, if the real game happens below?
We put our two fighters in from, Mirado on the front left, Rul on the right, slightly refused (armed with his bow), and Minister and Joe in back. Ironic, because they have better AC than either Mirado or Rul.
We immediately moved to the lizard man area we'd pillaged last trip, looking to see what had transpired and what we missed. Not a lot - a larder was found, but otherwise nothing. Exploring the area further, we stumbled across a pair of lizard men armed with whips and swords and tethering eight velociraptors. They loosen them, and we loosed a pair of Sleep spells. That did for the lot of them. Magic early and often was our mode tonight. We slew the sleepers and kept one lizard ma alive for questioning. His broken common made communication possible, but he had little to tell us. We tethered him up as a trap-triggerer and pushed him ahead of us.
The next area we found turned out to be the beetle complex. It had phosphorescent mold on the walls and boring beetles munching on it. We attacked the first group without hesitation. Rul handled initiative rolls, so we actual won initiative often.
Joe decided on Monster Summoning I, but it turns out it's a terribly weak spell in S&W, so Tenkar let him retcon that and use Web instead. That did it. We shot the beetles up for a bit with arrows and then lit them on fire. Our lizard man burned, too, which Mirado kind of felt bad about.
We found several more rooms of beetles. The next room has 6, which Joe blew up with a fireball. Three survived to attack him, but he fended them off and slew them as we charged up, with Mirado killing the last one. We found a charred corpse with some platemail (we took it, but it didn't turn out to be magical), a burned scroll, some gems (we lost two to the fireball), and a nice mace. And a few melty gold coins.
Naturally, there were a few more rooms of beetles, and we trashed them without magic. A dead elf gets use some gold, two potions (Levitate, Invisibility we later learn), and a glowing magical longsword that Rul eventually ends up with.
From there, we found a teleporter corridor (pretty easy to spot, actually, since we were a little spread out) and signs of more annoying map-busters to come. We found something like 100 pounds of silver coins, too, in a chest. We took them, naturally. So we moved back to explore some doors we'd discovered but hadn't gotten too.
We hit a mish-mash of rooms, including:
- a room with old dusty covered furniture. My brain immediately went to my Italian relative's houses with the plastic covered furniture in the living room, the stuff you never sat at anyway because the kitchen and dining room is where life happens. In it we heard crying, and found a kobold skeleton. Turning it and smashing it did nothing. We shortly found a doll, Minister gave it to the kobold (as Joe and Mirado moved way the **** back), and it stopped crying. Aww . . .
- we found a room with a bas relief of clowns that felt spooky. We left it, after bitching that spooky stuff should be "cthulhu" not "Ringling Brothers."
- we found a room full of moldy furniture. We immediately closed the door. I don't walk into mold-filled rooms in real life, and real life doesn't have violet fungi or yellow mold.
- A room with a bunch of skeletons, which Minister turns into dust with a 20 on his turning roll. Mirado checked out a chest in the room "carefully" but I rolled a 1 on my INT roll, so "carefully" meant "hit it with my crowbar." Poison gas enveloped us, but saving throws were on our sides (and Joe D had positioned himself "way the **** back" and was safe).
- we found a series of colored rooms. After green we found blue, realized it was a rainbow, and sought out the rest. One room we stumbled into was bright pink and caused 3d6 damage, no save, from pink. Sigh. We solved the puzzle of the rainbow rooms and earned +1 HP permanently each.
- we found a mated pair of gargoyles. Mirado was so happy the room wasn't pink or rainbow colored or full of moldy clown that we said "Hail friend!" and talked to the gargoyles while we checked out a neighboring room. Had they been lounging on a pile of gold, it would have been different, but as it was, Well Met Underground Stoners.
- we found an empty, unkeyed room, which put Circle of Iron
into my head. Think, Zetan's book.- naturally, we found a big empty room. I guessed "teleporter" but it was an elevator. It ground down to what we estimated was level 6 or 7. We just sat in it for 24 hours and waited for it to go up, sleeping in shifts, standing guard, healing, etc. because we didn't have a way back up from level 7.
After the elevator, we hit one more room (it had some useless broken jugs in it, which we did nothing useful with), and then headed to town.
It was a pretty good haul, Mirado and Rul both made level 6 (as did Joe, and I'm pretty sure Minister is either 4/3 or 4/4 now). We got some nice stuff, too, and the game was fun as usual.
Notes:
We bs'd away a whole hour at the beginning. Fun, but next time I hope to only bs a half hour before we start killing. I like chatting with the guys but I like playing with the guys more.
I have a whole post coming up on COTMA and what I think of it. Suffice it to say, the Dungeon Robber aspects of it are getting to me a little. Not just me, either, but more on that latter in the week.
We usually keep left, and choose left over right. But someone compared Tenkar to right-wing talk radio so we decided, screw it, today we're going right. Solidarity with the GM, man.
We still need a thief. As I've said here and elsewhere, we're getting away without one with careful play and lots of HP, but it's a sub-optimal solution.
Joe did a spells memorized and magic item info dump on us. That was very useful. I'll do that next time, too, so other people know what tools we have. We don't want a "Why didn't you mention the holocaust cloak and wheelbarrow?" kind of situation here.
Once again, we found a better magic sword for Rul, that glows, is +2, and has a hidden special ability. So he's got a spare Longsword +1, +2 vs. mammals you can ask him about. I have Woundlicker, and it's unlikely I'd "upgrade" unless something vastly better came along. Having injuries be "just until I get into the next fight" is amazingly useful. Mirado took the Potion of Invisiblity to go with his Boots of Elvenkind, Rul now has three magical swords, and Joe took the Potion of Levitation. I felt kind of bad Minister was so useful this session but got little besides money to show for it, but it happens. Had we found a magic item he could use, he'd have gotten it.
I'm pretty sure the exit was part of a deal with the GM. We decided to sit and wait in the elevator until it went back up, and probably because it was nearly midnight I think Tenkar let us do it without consequence. After all, we were all looking to just head out, not continue play. If it was 9 pm, maybe he would have just said, suck it up and open the door, but it was late and the game changes as it gets late.
I made a completely inappropriate remark about the gargoyles that made everyone laugh, and earned 1000 bonus xp. Not bad. Not repeatable, really, or funny out of context, but in context, it crushed us with laughter for a while. Good times.
It was a really fun session, overall, and the bonus XP for exploration in the monthly game meant we're always getting better and can face more dangerous stuff each week without a grind. That's nice because we'd play more if we could, but honestly, we just can't.
Tuesday, July 22, 2014
How silent are those Boots of Elvenkind?
So just how effective are Mirado's Boots of Elvenkind?
S&W Complete is pretty definite on the subject:
"Boots of Elvenkind: The wearer of the boots moves with complete silence."
No word about speed restrictions, encumbrance, etc. As written, you could run in these puppies and not make a sound. It doesn't even say foot sounds, only - movement. So, breathing? Swinging swords? What's the cutoff, I wonder, for "movement." You could say they are boots, so it's obviously foot movement only, but a ring of invisibility doesn't just hide your finger or hand, and a cloak of protection works on your whole body. So it's a valid question in my mind.
AD&D was a lot more restrictive:
"Boots of Elvenkind: These soft boots enable the wearer to move without sound of footfall in virtually any surroundings. Thus the wearer can walk across a patch of dry leaves or aver a normally creaky wooden floor and make only a whisper of noise - say 95% chance of silence in the worst of conditions, 100% in the best."
That's what I was thinking of during the session, but the short version S&W went with makes it considerably better of a magic item.
Certainly they got a bit weaker in 3.x, according to the SRD:
"Boots of Elvenkind These soft boots enable the wearer to move quietly in virtually any surroundings, granting a +5 competence bonus on Move Silently checks."
But still, yeah, I need to ask our GM what effect he's thinking of.
S&W Complete is pretty definite on the subject:
"Boots of Elvenkind: The wearer of the boots moves with complete silence."
No word about speed restrictions, encumbrance, etc. As written, you could run in these puppies and not make a sound. It doesn't even say foot sounds, only - movement. So, breathing? Swinging swords? What's the cutoff, I wonder, for "movement." You could say they are boots, so it's obviously foot movement only, but a ring of invisibility doesn't just hide your finger or hand, and a cloak of protection works on your whole body. So it's a valid question in my mind.
AD&D was a lot more restrictive:
"Boots of Elvenkind: These soft boots enable the wearer to move without sound of footfall in virtually any surroundings. Thus the wearer can walk across a patch of dry leaves or aver a normally creaky wooden floor and make only a whisper of noise - say 95% chance of silence in the worst of conditions, 100% in the best."
That's what I was thinking of during the session, but the short version S&W went with makes it considerably better of a magic item.
Certainly they got a bit weaker in 3.x, according to the SRD:
"Boots of Elvenkind These soft boots enable the wearer to move quietly in virtually any surroundings, granting a +5 competence bonus on Move Silently checks."
But still, yeah, I need to ask our GM what effect he's thinking of.
Saturday, July 19, 2014
S&W in the Southern Reaches: Session 7 - Castle of the Mad Archmage 4 - Ones Are What We Roll
We played in Erik Tenkar's S&W game last night. For a more detailed summary full of Doug whining and mocking me out of jealousy over my Boots of Elvenkind, check out this.
PCs
Minister, Half-Elf Cleric/Magic-User (lvl 3/3) (Tim Shorts)
Mirado the Slow, Human Fighter (lvl 5) (me)
Rul Scararm, Human Fighter (lvl 5) (Douglas Cole)
Only three delvers tonight, sadly, which greatly impacted our ability to get in some serious killing and looting.
We headed down to level 3 via the circular staircase instead of our usual 5% slope ramp. We opened to doors and found another 5% slope ramp. Sigh.
We went left (Map East) and down a corridor, and took the first door we found and saw a corridor ahead. So we went left and blundered into 6 giant scorpions (like, 2 HD big). They were fast, and we were not, so Mirado immediately called to Minister for a Sleep spell. Probably unnecessary, if only because Minister had the same idea. We put one down, Minister put 3 to sleep, and we eventually cut down the other two - but only after Mirado was stung (and needed Luck to save) and Minister was stung (and wounded badly.) We used magic to heal up. We'd gotten fairly mauled by what should have been an easy fight.
The scorpions had some treasure - well, two skeletal dwarves stripped to the bone (the best kind of skeletons, we agreed) had a chest. It had 2047 gold and what turned out to be 4 pieces of jewelry at 250 each. We checked some rooms past there, too, but it was a nightmare of inability to open doors for everyone until Minister busted out a crowbar and one of us managed to pry it open on a second try.
Good thing we did, as we found two more dead dwarves and not much else. Sigh. (By this point, it was around 8:45 and it was clear we had a short night in store.)
We turned back to the corridor to Map South, and Mirado naturally fell in a pit. Sigh. Even tapping with the spear is useless, he decided, and gave up on that. We continued on and bypassed a corridor, foolishly not even looking in it.
Bad move. Three carnivorous apes (the most delicious of all apes!) jumped us from behind. We managed to avoid surprise and tie initiative, so with their DX bonuses Rul and Mirado were able to reverse course and jump into between apes and Minister. We fought, and they mauled Rul and Mirado both a fair bit with their claws and teeth . . . probably more than either has taken before in a single fight. Minister saved the day with Phantasmal Force, fooling two of the apes into thinking they'd fallen into a pit that opened up underneath them. While they flailed, we kept chopping at the sole Saving Throw-making ape in the bunch. They eventually all went down, leaving us, again, badly mauled and lower on resources.
Mauled, we drank potions and moved on. We found a door to a room that stank of incense and had a statue of Mephistopheles in it. We decided the local hobgoblins (who Minister said worship the arch-devil in question) must be on The Weed They'll All Doing These Days. There was another door, so Mirado crept over with his elven boots, prompting mocking by Rul, who probably regrets not trying them on himself after we found that mummy. Mirado heard a single voice chanting, and snuck back.
We settled on an unusually nuanced plan, for us - we'd charge in an attack, but with bow support!
That's what we did. Mirado charged the flimsy, partly-open door and flew through to the floor at the feet of a hobgoblin shaman. Rul popped him with an arrow. The shaman cast Hold Person on Mirado, but he saved. Mirado couldn't get a cut in but Rul popped the shaman with another arrow. Then, Mirado cut him down.
Rul went out to watch for reinforcements while Minister and Mirado looted. We found what later turned out to be a morningstar +1 and 112 pp.
Having decapitated the hobgoblin shaman - so Mirado could throw it as a shock-inducing fight starter against hobgoblins - we wound our way around and up some stairs.
At the top was a 40' hallway with a door to the right, and a room ahead lit by a fire. Mirado sneaked up with his Boots of Elvenkind, intending to start a fight by tossing the head, then running back past the side door to where Rul and Minister awaited. But instead of a handful of hobgoblin guards he saw 5 watchful, well-armed guards, and a dozen or so women and less-alert men rolling dice. Not only that, but he caught a scent he found familiar - apes!
Mirado stealthily moved back and motioned the group around some corners before explaining what he saw. Mirado voted against attacking - likely there are dozens and dozens more hobgoblins, there are three in the group, and we had only a single Sleep spell. So we pulled back, dumping the shaman's head in the pit trap, then spiking the door shut. Screw them, that's a big fight for dubious loot, and we were low on everything.
Going the other way, Map West, we found a door and kicked it down, surprising 10 lizardmen!
We attacked, saving Sleep in case in got bad. It mostly didn't, as we started to finally get initiative as the fight rolled on. It was a messy brawl. As we whittled them down to 3, a side door burst open and 3 more lizardmen charged in.
Two were big, and armed with tridents. One was bigger, wore plate, and had a longsword. Sweet!
We cheerfully engaged. Mirado was happy - knee deep in gore, and the leader chose to fight him - especially since he was open, swinging a sword that drank blood, and waving an ogre head. The lieutenants each took on Minister and Rul, backed by a regular lizard man.
Things got a little dicey as Minister was struck down by his trident-armed foe (who did 8 damage) and the lizard man next to him (who did 3 . . . and he had 1 HP left). He dropped. But meanwhile Mirado slew the scrub near him and wounded the big lizardman, taking some hellacious hits in return. Rul worked on his foes, taking out the scrub and then the lieutenant. We then finished the others - Mirado the chief, and then Rul the other lieutenant.
Mirado and then Rul fed Minister a healing potion, getting him up enough to Cure Light Wounds himself. We searched the rooms, taking home another good score - 5617 sp, 2166 gp, 14 gems @ 120 gp each, and what turned out to be a Longsword +1, +2 vs. Mammals.
We headed home. We were even lower on HP, we had almost no reserves to bail us out if a fight went badly, and we had solid loot.
We made it back to the surface.
Notes:
We had enough money for 2680 each, 1 gp left over. Since Minister got the magical morningstar, naturally, and since we were able to convince Rul that carrying an undead-slaying sword as a backup was nice but a sword vs. mammals (like orcs, humans, hobgoblins, giant rats, wombats, etc.) was a great main weapon, Mirado got the extra 1 gp.
I'm pretty sure this is my first trip into the Castle where I ended up with more loot than expended resources.
The Boots of Elvenkind were actually quite useful.
Short session overall - we finished a little after 10, instead of our usual 11:30 or later, because we simply didn't have a way to ensure going on wasn't risking everything with no backup. Still, it worked out well, because Minister leveled up and he'd set up much better for next time, at level 4/4.
Good session overall, albeit shortened by bad rolling early on that cost us spells, HP, and potions we didn't have enough of.
PCs
Minister, Half-Elf Cleric/Magic-User (lvl 3/3) (Tim Shorts)
Mirado the Slow, Human Fighter (lvl 5) (me)
Rul Scararm, Human Fighter (lvl 5) (Douglas Cole)
Only three delvers tonight, sadly, which greatly impacted our ability to get in some serious killing and looting.
We headed down to level 3 via the circular staircase instead of our usual 5% slope ramp. We opened to doors and found another 5% slope ramp. Sigh.
We went left (Map East) and down a corridor, and took the first door we found and saw a corridor ahead. So we went left and blundered into 6 giant scorpions (like, 2 HD big). They were fast, and we were not, so Mirado immediately called to Minister for a Sleep spell. Probably unnecessary, if only because Minister had the same idea. We put one down, Minister put 3 to sleep, and we eventually cut down the other two - but only after Mirado was stung (and needed Luck to save) and Minister was stung (and wounded badly.) We used magic to heal up. We'd gotten fairly mauled by what should have been an easy fight.
The scorpions had some treasure - well, two skeletal dwarves stripped to the bone (the best kind of skeletons, we agreed) had a chest. It had 2047 gold and what turned out to be 4 pieces of jewelry at 250 each. We checked some rooms past there, too, but it was a nightmare of inability to open doors for everyone until Minister busted out a crowbar and one of us managed to pry it open on a second try.
Good thing we did, as we found two more dead dwarves and not much else. Sigh. (By this point, it was around 8:45 and it was clear we had a short night in store.)
We turned back to the corridor to Map South, and Mirado naturally fell in a pit. Sigh. Even tapping with the spear is useless, he decided, and gave up on that. We continued on and bypassed a corridor, foolishly not even looking in it.
Bad move. Three carnivorous apes (the most delicious of all apes!) jumped us from behind. We managed to avoid surprise and tie initiative, so with their DX bonuses Rul and Mirado were able to reverse course and jump into between apes and Minister. We fought, and they mauled Rul and Mirado both a fair bit with their claws and teeth . . . probably more than either has taken before in a single fight. Minister saved the day with Phantasmal Force, fooling two of the apes into thinking they'd fallen into a pit that opened up underneath them. While they flailed, we kept chopping at the sole Saving Throw-making ape in the bunch. They eventually all went down, leaving us, again, badly mauled and lower on resources.
Mauled, we drank potions and moved on. We found a door to a room that stank of incense and had a statue of Mephistopheles in it. We decided the local hobgoblins (who Minister said worship the arch-devil in question) must be on The Weed They'll All Doing These Days. There was another door, so Mirado crept over with his elven boots, prompting mocking by Rul, who probably regrets not trying them on himself after we found that mummy. Mirado heard a single voice chanting, and snuck back.
We settled on an unusually nuanced plan, for us - we'd charge in an attack, but with bow support!
That's what we did. Mirado charged the flimsy, partly-open door and flew through to the floor at the feet of a hobgoblin shaman. Rul popped him with an arrow. The shaman cast Hold Person on Mirado, but he saved. Mirado couldn't get a cut in but Rul popped the shaman with another arrow. Then, Mirado cut him down.
Rul went out to watch for reinforcements while Minister and Mirado looted. We found what later turned out to be a morningstar +1 and 112 pp.
Having decapitated the hobgoblin shaman - so Mirado could throw it as a shock-inducing fight starter against hobgoblins - we wound our way around and up some stairs.
At the top was a 40' hallway with a door to the right, and a room ahead lit by a fire. Mirado sneaked up with his Boots of Elvenkind, intending to start a fight by tossing the head, then running back past the side door to where Rul and Minister awaited. But instead of a handful of hobgoblin guards he saw 5 watchful, well-armed guards, and a dozen or so women and less-alert men rolling dice. Not only that, but he caught a scent he found familiar - apes!
Mirado stealthily moved back and motioned the group around some corners before explaining what he saw. Mirado voted against attacking - likely there are dozens and dozens more hobgoblins, there are three in the group, and we had only a single Sleep spell. So we pulled back, dumping the shaman's head in the pit trap, then spiking the door shut. Screw them, that's a big fight for dubious loot, and we were low on everything.
Going the other way, Map West, we found a door and kicked it down, surprising 10 lizardmen!
We attacked, saving Sleep in case in got bad. It mostly didn't, as we started to finally get initiative as the fight rolled on. It was a messy brawl. As we whittled them down to 3, a side door burst open and 3 more lizardmen charged in.
Two were big, and armed with tridents. One was bigger, wore plate, and had a longsword. Sweet!
We cheerfully engaged. Mirado was happy - knee deep in gore, and the leader chose to fight him - especially since he was open, swinging a sword that drank blood, and waving an ogre head. The lieutenants each took on Minister and Rul, backed by a regular lizard man.
Things got a little dicey as Minister was struck down by his trident-armed foe (who did 8 damage) and the lizard man next to him (who did 3 . . . and he had 1 HP left). He dropped. But meanwhile Mirado slew the scrub near him and wounded the big lizardman, taking some hellacious hits in return. Rul worked on his foes, taking out the scrub and then the lieutenant. We then finished the others - Mirado the chief, and then Rul the other lieutenant.
Mirado and then Rul fed Minister a healing potion, getting him up enough to Cure Light Wounds himself. We searched the rooms, taking home another good score - 5617 sp, 2166 gp, 14 gems @ 120 gp each, and what turned out to be a Longsword +1, +2 vs. Mammals.
We headed home. We were even lower on HP, we had almost no reserves to bail us out if a fight went badly, and we had solid loot.
We made it back to the surface.
Notes:
We had enough money for 2680 each, 1 gp left over. Since Minister got the magical morningstar, naturally, and since we were able to convince Rul that carrying an undead-slaying sword as a backup was nice but a sword vs. mammals (like orcs, humans, hobgoblins, giant rats, wombats, etc.) was a great main weapon, Mirado got the extra 1 gp.
I'm pretty sure this is my first trip into the Castle where I ended up with more loot than expended resources.
The Boots of Elvenkind were actually quite useful.
Short session overall - we finished a little after 10, instead of our usual 11:30 or later, because we simply didn't have a way to ensure going on wasn't risking everything with no backup. Still, it worked out well, because Minister leveled up and he'd set up much better for next time, at level 4/4.
Good session overall, albeit shortened by bad rolling early on that cost us spells, HP, and potions we didn't have enough of.
Saturday, June 28, 2014
S&W in the Southern Reaches: Session 6 - Castle of the Mad Archmage 3 - Norkers & Teleporters
We played in Erik Tenkar's S&W game at long last on Friday night. For a better, more detailed summary, check out Doug "Rul" Cole's summary here.
PCs
Minister, Half-Elf Cleric/Magic-User (lvl 3/3) (Tim Shorts)
Mirado the Slow, Human Fighter (lvl 4) (me)
Rul Scararm, Human Fighter (lvl 4) (Douglas Cole)
Bello the Dwarf, Dwarf Fighter (lvl 2) (Chris Maler)
We returned to the Castle of the Mad Archmage, this time with Bello the Dwarf, who was going to join us before but who was lost due to connection issues. We joked he'd stopped to tie his shoelaces and only now had finished and caught up.
We entered, passing two teens with sticks who were counting adventurers going in for taxing by the mayor. Mirado asked, "Are you coming?" They refused. More fools they than us.
We went right down to level 3, because a) we scored well there last time and b) the dungeon kept putting us back down to level 3.
The first thing we did was blunder into a pit, which Mirado fell into. He suffered little damage but only because he avoided the poisoned spikes at the bottom. He climbed out and we moved on, tapping with a spear in front of us.
We explored and found a "maze of twisty passages, all alike" and fought some skeletal dogs. We found little of interest except
a room with flaming freaking rolling barrels in it. No clue how it reloads, which led us to decide it was the honor system - you're supposed to reset the trap for the next folks. We didn't, though. and moved on to some doors we'd bypassed. From then on, it was doors over escape or passages, every time. We kicked down a few, crowbared open a locked one (and got surrounded with some weird mist that didn't seem to harm us), and in one, the group moved in as Mirado watched from the hallway. The group suddenly disappeared. They didn't answer Mirado's hail. So, he decided it was a teleporter and - since the group did the same for him - went in.
We found ourselves turned around, but the dwarf knew map north so we were good. We explored around the teleporter area, and found signs of a wizard - an inlaid silver conjuring circle, a not-well-hidden-enough spellbook (score!), and then a wizard and his mail-armored cronies.
We were surprised, and the swordsmen laid into Mirado and the wizard disappeared. His spellbooks had included invisibility, so it must have been that. We finally countered and Mirado cut one of the swordsmen, before Minister put them to sleep. The wizard had escaped out a side passage, and Mirado couldn't find him. We headed back to the room and searched until we heard a shouted curse.
Aha! Mirado and Rul charged back to the room with the hidden spellbook niche. We slammed into an invisible mage, and after some desperate (and mostly hapless) grappling, we got him down under Mirado. We set to with daggers until the mage died an ignominious death.
We went back and Mirado, run by a player in a bad mood, killed the swordsmen just to get 2 HP back.
Somewhere around this time, we found a room full of rats who had 2000 cp. Of course. We took it.
We explored more, and kicked down one door that was especially fun:
Inside were some norkers.
Mirado shouted with joy and we attacked. They died rapidly. The next room had more norkers, and they died too - so far, 10 down. 10 more charged us from another room, right into Minister. His sleep spell put 3 down, and they broke and ran. We briefly considered pursuit but then decided a) we can't map and b) they don't have pockets and therefore no real loot. We took their silver (poorly hidden) and left.
We explored more - despite not being 100% sure where we were, we prioritized doors over escape. We dealt with a few of them - including a number of those little dwarf doors. One had a trap of some kind going, but we never did figure it out. We fought more things, including camel spiders (big ones) and some really tough skeletons Minister couldn't turn but Rul could chop apart with his undead-slaying sword.
We took their golden gorgets and pried open the sarcophagus they guarded. Inside was a mummy with nice boots and a gold necklace.
Mirado grabbed the mummified corpse's boots and blew a Saving Throw (despite Luck, good Con, and a Ring of Protection). That got him turbo-rot (aka hyper-leprosy, aka mummy rot) and a pair of Boots of Elvenkind. In normal circumstances, I'd have given them up to, say, the guy who needs to sneak the most. But no way, it cost Mirado 1100 gp for Cure Disease so I figured he'd more than paid for the boots.
We simply headed back to town after that, easily connecting back up with our escape route and getting to the surface. The two teens were dead, throats slit, so Mirado marked two notches in the ground for them and we went to town. They should have come with us.
Notes:
"Honor the arrow." One door had an arrow symbol on it with no explanation. One-way door, maybe? Erik ruled it was a normal door that opened out. So we went on through. By Gygax, we honor the arrow!
I was in a grumpy mood, which might explain the relentless murder. Guys Mirado would have spared died because I just wasn't having a good week. As the man said, so it goes.
I love norkers. Mirado even shouted, "I love norkers!" just before we killed the first bunch. Lucky for us, their morale cracked when faced with a plate-armored cleric/magic-user putting them to sleep. That combined with my terrible initiative rolls lead to 3 PC re-names right there.
We found a spellbook, some cash, and the Boots, a set of Bracers of AC6 (or +4, maybe) (sold!) and like 800 gp or so each counting the sales. But that's it. We've done very poorly for loot and especially for magic items so far. I came into the castle with a magic sword, a magic ring, and some money. I've got less money than when I started and a pair of elven boots. Oh well, it just feels a little poorer than smaller adventures tend to be. Interesting.
I was rolling very poorly, very often. It was rare for me to hit, infrequent to cleave, and frequently I did miniscule damage. I'm not sure why. I'd roll 6s on doors and 1s on initiative. Annoying. I even rolled only a 4 (on two tries!) for my HP, making my new HP 38, the only time I've gotten less than 8 hp per level. I was at 34 at 4th level with a +1 CON bonus, which is 36 HP max. I'm still doing okay, though.
Some gripes.
Teleporter - this was fine, but like a lot of the traps. etc. and other encounters, it feels very . . . random. I don't feel like, "I should have seen it coming" so much as "Oh, yeah, some rooms teleport you and some hallways have deathtraps." I really understand what Courtney means about telegraphing traps so I can make some kind of informed decision. I'd rather say, "Ok, I brought that on myself" than "sometimes you search a room and there is treasure, sometimes you search a room and you teleport away."
D&D based games have too many subsystems. Roll high for this, low for that, but high for this, and percentage for that. It's annoying. I have some suggestions I'll codify into a post this coming week.
PCs
Minister, Half-Elf Cleric/Magic-User (lvl 3/3) (Tim Shorts)
Mirado the Slow, Human Fighter (lvl 4) (me)
Rul Scararm, Human Fighter (lvl 4) (Douglas Cole)
Bello the Dwarf, Dwarf Fighter (lvl 2) (Chris Maler)
We returned to the Castle of the Mad Archmage, this time with Bello the Dwarf, who was going to join us before but who was lost due to connection issues. We joked he'd stopped to tie his shoelaces and only now had finished and caught up.
We entered, passing two teens with sticks who were counting adventurers going in for taxing by the mayor. Mirado asked, "Are you coming?" They refused. More fools they than us.
We went right down to level 3, because a) we scored well there last time and b) the dungeon kept putting us back down to level 3.
The first thing we did was blunder into a pit, which Mirado fell into. He suffered little damage but only because he avoided the poisoned spikes at the bottom. He climbed out and we moved on, tapping with a spear in front of us.
We explored and found a "maze of twisty passages, all alike" and fought some skeletal dogs. We found little of interest except
a room with flaming freaking rolling barrels in it. No clue how it reloads, which led us to decide it was the honor system - you're supposed to reset the trap for the next folks. We didn't, though. and moved on to some doors we'd bypassed. From then on, it was doors over escape or passages, every time. We kicked down a few, crowbared open a locked one (and got surrounded with some weird mist that didn't seem to harm us), and in one, the group moved in as Mirado watched from the hallway. The group suddenly disappeared. They didn't answer Mirado's hail. So, he decided it was a teleporter and - since the group did the same for him - went in.
We found ourselves turned around, but the dwarf knew map north so we were good. We explored around the teleporter area, and found signs of a wizard - an inlaid silver conjuring circle, a not-well-hidden-enough spellbook (score!), and then a wizard and his mail-armored cronies.
We were surprised, and the swordsmen laid into Mirado and the wizard disappeared. His spellbooks had included invisibility, so it must have been that. We finally countered and Mirado cut one of the swordsmen, before Minister put them to sleep. The wizard had escaped out a side passage, and Mirado couldn't find him. We headed back to the room and searched until we heard a shouted curse.
Aha! Mirado and Rul charged back to the room with the hidden spellbook niche. We slammed into an invisible mage, and after some desperate (and mostly hapless) grappling, we got him down under Mirado. We set to with daggers until the mage died an ignominious death.
We went back and Mirado, run by a player in a bad mood, killed the swordsmen just to get 2 HP back.
Somewhere around this time, we found a room full of rats who had 2000 cp. Of course. We took it.
We explored more, and kicked down one door that was especially fun:
Inside were some norkers.
Mirado shouted with joy and we attacked. They died rapidly. The next room had more norkers, and they died too - so far, 10 down. 10 more charged us from another room, right into Minister. His sleep spell put 3 down, and they broke and ran. We briefly considered pursuit but then decided a) we can't map and b) they don't have pockets and therefore no real loot. We took their silver (poorly hidden) and left.
We explored more - despite not being 100% sure where we were, we prioritized doors over escape. We dealt with a few of them - including a number of those little dwarf doors. One had a trap of some kind going, but we never did figure it out. We fought more things, including camel spiders (big ones) and some really tough skeletons Minister couldn't turn but Rul could chop apart with his undead-slaying sword.
We took their golden gorgets and pried open the sarcophagus they guarded. Inside was a mummy with nice boots and a gold necklace.
Mirado grabbed the mummified corpse's boots and blew a Saving Throw (despite Luck, good Con, and a Ring of Protection). That got him turbo-rot (aka hyper-leprosy, aka mummy rot) and a pair of Boots of Elvenkind. In normal circumstances, I'd have given them up to, say, the guy who needs to sneak the most. But no way, it cost Mirado 1100 gp for Cure Disease so I figured he'd more than paid for the boots.
We simply headed back to town after that, easily connecting back up with our escape route and getting to the surface. The two teens were dead, throats slit, so Mirado marked two notches in the ground for them and we went to town. They should have come with us.
Notes:
"Honor the arrow." One door had an arrow symbol on it with no explanation. One-way door, maybe? Erik ruled it was a normal door that opened out. So we went on through. By Gygax, we honor the arrow!
I was in a grumpy mood, which might explain the relentless murder. Guys Mirado would have spared died because I just wasn't having a good week. As the man said, so it goes.
I love norkers. Mirado even shouted, "I love norkers!" just before we killed the first bunch. Lucky for us, their morale cracked when faced with a plate-armored cleric/magic-user putting them to sleep. That combined with my terrible initiative rolls lead to 3 PC re-names right there.
We found a spellbook, some cash, and the Boots, a set of Bracers of AC6 (or +4, maybe) (sold!) and like 800 gp or so each counting the sales. But that's it. We've done very poorly for loot and especially for magic items so far. I came into the castle with a magic sword, a magic ring, and some money. I've got less money than when I started and a pair of elven boots. Oh well, it just feels a little poorer than smaller adventures tend to be. Interesting.
I was rolling very poorly, very often. It was rare for me to hit, infrequent to cleave, and frequently I did miniscule damage. I'm not sure why. I'd roll 6s on doors and 1s on initiative. Annoying. I even rolled only a 4 (on two tries!) for my HP, making my new HP 38, the only time I've gotten less than 8 hp per level. I was at 34 at 4th level with a +1 CON bonus, which is 36 HP max. I'm still doing okay, though.
Some gripes.
Teleporter - this was fine, but like a lot of the traps. etc. and other encounters, it feels very . . . random. I don't feel like, "I should have seen it coming" so much as "Oh, yeah, some rooms teleport you and some hallways have deathtraps." I really understand what Courtney means about telegraphing traps so I can make some kind of informed decision. I'd rather say, "Ok, I brought that on myself" than "sometimes you search a room and there is treasure, sometimes you search a room and you teleport away."
D&D based games have too many subsystems. Roll high for this, low for that, but high for this, and percentage for that. It's annoying. I have some suggestions I'll codify into a post this coming week.
Saturday, April 26, 2014
S&W in the Southern Reaches: Session 5 - Castle of the Mad Archmage 2 - Chutes & Slopes
We went back to the Castle of the Mad Archmage in the Southern Reaches B-Team game. For a much better summary, check Doug's blog. Where our accounts differ on specifics, he's certainly the correct version. Mine is from memory, his is from notes.
Here is the GM's perspective on it, too.
PCs
Minister, Half-Elf Cleric/Magic-User (lvl 1/1) (Tim Shorts)
Mirado the Bloody, Human Fighter (lvl 3) (me)
Beggar #1 (lvl 0), human wretch with staff and torch
Beggar #2 (lvl 0), human wretch with staff and torch
Rul Scararm, Human Fighter (lvl 3) (Douglas Cole)
Alisha, Human Druid (lvl ?) (Michael)
We started out at the gates of the Castle of the Mad Archmage. Rul had wisely purchased some healing potions last time but foolishly didn't buy more this time. Mirado once again hired some hirelings, wasting 50 gp on recruiting considering the two miserable specimens of doltish cowards he ended up hiring. Still, a torchbearer is a torchbearer, and the sunk cost of the 50 gp convinced him to take them along.
The guards from last time were gone - clearly they left in some haste. It occured to Mirado that something must have come up and chased them away, and the idea that they'd fled real authorities or more badass adventurers once their possible scam had been discovered didn't yet occur to him.
We headed down to level 2 without stopping on level 1. We discussed continuing down to level 3 (I was all for it) but everyone else felt compelled by a) Minister being a novice yet and b) level 3 being quite potentially dangerous. So we opened up the double doors.
We immediately started to go left. Minister reminded us Left is Sacred, and indeed, the Church of the Left Turn has treated this flock well. We've occasionally had to bend to the whims of the evils of straights and rights, but often once we re-orient ourselves after passing them, those false rights turn out to be well and truly lefts, and it's okay for us to continue.
We found a Magic Mouth which told us a limerick about an elf that slid down a pit into the depths, or something, and what looked the a Grimtooth trap - a long corridor with spikes at the end. Uh, nah.
In short order we found a room with fungus, a passage on the other side, and five giant crickets in it. There was also a small door - 4' tall and 2 1/2' wide. Our druid tried to listen at the door, but the crickets prevented that. In frustration, Mirado attacked them - briefly considering and then discarding the idea of using oil. Oops. Mirado preceded to whiff over and over on the crickets, as did Rul, allowing them to bite Minister and Mirado. Minister had to bust out his Sleep spell to put them down. Which was actually good, because it also slept a pair of megalocentipedes charging in to the fray. We slew them and searched their room, but nothing.
Behind the small door was a chest with silver pieces, and a suit of human-sized full plate, which Mirado took, and gave his plate mail to Minister.
We continued on and found a long corridor with sloped slightly down. We figured it went to level 3; Mirado argued we needed to see if it did and then Rul argued strongly we needed to check a room. Especially after it took our poor GM a while to pull the map up to look at it. (Sorry)
We tried some doors and failed to open them. Behind another we found a room with a door and 16,000 odd keys hanging on the wall. A message on the floor told us a story, and we started to puzzle out the message. Rul pounced on the answer right away, and selected the right key and opened the door. Nice.
Beyond it was a room with a wardrobe and three chests. (At this point, Michael was tired and had to go, so our Druid headed to the surface)
Mirado looked for obvious traps, because if he was a Mad Archmage he'd put a totally awful deathtrap behind a difficult puzzle, just to be like that. But we found nothing of that sort - just the usual deathtraps on the treasure.
We got the chests open, although Mirado got his arms slammed with a beartrap. We found 10,000 cp and a bunch of silver and 3000 or so gold, and a shortsword. Finally there was the wardrobe. The idea was to pull it open with a rope, so Mirado went to tie it on . . . but got nailed with an Old School Save or Die poison needle. Hah, I say. Hah. He easily made his save this time. Behind it was a leather cloak. We took the better loot and marked the location in our minds to come back to.
We went back to level 2 and explored more. We met and killed some troglodytes - and a timely Sleep spell by Minister put them down along with their reinforcements. Nicely done.
We kept exploring.
We bashed open a door and surprised some orcs playing cards. Mirado rushed in and attacked, killing one and then whiffing on the next - but only barely. So I spent 1 Luck for a +2 and made it barely hit, instead. That told - Mirado sliced down four orcs before he could cleave no more. The fifth and sixth went down to Minister.
We heard orcs in the other room call out. Mirado responded in Orcish with something like "Come help us!" but they weren't fooled. They piled up stuff in front of the door. Heh. Mirado got out oil, but then thought better of it. We looted the downed orcs, and Mirado called out what we found on each one. The orcs on the other side complained they were card cheats. Then Mirado decided to negotiate.
He offered the orcs the copper from level 3 if they'd help carry treasure. They asked for the ep we found on the orcs. Mirado said, sure, yeah, if they help carry the treasure they could have the copper and the ep, but not any of the rest. They agreed and opened the door. Notice that Mirado didn't say anything about not attacking them. Not even close to violating his word - he just offered a job and a reward for the job. When they opened the door, Mirado looked at Rul and said, "Are you thinking what I'm thinking?"
Rul had no clue.
So Mirado clued him in - when he attacked the orc leader. Slice, he went right down, as did some of the others through Cleave. The group piled on and the orcs went down.
Fools.
Mirado briefly considered raising an orc army to back him, but then, nah. Not those orcs. They cheat at cards.
Mirado turned to Rul and said, "I'm disappointed you didn't know what I was thinking." Geez, do I have to spell it out in pig common? "ets-lay ill-kay ose-thay cs-oray."
After the orcs, it would have been pretty smooth sailing back. But right as we were thinking about returning to the surface or pushing our luck a bit, Mirado prompted everyone to see if a corridor on our map linked up. Tenkar subtly hinted we could just go right back to the surface, but we ignore that, mostly because I knew if I didn't check that right now, I'd check it next time first thing, and I was curious if it linked up. That cost us a bit of fun and a brief moment of me wondering if my guy didn't just up and get killed.
As we moved along the hallway, Mirado got a little in the lead. We'd neglected to keep tapping the floor (or maybe just to remind the DM we were doing so) and Mirado hit a pit trap. He blew two pretty easy saves (I needed an 11, thanks to level, DX, and my magic ring, a second one after blowing two Luck, and dropped down a chute. I didn't know it was a chute, and when I heard I'd dropped down and was gone I figured I'd gone where that Magic Mouth told us the elf went. I stopped and asked Erik, "Is my guy dead?" - it would have sucked if so.
It was kind of a Dungeon Robber moment right there.
But he wasn't. Mirado fell into a 30 x 30 room with skeletons in it. He still managed to pop up and attack them first, and began to melee them. The hole in the ceiling closed, but the guys above could hear fighting.
Then - and this is why Mirado adventures with these men - they grabbed the two beggars and jumped into the chute-bottomed pit and slid into the fray. One for three and three for all. One beggar landed on Mirado (ouch), another on a skeleton (ouch). Minister was hurt, too, if I recall correctly. But with Rul there with his undead slaying sword, the skeletons went down quickly.
Naturally, there were no exits. But "Mad Archmage" isn't the same as "total jerk" so we were sure there was one. We found it.
This is where our mapping (well, Tenkar's mapping on our behalf) paid off. And where our scouting paid off in spades. We were somewhere North and East of our way back up to level 2. Heheheh. We kept pushing for a connection, and - after being mocked and questioned by a Magic Mouth (who Mirado owned up to that we had no idea what us dolts were doing here) - we eventually found one.
With that, we headed home. Ah, Mirado's companions are some really good guys.
We paid off the hirlings their two gold (which they barely earned), split the rest four ways, and then hit the shops to get more potions. We did, cleaning them out of healing-type potions for next trip.
The shortsword turned out to be +1, but cursed to always be in your off hand. Mirado briefly considered taking that, but since it's not any better and considerably less cool than an ogre head, he didn't. We sold it off to pay for the Remove Curse. The cloak was a Cloack of Protection +2 and while Mirado would love that, Minister needs better saves and AC so it was a no-brainer that he would get it.
Great game.
Notes:
- Mirado went from nearly level 4 to nearly level 5. And rolled a 1 on his HP, like the last two levels, but that triggers an automatic re-roll. He got a 7, so +8 HP. He's now at 34 HP. Nice.
- Once again the hireling were largely useless. I'm sort of tempted by getting actual henchmen - level 1 dudes, now that I'm a flush 4th level fighter. With the per-room exploration bonus Tenkar is using, it wouldn't matter if they take a full sized chunk of XP. They're welcome to it.
If that per-room bonus was not per-person but divided amongst the group, then it might be more of an issue (and really tempt people to solo trips.) But it's a mechanism for advancement in a 12-times-a-year game, so who cares?
That per-room bonus is why we gave a full share to the druid even though his player had to bow out just before we found all the good loot. Why stint? He probably needs it, and Rul and Mirado wouldn't have leveled any more with it and Minister couldn't. And the freaking hirlings didn't earn it. The most any of them did was 1 HP of damage to a skeleton he fell on.
- We need better guards for our six and a scout of some kind, preferably a thief. Double-preferably one with secret door detection abilities. Maybe I need to find and hire those two guys I spared last time.
- I always wonder when I'm driving or walking why you wouldn't notice a low incline when you're moving. I might not be able to tell you the degree of slope, but it's really clear when things slope down more than a very slight amount. Or up. Anyway, I bought some clay marbles and I'm going to make a simple plumb line with a sling bullet and a piece of leather and a short wooden handle.
- I need to re-write my character sheet.
- Tenkar has gotten very, very good at slicing the edge on Fog of War. No longer do we find secret doors just by noticing map artifacts, and we've had to check some spots that look likely but turned out just to be well-FOW'ed wall edges. Nice.
- Save or die poison? We need to buy a scroll of Slow Poison, assuming that actually would stop "instant" death poison. Also, I always get a grin out how poison needles are armor piercing in D&D games. It's not like I'd take my gloves off to open a wardrobe, and if I had to, I wouldn't handle the handle. Oh well. Next time, axe.
- Once again, Mirado is living the dream. Cut him for 4 damage? Then he's stabbing you and your sleeping buddies four times and healing up. Rul (reasonably) asked to borrow the sword to heal himself.
I did my best George Thorogood impression when Rul asked.
"Hey, I'm wounded, do you think you can let me stab people with your sword a little bit?"
"I dunno, I have to go ask Woundlicker."
(moments later)
"Uh, she's kind of funny about that . . . "
Out of game, I'd do it. In game, I suspect Mirado is slightly worried by what might happen if his sword is more willful than it lets on and I go passing it around like a HP-healing soda straw. So he won't be doing that. There is potentially real downsides to messing with a sword that drinks blood.
I do need to stat up a variety of vampiric weapons for GURPS - that might be a fun Pyramid article for DF. I'll get on that. I need to ask Erik if Woundlicker is his and if I can use the name, though, or come up with my own. BTW Woundlicker would make a great Kiss song title.
Here is the GM's perspective on it, too.
PCs
Minister, Half-Elf Cleric/Magic-User (lvl 1/1) (Tim Shorts)
Mirado the Bloody, Human Fighter (lvl 3) (me)
Beggar #1 (lvl 0), human wretch with staff and torch
Beggar #2 (lvl 0), human wretch with staff and torch
Rul Scararm, Human Fighter (lvl 3) (Douglas Cole)
Alisha, Human Druid (lvl ?) (Michael)
We started out at the gates of the Castle of the Mad Archmage. Rul had wisely purchased some healing potions last time but foolishly didn't buy more this time. Mirado once again hired some hirelings, wasting 50 gp on recruiting considering the two miserable specimens of doltish cowards he ended up hiring. Still, a torchbearer is a torchbearer, and the sunk cost of the 50 gp convinced him to take them along.
The guards from last time were gone - clearly they left in some haste. It occured to Mirado that something must have come up and chased them away, and the idea that they'd fled real authorities or more badass adventurers once their possible scam had been discovered didn't yet occur to him.
We headed down to level 2 without stopping on level 1. We discussed continuing down to level 3 (I was all for it) but everyone else felt compelled by a) Minister being a novice yet and b) level 3 being quite potentially dangerous. So we opened up the double doors.
We immediately started to go left. Minister reminded us Left is Sacred, and indeed, the Church of the Left Turn has treated this flock well. We've occasionally had to bend to the whims of the evils of straights and rights, but often once we re-orient ourselves after passing them, those false rights turn out to be well and truly lefts, and it's okay for us to continue.
We found a Magic Mouth which told us a limerick about an elf that slid down a pit into the depths, or something, and what looked the a Grimtooth trap - a long corridor with spikes at the end. Uh, nah.
In short order we found a room with fungus, a passage on the other side, and five giant crickets in it. There was also a small door - 4' tall and 2 1/2' wide. Our druid tried to listen at the door, but the crickets prevented that. In frustration, Mirado attacked them - briefly considering and then discarding the idea of using oil. Oops. Mirado preceded to whiff over and over on the crickets, as did Rul, allowing them to bite Minister and Mirado. Minister had to bust out his Sleep spell to put them down. Which was actually good, because it also slept a pair of megalocentipedes charging in to the fray. We slew them and searched their room, but nothing.
Behind the small door was a chest with silver pieces, and a suit of human-sized full plate, which Mirado took, and gave his plate mail to Minister.
We continued on and found a long corridor with sloped slightly down. We figured it went to level 3; Mirado argued we needed to see if it did and then Rul argued strongly we needed to check a room. Especially after it took our poor GM a while to pull the map up to look at it. (Sorry)
We tried some doors and failed to open them. Behind another we found a room with a door and 16,000 odd keys hanging on the wall. A message on the floor told us a story, and we started to puzzle out the message. Rul pounced on the answer right away, and selected the right key and opened the door. Nice.
Beyond it was a room with a wardrobe and three chests. (At this point, Michael was tired and had to go, so our Druid headed to the surface)
Mirado looked for obvious traps, because if he was a Mad Archmage he'd put a totally awful deathtrap behind a difficult puzzle, just to be like that. But we found nothing of that sort - just the usual deathtraps on the treasure.
We got the chests open, although Mirado got his arms slammed with a beartrap. We found 10,000 cp and a bunch of silver and 3000 or so gold, and a shortsword. Finally there was the wardrobe. The idea was to pull it open with a rope, so Mirado went to tie it on . . . but got nailed with an Old School Save or Die poison needle. Hah, I say. Hah. He easily made his save this time. Behind it was a leather cloak. We took the better loot and marked the location in our minds to come back to.
We went back to level 2 and explored more. We met and killed some troglodytes - and a timely Sleep spell by Minister put them down along with their reinforcements. Nicely done.
We kept exploring.
We bashed open a door and surprised some orcs playing cards. Mirado rushed in and attacked, killing one and then whiffing on the next - but only barely. So I spent 1 Luck for a +2 and made it barely hit, instead. That told - Mirado sliced down four orcs before he could cleave no more. The fifth and sixth went down to Minister.
We heard orcs in the other room call out. Mirado responded in Orcish with something like "Come help us!" but they weren't fooled. They piled up stuff in front of the door. Heh. Mirado got out oil, but then thought better of it. We looted the downed orcs, and Mirado called out what we found on each one. The orcs on the other side complained they were card cheats. Then Mirado decided to negotiate.
He offered the orcs the copper from level 3 if they'd help carry treasure. They asked for the ep we found on the orcs. Mirado said, sure, yeah, if they help carry the treasure they could have the copper and the ep, but not any of the rest. They agreed and opened the door. Notice that Mirado didn't say anything about not attacking them. Not even close to violating his word - he just offered a job and a reward for the job. When they opened the door, Mirado looked at Rul and said, "Are you thinking what I'm thinking?"
Rul had no clue.
So Mirado clued him in - when he attacked the orc leader. Slice, he went right down, as did some of the others through Cleave. The group piled on and the orcs went down.
Fools.
Mirado briefly considered raising an orc army to back him, but then, nah. Not those orcs. They cheat at cards.
Mirado turned to Rul and said, "I'm disappointed you didn't know what I was thinking." Geez, do I have to spell it out in pig common? "ets-lay ill-kay ose-thay cs-oray."
After the orcs, it would have been pretty smooth sailing back. But right as we were thinking about returning to the surface or pushing our luck a bit, Mirado prompted everyone to see if a corridor on our map linked up. Tenkar subtly hinted we could just go right back to the surface, but we ignore that, mostly because I knew if I didn't check that right now, I'd check it next time first thing, and I was curious if it linked up. That cost us a bit of fun and a brief moment of me wondering if my guy didn't just up and get killed.
As we moved along the hallway, Mirado got a little in the lead. We'd neglected to keep tapping the floor (or maybe just to remind the DM we were doing so) and Mirado hit a pit trap. He blew two pretty easy saves (I needed an 11, thanks to level, DX, and my magic ring, a second one after blowing two Luck, and dropped down a chute. I didn't know it was a chute, and when I heard I'd dropped down and was gone I figured I'd gone where that Magic Mouth told us the elf went. I stopped and asked Erik, "Is my guy dead?" - it would have sucked if so.
It was kind of a Dungeon Robber moment right there.
But he wasn't. Mirado fell into a 30 x 30 room with skeletons in it. He still managed to pop up and attack them first, and began to melee them. The hole in the ceiling closed, but the guys above could hear fighting.
Then - and this is why Mirado adventures with these men - they grabbed the two beggars and jumped into the chute-bottomed pit and slid into the fray. One for three and three for all. One beggar landed on Mirado (ouch), another on a skeleton (ouch). Minister was hurt, too, if I recall correctly. But with Rul there with his undead slaying sword, the skeletons went down quickly.
Naturally, there were no exits. But "Mad Archmage" isn't the same as "total jerk" so we were sure there was one. We found it.
This is where our mapping (well, Tenkar's mapping on our behalf) paid off. And where our scouting paid off in spades. We were somewhere North and East of our way back up to level 2. Heheheh. We kept pushing for a connection, and - after being mocked and questioned by a Magic Mouth (who Mirado owned up to that we had no idea what us dolts were doing here) - we eventually found one.
With that, we headed home. Ah, Mirado's companions are some really good guys.
We paid off the hirlings their two gold (which they barely earned), split the rest four ways, and then hit the shops to get more potions. We did, cleaning them out of healing-type potions for next trip.
The shortsword turned out to be +1, but cursed to always be in your off hand. Mirado briefly considered taking that, but since it's not any better and considerably less cool than an ogre head, he didn't. We sold it off to pay for the Remove Curse. The cloak was a Cloack of Protection +2 and while Mirado would love that, Minister needs better saves and AC so it was a no-brainer that he would get it.
Great game.
Notes:
- Mirado went from nearly level 4 to nearly level 5. And rolled a 1 on his HP, like the last two levels, but that triggers an automatic re-roll. He got a 7, so +8 HP. He's now at 34 HP. Nice.
- Once again the hireling were largely useless. I'm sort of tempted by getting actual henchmen - level 1 dudes, now that I'm a flush 4th level fighter. With the per-room exploration bonus Tenkar is using, it wouldn't matter if they take a full sized chunk of XP. They're welcome to it.
If that per-room bonus was not per-person but divided amongst the group, then it might be more of an issue (and really tempt people to solo trips.) But it's a mechanism for advancement in a 12-times-a-year game, so who cares?
That per-room bonus is why we gave a full share to the druid even though his player had to bow out just before we found all the good loot. Why stint? He probably needs it, and Rul and Mirado wouldn't have leveled any more with it and Minister couldn't. And the freaking hirlings didn't earn it. The most any of them did was 1 HP of damage to a skeleton he fell on.
- We need better guards for our six and a scout of some kind, preferably a thief. Double-preferably one with secret door detection abilities. Maybe I need to find and hire those two guys I spared last time.
- I always wonder when I'm driving or walking why you wouldn't notice a low incline when you're moving. I might not be able to tell you the degree of slope, but it's really clear when things slope down more than a very slight amount. Or up. Anyway, I bought some clay marbles and I'm going to make a simple plumb line with a sling bullet and a piece of leather and a short wooden handle.
- I need to re-write my character sheet.
- Tenkar has gotten very, very good at slicing the edge on Fog of War. No longer do we find secret doors just by noticing map artifacts, and we've had to check some spots that look likely but turned out just to be well-FOW'ed wall edges. Nice.
- Save or die poison? We need to buy a scroll of Slow Poison, assuming that actually would stop "instant" death poison. Also, I always get a grin out how poison needles are armor piercing in D&D games. It's not like I'd take my gloves off to open a wardrobe, and if I had to, I wouldn't handle the handle. Oh well. Next time, axe.
- Once again, Mirado is living the dream. Cut him for 4 damage? Then he's stabbing you and your sleeping buddies four times and healing up. Rul (reasonably) asked to borrow the sword to heal himself.
I did my best George Thorogood impression when Rul asked.
"Hey, I'm wounded, do you think you can let me stab people with your sword a little bit?"
"I dunno, I have to go ask Woundlicker."
(moments later)
"Uh, she's kind of funny about that . . . "
Out of game, I'd do it. In game, I suspect Mirado is slightly worried by what might happen if his sword is more willful than it lets on and I go passing it around like a HP-healing soda straw. So he won't be doing that. There is potentially real downsides to messing with a sword that drinks blood.
I do need to stat up a variety of vampiric weapons for GURPS - that might be a fun Pyramid article for DF. I'll get on that. I need to ask Erik if Woundlicker is his and if I can use the name, though, or come up with my own. BTW Woundlicker would make a great Kiss song title.
Wednesday, April 2, 2014
Random Notes from Friday's S&W Game
Just some random notes about last session.
- The Maze of Doors feels very Dungeon Geomorphs. I actually pulled my copied version and waved them at the camera when we found it. Set 3, the Lower Dungeons. We'll check them sometime, with lots of checks for secret doors. But I dunno, most of the maze of doors setups I am familiar with have trapped false doors, and lead nowhere.
- Dungeon Rhinos. If the Illusion was an ogre, I'd have bought it. Or a big ooze. Or a big beetle. It just hit me as totally wrong for the spot. I didn't believe it for a second, personally and viscerally.
- Parlaying. We parlayed where we could - the dwarves we spoke to, and tried to recruit them. Mirado asked them if the kobolds were friendly - heck, maybe we could talk to them or hire them. But they sound hostile and potentially valuable to us dead and dangerous to us alive.
The humans we fought, well, admittedly we forced the door open. We didn't listen or try to communicate with them. Had we done so, maybe they would have talked. Maybe not, though, and we did better for the fight than we would have by negotiating.
The rest, though? Beetles, rats, skeletons, zombies, giant flies. All attacked us on sight. The only negotiating we could have done was toss food to distract the rats. Or it might not have. We may have to lace some rations with rat poison and leave them around - possibly labeled as such, rats can't read. Just to keep the numbers down. No way to talk to them usefully.
So we might have seemed like "find it, kill it, loot it, move on" but it wasn't quite like that. Mirado has dreams of an army of followers. He's limited to 4 special ones by his CHA, but hordes don't seem limited in S&W.
- Keyed maps. I'm hoping Erik can edit an unkeyed map. Seeing the map in Roll20 keeps it easy to follow with a physically scattered group (Erik and I were the closest on Friday - maybe 30-60 minutes apart by car?). Hand mapping would be a nightmare - sharing it out to everyone, people needing to ping sections because they can't point, etc. Seeing the room numbers kills some of that. Seeing nothing on the map would make it feel really worrying - a perfect player-drawn map, basically, with no clue if the room or corridor section is or was important in some sense. If nothing is keyed, everything seems dangerous. If some things are keyed, well, nothing else seems dangerous at all. The author weighs in apprantly disagrees with me. But I think the rest of the B-Team will agree with me - a blank map is a really a no-brainer for a Roll20 game. Upload it, put on Fog of War, and get rolling.
- Killing. We killed everything we encountered that we didn't talk to. But we spared the ones who we could extract believable promises of non attacking us. Ruthless but not bloodthirsty is how I'd describe it.
- Non-Undead Foes - we fought a fair amount of undead in the games I played so far. I'm glad the dungeon had a nice variety of non-undead foes!
- Hirelings. They were okay, but I need to find ways to make them a bit more useful. And keep the torchbearer safer. They were cheap as dirt but I don't like expending lives uselessly. Or really, expending them merely for profit.
- Go Left Young Man. At Tim Shorts' suggestion, we always went left. Well, close to always. We kept left but made sure to explore passages and doors around us that could leave us in a bad spot. But "Always Go Left" was a good starting point for exploration. I know this makes Jeffro go into Hulk-rage, but yeah, we did it and it's a sensible approach. SOP is SOP for a reason - it works in standard situations. It's not flawless but having a basic approach beats having no basic approach.
Next time, level 2. It seems unlikely that my 3rd level PC is going to level fast enough hanging around on level 1.
I am really enjoying the whole megadungeon experience. I can't wait to piece together what this place is really like.
- The Maze of Doors feels very Dungeon Geomorphs. I actually pulled my copied version and waved them at the camera when we found it. Set 3, the Lower Dungeons. We'll check them sometime, with lots of checks for secret doors. But I dunno, most of the maze of doors setups I am familiar with have trapped false doors, and lead nowhere.
- Dungeon Rhinos. If the Illusion was an ogre, I'd have bought it. Or a big ooze. Or a big beetle. It just hit me as totally wrong for the spot. I didn't believe it for a second, personally and viscerally.
- Parlaying. We parlayed where we could - the dwarves we spoke to, and tried to recruit them. Mirado asked them if the kobolds were friendly - heck, maybe we could talk to them or hire them. But they sound hostile and potentially valuable to us dead and dangerous to us alive.
The humans we fought, well, admittedly we forced the door open. We didn't listen or try to communicate with them. Had we done so, maybe they would have talked. Maybe not, though, and we did better for the fight than we would have by negotiating.
The rest, though? Beetles, rats, skeletons, zombies, giant flies. All attacked us on sight. The only negotiating we could have done was toss food to distract the rats. Or it might not have. We may have to lace some rations with rat poison and leave them around - possibly labeled as such, rats can't read. Just to keep the numbers down. No way to talk to them usefully.
So we might have seemed like "find it, kill it, loot it, move on" but it wasn't quite like that. Mirado has dreams of an army of followers. He's limited to 4 special ones by his CHA, but hordes don't seem limited in S&W.
- Keyed maps. I'm hoping Erik can edit an unkeyed map. Seeing the map in Roll20 keeps it easy to follow with a physically scattered group (Erik and I were the closest on Friday - maybe 30-60 minutes apart by car?). Hand mapping would be a nightmare - sharing it out to everyone, people needing to ping sections because they can't point, etc. Seeing the room numbers kills some of that. Seeing nothing on the map would make it feel really worrying - a perfect player-drawn map, basically, with no clue if the room or corridor section is or was important in some sense. If nothing is keyed, everything seems dangerous. If some things are keyed, well, nothing else seems dangerous at all. The author weighs in apprantly disagrees with me. But I think the rest of the B-Team will agree with me - a blank map is a really a no-brainer for a Roll20 game. Upload it, put on Fog of War, and get rolling.
- Killing. We killed everything we encountered that we didn't talk to. But we spared the ones who we could extract believable promises of non attacking us. Ruthless but not bloodthirsty is how I'd describe it.
- Non-Undead Foes - we fought a fair amount of undead in the games I played so far. I'm glad the dungeon had a nice variety of non-undead foes!
- Hirelings. They were okay, but I need to find ways to make them a bit more useful. And keep the torchbearer safer. They were cheap as dirt but I don't like expending lives uselessly. Or really, expending them merely for profit.
- Go Left Young Man. At Tim Shorts' suggestion, we always went left. Well, close to always. We kept left but made sure to explore passages and doors around us that could leave us in a bad spot. But "Always Go Left" was a good starting point for exploration. I know this makes Jeffro go into Hulk-rage, but yeah, we did it and it's a sensible approach. SOP is SOP for a reason - it works in standard situations. It's not flawless but having a basic approach beats having no basic approach.
Next time, level 2. It seems unlikely that my 3rd level PC is going to level fast enough hanging around on level 1.
I am really enjoying the whole megadungeon experience. I can't wait to piece together what this place is really like.
Saturday, March 29, 2014
S&W in the Southern Reaches: Session 4 - Castle of the Mad Archmage 1
Last night the S&W B-Team made its debut visit to Joseph Bloch's Castle of the Mad Archmage. Erik Tenkar polled us to find out which megadungeon we wanted to raid, and we pretty universally chose that one. Turns out a lot of us have run other big dungeons but hadn't read this one.
And one thing before I begin - all published adventures in PDF form need a number-free "players" map the GM can import into a VTT and reveal piecemeal to the players.
PCs
Minister, Half-Elf Cleric/Magic-User (lvl 1) (Tim Shorts)
Mirado the Bloody, Human Fighter (lvl 3) (me)
Redshirt #1 (lvl 0), human hireling (ring armor, spear, dagger, 5 HP)
Redshirt #2 (lvl 0), human hireling (ring armor, spear, dagger, 5 HP)
Torch Boy, 14-year old human (1 HP)
Rul Scararm, Human Fighter (lvl 2) (Douglas Cole)
We started out at the gates of the Castle of the Mad Archmage. Rul had wisely purchased some healing potions, and Mirado hired some hirelings.
The stairs down were guarded by two guardsman, who questioned us, sold us a license (12 gp for a year's adventuring) under the auspices of his lordship (name unknown to me), and took down our name - "Ogre Heads!" was what Rul shouted out and it stuck. Mirado spoke up and got considered the leader.
Mirado also gave them a couple gold to get some extra information out of them, mostly about a party of marauders* - a six-man mixed group (3 humans, halfling, elf, dwarf), also some dwarves and some elves that have been down there a while.
We took the spiral staircase down to level 1. We could have continued to level 2, and we briefly considered it. Mirado suggested we check around the staircase area on level 1, then head down if we didn't find anything. Later reflection that we had a fragile 1st-level guy with us kept us on the first level.
We started a "always go left" routine which mostly worked out, changing it up mainly to explore doors and take a brief look up side passages. We didn't get more than a hundred feet in when a half-dozen giant rats rushed us. They gnawed on the torch boy and dropped him to 0 HP, and hurt one of the redshirts before we cut them down. So we had to bandage up the boy and take him right back up to the surface. Mirado dropped him off and said to the guards, "He'll rest up here." They asked if he needed healing. Rul said yes, but Mirado vociferously said "NO!" - no way, that's a money grab, not an offer of free help. He'd be fine with rest.
We headed back down and continued to explore. The dungeon was a bit oddly layed out - lots of angled passages, trapped floors, tightly packed rooms, etc. We stumbled across a spear trap that winged one of the hirelings before we found a door at the end of a passage. We forced it open, and there was a rhino facing us!
Hah. No. Mirado didn't believe that for a second. He Disbelieved, make a great roll, and scoffed - "It's an illusion!" Sorry, rhino on level 1, no.
An exhaustive search of the room revealed a secret door, which we opened to find a two-way passage. We turned to the right and headed down, eventually finding a dung-filled room that we refused to search for 2000 cp in. Right after that, we heard marching feet and set up for a fight. Minister recognized the sound of the dwarven language, and we parlayed with the dwarves. There were 7 of them, and the lead dwarf (I forgot his name, it's written down at home) and we spoke in Common. They warned us of kobolds and told us they'd pay 5 gp an ear for kobolds and 100 gp for a chief's head - we'd know the chieftains by their beads. They also warned us about zvarts.
We couldn't get them to team up with us, so we decided to search in a different direction than the one they'd come from - which they said had kobolds in it. Mirado wasn't interested in fighting kobolds, so we headed back the way we came (and they did, too, ducking in the secret door to the rhino room.) We found a door and forced it open, and found 3 zombies.
Two had big sweaters on that read "STATE" and one had a beaver coat and a ukelele. So we attacked. It took a couple turns of fighting (and a 1 on a turning roll by Minister, He Whom The Dice Doth Despise - he'd roll a lot of 1s) we took them down. The ukelele was smashed but the beaver coat was recoverable, so we took it, bundling up a hireling in it. (It was his idea).
After that, working our way back to some passed-up side passages we found:
- a room with five rose bushes in it lit by continual light. Behind adventurers, we had Rul shoot them. Good thing, because under one we found a treasure map. If it's real, it's a quick hike and 3000 gp. If it's fake, it's an easy "yo man, I'll sell you my lottery ticket" sales job.
- a room with giant bluebottle flies in it. Minister flailed around in combat again, sadly (seriously, the dice roller hated him) but we managed to take them out with minimal difficulty. We found a silver dagger in some dried fly scat.
and then we started to search around close to the entrance again, trying to avoid the angled corridors for fear of more traps.
Another room had some 3 fire beetles in it (we killed them easily, and took their glow glands), We also found a gold ring with a ruby worth 75 gp.
After that, we found yet another room, this time with three battleaxe-wielding skeletons. Mirado opened the door too widely, allowing one to cut Rul. Rul retaliated by killing all three in a sweep of his Sword +1, +3 vs. Undead.
We tried the door and it was stuck, so Mirado tried to force it. Once it opened, we found ourselves facing two mail-armored men backed by a man in robes. They attacked, and Mirado ate a pair of Magic Missiles before we could strike back. We did, injuring one of the fighter-types but not the other. Lucky for us Minister chose at this point to reveal his other talent by throwing a Sleep spell, knocking the whole group of them out.
So we moved into the room, and quickly tied them up and gagged the wizard. After looting them - getting a nice dagger off the wizard, and finding a chest with 200 gp (stowed in Mirado's backpack) - Mirado woke up the injured fighter and questioned him. He turned out to be hired help, one of four originally. He rattled off his story about running from dwarves, kobolds, big beetles, maybe other things.Once it was clear he was just a hired hand, Mirado offered him (and his buddy) a job working for him. They'd get 10% of the take from their old boss, but Mirado offered only a bonus. Hey, it was worth asking - them for the 10%, Mirado for their services. But Mirado said then he'd just escort them to the surface. The guy did cough up something like "Why don't you take the boss's spellbooks?" and told us where he'd hidden them. So Minister found them under a stone, and took that. Plus, that dagger we found turned out to be +1, +2 vs. humanoids, so Minister kept that as well. Bootstrapping at its finest, baby.
Then Mirado cut off the wizard's head (no sense questioning him, because even tied up he could try Charm Person, so forget that). I finally remembered to ask Erik what it's like when Woundlicker wicks away a HP and gives it to me. Blood basically flows into the blade and Mirado feels warm. Nice. I said "Mirado always heard those tales of fighters with evil swords, and he never thought it would happen to him." Tim: "He's living the dream." Damn right!
So we escorted the prisoners to the surface, gave them back their weapons, and bid them good day. Then we tried a couple more rooms. One turned out to be to a maze of doors, which closed automatically and needed forcing. Bleh. Some other time.
A little more searching turned up a room with 10 giant rats (quickly slain), and a gold bracelet in their refuse.
After that it was getting late, so we just went up to the surface and called it a day. Rul has the treasure list and needs to parcel it out, and we owe 5% of that to the lordship(s) of Sanctuary.
At the end, Mirado handed out 5 gp bonuses to each of the two redshirts for their help, since they were pretty useful and didn't die. I forgot to mention it but he's also giving the torchboy some extra money, too - 1 gp - with instructions to go buy some milk and drink it. That boy needs HP. He can come back when he's a bit beefed up.
* Marauders - Mirado's term for other adventurers. We are adventurers, they are marauders. We bravely salvage treasure from the evil hordes, they plunder hapless underdwellers of their wealth.
***
"Headhunters" would have been a better name for us. And I guess being 3rd level and on my fourth adventure makes me senior and thus the nominal leader. Mirado would like that.
Notes: I didn't name the hirelings, but I just didn't feel like I had any good names handy. Next time I will.
I also treat my hirelings less like meatshields and more like valuable commodities. I held them out of battle when I could, because I figured we might come to a time when having them jump in or watch our back might be critical. I didn't want them dying uselessly.
I got to decide on one of my two bonus languages. Mirado now speaks Common and Orcish, and has one more slot to fill. I'm not sure what would be valuable.
The college zombies were kind of funny, but did kind of pull us out of the moment. We did end up talking WG7 vs. EX1 & EX2, and why one sucked and the others were cool. And it turns out Tim Shorts also converted those to GURPS once, too.
Mirado spared the prisoners (and paid out that bonus) with an eye to his future - a good rep for honesty and mercy can't help but get his name out there as a good boss. That should make it easier to find some hired help in the future, and ensure their loyalty.
Overall, this was by far the least productive session for Mirado in terms of magic items and loot and probably experience. But we've gotten a feel for the dungeon a little bit, and we can dare more when we're a bit larger of a group. Better to explore a bit and come home safe than to push too far and die trying to max out the loot. Plus it helps Erik, too, because he can just keep using the same dungeon and change it up a bit to reflect adventuring.
I'll update Mirado's sheet when I get a final tally on gold and xp.
I may have forgotten details, but chances are Doug and Tim haven't. Check their posts:
S&W B-Team Strikes Back: Castle of the Mad Archmage
Discovering the Amount of Poo You're Willing to Dig Through
And one thing before I begin - all published adventures in PDF form need a number-free "players" map the GM can import into a VTT and reveal piecemeal to the players.
PCs
Minister, Half-Elf Cleric/Magic-User (lvl 1) (Tim Shorts)
Mirado the Bloody, Human Fighter (lvl 3) (me)
Redshirt #1 (lvl 0), human hireling (ring armor, spear, dagger, 5 HP)
Redshirt #2 (lvl 0), human hireling (ring armor, spear, dagger, 5 HP)
Torch Boy, 14-year old human (1 HP)
Rul Scararm, Human Fighter (lvl 2) (Douglas Cole)
We started out at the gates of the Castle of the Mad Archmage. Rul had wisely purchased some healing potions, and Mirado hired some hirelings.
The stairs down were guarded by two guardsman, who questioned us, sold us a license (12 gp for a year's adventuring) under the auspices of his lordship (name unknown to me), and took down our name - "Ogre Heads!" was what Rul shouted out and it stuck. Mirado spoke up and got considered the leader.
Mirado also gave them a couple gold to get some extra information out of them, mostly about a party of marauders* - a six-man mixed group (3 humans, halfling, elf, dwarf), also some dwarves and some elves that have been down there a while.
We took the spiral staircase down to level 1. We could have continued to level 2, and we briefly considered it. Mirado suggested we check around the staircase area on level 1, then head down if we didn't find anything. Later reflection that we had a fragile 1st-level guy with us kept us on the first level.
We started a "always go left" routine which mostly worked out, changing it up mainly to explore doors and take a brief look up side passages. We didn't get more than a hundred feet in when a half-dozen giant rats rushed us. They gnawed on the torch boy and dropped him to 0 HP, and hurt one of the redshirts before we cut them down. So we had to bandage up the boy and take him right back up to the surface. Mirado dropped him off and said to the guards, "He'll rest up here." They asked if he needed healing. Rul said yes, but Mirado vociferously said "NO!" - no way, that's a money grab, not an offer of free help. He'd be fine with rest.
We headed back down and continued to explore. The dungeon was a bit oddly layed out - lots of angled passages, trapped floors, tightly packed rooms, etc. We stumbled across a spear trap that winged one of the hirelings before we found a door at the end of a passage. We forced it open, and there was a rhino facing us!
Hah. No. Mirado didn't believe that for a second. He Disbelieved, make a great roll, and scoffed - "It's an illusion!" Sorry, rhino on level 1, no.
An exhaustive search of the room revealed a secret door, which we opened to find a two-way passage. We turned to the right and headed down, eventually finding a dung-filled room that we refused to search for 2000 cp in. Right after that, we heard marching feet and set up for a fight. Minister recognized the sound of the dwarven language, and we parlayed with the dwarves. There were 7 of them, and the lead dwarf (I forgot his name, it's written down at home) and we spoke in Common. They warned us of kobolds and told us they'd pay 5 gp an ear for kobolds and 100 gp for a chief's head - we'd know the chieftains by their beads. They also warned us about zvarts.
We couldn't get them to team up with us, so we decided to search in a different direction than the one they'd come from - which they said had kobolds in it. Mirado wasn't interested in fighting kobolds, so we headed back the way we came (and they did, too, ducking in the secret door to the rhino room.) We found a door and forced it open, and found 3 zombies.
Two had big sweaters on that read "STATE" and one had a beaver coat and a ukelele. So we attacked. It took a couple turns of fighting (and a 1 on a turning roll by Minister, He Whom The Dice Doth Despise - he'd roll a lot of 1s) we took them down. The ukelele was smashed but the beaver coat was recoverable, so we took it, bundling up a hireling in it. (It was his idea).
After that, working our way back to some passed-up side passages we found:
- a room with five rose bushes in it lit by continual light. Behind adventurers, we had Rul shoot them. Good thing, because under one we found a treasure map. If it's real, it's a quick hike and 3000 gp. If it's fake, it's an easy "yo man, I'll sell you my lottery ticket" sales job.
- a room with giant bluebottle flies in it. Minister flailed around in combat again, sadly (seriously, the dice roller hated him) but we managed to take them out with minimal difficulty. We found a silver dagger in some dried fly scat.
and then we started to search around close to the entrance again, trying to avoid the angled corridors for fear of more traps.
Another room had some 3 fire beetles in it (we killed them easily, and took their glow glands), We also found a gold ring with a ruby worth 75 gp.
After that, we found yet another room, this time with three battleaxe-wielding skeletons. Mirado opened the door too widely, allowing one to cut Rul. Rul retaliated by killing all three in a sweep of his Sword +1, +3 vs. Undead.
We tried the door and it was stuck, so Mirado tried to force it. Once it opened, we found ourselves facing two mail-armored men backed by a man in robes. They attacked, and Mirado ate a pair of Magic Missiles before we could strike back. We did, injuring one of the fighter-types but not the other. Lucky for us Minister chose at this point to reveal his other talent by throwing a Sleep spell, knocking the whole group of them out.
So we moved into the room, and quickly tied them up and gagged the wizard. After looting them - getting a nice dagger off the wizard, and finding a chest with 200 gp (stowed in Mirado's backpack) - Mirado woke up the injured fighter and questioned him. He turned out to be hired help, one of four originally. He rattled off his story about running from dwarves, kobolds, big beetles, maybe other things.Once it was clear he was just a hired hand, Mirado offered him (and his buddy) a job working for him. They'd get 10% of the take from their old boss, but Mirado offered only a bonus. Hey, it was worth asking - them for the 10%, Mirado for their services. But Mirado said then he'd just escort them to the surface. The guy did cough up something like "Why don't you take the boss's spellbooks?" and told us where he'd hidden them. So Minister found them under a stone, and took that. Plus, that dagger we found turned out to be +1, +2 vs. humanoids, so Minister kept that as well. Bootstrapping at its finest, baby.
Then Mirado cut off the wizard's head (no sense questioning him, because even tied up he could try Charm Person, so forget that). I finally remembered to ask Erik what it's like when Woundlicker wicks away a HP and gives it to me. Blood basically flows into the blade and Mirado feels warm. Nice. I said "Mirado always heard those tales of fighters with evil swords, and he never thought it would happen to him." Tim: "He's living the dream." Damn right!
So we escorted the prisoners to the surface, gave them back their weapons, and bid them good day. Then we tried a couple more rooms. One turned out to be to a maze of doors, which closed automatically and needed forcing. Bleh. Some other time.
A little more searching turned up a room with 10 giant rats (quickly slain), and a gold bracelet in their refuse.
After that it was getting late, so we just went up to the surface and called it a day. Rul has the treasure list and needs to parcel it out, and we owe 5% of that to the lordship(s) of Sanctuary.
At the end, Mirado handed out 5 gp bonuses to each of the two redshirts for their help, since they were pretty useful and didn't die. I forgot to mention it but he's also giving the torchboy some extra money, too - 1 gp - with instructions to go buy some milk and drink it. That boy needs HP. He can come back when he's a bit beefed up.
* Marauders - Mirado's term for other adventurers. We are adventurers, they are marauders. We bravely salvage treasure from the evil hordes, they plunder hapless underdwellers of their wealth.
***
"Headhunters" would have been a better name for us. And I guess being 3rd level and on my fourth adventure makes me senior and thus the nominal leader. Mirado would like that.
Notes: I didn't name the hirelings, but I just didn't feel like I had any good names handy. Next time I will.
I also treat my hirelings less like meatshields and more like valuable commodities. I held them out of battle when I could, because I figured we might come to a time when having them jump in or watch our back might be critical. I didn't want them dying uselessly.
I got to decide on one of my two bonus languages. Mirado now speaks Common and Orcish, and has one more slot to fill. I'm not sure what would be valuable.
The college zombies were kind of funny, but did kind of pull us out of the moment. We did end up talking WG7 vs. EX1 & EX2, and why one sucked and the others were cool. And it turns out Tim Shorts also converted those to GURPS once, too.
Mirado spared the prisoners (and paid out that bonus) with an eye to his future - a good rep for honesty and mercy can't help but get his name out there as a good boss. That should make it easier to find some hired help in the future, and ensure their loyalty.
Overall, this was by far the least productive session for Mirado in terms of magic items and loot and probably experience. But we've gotten a feel for the dungeon a little bit, and we can dare more when we're a bit larger of a group. Better to explore a bit and come home safe than to push too far and die trying to max out the loot. Plus it helps Erik, too, because he can just keep using the same dungeon and change it up a bit to reflect adventuring.
I'll update Mirado's sheet when I get a final tally on gold and xp.
I may have forgotten details, but chances are Doug and Tim haven't. Check their posts:
S&W B-Team Strikes Back: Castle of the Mad Archmage
Discovering the Amount of Poo You're Willing to Dig Through
Saturday, February 8, 2014
S&W in the Southern Reaches: Session 3 - Clerics in the Dark
Friday night was the third session of the Southern Reaches B-Team. We spent a fair amount of time just chatting before we got underway, not the least of which is characters had to be scrounged up, rules to be remembered, and because we hadn't gamed since 12/22 so there was the inevitable chattiness that comes with intermittent play. I expect much the same in tomorrow's DF game, as well.
PCs
Mirado the Bloody, Human Fighter (lvl 2) (me)
Irban - Half-Elf M-U/Thief (lvl 2/2?) (Jason)
Rul Scararm, Human Fighter (lvl 1) (Douglas Cole)
Starlander Bek, Elf M-U (level 4?) (Joe D)
All of our characters awoke with a dream of a skeletal armor crushing a village, and trampling the sign reading "Aberton" underfoot. Being adventurers, we totally failed to realize that "Keep Out" doesn't mean "Free Money and Beer" and decided to investigate. Eddie Murphy's comment about Amityville came to mind. A vision of a glowing magical sword didn't hurt - although Mirado immediately realized that we'd be tracking it down for Rul, whose total lack of a magical sword is a shame to one and all.
It was a few days' ride to Aberton, so Mirado sprang for horses for everyone because he has more cash than things to spend it on. Mirado's horse is named Melyngrab.
We rode to the town, and found it was marked up as a plague center. So we bravely decided to follow a trail we found nearby and avoid the town completely. Along the trail we found a zombie caught in brambles - and shot it to death with arrows. It had been dead a long time, long enough for its clothes to rot.
We followed a rough trail to a collapsed mine. We checked around to avoid getting jumped from behind - and were attacked by skeletons who rose from the dirt to attack us. They didn't last.
Once they dropped, we dug. Mirado pitched even after claiming fighters should supervise, and clunked himself with falling rocks for 2 HP damage. Sigh. The stench of death from inside was strong, but only Irban was affected.
We pushed inside, and found a bunch of zombies in tattered uniforms (from a nearby monastery.) We put them down pretty quickly, and moved further into the dungeon, keeping to the left mostly because it seemed most likely to secure our rear than going right would.
Next up was a bigger room, with a plate-armored skeleton with a glowing sword, and some glowing spots on the ground that inevitably sprouted more skeletons. We fought, and some web spells (lit up by Starlander), a few sweet cleaves, and some general brawling put them all down. Mirado took out a few pretty quickly, but once Bek backed off to let the fighters handle it the rolls went south. He waded back in with a 20 and put things to right. Mirado isn't much of a finisher without mages in melee to keep his enthusiasm up. Rul went down, seriously injured (negative HP) and we had to close in around him to kill the enemy before any of them did any PC-like thing such as finishing the wounded.
Once they were down, Mirado was granted the plate armor (which, despite my concerns about his movement rate and mobility, he took, mostly because it was funny.* Rul took the sword, which turned out to be +1, +3 vs. undead, and glows blue when drawn.
Next we found a bunch of goblins up on a dead-end rise. We negotiated by identifying the one that could speak Common, and Bek casting Sleep on the rest (who looked sickly). While the goblin (later named Brak) told us tales of being inflicted with diseases by some evil dude(s), we tossed oil on the sleeping goblins and lit them up. Mirado's oil, actually, which just goes to show how much of a callous person he is.
Further exploration revealed a wide open coal mine area with prompted Loretta Lynne/Sissy Spacek comments under the place went all Harryhausen on us and ranked skeletons with matching weapons and shields rose up from the ground. Awesome.
We backed off to narrow, higher ground, and held them off. They attacked, but we basically trashed them although injury was incurred and we ended up needing to break out potions again.
From there, we continued to explore, aided by Skylander's extremely useful undead-detecting wand. We found a collapsed area we chose to leave for the moment. We next found a cul-de-sac with a shadow in it. It didn't last, because stating with Bek we opened up on it with everything and hit it hard. It went down without hitting any of us.
From there we found the BBEG. A cleric with a magical lantern and skeletal guards, and an alter with an otyugh all cut up on it to generate whatever disease magic he was working. What followed was a messy fight. Hold Person paralyzed Irban, and the cleric and skeletons swarmed in to attack Skylander. He tried to Magic Missile the lantern out of the guy's hand but didn't manage it, and took some hammering back from the cleric for his trouble. Mirado, who'd been holding back in the darkness, waded in swinging. A mix of misses and bad misses leeched away a few HP (I forgot to ask Erik how it manifests, actually), but eventually Mirado started to tee off with 19s and 20s as Rul got in hits, too. Rul had his sword, and Mirado just sucked up a -4 to hit in the darkness. We eventually got the cleric down and were able to feed potions to Bek and get him back up and going. Mirado took the cleric's head as proof we killed him, but that never turned out to be needed.
We looted the guy, finding magical armor and a magical mace (given to Irban, because he lacks a magic weapon), and eventually some cash and what turned out to be crappy gems.
We did some miscellaneous looting and exploring, but it mostly ended there. We did great on magical loot and general slaying, and got a bit of coin, too.
* Actually, Doug offered me the plate, and I said "Okay." Almost immediately he suggested as a lower-HP fighter he might benefit more, so I just snapped out "I already said OK." Everyone burst out laughing . . . . which is mainly why I did it. Still cost me some better armor later - same AC, lower weight. Oh well.
Notes:
We explored the dungeon out in exact room order, 1-8.
As discussed last time, we needed better fight coordination. We got it in spades today. Shots were aimed at damaged foes trying to set up cleave results (generally; once I nailed a full-HP skeleton because I thought killing it was more important than scoring a cleave . . . lucky me I got it anyway). Downed PCs were rescued but first we secured them from damage. PCs stuck close to benefit from area-effect powers (Mirado's ring, for one) and so they could aid each other. It was much more solid teamwork and it showed in the way we generally plowed through the opposition and survived what could have been death.
Once again, Mirado's quick claiming of some mundane gear cost him better mundane gear later. Last time, it was a longbow that cost him a longbow +2. This time, it was old plate armor that cost him banded armor +1. Hopefully we'll find something magical in the future and I can leverage my lack of magic armor into claiming that! I'm not so comfortable with armor that D&D-style game systems feels is clumsy and heavy. I'd rather take a few hits than drown or sink or clank. But for now, I'll keep it.
Mirado's Ring of Protection (10' radius, saves only) has been really useful. I'm glad I traded for it, it makes me a real close-in asset.
Woundlicker cost me 2 (might have been 3 - I erased instead of crossed out, it's hard to tell now) thanks to 1s, and got me 2 back (thanks to hits on the cleric.) Its inability to suck HP from undead makes it risky against them, because it's risking HP loss just to get a +1 to hit and damage. But screw it, Mirado isn't carrying a spare sword just for undead. Might have to take the axe out next time though.
Mirado's ogre head has been interesting. Ever since I got it and started dual-wielding it, I've been rolling generally better. I got off a few 2-3 foe cleaves this session, and at least one of those hits (two, perhaps) were by the +1 for dual-wielding. It's a damn lucky head. I marked off some money to cover getting it preserved and weighted so I can keep bashing folks with it. It would be funny to turn it into a helmet and then turn the cleric's head into my "new" weapon. Heh. Nah. The ogre head is cooler.
I love playing S&W, but it's hard not to get the idea out of my head that my armor should be protecting me from damage, not hits, and that when I get hit and hurt that I'm not really reduced in combat ability. It's not a system complaint, it's just that going on 30 years of GURPS/Man-to-Man play means its concepts and concerns are deeply embedded in my reactions.
Doug blogged about this sooner and better than me.
PCs
Mirado the Bloody, Human Fighter (lvl 2) (me)
Irban - Half-Elf M-U/Thief (lvl 2/2?) (Jason)
Rul Scararm, Human Fighter (lvl 1) (Douglas Cole)
Starlander Bek, Elf M-U (level 4?) (Joe D)
All of our characters awoke with a dream of a skeletal armor crushing a village, and trampling the sign reading "Aberton" underfoot. Being adventurers, we totally failed to realize that "Keep Out" doesn't mean "Free Money and Beer" and decided to investigate. Eddie Murphy's comment about Amityville came to mind. A vision of a glowing magical sword didn't hurt - although Mirado immediately realized that we'd be tracking it down for Rul, whose total lack of a magical sword is a shame to one and all.
It was a few days' ride to Aberton, so Mirado sprang for horses for everyone because he has more cash than things to spend it on. Mirado's horse is named Melyngrab.
We rode to the town, and found it was marked up as a plague center. So we bravely decided to follow a trail we found nearby and avoid the town completely. Along the trail we found a zombie caught in brambles - and shot it to death with arrows. It had been dead a long time, long enough for its clothes to rot.
We followed a rough trail to a collapsed mine. We checked around to avoid getting jumped from behind - and were attacked by skeletons who rose from the dirt to attack us. They didn't last.
Once they dropped, we dug. Mirado pitched even after claiming fighters should supervise, and clunked himself with falling rocks for 2 HP damage. Sigh. The stench of death from inside was strong, but only Irban was affected.
We pushed inside, and found a bunch of zombies in tattered uniforms (from a nearby monastery.) We put them down pretty quickly, and moved further into the dungeon, keeping to the left mostly because it seemed most likely to secure our rear than going right would.
Next up was a bigger room, with a plate-armored skeleton with a glowing sword, and some glowing spots on the ground that inevitably sprouted more skeletons. We fought, and some web spells (lit up by Starlander), a few sweet cleaves, and some general brawling put them all down. Mirado took out a few pretty quickly, but once Bek backed off to let the fighters handle it the rolls went south. He waded back in with a 20 and put things to right. Mirado isn't much of a finisher without mages in melee to keep his enthusiasm up. Rul went down, seriously injured (negative HP) and we had to close in around him to kill the enemy before any of them did any PC-like thing such as finishing the wounded.
Once they were down, Mirado was granted the plate armor (which, despite my concerns about his movement rate and mobility, he took, mostly because it was funny.* Rul took the sword, which turned out to be +1, +3 vs. undead, and glows blue when drawn.
Next we found a bunch of goblins up on a dead-end rise. We negotiated by identifying the one that could speak Common, and Bek casting Sleep on the rest (who looked sickly). While the goblin (later named Brak) told us tales of being inflicted with diseases by some evil dude(s), we tossed oil on the sleeping goblins and lit them up. Mirado's oil, actually, which just goes to show how much of a callous person he is.
Further exploration revealed a wide open coal mine area with prompted Loretta Lynne/Sissy Spacek comments under the place went all Harryhausen on us and ranked skeletons with matching weapons and shields rose up from the ground. Awesome.
We backed off to narrow, higher ground, and held them off. They attacked, but we basically trashed them although injury was incurred and we ended up needing to break out potions again.
From there, we continued to explore, aided by Skylander's extremely useful undead-detecting wand. We found a collapsed area we chose to leave for the moment. We next found a cul-de-sac with a shadow in it. It didn't last, because stating with Bek we opened up on it with everything and hit it hard. It went down without hitting any of us.
From there we found the BBEG. A cleric with a magical lantern and skeletal guards, and an alter with an otyugh all cut up on it to generate whatever disease magic he was working. What followed was a messy fight. Hold Person paralyzed Irban, and the cleric and skeletons swarmed in to attack Skylander. He tried to Magic Missile the lantern out of the guy's hand but didn't manage it, and took some hammering back from the cleric for his trouble. Mirado, who'd been holding back in the darkness, waded in swinging. A mix of misses and bad misses leeched away a few HP (I forgot to ask Erik how it manifests, actually), but eventually Mirado started to tee off with 19s and 20s as Rul got in hits, too. Rul had his sword, and Mirado just sucked up a -4 to hit in the darkness. We eventually got the cleric down and were able to feed potions to Bek and get him back up and going. Mirado took the cleric's head as proof we killed him, but that never turned out to be needed.
We looted the guy, finding magical armor and a magical mace (given to Irban, because he lacks a magic weapon), and eventually some cash and what turned out to be crappy gems.
We did some miscellaneous looting and exploring, but it mostly ended there. We did great on magical loot and general slaying, and got a bit of coin, too.
* Actually, Doug offered me the plate, and I said "Okay." Almost immediately he suggested as a lower-HP fighter he might benefit more, so I just snapped out "I already said OK." Everyone burst out laughing . . . . which is mainly why I did it. Still cost me some better armor later - same AC, lower weight. Oh well.
Notes:
We explored the dungeon out in exact room order, 1-8.
As discussed last time, we needed better fight coordination. We got it in spades today. Shots were aimed at damaged foes trying to set up cleave results (generally; once I nailed a full-HP skeleton because I thought killing it was more important than scoring a cleave . . . lucky me I got it anyway). Downed PCs were rescued but first we secured them from damage. PCs stuck close to benefit from area-effect powers (Mirado's ring, for one) and so they could aid each other. It was much more solid teamwork and it showed in the way we generally plowed through the opposition and survived what could have been death.
Once again, Mirado's quick claiming of some mundane gear cost him better mundane gear later. Last time, it was a longbow that cost him a longbow +2. This time, it was old plate armor that cost him banded armor +1. Hopefully we'll find something magical in the future and I can leverage my lack of magic armor into claiming that! I'm not so comfortable with armor that D&D-style game systems feels is clumsy and heavy. I'd rather take a few hits than drown or sink or clank. But for now, I'll keep it.
Mirado's Ring of Protection (10' radius, saves only) has been really useful. I'm glad I traded for it, it makes me a real close-in asset.
Woundlicker cost me 2 (might have been 3 - I erased instead of crossed out, it's hard to tell now) thanks to 1s, and got me 2 back (thanks to hits on the cleric.) Its inability to suck HP from undead makes it risky against them, because it's risking HP loss just to get a +1 to hit and damage. But screw it, Mirado isn't carrying a spare sword just for undead. Might have to take the axe out next time though.
Mirado's ogre head has been interesting. Ever since I got it and started dual-wielding it, I've been rolling generally better. I got off a few 2-3 foe cleaves this session, and at least one of those hits (two, perhaps) were by the +1 for dual-wielding. It's a damn lucky head. I marked off some money to cover getting it preserved and weighted so I can keep bashing folks with it. It would be funny to turn it into a helmet and then turn the cleric's head into my "new" weapon. Heh. Nah. The ogre head is cooler.
I love playing S&W, but it's hard not to get the idea out of my head that my armor should be protecting me from damage, not hits, and that when I get hit and hurt that I'm not really reduced in combat ability. It's not a system complaint, it's just that going on 30 years of GURPS/Man-to-Man play means its concepts and concerns are deeply embedded in my reactions.
Doug blogged about this sooner and better than me.
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