Thought I’d share a little tidbit from a Paizo forum thread I started asking about Hispanic or Latino analogues in Golarion.  I’ve run through most of the other Golarion ethnicities and I’m hankering to play a member of La Raza Cósmica! James Jacobs says there’s not really anything now, but there will be – “That’s the plan.”  Most speculation as to where that’ll come from is on Arcadia, though he doesn’t say that out loud.

Why, I think I’ll get one of these Han Cholo rings in preparation!

Captain Scarbelly

Fourth Session (16 page pdf) – “Family, Worship, and Business” – Sam and Serpent’s egg is coming along nicely while Sindawe and Hatshepsut visit an orc bar and get more than they bargained for. Finally, they protect some Cyphermages while negotiating with orcish pirates.  Just another day in the life!

After they spizzle the weasel-mast, the PCs head into Riddleport on various errands, none of which really bear mentioning in polite company. Luckily there’s no polite company here!  They try to deal with other pirate captains, procure biker-gang outfits for their crew, visit Serpent’s eggs… You know, normal weekend stuff.

And then Sindawe and Hapshetsut must prove their worth to a bar full of orcs. The Happy Fellow is a bar from a Freeport supplement, where orcs fight each other for spots beneath iron teats drooling “blood grog.” Captain Scarbelly and his crew are straight out of the Freeport books too.

If you want to make a “skill challenge” not boring, have it be to beat back orcs while trying to stay under a blood-grog nipple. It all ends successfully (which is to say in sex and violence).

Then in a weird turn they have agreed to escort the Cyphermages, who are pretty much shut-ins now because their two former leaders have tried to destroy the city in weird cult activity, on a field trip. While they’re doing this one Cyphermage and the ship’s cook sneak off into an alleyway. Ever alert for treachery, they send the mentally challenged crewman “Dum Dum” to spy on them (No, I don’t know why they picked him). When he returns, this was the exchange.

Dum Dum enters the alley cautiously, disappearing into the fog. He quickly returns explaining, “Billy is just helping that fancyboy go to the bathroom.” They wriggle uncomfortably at this news.

Captain Scarbelly and his orcs show up due to Sindawe and Hapshetsut’s brave performance the night before. The two captains parley for a while to their mutual profit. Then we end with…

Captain Scarbelly seems intelligent for an orc. The two discuss pirating business a bit  more before Scarbelly announces he has to go. Sindawe hands him a gift: a Mordant Spire elf mask.  Scarbelly admires the mask then says, “I need to find a prostitute.” He marches off.

 

Fantasy Janitors At Work

Fourth Session (16 page pdf) – We continue to hit demon cultist hardpoints in the ruins of Kenabres with the help of mongrelmen and lesbian paladins.

This session is mainly fight after fight with tieflings, dretches, and various other evil varmints of various description. That part wasn’t all that exciting. (Ironically fights in Pathfinder, while supposed to be scenes of high action like in a movie, are sometimes boring… Like Peter Jackson and Michael Bay are managing to do with their big action scenes.) The interesting things that came up were:

Mongrelman rangers! We got a squad of mongrelman helpers and they were very helpful. We named them, and everyone ran one. Antonius had some soul-searching to do though – the faith of Irori advocates physical and mental perfection but mongrelmen are the ultimate in mutated – it just kinda bothered him.

Janitorial work!  So we find a ruined shrine to Iomedae in the Grey Garrison and it’s pretty clear we “should” clean it up. Will all the monsters just go into stasis for a couple hours while we do so? Well sure, no problem. This will come up again, by the way. We are told we get a “devotion point” for that, a fact that Chris and I try to erase from our brains – we’ve had about enough of Pathfinder APs giving us something-or-other points and driving our party-mates into fits of bizarre behavior (like gift-buying in Jade Regent) because they see a new rules system than needs manipulation.  If we’re going to start getting Divine Janitor Points for clearing poo from every shrine we enter I’d rather the mechanics be obscured from me.

But, we level and get some phat lewt.

Areelu Vorlesh

Fifth Session (14 page pdf) – We thwart the Forces of Evil ™ and destroy their captive wardstone bit, hurling the demonic forces back – for a time.  And we all experience THE QUICKENING!!!

We continue to sweep and clear the Gray Garrison. Many tieflings and cultists meet their end.  “It is thus that the fields of Justice are nourished with the blood of our enemies!” claims the session scribe.

We do get to fight a peryton, which is cool. And a goat-demon.  We hear from prisoners that there’s a minotaur around, leading to the following fun quotes:

“Minotaurs are bad news too,” shares Antonius. “I read a comic back in camp that says they’re more than a little… rapey.” Everyone shuffles uncomfortably at that thought.

Then a bit later,

From up above the minotaur howls.
Trystan tells Rogoff [his mongrelman henchman], “You go first!”
Rogoff looks dubious. “For what it’s worth, boss, I read the same comic book  about minotaurs that Antonius did. And you guys normally go in first – I’m not sure I feel  comfortable about this arrangement.”

For some reason the baddie, Jeslyn, spread all her defenders out into conveniently small packages leading to her, so we kill each group easily and then attack her solo.  Solo casters – why do they even try?  I run over and put her in a grapple and then convert it to the figure four leg lock and then it’s all over. It’s what I do with all solo casters – they just can’t do anything about it.

And then the shit really hits the fan.  Irabeth destroys the last fragment of Kenabres’ Wardstone with a rod of cancellation.  It explodes, it kills every demon in the zip code, we hallucinate for a while. Areelu Vorlesh gates in and sics six babau demons on us.  But we are powered-up with all kinds of special abilities and also she gets blown back through the gate. The baubaus attack and start gating in more babaus. This is quite a fight and we emerge victorious!  I club-dance and we gain… a Mythic Tier!

For those not familiar with it, Mythic Adventures is a cool new Paizo system that, instead of adding levels like Epic, adds a layer of being a kinda demigod type on top of our normal levels. So now we get weird superpowers!  (Go see our character sheets by level on the campaign page for more.)

We’re getting set to run through Razor Coast in our Reavers campaign. This Kickstarted gem from Nick Logue was in limbo for a long time and finally came to fruition.  If you didn’t get a copy, you are in luck – the PDFs are in this week’s Bundle of Holding and you can get the whole set of books cheap!

Queen Galfrey of Mendev

First Session (12 page pdf)  – Mendevian Queen Galfrey sends us on a mission… From God. We’re off to retake the fortress of Drezen deep within enemy lines. So we take our paladin army and encounter both troops and treachery along our way.

We lead the Army of Kenabres across the blasted terrain. Calanthe is selected to lead the army since she has the highest Charisma, leading us (well, instigated by me) to dub her “Khaleesi.”

One of our NPCs betrays us, which is par for the course.  Being all good, we fret over it before executing her for treason.

Some army combat, some ruin exploration.  And we fight an incubus. Decent.

Second Session ( 14 page pdf) – Our army reaches Drezen and we start in on the reduction of its defenses, fighting both armies and monsters with increasingly ridiculous names.

Nabassu

A lot gets done this session!  First, we fight a nabassu in ruins. It’s a lively battle and there’s much loot to be had.  After that, we head towards Drezen with our army.  We are semi thwarted by demonic locusts but get through that.

Then we find out that Aron Kir, aka “Sosiel’s bottom,” has a demon blood addiction problem like Sam from Supernatural. We decide immediately that Sosiel looks like Dean and Aron looks like Sam and it’s all slashfic all the time thereafter.

When we get to Drezen, we reconnoiter and find it’s basically a bunch of zones with armies in it…

Drezen

We take out Southbank first and then try to capture the bridge, but unlucky rolling lets them destroy it before we can secure it. So we clear out the cemetery and Paradise Hill (apparently even crusader citadels have low income housing projects) while we rebuild.  We stretch the mass combat rules to their breaking point with our cunning tactics.

In the cemetery we come across a monster, “Moxaboo the berbalang.” I laughed so hard at his name I nearly peed myself and named him “Riddleyboo” for the couple rounds he lasts against us. Come on Filipinos, you have a perfectly good monster and give it the goofiest ass name ever.

Then a mythic cold chimera thing (I call it a cryo-mera!) attacks us. It’s a brutal fight and I get in my patented backbreaker move! It counts as a mythic trial so we all get a new mythic level and everything goes all Highlander for a minute. Good times!

Third Session (12 page pdf) – We reduce the remaining demonic armies and lay siege to the fortress of Drezen. The command staff inserts via a poorly defended point and sweeps and clears a good portion of the ground level, allowing the paladin forces into the keep.

First we personally assault the brimorak-manned catapult towers, then we lead our forces against their armies and rout them. That then leaves the citadel buttoned up – time for PC SpecOps strikes!

Here’s an example snippet of purple prose describing how that goes:

Calanthe then peppers the other brimorak with a magic missiles to leave it horribly wounded. Trystan finishes the job with two shots, clean through the creature’s eyes. It falls from the parapet, screaming like a hell-muppet.

We kill constructs and demons and cultists with gimp masks and elementals. We come across another shrine where Iomedae appears to us again.  Oh, as if, we’re LG not Lawful Stupid, we channel some positive energy and when she takes damage we smoke her. She’s a succubus and she enslaves Shawanda but I give her an Egorian style beat down.

They all pause to pray at the altar of Iomedae. “Forgive us our lusty thoughts!” mumbles Shawanda under her breath. The other crusaders try to make sense of her words. “Lusty slots?” thinks Trystan. “Hungry slots?” thinks Tsuguri. “Lusty sluts?” thinks Antonius.

This is real dialogue, Patrick was muttering and we couldn’t hear him, and we all heard variations on dirty things, as we are wont to do. We fight a mimic, during which Tsuguri insists that pee is the only thing that will get the monster’s adhesive excretion off people.

After several rounds of death and Tsuguri attempting to urinate on his party members, they all come unstuck.
They find four suits of masterwork full plate, one of which is magical, mithril, and painted gold and Iomedae-y. Shawanda swoons. Trystan starts to explain how he might benefit from it as well and she yells, “Bling bling honky!” and flees the room with
the armor.

In Aliens fashion, we declare the area “secure” and let in our paladins through the front door to occupy the better part of the first floor.  We go up to one of the parapets and find a crazy barbarian woman that’s decapitated all her tribesmen. Calanthe (Tim) decides to use a spell to impersonate antipaladin Staunton Vhane halfway through this which comes close to ending in fratricide. I choke her out (monk grappling is so great against casters and two-handed weapon users!). We toss her in a tiger cage and wrap up!

This was a fun session, we were a little punchy so it got a little silly but good.  We’re decently overpowered in this AP and it’s a nice change – it’s boring rolling over opposition when it’s meaningless grind like a couple sessions ago, but when it’s interesting stuff it’s as fun as being on the ropes all the time. Plus, it makes us feel more OK with taking prisoners and negotiating and stuff, as opposed to “I MUST USE MY ACTION ECONOMY FOR TOTAL WAR OR WE WILL BE TPKED.” That gets old.

Dungeons & Dragons Fifth Edition is out – and it’s pretty good!  I hated Fourth Edition and, like many folks, defected to Paizo’s 3e-derived branch called Pathfinder and Paizo rose to the top of the sales charts for a long period. But now with a viable product, good community engagement, and the nostalgia factor (Drizzle the elf! Space hamsters!) WotC is back in the game.  Will Paizo just fade away, only beloved by a fringe of the old guard?  No, and here’s why.

Let me preface this by saying these are “big boy” reasons, not game system details – how many hit points a bard gets is very meaningful to some ultrageeks but is not relevant to market position. If you wanted to hear something about 5e gnomes vs Pathfinder gnomes, please go play and let the grownups talk for a minute.

1. The subscription model. Paizo’s subscription model of selling is like printing money. You’ve heard how comics subscriptions are basically the single largest factor in keeping comics and comic stores afloat right? Well, same thing with Pathfinder subscriptions.  The convenience wrenches the money right out of me and many others. You know, why WoW always made huge bank and that model became very compelling to game producers. Paizo keeps quiet about how much of a big deal this is, probably deliberately so folks like WotC don’t get the memo. But from a business point of view, this is probably the single biggest innovation and leverage point they have from a revenue model perspective. and it’s a big one.

2. The iconics. With their iconic characters – an idea enhanced from 3e D&D – Paizo doesn’t just have a game system, they have intellectual property. They have then used those iconics to fuel comics, audio dramas, card games, mini-figs – and I wouldn’t be surprised to see movies or TV. I thought it would be a no-brainer for WotC to have a strong stable of iconic characters in 5e but they completely didn’t. Sure, they have some older characters – Elminster, Drizz’t, the Dragonlance people – but they’re not capitalizing on them. One big reason why the D&D movies sucked was that both the good guys and the bad guys were just new made-up generic folks.  “I have purple lips and am evil!” Fuck you. Call me when you make Strahd or  Bargle or Vecna or someone the bad guy. Hasbro is supposed to be “branding” geniuses, but even Paizo’s goblins generate stuffed animals and cute comic spinoffs while with the 5e launch, WotC’s critter of choice, kobolds, had pretty much zero sizzle and visual styling.

3. The adventures. “It’s the adventures, stupid.” Why do people nostalgia-love the old days of Basic D&D/1e AD&D? Do they go back and talk about their love for weapon speed factors and to-hit tables? No, they talk about THE ADVENTURES. Temple of Elemental Evil, Ravenloft, Scourge of the Slavelords, Isle of Dread… These were the shared experiences people had and what they find compelling about the hobby.  Adventuring is the entire point of all this other rules and setting content, it’s the actual activity of the game. WotC gets this enough to keep revisiting them every edition (Return to the Return to the Keep of the Hill Giants!) but not enough to actually put out frequent and compelling adventure content themselves except for a smattering of mostly indifferent products. In 3e, the Open Gaming License covered this gap and new adventures are what propelled companies like Green Ronin and Atlas Games into the larger businesses they are today. In 4e, they kicked off with a couple and then slid into nowhere and now with 5e, they managed to get two out – but frankly, they’re not all that good, and again, it’s a matter of amount.  Paizo gets out an Adventure Path chapter per month, every 6 months it’s a new one, there’s previous ones where if you want to do gothic horror or Arabian Nights or whatever there’s something to scratch that itch – WotC’s just planning to retread the same old properties, at a plodding pace.

So though 5e is a fine game – I’m not sure that as part of the overall package, Paizo has a lot to worry about.  Sure, Hasbro can pump in marketing dollars and get things into bookstores, but a) do they care enough about a small line to, as opposed to making more Iron Man doodads, and b) can they really successfully capitalize on multiple product lines and the D&D IP? You’d think that’s where they would be Vikings, but so far early results don’t show a lot of spark there.

Staunton Vhane

Fourth Session (14 page pdf) – We slay and slay and slay until we finally get to the dwarven antipaladin Staunton Vhane. And then we slay some more!

First I choke out another succubus. My new imprinting hand mythic trick is very Irorian.  Then we fight a bunch of insolence demons that make us insolent for a while. The difference is hard to notice.

Then it’s antipaladin time! He has a brother, blood demons, fiendish minotaurs… Finally, a stand-up fight! We get a good tactical exercise and wipe the floor with ‘em.  Then it’s all over but the looting and the intel gathering.

Fifth Session (13 page pdf) –  Though we’ve killed Staunton Vhane, there’s a lower level that still needs clearing in Drezen. “Someone’s in my root cellar. Someone with a fresh soul!”

First we do loot distribution.  I should do a separate post with our 3l33t loot tracking and distribution spreadsheet format, it makes it easy to keep up with it all. You find literally 100 different things per AP volume and tracking it needs some rigor.

The dumb demonblood addict has run off again. We head into the dungeons of Drezen to find him and the Sword of Valor (really a banner, in a case of false advertising). Vampires and demons and such annoy us until we’re finally at a loss as to where to go, we have to bring in Staunton Vhane’s brother Joran to do the dwarf thing and show us the secret door we can’t find.

Salamander

Inside, we find the Corruption Forge and a bunch of salamanders.  I love salamanders, I don’t know why. Probably the super boss AD&D MM art. Everyone else starts taking the slow way down and I just swashbuckler-swing down there, get in the middle of ‘em and start whaling away. It hurts, but a lot of my Iron Mountain and Champion of Irori powers have to do with staying in one place and being surrounded…

Then it’s a priestess and schir demons and crystal widgets. Calathe actually has shatter for some reason (well, there have been a lot of demonic crystals in this campaign) and she brings it down while we destroy them in detail.

Ah, killing people and taking their stuff.  It’s great fun, but in this era of Christmas Tree Syndrome it’s hard to keep up with all that loot!

The GM tells you about some stuff when you loot your dead opponents – and a lot of details are held till later (magic, street value). Sometimes no one writes it down, and that item is lost forever.  Sometimes multiple people write it down and you have a conflict later on. Sometimes when you go back and ask the GM “OK so was that morningstar magic?” he responds “what morningstar? You mean two or three sessions ago? I have no idea.”

For our Pathfinder games, I developed a solution.  (It’ll work for any game though.) It’s an easy to use Excel spreadsheet that you use to log treasure, distribute treasure, and handle selloffs and money splitting. So I’m sharing it with you! (cc-attribution-sharealike).

The Geek Related Treasure Distribution Spreadsheet

It has an instructions tab, but here’s how it works.  When you get loot you log it on the Party Treasure tab with who you got it from and when thus:

Then any time someone claims an item, you cut and paste it to the Distributed Treasure tab and add who got it and when thus:

And you never have to worry again! It makes organizing distributions easy, and selling off unwanted loot and splitting the profits. Money is handled slightly differently on the Coinage tab thus:

It has a couple formulas but it’s not fancy, mainly it’s just a well thought out format that is a) really fast to enter when you’re in the middle of a game and b) efficient to do distributions and sell-offs. Now the GM has some context to help him remember that maybe-magic morningstar (Oh, the dead cultists right after the temple to Torag, right…), you know who got a piece of loot, and most importantly no valuable treasure just goes missing. We often do a big selloff at the end of a session when someone’s had to hurry off – now they can just go look and see how much money they got out of it.

And it’s entertaining to review late in a campaign. It’s like a historical record of things that happened.  (We gave two snake corpses to a mole-man?  Oh yeah, I remember that…).  It’s amazing how big the spreadsheet gets, when we get finished with an Adventure Path we look back and there’s four-hundred-odd entries… Add extra tabs for other stuff you need to track (like I added a tab to track army food and stores for Wrath of the Righteous, or caravan food and stores for Jade Regent). Your party will love you for it! Once we started doing this we got hooked and now every single campaign has a big ol’ treasure spreadsheet at the end of it.

It works best if you put it in a Dropbox so everyone in the group can view/edit it from their computers and phones and stuff. Enjoy!  Feel free and ask questions about its use after you’ve given it a look.

Sixth Session (12 page pdf) – And finally we liberate Drezen and retake the Sword of Valor! We relax by going to kill some grandmas.

Deeper in the dungeon, a bunch of Deskari statues do a phantasmal killer on the NPC Sosiel; he lives but is driven insane. I have to choke him out too (I choke out about one person per game session). Then, it’s a Grimtooth’s Traps moment with a pit of green slime that nearly devours Shawanda totally.

Then we find Aron Kir (Sam Winchester) under the thrall of a shadow demon. I KO him, the demon comes out and it gets frisky. It tosses Shawanda all the way back into the green slime pit, which is entertaining in a morbid way. It turns into a festival of me and Shawanda tanking it, the healers pouring healing into us, and Calanthe magic missiling away (sovereign against incorporeal foes!).

We come away with the Sword of Valor.  Huzzah!

Then we get Drezen in order and try to redeem/heal our various evil and/or insane posse.

• Joran Vhane – evil dwarf
• Chaleb – evil homicidal cavalier
• Uziel – evil tiefling rogue
• Sosiel – insane cleric
• Aron – formerly possessed drug addict
• Jestak – evil homicidal barbarian

Yes, these are the understudies for our party of paladins.

We go out on patrol and find three crazy grandmas who are actually hag cultists of Lamashtu conducting Island of Dr. Moreau experiments and have created a largely-useless “octoeagle” (octopus/eagle hybrid) and “clawyote” (coyote with crab claws). We kill them for crimes against nature. We loot their country-clutter decor with abandon and take the two animals back to be mascots for our two army units.

Jesker Helton

First Session (11 page pdf) – We fight some random wildlife and then have a brotherly encounter with some barbarians.  Not really.

We are on a quest to find some demented priest of Erastil who has gone all Number 23. We find him and kill the demon he vomits up.  He’s still evil, but then again so is everyone we take on as minons in this AP. The dead Erastilian hero whose tomb we find him in is interred with some super magic bow that Trystan covets.

Trystan recovers his commune spell to ask the burning question, “Would Erastil want us (me) to have Delamar’s bow?”
Shelyn’s reply, “No.”
“What’s that Shelyn? I can’t quite make you out… zzzzCRACKLE,” says Trystan.
The rest of the group stares sternly at him and he sighs.

Retriever

Then, we go on patrol with Jestak our evil barbarian captive.

Trystan raises the alarm, “Evildoers are afoot!” Antonius and Jestak leap to their feet.
Jestak yells, “Evildoers? I have been told we hate evildoers!”
Shawanda stares sternly at Jestak.

I got to try to grapple a retriever, which actually posed a grappling challenge for me which was nice. I talk everyone into bringing the jewel-eyed spider skulls back to complete our dance club in Drezen.

I had to leave before the next part, where the group got to Winter Sun Hall and met up with a barbarian leader who is connected to Shawanda (he calls her “Sister,”), they both were exposed to the same awfulness that started her down her mythic path. He attacks, and Trystan just kills him with an arrow of human slaying. Apparently the keeping everyone evil alive stuff only applies in some cases, when it won’t cause a huge buzzkill for someone else’s plotline. Sad trombone.

Second Session (14 page pdf) – Our heroes continue to investigate the Worldwound and slay various beasties found therein.

First up: The Shrine of the Fallen. Interesting note, we were having fun with playing explorer and naming all the terrain features we came across regardless of whether anyone else had named them (natives, what do they know) and I declared this place the Shrine of the Fallen.  And later we found out that was totally its name and the undead that haunt it are called “fallen.” Noice!

Zanedra

Next up: Some half elf chick named Zanedra and some Baphomet cultists. She has a monster with her that turns out to be her eidolon, she’s a summoner! Its name is something like “Spinnarabeth,” which is weird because the suffix -beth is used for a lot of villain names in this AP. I immediately develop a conspiracy theory that this is usual among evil people and resolve to keep a better eye on Irabeth back in Drezen. We take Zanedra captive and send her back for justice, which might be dangerous (won’t her eidolon just come back? Eh, who knows.).

Then it’s bodaks… Shawanda, Trystan, and I pretty much kill whatever we get to hit so it’s just a race to see who goes first.

Antonius steps into the bodak and smites it three times with his three-section staff. He destroys it utterly. Shawanda puts her sacred blade back into the scabbard with an irritated sigh.

But then I fail to kill Skullgrim the nabassu in one attack routine and she gets to kill him, so balance is restored to the force.

Vrock

Third Session (7 page pdf) – a Woundwyrm and mythic vrocks decide to challenge our Mythic Bullshit ™ but are thwarted! And we thaw out some new friends.

We prepped heavily for the fight with the Woundwyrm and it ended up being quite mobile and complex. Tsuguri’s aura of madness ability is the real star here, causing the beast to lose several rational moves.

“I know, let’s redeem it!” exclaims Antonius! Before everyone is done with their expressions of shock and horror,  he finishes it a swat from his weapon.

After we kill it we bust out some guys who got turned into statues, and one, Trevor, is Sosiel’s lost brother and has written a long sad letter to him.  We joke about delivering the letter and then trotting his brother out 30 seconds later. He’s pretty buff, so I try flirting with Trevor but to little effect.

Then we go to my Place of Destiny ™ and kill the mythic vrock that engineered the evil ritual that set me on my path to mythic notability.

This was a pretty tactical session but I was punchy so I got in a lot of little quips.

Arushalae, Reformed Succubus

Fourth Session (9 page pdf) – We find an allegedly reformed succubus and fight a sea of enemies on her behalf, just like with a normal succubus.

So this reformed succubus sends Tabregon a dream and we go get her and kill her enemies and she’s good and we of course believe her and want her to come join the Crusade because those guys are just poopy-head racists whenever they don’t like anyone with horns.

As you can tell from the tone there I started to get a bad attitude about this time and I’ll explain why.

Here’s the problem I have – it’s partly with this adventure path, and partly with how some of our party is acting around these “redemption” plotlines. We’re just eating the plot-points like so much pablum without any real roleplaying or interesting conflict about what’s supposed to be difficult moral decisions.  I’m not dumb, I’m sure she really is supposed to be good and there’s no “game success” repercussions to blindly trusting her.  That’s par for the course for these Paizo storylines, they usually only have one layer of complexity to them and don’t require you to really think or make hard decisions to succeed. What I do object to is not having any realistic push-back at all.  Succubi, what with the telepathy and dominate person? So we should all automatically back her?  I’m sure the crusaders won’t just throw us in the hole and execute her when we return, but they *should*, or at least there should be the threat of that.  “Detect evil” and metagaming shouldn’t settle every argument and some of these attempted redemptions (we’ve hauled a half dozen high level evil folks back to camp and dumped them there as possible proteges) should bite us in the ass.

I like the idea of a good campaign, and of the possibility of redeeming some foes – I’m usually the only one in most of our games suggesting we don’t just kill all our enemies out of hand. Everyone shouldn’t be unremittingly evil or there’s never any hope or changing people. But the way this is playing out, it just makes it… Cheap. There’s just no drama about it.  So it makes me bored.  As an Irori-ite I find Chaos just about as objectionable as Evil, but I’m sure no one in the group is interested in talking about that philosophical point so bah.

I understand some people like their games like this, but to me this kind of thing is the interesting crux of roleplaying so when it gets short shrift it drains most of the enjoyment for me – I could give a shit about killing more monzterz for their XPz. Story shouldn’t be video game cutscenes inflicted on you… I am trying to push more real in-character discussion on this stuff but we don’t have all of the group IC at the same moment pretty much ever so it’s hard to get going.

Jerribeth

Fifth Session (11 page pdf) – After a brief regrouping, we head out to the Ivory Labyrinth where we fight Jerribeth, a fetching looking mythic glabrezu demon, and send her down the dark road to the black mountain from which none ever return. Then we come face to… something squirmy with the worm-man sorcerer Xanthir Vang and, one can only assume, his magical pan flute!

First, though, Trystan convinces Arushalae to give him her magical bow as, you know, part of her repentance. This gives Antonius a very, very poor impression of Trystan. Avarice is non-good in general but Irori teaches separation from all earthly entanglements, so this is double grody to him. If this were a real good story, people’s sins would get used against them at some point during the AP but I’m sure that won’t happen.  It would be boss though.

We get to the Ivory Sanctum and find Jerribeth, who looks fair but is really just a glabrezu.  I grapple her anyway, which hurts a lot but I’m trying to become the ultimate mythic grapple monster so it’s good practice. It doesn’t stop her attacks but it sure stops her spells. I repeat my mocking schtick about “redeeming everyone!” when we defeat Jerribeth…

“OK, now let’s lead her on the road to redemption!” he declares, pausing long enough to see the horrified expressions on his comrades’ faces before snapping the demon’s neck.

Then we kick in a lot of buffs and just rampage through the complex. “Don’t stop to loot – there’s more kill to be had!” we cry as we sprint past our downed foes to the next room. We only halt once we get to Ol’ Wormy himself… Next time!

Xanthir Vang

Sixth Session (11 page pdf) – We slay Xanthir Vang, and then it’s mostly all over but the looting.  The extensive, extensive looting.

A spellcaster I can’t grapple?  Well that’s a corker.  I use my mythic maneuver power to Dirty Trick him while everyone else tries to figure out how to hurt him.  Sadly, “area effect spells” are what we don’t use, though apparently they would have been great.  After an epic fight, we kill him anyway.

End of battle quote, courtesy Bruce our session scribe, who often lives in a parallel plane of existence:

Calanthe looks at the mass of disintegrating worms. She says, “And thus I am avenged for the deaths of my parents. This is how we treat assassins who have no respect for life.” In saying this, of course, she does not know that she is channeling the only known words of Argrath the Liberator, who uttered a sacred oath to tear the Red Moon from the Middle Air.

An insider note – Xanthir offered a question-for-question info exchange.  We agreed, as long as Tabregon answered the questions.  This is a bit of an inside joke; Bruce, Tabregon’s player, both attends via Skype (and sometimes gets a warped impression of what’s going on as a result) and is somewhat notorious for not being able to explain things in a concise and coherent way.  We all giggled at the thought of this being put to good use against our enemies for once. Xanthir got frustrated fast and just went to combat. Heh heh.

The rest of the time we piled up loot. Next, we’re on to The Midnight Isles!

  Queen Galfrey

First Session (12 page pdf) – We pick up Queen Galfrey of Mendev and roll out to the Midnight Fane to stop their mythic-demon-elixir naughtiness.

It’s the beginning of a new chapter.  In a surprise move, Queen Galfrey of Mendev wants to come with us into the Abyss.  “OK, I reckon,” we say, and she settles down into the usual quiet and mostly-useless NPC role that all party NPCs do. Weird.

We go to the Midnight Fane, and manage to restrain ourselves from killing long enough to be escorted to the local boss.  It’s a big fight, but it turns out most of it was with a projected image from some eyeless minotaur chick that teleports away.

Ursathella the Snake Lady

Then we go find a snake lady and engage in witty repartee.

Antonius tells her, “Mutasafet sent us. He says, ‘Blaaaggh!’ And do you know anything about the ecology of ash giants?”

The serpent-woman responds, “While would be very interesting to have a long conversation with you about ash giants, I think I shall have that conversation after you are dead. I have promised my mistress Areelu Vorlesh that I shall defend the Rift at all costs!”

Antonius offers, “You better simmer down or we’re going to dimensional anchor your snaky ass and murderhobo you.”

She does not simmer down, so we do.