Dale's Campaign - Sessions #8 & #9

Sorry for the delay.
I’ve been busy with a variety of little things and some not so little.

When I record our sessions, I usually listen to them at work and take minor notes as a kind of memory refresher. It also aids a lot to getting quotes right.
Well this past week I’ve been training someone new at work, meaning no MP3 player for several days.

So that impeded my progress.

And here’s the true reason, I gave a new PC game a try.
It’s called GalCiv II. It’s basically a civilization style game in space.
At least that is what it is supposed to be.
Once again a game company has release a PC game that is not even 50% ready for market. It has too many little bugs and is still quite poor with the interface from the original game.
Heck, I can’t even reload a saved game.
Don’t bother with this so-called game for now.

But anyway, let’s move on to our game.

Dale “warned” us that because it was Saint Patrick’s Day for this session, there would be a whimsical part to the adventure.

I shuddered. Dale’s whimsical parts grate on my cynical nerves. But Dale likes them and everyone else enjoys them, so I just gripe about it and move on.

Our last session ended with us resting via a Rope Trick scroll.

From that point we moved on down the swampy river and came to a construction that reminded us of a giant beaver damn, with an entrance and all.

Sensing a DM plot trap, we prepped up and entered the thing after Mark detected a vague evil throughout the thing.

To make a long story short - we killed a shambling mound, then a trio of hags (but not a covey) and their owlbear pets.

Sean: “Never mess with a druid in the woods.”
Said because Kal’s summoned creatures prevented the last hag from escaping.

Then the place started falling apart and we heard some screams for help. We quickly tracked down the screams and find a poor dryad who had been captured by the hags.

And thus begun the whimsical part of the night.

The dryad was too afraid to return to her tree alone, so she guilt tripped the paladin Mark into helping her.

One moment we were rowing down the river, and then all of a sudden the druid moved us to solid ground.

Kal’s knowledge of nature told him that we were no longer on the southern side of the continent, but rather back up to the northern side.

Although Kal comes from that area, we had a job to do and were on a deadline.

But the selfish dryad couldn’t care less. Once we were there she said thanks and walked away.

We asked about getting back and she said, “Oh there’s a human city not far that way.”

Were I playing a non-good, non-druid, I’d have fried her right there.

We walked to the city and inquired about getting back.

Well the townsfolk knew how to get us back, but they needed help too.

Lo and behold there was some leprechaun that was wreaking havoc with the local populace. He wasn’t killing anyone, just irritating them.

“Boo-freaking-hoo”, thinks Kal.

So we followed the forced-DM plot train.

(Note to Dale: no more plot trains please.)

We found where the leprechaun lived and confronted the little twerp.
Without making a single offensive movement, we talked to him, even while he was trying to get on our nerves.

Well we found out what was wrong was him.
He was a candy-assed-pansy-boy.

Some nymph came by and swam in his pond and he fell in love. But she rightfully wanted nothing to do with him.

We told him we’d fix the problem, and he promised us 20,000 in gold. I think the 20,000 gold promise came first though.

Now if you’re thinking to yourself, “Just nuke the little punk, turn evil, and let the maiden in Darken Moor be sacrificed.” well I didn’t think about it at the time. I was too busy protecting my sanity from the whimsy. Rational thought was not working for me at the time.

So we tracked down the nymph and talked to her. She said she’d have dinner with him the next evening.

Then we went about helping the pathetic little lepper-chaun.
We trained him, had hand signals, summoned cute little birds, cleaned his area of the forest, and basically did every little thing we could think of the make the little twerp presentable to the nymph.

Then it all came down to a die roll.
We let Mike roll it. And we were rewarded with a nice natural 1.

Good thing I had a contingency plan.
When the leprechaun offended her, Kal summoned in a dire wolf to half-heartedly attack her so the leprechaun could save her.

That almost worked, but she saw through it.
But she apparently liked pathetic & desperate 2’ tall, green freaks.

The next day we attended their wedding, took our 20,000gp, and got teleported out of that place with a magic mirror.

Note to self: When Kal turns evil, return to that town, decimate that forest and steal that mirror.

Well one good thing did happen, at level 6 Kal took the leadership feat and now he has a cleric, Jaxil, at his side at nearly all times. He doesn’t like the leprechaun either.

We returned to near where we left, but it was at night, and we were immediately set upon by a will-o-wisp.

One dead will-o-wisp later we decided to see how well we could do in the swamp at night.

Well we can do pretty well apparently, because the hound of the moors and his pack are now dead.

And that was the end of session #8.

And this is the start of session #9.

I was in a much better mood this time around. I think it was the lack of whimsy and that I would be going to Windsor, Canada the following day for some Texas Hold’em while the wife went to a baby-shower in Toledo. Result: I only lost $27 US.

After the hound of the moors and pack (all shadow mastiffs) attacked us, we thought it was a good time to return to Darken Moor.

So we were rowing along and minding our own business. Then we saw something dark in the distance flying right towards us.

It was a juvenile black dragon, out looking to have fun and wreak havoc.

At first we were a little nervous because we don’t fight dragons that often. But we really had nothing to fear. Our combats with Dale’s dragons usually go really well or really bad.

A couple of Scorching Rays and Lightning Bolts from Kineo & Kal sent it packing with less than 10hp.

No treasure or anything from the little bugger either.

I’ve got a bad feeling that it was one of Growlgretch’s brood, and he or she will be coming for us, and soon.

Next we returned to town and spent a few days crafting 5 +1 Vests of Resistance. We need bonuses on our saves. Our reflex saves are in bad need of improvement.

During the evenings we all did our own thing.

Kal did his usual bit of evening fun while working hard during the day.

Culan & Mark went to their temples and healed the sick, offered up money to help the poor. Kal and Kineo made fun of them behind their backs for that.

Culan also had drinks with the Brother’s Grimm at the inn. It was nice and pleasant in a creepy sort of way. Now he’s friends with them in a way. They’ve promised to kill him last and he promised to kill who ever is last in line.

As a joke he changed out the water in their morning wash bin and replaced it with holy water.

And Kineo returned to see Lindepohl and spent some time there learning some dark things. And none of the rest of us knows about it.

Once all of that was said and done, we returned to the swamps with the intent of finding that dragon and putting it down for good.

After a long while we came to a new temple. But it was not a ruined temple of the old gods. It was an abandoned, but immaculate, temple & graveyard of Mahnway, Mark & Culan’s god (I think).

We checked it out closely, while being very nice to everything (read that as – we didn’t plunder it for riches).

All we found was some clay golems guarding an underground area. Otherwise the place was utterly immaculate.

Kal had Jaxil fly up 240’ to get an aerial view, and it looked as good from up there as it did from the ground.

We then left the temple and decided that it might be a good resting point if need be.

Next stop on our journey was an odd group of ruined buildings. Probably the remnants of a small village long abandoned.

Kal, aided by Kineo, was able to get a total of 40 on his Knowledge: Nature skill roll.

Using the knowledge that only a skilled druid would have, Kal was able to determine that the evil plaguing the Darken Moor area dated back much farther than the coming of the hags and their stories.

They are just taking credit for the evil that is about.

So something else, much more powerful than the hags, is causing all of this, and possibly calling evil creatures to the area as well.

Dale: “When the control group went through this area, they had a little trouble.”
Said by Dale prior to our excursion into the land.

We started with the closest building of interest, a collapsed mill.
The main level of the building had nothing of interest, but it did have stairs leading down to the basement.

And in that basement was a hydra, hiding and waiting to rip us a new one.
It won initiative and took Culan to under half of his hit points.
So Kal stepped away and cast Haste on everyone.
Jaxil cast a Prayer spell.
Then Mark and Culan did a collective 60 points of damage, but would have missed had Haste not been cast. (Yes, it’s a shameless bragging of Kal).
Then Kineo cast Scorching Ray, critted with one of them, and did over 65 damage with the spell.

The hydra, even with a regeneration of 10 just couldn’t hold up to that.

So we looted what we could find and checked out the next closest place, an old ruined house.

“Do you like gladiator movies Billy?”
I don’t know why we said that, but it always gets a laugh.
And it’s certainly funnier than anything said in Napoleon Dynamite.

But anyway, Mark detected something evil in the building, so we checked it out nice and slow.

Inside was a Slaughter Wight from the Libris Mortis.

It was dead by round 2. And that ankh of Mark’s saved him from a potential level drain attack.

We looted and moved on again.

Then we met a group of evil thugs searching thoroughly through a big pile of what was once a building.
We tried to be nice to them and give them a chance to lay down their arms and leave.

Yeah, I knew it wouldn’t work, but we can’t just go around nuking first and then asking questions...yet.

Then we were on initiative, and our initiative just wasn’t quick enough.

They were just a group of level 3 punks, but their caster had a Wand of Fireballs (8d6 damage – only 2 charges left).

We got nuked once (and it hurt), and one of us was backstabbed nicely by their rogue, but after that initial round, they were nothing.

We used the teamwork options from the Dungeon Master’s Guide II and they faced a Fireball from Kineo followed by a Flame Strike from Kal.

After that only their rogue still stood, and that’s only because he wasn’t hit by the spells.

He refused to surrender, and paid the price.

So we took their stuff and finished searching through the building rubble that they were searching through.
We found a great big pile of 90,000 coins. Every last one of them copper.

That’s ok; we found a good use for 900gp worth of copper.

We returned to the temple and put 100gp of copper into the offering plate and received a vision from the past.

Long ago was an evil wizard of great power that came to these lands while they were under the sway of the forces of good.

The wizard and the powers of good fought for reasons unknown to us so far.
The wizard was stopped from becoming a lich, but he did become “something else”.
Whether the powers of good were defeated or killed, we don’t know, but they certainly aren’t around now.

But the fouling of the land is caused by the existence of the powerful evil wizard.

And so ended session #9.
It was slightly shorter than usual, but we seemed to have gotten more done.

Dale's Campaign - Session #7

Ya know what? I have seen the 1980’s version of the movie Dune (extended version), the Sci-Fi Channel’s mini-series of Dune, and listened to the audio book of Dune and I still would not have known some key bits of information had I not talked to several people, all gamers, who read the 2000 page book.

Should I cave and actually read the book? No chance in hell of that. I have over a dozen gaming books that I haven’t even cracked open thanks to a lack of time. Then throw in the miniatures I need to paint, the computer gaming I find time for, and the TV just have to watch. I could make time by quitting my job, but I think my wife might have a few choice words for that.

Yeah...I don’t think she’d go for that at all.

Before the game even started, I had some good luck. Taco Bell, at 6pm on a Friday, had no line in the drive-thru. And they even had my order to me in less than 2 minutes to boot. Now if you’re thinking “No big deal, I always have good service there.”, then you are a lucky person my friend. All of the local Taco Bells have earned their Taco Hell nickname because there’s always a line, and it always takes 20 minutes to get your order. Heck I’ve been to one that was so bad that it had two lines; one to place you order and one to pick it up. Each one had a 10-20 minute wait.

So as you can see, in and out of there in under 5 minutes is some kind of record.

During the game, Dale was having one of his poor rolling nights. He wasn’t rolling really bad, but just enough for us to do more with less effort. More stuff going my way.

And best of all, Dale agreed to allow Kal to take alternate class options for both classes after I made it clear to him that Kal was losing more than he was gaining overall and that I had no intention of trying to find a way to exploit anything. Everything was coming up in my favor today.

Brian was out this session, and as usual Aaron played Culan.
Justin could not make it, so Arriseus spent his time guarding our home.

And we had something that we haven’t had in a while, a contested magic item.
In our last session, the mummy we put to rest (killed, murdered, or brought down – pick one) had a really magic item on him – The Ankh of Weapon Deflection.

The ankh is from Gary Gygax’s Necropolis campaign, but shown as an amulet in there, Dale changed it to match the theme of the adventure.
But what the ankh does is allows you to ignore 3 melee hits per day. Not attacks, hits. So before damage is rolled from a hit in melee, even a critical, you can say “I don’t think so” and the hit becomes a miss.

A pretty powerful item we all agree. And we all wanted it. But thanks to the way we split up treasure in the group, it went to our paladin Mark. Kal wanted it, but there were 2 wands in the treasure that were of use to him. Kineo wanted it, but he has spent too much money recently on other things, so he had to settle on a Ring of Protection +1. Culan probably wanted it too, but since Brian wasn’t around, Culan just got a bigger share of the treasure.

So Mark got the ankh. He also had to pay some money back to the group for it to make up for the value difference (it’s a math thing – if you honestly want to know how we do it, I’ll tell you).

Dale also changed the “masterwork canoe” we found before into a magical canoe. Basically it moves a little quicker and I think it is harder to tip over.

All that done, we set about doing some city role-playing.

While Mark and Culan were out at the temple getting his mummy rot removed and Kineo was out trying to buy wands (and struggling with it), Kal had to go see Ian de Magi to warn him of what happened last session.

But first he had to cover his tracks in a way. First off he decided that the tile we received from the Brother’s Grimm was a good object to use scrying spells and locate object spells on to spy on us. So Kal did not even speak of anything important while it was around, including mentioning that it might be a scrying item and then he hid it in the house under any obvious clothes that Kal had worn while talking to the Brothers.

Then he went to the local weaponsmith to make it look like it he wasn’t heading straight to Ian’s. Well the weaponsmith was not making good progress on crafting the masterwork scimitar that Kal had already paid him for. That’s 165gp down the drain.

And finally Kal went to see Ian de Magi. He was not happy to say the least, but with Kal’s maxxed out ranks in diplomacy, it was smoothed over. And to not risk doing anymore damage, Kal chose not to attempt to use Ian as a spell or magic item shop. But he did find out that Ian and Lindepohl might possibly be related in some way.

I’m not sure what that means exactly to the campaign other than a little color though. So far we know that Ian was an exalted fellow and we think that Lindepohl is probably a vile kind of fellow. And I mean “vile” as in Book of Vile Darkness.

The remainder Culan was doing his standard clerical meditation and such. Kal decided to use the rest of his day to scribe a scroll for the group, basically to get some healing spells in scroll form for an emergency. Mark decided to chat with some religious folk and nearly let it slip what our goals were in this town – but he did find out that we only had 4 weeks remaining to save the local maiden. And Kineo used his night and evening to gather information...and other things.

He spent the evening going from tavern to tavern and inn to inn to gather some various bits of information to help us out in our goal.

He didn’t do that well for a long time, but was able to get a couple of things:

- There is a black dragon that guards the delta of the river we use and its name is Growlgretch. Luckily we haven’t met him yet, but we probably will have to deal with him at some point.
- You can kill the hags by pouring salt on them. We think that one is BS. Well unless those hags are transformed slugs.

Then Kineo got himself a girlfriend.
And here are her stats in the order they were rolled (using the 4d6 drop the lowest method):
Charisma = 6 (eek!)
Intelligence = 8 (haha!)
Wisdom = 8 (Dale’s curse hurts Aaron the most tonight)
Dexterity = 10
Constitution = 13 (That’s probably her most important score at this point)
Strength = 13 (Hah! She’s stronger than Kineo)
With rolls like that Dale named her Mirthel and she had a curiosity about elves.

And since Kineo is a warmage/ROGUE he decided that he was going to use her for things like alibis and such.

And without saying anything “icky” the night ended.

All of us divine spellcasters had yet another dream that basically said that we were doing good deeds and we then had access to non-PHB spells.

Well all of us except for Mark. His dream was a little “fuzzy”. He only has a wisdom score of 10, so spellcasting is not much for him. And also his deity wanted to let him know that he is walking a fine line when dealing with the Brother’s Grimm.

Now if you’re thinking that’s a bit harsh. I don’t agree. It’s just a warning. Paladin’s are an often argued about class when it comes to everyone’s concept of how a paladin should act. Giving a single warning is much more effective at pointing out the line to the players than just dropping the bomb on the player.

And remember I’ve heard about and seen a lot of bad paladins. The worst so far is a 25+ year old woman who played a paladin that thought torturing a kobold was acceptable behavior. When every other player called her on that, she claimed that she was being singled out because she was a woman. And since her boyfriend was the DM, nothing happened. I’m glad I wasn’t part of that mess. Games like that last a month or less after something like that happens.

But anyway, back to the game.

The next morning Kineo decided to go meet the reportedly evil Lindepohl. He brought with him the same 2 scrolls we had shown the Brother’s Grimm. And he was hoping to learn how to decipher the hieroglyphs on the ancient ruins.

Was he evil? Oh he sure was. He was very evil, very powerful, and about to lose the last of his sanity. Heck his goblin sorcerer was pretty danged evil too and could probably wipe us out.

Lindepohl kind of acted like an evil little Star Trek geek too. You know the kind. And if you don’t, wow, you’ve led a pretty easy gamer life.

So 200gp of the group’s money (without group knowledge) later, Kineo had a little book that taught the basics reading the language of the ancients.

Of course the book just reeked of evil and was bound in human skin, but hey Kineo received a free point in his decipher script skill. Of course he suffered a -1 to all of his saving throws for the next day or two and probably had a general icky feeling.

He also told Lindepohl (read as “sucking up to”) that the Brother’s Grimm mentioned taking on Lindepohl. Lindepohl just laughed and said that they weren’t even of name yet.

For those of you who are too young, “name level” is gained by most classes at level 9. That could be some vital information for us later.

Kineo left Lindepohl to his creepiness and hid the book at his new girlfriend’s place rather than leave it at ours; a pretty smart move in my opinion.

Kineo met us at the river and we all got in our boat, and headed back down the river in the hopes of finding more information about the hags, the hound of the moor, and the gray render.

A couple of hours into it, in an area we had been through before, a manticore (with a single level of bard) harassed us. We pulled our canoe over to land and talked with it.

“Go no further. Turn around. I exact a toll.”

“You weren’t here before. We’ve been this way before.”

“Consider that your one freebie.”

“What toll do you seek?”

“I think 100 gold in a toll.”

“What do we get for that?”

“Nothing.”

Then we mentioned something about the mafia not being as bad as that and rolled initiative.

This combat was mostly done by the casters as Culan could only use buff spells, Mark had no spells or bow, and none of us could fly.
Kineo cast his standard damage spells (and critted with an acid arrow) and Kal summoned a Celestial Hippogriff (who got a crit on his first attack and rolled max damage) and a few other minor spells.

Kineo, Kal, and Kal’s summoned hippogriff were able to keep the thing off-balance and brought it down in 4 rounds.

Then we were back on our way and moving farther down the river than we’d ever been before.

And once again we found another ruins of the ancient civilization.

Mark’s Detect Evil radar just showed the entire place as evil and desecrated.

And Kineo recognized the symbols on the entrance to them as the same on his evil book. They were the symbols of the evil god Set.

We entered the ruins and walked down the stairs to a large area that was once again bigger on the inside than on the outside and had a fountain in the center of the room with markings of Set on it.

We got lucky and didn’t see any giant salt and pepper shakers threatening to exterminate us. But there were 10 vargouilles hiding at the top of the ceiling.

And in a reversal of the previous combat, Kineo and Kal were worthless while Mark and Culan saved the day.

The special fear shriek attacks required each of us to make 10 will saves vs. DC12. According to the odds Kal and Kineo should have failed 3 times. Kal failed 3 times, Kineo failed once. Culan made all of his thanks to Mark’s paladin abilities. And of course Mark was not even affected.

So Kal and Kineo cowered in terror while Culan and Mark turned the vargouilles into evil piles of hamburger.

The rest of the dungeon was handily cleaned out by us. The 3 wights and 4 shadows gave us some trouble, especially the ankh-avoided crit from the shadows on Mark, but we were still quite full on spells after we made sure the place was empty.

Next Kineo decided to decipher the words on the fountain in the main room and an altar we found in the wraith room.

A natural twenty allowed Kineo to read the simple script: “Profane not the altar of Set.”

So we handed Kineo some holy water to use to profane the altar of Set. He was rewarded with a Flame Strike to the head. One failed save, 9d6 damage, and a few healing spells later we checked out the damage; the altar was cracked and its evil was gone.

Next we went to the fountain and repeated the action, but with a few buff spells. Another failed save, 9d6 damage, and some more healing spells later and the evil taint of the place was gone.

But we decided not to rest there just in case. Besides we were still good for a fight or two.

So we got back in our boat and moved further down the river.

Then a large clump of rotted vegetation floated towards our canoe. Although we tried to avoid it, it followed us and combat with a tendriculos began.

(For you reference the order in the boat from front to back was Mark, Culan, Kineo, & Kal.)

Round 1:
Kal cast Levitate.
The tendriculos attacks Mark and hits once for 9 damage.
Culan casts Shield of Faith on Mark.
Mark attacks and misses.
Kineo casts Melf’s Acid Arrow at it.

Round 2:
Kal casts Monster Summoning III and summons up 2 fiendish medium sharks. The sharks hit but their damage isn’t enough to beat the things regeneration of 10.
The tendriculos hits Mark once again for 12 more damage.
Culan casts a healing spell on Mark
Mark gets a solid hit for 17 points of damage.
Kineo hits with a Lesser Acid Orb spell and does some residual damage from the Melf’s Acid Arrow.

Round 3:
Kal, seeing that acid was damaging the thing, uses his Wand of Melf’s Acid Arrow and hits it. The sharks do their best to keep the things regeneration to a minimum.
Tendriculos: “Time to eat a paladin”. It crits once and hits once so the ankh is used to avoid the crit. The regular hit does 10 damage.
Culan thought about enlarging the paladin – but changed his mind once we reminded Aaron that we’re in a boat meant for medium people.
Mark missed.
Kineo cast another Lesser Acid Orb.

Round 4:
Kal used the wand again and did some residual damage from the previous wand hit. Both of the sharks miss.
The tendriculos hits Mark yet again for 12 more points of damage.
Culan, wanting to save spells, uses the Wand of Vigor on Mark.
Mark takes a wild swing with full power attack and misses.
Kineo casts yet another Lesser Acid Orb.

Round 5:
Kal gets double residual damage from two acid arrows. Thinking the thing is almost done in; he casts Snake’s Swiftness on Mark – who then misses again. Both sharks miss
The tendriculos misses. It’s Mark’s lucky day too.
Culan heals Mark some more.
Mark finally hits with a fully power attack and does 26 damage to it and it drops.

That fight drained us quite a bit more than we were comfortable with, and it was getting late.
So we used one of our “get out of jail free” scrolls of Rope Trick (level 9 caster) to rest for 9 hours free of danger.
Mark watched the normal world for a couple of hours before resting just to see what is out there since we don’t go out into the swamp at night.
He saw a floating ball of light (probably a will-o’-the-wisp), a ghostly human in armor with a battleaxe dashing to and froe while yelling something (possibly the warrior in the stories we heard about), and a whole pack of evil looking hounds with a very large one leading it (probably the hound of the moors).

That all done, we stopped for the evening.

Ahh, Level 5

Not much has really gone on this week amongst the group.

We made level 5 last week.
In my opinion, that's where the game begins to open up.

At level 1 you're too fragile. Your hit points are low and your equipment is limited. Maneuvering in combat simply to get a flanking bonus is almost required.
The differences in the classes aren’t quite as apparent either. Yeah they all have different skills and abilities, but if you blink you won't know whether it's the cleric or the druid casting Cure Light Wounds. And when everyone has a BAB of +0 or +1, melee is fun for all...until you get hit anyway.
Usually if I'm running a game, I will probably have the players skip this level.

At level 3 you usually have a good feel for the how your DM is running the world and your PC is a little stronger. The fragility is not gone entirely, but it's certainly better than before.

But at level 5 the fragility is gone and the differences in the classes become more apparent. Casters have a variety of spell slots to use. Warrior-types can take damage and deal it. And most class abilities are available to your PCs.

At level 5 for a druid, he gets his first taste of Wild Shape. Now it's not all that powerful now, but from everything I've heard and read - a properly buffed up druid using Wild Shape is as nasty in melee as the front-line fighters.

But I don't want to have to deal with that.
Kal is summoning druid and a summoning wizard.
Getting into melee combat pretty much removes the usefulness of his summoning.

So I looked into seeing what other options there were.
Aaron found the alternate druid in the Unearthed Arcana, and I found some conjurer wizard alternative options.

The druid one is not bad - you lose your Wild Shape abilities, but you gain the monk's speed and AC bonuses and the ranger's tracking and favored enemy abilities.
That is more than fair. In fact, from what I've heard about level 12 druids turning into dire bears and laying waste to the combat field, it's probably a bit of a loss.

But Dale doesn't like the conjurer alternate choices; you lose the ability to summon a familiar and you gain the ability to cast Summon Monster spells (not Summon Nature's Ally spells) in only 1 standard action rather than 1 round.

So what I'd be doing is dumping an unused class ability in favor of summoning a wizard creature in a single round rather than taking the span of 2 rounds to cast the same spell.

Dale is not sure that the cost of the familiar is worth the gain.

So I was thinking of what potential abuses there could be.
Only two came up. One is nice, but not abusive. And the other is not even close to abusive, and in fact is rather dumb.

The nice is that Kal would be able to finish casting 2 summon spells in the same round. On round 1 he casts a druid summon spell and then on round 2 he finishes the druid spell at the start of the round and then casts his wizard summon spell. All monsters from both spells appear and act on that round.
Now that seems powerful until you realize that Kal was doing nothing but casting that first round and received nothing for it.

And the dumb idea is that you could then quicken the summon spell. So you could conceivably get 4 summon spells off in 2 rounds.
On round 1 you cast a quickened wizard summon spell and a regular druid summon spell. Then on round 2, you finish the druid spell, cast a regular wizard summon spell, and then you cast another quickened wizard summon spell.
The result, if you're casting only level 9 spells:
1 Summon Nature's Ally IX
1 Summon Monster IX
2 Summon Monster V

The level 9 one looks powerful, but if you think about it, the 2 creatures you summon into a fight that also needs creatures from level 9 summoning spells, they won't live more than a round or two.
They would only be level 9 fodders for the pit fiend you're fighting.
I can think of a lot of better uses for your level 9 spells.

So I think it's a fair trade to give up:
- Familiar
- All Wild Shapes
In order to get:
- Monk AC bonus
- Monk Speed
- Ranger Tracking
- Ranger Favored Enemies
- Summon Monster spells take only a standard action.

Seems pretty fair to me.
Now I get to see tonight if Dale has given his stamp of approval to it.

I have no idea what is in store for the game tonight.
We're back in town, and the only things on our campaign "To do" list is to find a gray render and some hags and do them in.

Oh, and my wife wanted me to mention her on the blog.
So I just did.

Now I'm off to buy some chocolates. Because once she reads that, I'm in trouble.

Dale's Campaign - Session #6

Ok, I’m going to make a feeble attempt at making this short.

No Brian this session, so Aaron played Culan.
We later teased Brian that Culan became very brave that session, almost recklessly so.

We are starting to toss around the idea of “if you’re not here, neither is your PC”. But Dale isn’t going for that.
I don’t have a problem with it really. If there’s a TPK with this group, I doubt it will be caused by 1 less target.

And, for two sessions in a row Justin showed up. And he brought his usual sound-bite comments.

Mike returned as well, and we found out his career; a psychiatrist.
Sean: “You’re a doctor?”
Mike: “Yeah, I’m a psychiatrist.”
Justin: “Really? I’m a bartender. It’s kind of the same thing.”
[Laughs]

And later, while discussing night watches and how much sleep is needed:
Dale: “I used to play D&D until 3am and have to sing the next morning at 7:30 mass.”
Justin: “ Wow, what a wild man you are. Mother lock up your daughters. A wild man is on the prowl.”

Anyway, we last left our group when they rested inside the tower of the forest mage Llewellyn.

We started from there and while we walking 20’ to our swamp raft, that gargoyle attacked us. Oh, and thanks to the DM scaling the encounter, that gargoyle became 3.

Kal was in a bad position. He was in the back of the party, meaning closest to gargoyles, he had no protective spells cast yet, and he was last (or near last) on the initiative stack.

The gargoyles were handily taken out, but Kal took a lot of scratches from a very persistent gargoyle. He only had 3hp remaining before it was all over with.

After we healed up, we decided to move on through the swamp for a couple of hours, but we chose not to travel too far to make sure we’re not stuck in the swamplands at dark for fear of what lurks out there at night.

By the time the night was over, our Wand of Cure Light Wounds was drained of it last charges. Not bad for a 750gp item.

As we traveled along the swampy river we find a small island with 4 wizard looking types, an armored troll, a rogue picking a lock to an ancient-looking, solid-gold door, and a small building that said door was attached to.

They all registered big evil. Well not the door or building.

Since an armored troll alone could probably wipe us out, we chose to parlay with them. That’s one of those silly things we have about our PCs, we like them not to die.

Their spokesman was very nice and slimy. Even the words he spoke felt like greasy. But no, he wasn’t an aristocrat NPC, he was an enchanter type.

We found out that these four “Brothers Grimm” had hired the rogue, Gebb, to pick the lock on the door. And that they were searching through ancient buildings and talked of “old gods”.

So Kal mentioned something about pictures they’ve seen with man bodies and animal heads.

That got their attentions.

We stood on the raft most of the time until mentioning the gods, then we stopped and got off the raft.

We showed them a couple of the scrolls along that had the pictographs/hieroglyphs. That bought us some more information and some potential aid when we allowed them to copy the scrolls.

Kal also mentioned Lindepohl and Ian de Magi.
They said that they have had dealings with Lindepohl.
But they also whispered they could possibly take on Ian to get the stuff from him that we sold to him.

They told us that this continent use to be part of another larger continent. But it broke off and floated here. And the original continent had a very powerful civilization, whose gods had the bodies of men, but the heads of animals (Egyptian-themed of course).

One of the civilization’s inventions was true-gold.
We knew that true-silver is more commonly known as mithril. But we had never heard of true-gold. They told as that it is so strong that spells bounce right off of it.

They let us know that there were signs of this civilization in many hidden places. You just had to know what signs to look for.
The signs are of things that should not be, like golden sand.

Since we were so nice to them, they gave us a magical tile that could summon them to us for a one time aid.

These guys were pretty spazzy, especially when ancient civilization stuff came up.

They let us know that there were several of these ruins scattered throughout the area, we but had to look for them in the right places. And they wanted us to let them know if we found any ancient scrolls, especially spell scrolls. They’d gladly buy them from us.

Crisis of alignment vs. survival encounter was worth quite a bit of XP. We just have to warn Ian de Magi that the Brothers Grimm know we sold him some ancient civilization magic.

And we found a ruins not much later.

The ruins we found looked like it was about to fall over, but we entered anyway.

Inside is a statue of a woman, who we later found out to be a statue of an ancient goddess, named Isis. We found that out thanks to a comprehend languages spell on a scroll that Kineo had and he read a book with it.

The floor had several very nice tiles on the floor and the statue stated that we had to pay homage to Isis to move through.

It also told us a story about a king and his problems. He had yet to have children, so he sacrificed his wives to Isis. In addition to that not helping you get babies, it ticked off Isis. So she cursed him.
Guess where that left us.

It took us a long time that we had to spell out Isis on particular tiles, and if you stepped on the wrong tile all of your current work had to be started over and you got blasted with 8d6 damage from a Flame Strike. It was a very painful learning process.

Once we figured that out, the door beyond opened.

In the next room is a ziggurat that goes up higher than we are below ground – so we believe ourselves to be in an extra-dimensional space.

And that was odd because I don’t remember entering a blue British police box.

And of course there was something in there waiting to feed on us – harpies 2 of them.
All of us except Kineo failed at least one of the charm saves.
Luckily Kineo was able to save us from them by using his wand of lightning bolts and frying one them – then the other had a limited life span remaining.

We found a masterwork canoe. Odd thing to be near a ziggurat, but hey, it’s better than a raft.

The next room required us to take out a yuan-ti caster whose life-span was shorter than my attention-span.

Then a mummy (the king in the story) joined us in combat as the yuan-ti bought it.

He had a magic item that allowed him to avoid melee damage, so it took us longer to bring him down.
He had the Mark the paladin down to 0hp and gave him mummy rot.
Mark used his lay on hands on the mummy.
This brought Mark to -1hp, but it also dropped the mummy.

It was late so we had to spend the night in the ruins. The next morning we immediately headed back to town to get Mark some help.

Session end.

The story behind Rant Number Three

"Have you ever taken the time to get a group of people together to game then had the game you planned to run taken away from you?
It happened to me years ago. And I’m still a little irritated by it.
That same person also stole several of my game ideas.
I don’t mind people using my ideas, but give me credit for it. And do it without slamming me personally first.
Want to know more about that story? Ask and I shall tell."

Well someone asked, so here is the story.

In high school I went through the trouble of getting a bunch of the geeks I knew to give D&D and/or our tiny group a chance.
It didn't too much effort, but I was the only one putting forth the effort.

The only thing I didn't have was a place to run the game. That's where "Jack" comes in. We almost always played at his place because it was almost perfect for the high school gamer needs.

Because I had to work, I could only run once every other week.

Jack said that was ok, he'd run them through the Dragonlance modules on the other weeks.
Silly little me thought that was a good idea.

So we all got together and ran my first game. Everyone said they had fun and I was happy and prepared for what I would hope would be a fun campaign.

The following week I worked, and Jack ran DL1, the first module of Dragonlance.

Then on Monday I was told (by Jack) that they all liked the DL game more, so my game was out but I was welcome to join in "their" DL game.

And of course, that game lasted 3 or 4 whole weeks. Which was sadly, standard back then.

Now I know what you're probably thinking; "They liked the DL game more so why shouldn't they play that one over yours?"
And that is perfectly logical thinking if you're on the outside looking in.
But Jack was a guy who knew how to convince gamers to agree with him. And if you didn't agree, he'd convince everyone else and then have them start on you.

And although I was stubborn, debate was not my strong suit (my charisma is 6 on a good day).

Plus this same fellow had done the following:
- Bought modules and read them so he'd know everything in the module. I can name 3 modules he bought doing this.
- When I was running games, he knew where I kept my GM notes and would sneak into my backpack, find my notes, read them, and then tell everyone what I planned to do.
- I would not game with certain people. But he would invite those people to games, knowing I would be ticked. The result - I stopped showing and the people he invited ruined the game and it ended.
- He used some of my gaming ideas, and then ridiculed the way I did them. I recently found out that he has a website where he mentions me by name and not in a good way.

Yeah I know that this entry probably seems a little childish, but I'm looking at it as more of cathartic thing.

Besides, those years helped with the most important gaming rules of all:
- Don't risk losing a good player for an unknown player if that good player doesn't want the unknown player around.
- Everyone at the game table must be friends, or at least friendly. If players A & B can't get along, no one is going to have fun.
- And of course, "It's a game. Have fun!"

And on that note, tonight should be fun.

Last week we skipped our usual session to attend an ENWorld gameday.

I played in two games.

The first I originally hadn't intended to play in, but I joined in when I found out that there were not going to be any "pick-up" games.
So I made an 8th level rogue in about 1/2 an hour, and played in an updated version of "Expedition to Barrier Peaks".
My guy had a simple concept; "Pain is bad - let others get hurt".
And that concept worked too. Through several combats, I took not a single point of damage and dished out quite a bit with some of the "eggs" we found (grenades).
All six of us players had a good time.

The second game had Dale, Brian, Aaron, and I in it with three other players.
The game's description was basically that everyone was going to be a dwarf and we had to go stop a necromancer from raising our dwarven brethren from our graveyard.
We had all decided to sign up for that game and then create characters together to get them to work as a team.
We originally thought it would have been fun and funny for all four of us to bring in a dwarven cleric.
But we decided to go with something we liked from the WLD; 1 melee freak (me), 1 sorcerer (Dale), and 2 clerics (Aaron & Brian).
Now here's the funny part - the other 3 players made dwarven clerics as well. So had we gone with our original idea, there would have been 7 dwarven clerics!
My dwarven fighter(6)/barbarian(2) was happy - he had 5 walking bandaids around him!

It was a good time.