Ravenloft #11
I am getting pretty sick of Strahd.
I made that point to Dale during Session #10.
But now I think the issue is that we’ve seen Strahd way too often.
Every time we do something that hurts him, he’s there within moments. And Dale’s logic is impeccable; “You’re trying to hurt him, and he’s not going to sit on his ass while you’re ruining his plans.”
I agree with that logic 100%, but it has taken away from the game a bit on a suspense level. Kind of like how the scary monster in horror movies is pretty scary, until you see the monster. The creature was scarier in your mind than when you actually saw it because your imagination saw much more than what your eyes did.
Seeing Strahd show up to a fight should make our PC’s quake in their boots. And that did happen, the first time or two. Then we started making contingency plans for when Strahd showed up, and the horror lessened.
When we fought him in the Mountain Fane, we would have won had he not teleported away because we had used the terrain to our advantage. The other two terrains gave him the advantage.
That brings us to this session.
We last stopped with Strahd saying thanks for killing the “Shapeless Skin” (or whatever it was named).
For this session Mina was played by Aaron. Aaron’s new PC is named Numen, and he has a rat familiar, Alistair Snirdley.
Strahd told us that we had an option, leave the town unimpeded or face destruction.
I’m sure you can guess what our response was.
Even without the power of the fanes to boost him, Strahd was still pretty powerful. But we had not lost much of our resources in the fights we had so far. Well Tenbeers and Gortag were still under the Touch of Idiocy effects, but it’s not like those two really need a brain.
(Tenbeers had an intelligence of three and Gortag had a one, so Tenbeers was still normally playable while I put Gortag under a fight or flight setup where he looked to those he recognized as friends to guide his actions – Mina and Tenbeers.)
The disadvantage of making a new PC is that you start with less XP. But the bonus is that you get to design him with some knowledge about the game so far. In this case Aaron created Numen with an eye towards hurting Strahd by dispelling his many magicks.
Numen had Arcane Sight active when Strahd came to say hi, so he knew what we were facing. Within a few rounds Numen had removed all but one of Strahd’s buffs (a minor teleporting spell that allows him to jump 30’ per round as a move action) and had removed Gortag’s pesky intelligence problem.
But it did cost Numen his familiar, who blew up when Numen had to sacrifice him with a Bonded Familiar feat when Aaron botched a save versus a Lightning Bolt which would have killed him.
In the end we actually put Strahd in the negatives. Then we followed his slow moving gaseous form as it headed back to his sanctum (I presume) to regenerate.
We were careful not to follow too blindly for fear of being led into a trap.
That didn’t matter as he just led us to a wall with a small hole in it.
Well our undead hunter, Hannibal, who has many points in Knowledge – Religion, told us that it would take Strahd and hour to reform and haunt us again. So we took this as an opportunity to freely search the premises.
We searched around, found some spiral stairs up, took them to the next flight (hoping to find the church) and found nothing but bare wall (out of game we knew there were secret doors, but the lack of a good searcher bit us on that). So we took the next flight up which led us to the parapets and other rooms.
In there we found an ancient wedding cake that was mostly dust now, with only a groom at the top. And we found Gertruda after fighting a minor apparition undead for half a round.
She had been romantically swept off her feet by the count and was thoroughly enamored (possibly charmed) with him. But we convinced her to come back to town with us because her mother missed her.
We dropped her off at her mom’s, which in retrospect might have been a bad idea had she been turned into a vamp…
On our way back to the castle Hannibal really wanted Gortag’s cloak (of charisma +2) that Gortag took from Brian’s previous PC after Gortag spent the night in the water on the watch for Strahd.
Now I understand the need to optimize characters, but I have issues with just handing over equipment from PC X just because PC Y would get better use from it. On a role-playing level this is PC X’s stuff. He earned it. So if PC Y wants it, the player of PC Y should give a good role-playing reason why.
I tortured Brian for a good ten minutes before he finally came up with a role-playing reason. He kept coming up with mechanical and efficiency reasons, but it wasn’t until he finally pulled the brother card (Hannibal is Deimos’s brother) that Gortag handed the cloak over.
Oh well, back to a 7 charisma.
Once we were back to the castle we resumed looking up near where we found Gertruda. We fought a group of wights that didn’t last a round, and received some help from an incorporeal person from the Order of the Raven.
She (I think) told us that the temple was on the first floor, only one doorway from where we entered (doh!).
Inside we found a dead cleric, the crystalline blade of the sun sword, and a pure-silver raven idol.
While everyone was investigating the idol, Gortag pocketed the blade and the mace off the dead cleric (of an evil god).
We stopped there.
Gortag is minus one cloak, but he’s plus an unholy mace +2, and a big piece of a good artifact.
Yay Gortag!
Next week he dies because I said that.
I made that point to Dale during Session #10.
But now I think the issue is that we’ve seen Strahd way too often.
Every time we do something that hurts him, he’s there within moments. And Dale’s logic is impeccable; “You’re trying to hurt him, and he’s not going to sit on his ass while you’re ruining his plans.”
I agree with that logic 100%, but it has taken away from the game a bit on a suspense level. Kind of like how the scary monster in horror movies is pretty scary, until you see the monster. The creature was scarier in your mind than when you actually saw it because your imagination saw much more than what your eyes did.
Seeing Strahd show up to a fight should make our PC’s quake in their boots. And that did happen, the first time or two. Then we started making contingency plans for when Strahd showed up, and the horror lessened.
When we fought him in the Mountain Fane, we would have won had he not teleported away because we had used the terrain to our advantage. The other two terrains gave him the advantage.
That brings us to this session.
We last stopped with Strahd saying thanks for killing the “Shapeless Skin” (or whatever it was named).
For this session Mina was played by Aaron. Aaron’s new PC is named Numen, and he has a rat familiar, Alistair Snirdley.
Strahd told us that we had an option, leave the town unimpeded or face destruction.
I’m sure you can guess what our response was.
Even without the power of the fanes to boost him, Strahd was still pretty powerful. But we had not lost much of our resources in the fights we had so far. Well Tenbeers and Gortag were still under the Touch of Idiocy effects, but it’s not like those two really need a brain.
(Tenbeers had an intelligence of three and Gortag had a one, so Tenbeers was still normally playable while I put Gortag under a fight or flight setup where he looked to those he recognized as friends to guide his actions – Mina and Tenbeers.)
The disadvantage of making a new PC is that you start with less XP. But the bonus is that you get to design him with some knowledge about the game so far. In this case Aaron created Numen with an eye towards hurting Strahd by dispelling his many magicks.
Numen had Arcane Sight active when Strahd came to say hi, so he knew what we were facing. Within a few rounds Numen had removed all but one of Strahd’s buffs (a minor teleporting spell that allows him to jump 30’ per round as a move action) and had removed Gortag’s pesky intelligence problem.
But it did cost Numen his familiar, who blew up when Numen had to sacrifice him with a Bonded Familiar feat when Aaron botched a save versus a Lightning Bolt which would have killed him.
In the end we actually put Strahd in the negatives. Then we followed his slow moving gaseous form as it headed back to his sanctum (I presume) to regenerate.
We were careful not to follow too blindly for fear of being led into a trap.
That didn’t matter as he just led us to a wall with a small hole in it.
Well our undead hunter, Hannibal, who has many points in Knowledge – Religion, told us that it would take Strahd and hour to reform and haunt us again. So we took this as an opportunity to freely search the premises.
We searched around, found some spiral stairs up, took them to the next flight (hoping to find the church) and found nothing but bare wall (out of game we knew there were secret doors, but the lack of a good searcher bit us on that). So we took the next flight up which led us to the parapets and other rooms.
In there we found an ancient wedding cake that was mostly dust now, with only a groom at the top. And we found Gertruda after fighting a minor apparition undead for half a round.
She had been romantically swept off her feet by the count and was thoroughly enamored (possibly charmed) with him. But we convinced her to come back to town with us because her mother missed her.
We dropped her off at her mom’s, which in retrospect might have been a bad idea had she been turned into a vamp…
On our way back to the castle Hannibal really wanted Gortag’s cloak (of charisma +2) that Gortag took from Brian’s previous PC after Gortag spent the night in the water on the watch for Strahd.
Now I understand the need to optimize characters, but I have issues with just handing over equipment from PC X just because PC Y would get better use from it. On a role-playing level this is PC X’s stuff. He earned it. So if PC Y wants it, the player of PC Y should give a good role-playing reason why.
I tortured Brian for a good ten minutes before he finally came up with a role-playing reason. He kept coming up with mechanical and efficiency reasons, but it wasn’t until he finally pulled the brother card (Hannibal is Deimos’s brother) that Gortag handed the cloak over.
Oh well, back to a 7 charisma.
Once we were back to the castle we resumed looking up near where we found Gertruda. We fought a group of wights that didn’t last a round, and received some help from an incorporeal person from the Order of the Raven.
She (I think) told us that the temple was on the first floor, only one doorway from where we entered (doh!).
Inside we found a dead cleric, the crystalline blade of the sun sword, and a pure-silver raven idol.
While everyone was investigating the idol, Gortag pocketed the blade and the mace off the dead cleric (of an evil god).
We stopped there.
Gortag is minus one cloak, but he’s plus an unholy mace +2, and a big piece of a good artifact.
Yay Gortag!
Next week he dies because I said that.
posted by BlueBlackRed at 10:37 PM
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