Cormyr #1

Well this week Brian was able to make it, though next week he’s out again from some Latin thing, as are Dale and Joy who have some Celtic band they want to see. So sadly there is no game next week.

But we had a decent time this first session of Cormyr: The Tearing of the Weave.

Note: This is all from memory as I haven’t had an opportunity to listen to the recording of the session, so most names and minor happenings have been forgotten.

In case you haven’t read anything about the “shadow weave” in the Forgotten Realms Campaign Setting, it is basically an alternate source of magic created by the evil goddess Shar in order to hurt Mystra, the goddess of magic. And from what I guess this module, or set of modules, is based around that, though our PC’s aren’t supposed to know about it.

Our group is an already formed band of adventurers that have just entered a Cormyrian city on the Sembia border to sell some tomes we had found on our last adventure.

Our current cast (not including Justin because he had to cancel):

Farisilian or Faris (me): A moon elf rogue from Evermeet, chaotic good with chaotic greedy tendencies. His main deity is Tymora, the goddess of luck, but when he’s about to do something greedy he says a little prayer to Mask. He dual-wields (though not well) a couple of masterwork silver daggers.

Domitius or Dom (Aaron): A neutrally-aligned moon elf beguiler. He and Faris usually teamwork doors prior to barging into a room. Having never really seen a beguiler in action before, he currently appears to be a cross between a rogue and an illusionist.

Saeri or Sorry (Joy): Saeri (pronounced sare’-ee) earned her nickname by being critted or near-critted multiple times in the same battle. Other than that she is a wood elf bow-ranger, and potentially our only healer (but never in combat, unless it’s for herself). Her alignment is chaotic good.

Mousious or Mouse (Dale): A star elf warlock, who is also chaotic good. He lives in constant fear that we’ll meet up with someone who can bounce him off this plane as star elves aren’t from the prime material plane.

When Justin plays, he is either going to play a monk or a druid. Either class may not be all that enjoyable with our group. If he plays a monk, then he’ll be the group’s only melee tank, and without a healer. If he plays a druid, he’ll either be summoning creatures as temporary targets, or he’ll be healing until he can shape change. I doubt either will be all that interesting to him.

When it comes to combat, our preferred method is surprise and shadow. None of us can handle damage long term, so we have to make the best we can of the first round of combat. Faris needs to win imitative or flank to get his needed sneak attack damage. Dom throws up cover, charm targets, or otherwise incapacitates our enemies. And Saeri and Mouse use their ranged attacks to take out other ranged attackers, leaders, or spell casters. So far it has worked pretty well, but I believe we’re fragile enough that a small series of bad rolls can put us in TPK territory. If all of us rolled low on initiative, then we are pretty exposed.

The first half of the night was exclusively role-playing, as most first sessions tend to be that way.

We did some scouting around town, looking for plot hooks, er…I mean someone to sell our books to.

In no particular order we found:

- A priest of Mystra who said that there was something “off” about the new temple to Mystra in the northern area of town. First off, no one ever told him it was being built, and he lives in a neighboring city. We he visited the temple and requested to see the inner area, they denied him. Then a sixth-sense told him to run from the place. When he did, they gave chase rather than just let him leave.
- The leading priest at the city’s church of Silvanus was convinced something wrong was going on inside the new temple of Mystra. He had no proof other than the poor treatment they gave him when he visited the church.
- We found a bookseller, but he was not around. He distraught wife said he had gone missing. She thought she heard some unusual noises early one morning and ever since then her husband hasn’t been around. We searched the area and found signs of a scuffle and a note about some kind of ritual of mysteries. We asked if she had reported this to the local purple dragons (police equivalent); she had but they were too busy to investigate.

Obviously since everything was pointing to the new temple of Mystra, we knew we had to check it out. When we heard that there were more people entering than leaving, but only enough food for about 15 people going in, we knew it was an evil temple in disguise, possibly of Bane, Cyric, Mask, or …Shar.

We casually entered the temple under the guise of buying magic items and getting information about the temple itself.

It didn’t take long for things to go downhill of course.

We mentioned the priest of Mystra who ran from the temple and he gave his version of the story, which we didn’t believe was true.

He had no good answer for how people were disappearing.

And he kept saying that the only way to get information about the ritual of mysteries was to actually go through with the ritual, and pay 25gp.

I forget whether Dom attempted to cast Charm Person on the priest, or if Faris just stabbed the guy, but nonetheless, combat began.

The priest lived long enough to shout for help.
Dom threw up an Obscuring Mist, which helped protect from the two archers on the walls of the outer courtyard.
But not before Saeri got critted from a bowshot from one, so her first round action was to drink a healing potion. Through the rest of the night she was critted once more, and nearly critted twice more.
Between the Faris’s backstabs and Mouse’s eldritch blast, the priest didn’t last the round.

The following round Dom searched the priest while combat was still going. That set the precedent for the rest of the night it appears as all of us took opportunities during combat to steal from the group loot by searching downed bodies or swiping money from collection altars.

The combat lasted a few rounds, but other than the priest we dropped on round one, none of our other targets had more than 8 hit points.

We searched and cleaned out all of the adjacent rooms, leaving a large pair of barred doors leading to the inner courtyard of the temple.

Several rounds of eldritch blasting the center of the two doors gave us access to the area, and allowed those on the inside to prepare.

But our high initiative helped us.

There were a half dozen more guards and a lead priest as targets.

Dom incapacitated two of the guards with a Color Spray spell.
Saeri shot at the lead priest with her bow and Mouse put him on the defensive for the rest of the combat by always having a spider swarm summoned on top of him.
Faris spent his time playing mop up with the guards while everyone else mainly focused on taking down the lead priest.

Afterwards we looted and searched the nearby rooms, including saving a few dimwitted commoners preparing to go through the rite of mysteries (or whatever it’s called).

We had one more barred door to go through, and we did, only to be led to a shadowy room that lead deeper into the mountain the temple was built out from. We were attacked by a couple of shadowy-skinned human, but that combat didn’t last a full round.

We stopped there as it was late and we had hit a good point to stop the session.

Justin's One-shot

Well Brian literally cancelled at the last minute due to a health issue with his wife. He was really sorry for canceling, but he had no options.

But rather than the rest of us cancel, as Dale, Joy, and Justin had already left their homes and were more than halfway to my place, we decided to either play a game like Munchkin or have Justin run a one-shot when everyone arrived.

We decided on a one-shot game and used our characters for Brian’s campaign. If anything we’d figure out a few tactics we should or should not use, and it would help us redesign our PC’s in case we found out that they sucked in a certain area.

I’m running a moon elf rogue who is pretty much your standard rogue, who dual-wields a couple of daggers, but doesn’t have the feat for it (yet).

Aaron is running a moon elf beguiler. I’ve never seen a beguiler run before, but nothing really stands out in my memory with PC other than an illusion spell and a charm spell being cast.

Joy is running a wood elf ranger who specializes in her bow. She avoids melee like the plague and didn’t take a single point of damage during the night, in spite of the many attacks of opportunity she provoked.

Dale is running a star elf warlock. He is pretty much your standard warlock, though the star elf is a new thing to me. From what Brian and Dale stated they are basically extra-planar elves who get a bonus to charisma rather than dexterity and lose some standard elf benefits and their weapons are ghost touch weapons during the daylight hours.

Justin would have run a druid, but ran the AEG mini-module “The Crypt of Saint Bethesda” instead.

He did alright for his first time running us. We just pretty much took the night casually and didn’t do anything screwy to mess him up.

We learned that some of us need to adjust our skill point placement due to overlapping from other PC’s; my rogue has a high search skill (+17 at third level, 6 ranks + 4 due to an 18 intelligence, +2 for racial, +5 for Goggles of Minute Seeing) that is better than Aaron’s PC, but his listen skill is much better than my PC’s (a 7 wisdom can really hurt). I’ll be leaving the ranks in listen where they are because it’s a useful skill, but I doubt I’ll increase it any.

We have two big weaknesses in this group. We have no full-time healer and no full-time tank.

My PC is the only one that consistently uses melee attacks, reducing his sneak attack’s effectiveness due to the lack of flanking, and he isn’t about to stand and fight. He couldn’t take on a fight against skeletons with his puny dagger. Our reliance on ranged attacks could be a big problem.

Our current solution is to constantly take a few steps back while fighting.

Our only healing comes from healing wands and potentially the druid. I suspect the first person to bite it in the campaign will be strongly urged to make a healer type.

Hopefully this Friday everything will be good to go for Brian and we can put our PC’s to good use.

Ravenloft #12

Well I’ve taken a look at WotC’s newest hardback module, The Expedition to Undermountain.

From what I’ve read in it and heard about it, it’s a poorly done module. A good gamer friend of mine was actually pretty ticked off about the poor design of the Undermountain module; huge maps printed on half of the 8.5” x 11” page, Halaster’s death driving the start of the plot, and a CR11 golem as the big challenge in the end.

More and more of WotC’s releases and decisions haven been pretty disappointing lately. I hope it’s just a temporary phase and not the dreaded return of T$R.

I liked Ravenloft early on, but as it progressed it just kind of felt flat, and I do not blame the DM. Dale also has a pretty sizeable complaint about the dark pages making it hard for his “old man eyes” to read the print and something about the maps being hard to follow.

Complete Champion was worthless unless you reworked the class or used the Greyhawk deities. As I looked through it when it was new I found a few useful spells and feats. A few useful spells and feats aren’t worth $30+ to me.

Magic Item Compendium I’ve heard was nice, but it’s something I can do without.

Fiendish Codex II – I already bought it the first time around when it was called Book of Vile Darkness.

Dungeon Tiles – We have several Lexan sheets with a 1” grid cut into the bottom. Those sheets were perhaps the best use of the group’s money. One Lexan sheet, which is about 15” x 24”, cost us $17 and is incredibly sturdy. One package of Dungeon Tiles is $12 and they are pretty much plastic reinforced paperboard. How sturdy is Lexan? If memory serves me correctly, Lexan is among the primary items in bulletproof glass. I’ve been told a hammer won’t scar it.

I can keep going, but I’ve got other stuff to write about, so just one more.

Cormyr, The Tearing of the Weave – I hope for Brian’s sake that it doesn’t suck. He doesn’t have much experience running games, so I hope they’ve done a good job on this one. If this module blows, then I’m done buying WotC modules entirely.

Ah, who am I kidding? I think the last WotC module I bought was The Return to the Temple of Elemental Evil. I almost bought The Red Hand of Doom, but the $25 price tag was too much for me.

Ok, but anyway, this session was, um, interesting. I guess.

Dale realized during the week that he had made a boo-boo or two with running Strahd. Specifically he had Strahd using spells from schools of magic that he had given up on to specialize in necromancy. One school was a minor offense; abjuration – which covers spells like Shield and Dispel Magic. But the illusion school was the worst. Strahd had been hounding us while using Greater Invisibility, Blur, and Mirror Image. So to make up for it Dale gave us an extra 1000xp and hand-waved finding the other pieces of the sunsword, and a free night or two of resting in the castle where Strahd would have attacked us according to the book.

We last stopped in the chapel of Castle Ravenloft where we had recovered a pure silver idol of a raven and the sunsword of Strahd’s brother.

Mina and Hannibal, using their collective Knowledge – Religion skills were able to determine the powers of silver raven idol, the sunsword, and the Holy Symbol of Ravenkind would be once activated.

I don’t recall the specifics, but legacy items as written absolutely suck. You have to permanently give up things that are worth more than what you’re getting. In fact we were better off not activating the sunsword at all. The only reason we bothered with the other two were story items.

Add this to the above list – Weapons of Legacy, nice idea, pathetically poor execution.

By the end Tenbeers had the idol, Mina had the holy symbol, and Numen took the sword (even though he couldn’t use it as a weapon) because it glowed when undead were nearby.

All Gortag got was a hand of gold (5gp) for the sword.

Poor Gortag is losing magic items all the time now.

We did a variety of non-consequential things for the next hour or so of game play, but ironically the lack of a person in the group with good searching abilities paid off. Because we found only one secret door, we had nowhere else for our searches to take us. Every stairway we took, led us to somewhere we’d been before. Even the fights we had lasted less than a round.

Our only route left lay behind the stone wall that Strahd had fled through while in gaseous form last session.

According to the rules, it took Tenbeers less than a minute to hammer his way through that wall. So he did, and we went to the crypts below after buffing up a little.

We found a lot of crypts too, at least a couple dozen, plus some larger ones off in some side rooms. One was for Strahd’s parents, another for his brother Sergei, and one for Strahd himself. We saved that one for last.

We checked out a few crypts, but found nothing of interest that we could take (because Hannibal kept getting all jerky about stealing from the dead – that’s what adventurer’s do!).

So at last we headed to Strahd’s crypt.

Numen’s Arcane Sight spell showed a teleportation field, so he dispelled it, but the field came back in two rounds.

And on that note we were on initiative with Strahd as he was waiting for us within his crypt.

Early rounds:
Gortag sprinted into Strahd’s crypt, but couldn’t quite reach him.
Mina royally hurt Strahd with a sun domain empowered turn undead.
Strahd responded with an Evard’s Black Tentacles that trapped Mina, Numen, and Hannibal and slowed down Tenbeers for a round or two.
For the next several rounds Mina, Numen, and Hannibal would occasionally cast a spell while grappled, but usually tried to break free from the tentacles.
Gortag cut down Strahd with two power attack boosted swings from his axe.
Strahd turned gaseous and fled 5’ away to his coffin.

Middle Rounds:
Strahd’s “death” caused his golem to activate. It had two attacks and with each hit from its fists you had to make a DC17 will save or be stunned.
Gortag put a few dents in the golem, but eventually he was knocked unconscious with -5 hp. He stabilized two rounds later, but when his rage ended, he went to -15 hp.
Tenbeers didn’t fair much better. Justin couldn’t hit or make a save. Tenbeers was smashed to goo at -15 hp.
One by one the rest of the group broke free of the tentacles, but still had to deal with the teleportation field.

Final Rounds:
Numen tried again to dispel the field, but failed.
Mina, having a good Will save for the teleportation field decided to go through it. A roll of natural 1 teleported her to a crypt somewhere in the castle, where she was also nekked. Replacing her on the battlefield was a wight wearing all of her stuff (who was then killed by the tentacles). Mina eventually pushed the lid open off her crypt, and was then attacked by several undead. With no holy symbol of any kind, we effectively wrote her off.
Hannibal, after healing up Numen the best he could, entered the tentacle area again, and the teleportation field. After a couple of rounds in the tentacles (he failed the save then broke free) he jumped through the field and made the DC 20 Will save.
Numen transposed himself with Tenbeers’s corpse (not sure of the legality of that) and occupied the golem’s time.
The golem kept pounding away at Numen, killing only Mirror Images.
Hannibal cut off Strahd’s head and ran, followed by Numen.

They made it through the teleportation field, fled the castle and ran to the Tser Waterfalls where they immersed the head in the flowing water until it dissolved.

It was late, so we stopped there.

It was one of those victories that didn’t feel like one.

Campaign over, with a technical victory.