Rappan Athuk #9 - The Old Guardhouse
My wife’s parents went on vacation this past week to Italy and made a stop at the Vatican to attend a mass that the pope was going to give a blessing at. They wanted to know if my wife or I had anything we wanted to get blessed.
Much too late I thought about giving them some dice.
That leads to two questions:
#1) Does that make me a major gamer geek?
#2) Would those dice burn my skin whenever I touched them, or just roll 1’s all day long for me?
This session had a little bit of everything.
We had some pointless non-D&D discussions.
We had some D&D 4E discussions.
We had some role-playing.
We had some paperwork gaming.
We had a combat.
The non-D&D discussions were our usual messed-up stories or politics.
The 4E discussions were about the usual:
We will be playing 4E. If it ends up being worse, we’ll switch back to 3.5. But we are definitely going to give it a fair shot.
We will not be playing in the Forgotten Realms and probably not any WotC campaign worlds. They’ve gone from Tolkien fantasy to an anime and Warcraft.
Until I get some solid opinions from a trusted source that WotC is making good modules again, we will not use any WotC modules. Other companies’ modules I’ll keep an open mind about.
Dale is probably going to run the first 4E campaign, while I will prep up for another Valley campaign.
We will probably start it a few weeks after the release, which is about 2 months away.
Also, Joy will be on a hiatus for a while. She and many of her friends recently graduated college. So rather than skip every other week to go to some party until reality seeps in, she’s just leaving for awhile.
That also means we might be looking for someone new when we start 4E if she’s into returning.
Dale has kind of been looking around for new players, but so far he’s only turned up someone who will not be switching to 4E under any circumstances.
That sounds foolishly short-sighted and narrow-minded, but to each his own.
Remember:
4E crunch (to me) is looking good and gives me hope.
4E fluff (to me) is a pile of Dungie that will ruin FR.
As for Eberron, who gives a rat’s ass?
Now we move on to our game.
The coupons seem relatively popular. Instead of me keeping track of bonus rolls, all I do is hand out coupons at various times. So far the only drawbacks are people misplacing and losing their coupons or the inevitable “oh crap” moment where a coupon would have come in handy, but the player forgot about it.
I haven’t boosted that many monsters to counter the coupons yet. There simply has not been a need.
Once the gestalt power starts to kick in, then I might need to boost some monsters. But for now I’ve killed too many PC’s to make it a need.
In the past month we’ve somehow added PC’s, lost PC’s, and generally left them all over the dungeon.
So for my sanity’s sake, we just plopped everyone in the village of Lhend so they could buy, sell, and identify equipment as was needed.
For this session we had:
Gehei (GI), level 5 knight/favored soul (Nerull), played by Aaron
Saver, level 5 sorcerer/favored soul (Pelor), played by Dale
Javier, level 4 fighter/favored soul (Heironeous), played by Brian
Spotted Dragon (Spot), level 5 fighter/monk, played by Justin
I see a lot of fighting and healing power, but not much in the way of dealing with traps.
I’ll have to make a mental note of that for later.
After everyone sold off their gems and equipment they didn’t need, they wanted to upgrade their equipments.
Upgrading their non-magical equipment was relatively easy, and if it could be bought from Trake’s Armory the upgrades were decently priced.
But when they wanted to spend their newly gained thousands of gold on something magical, well they were in for sticker shock.
Tantagel’s Magic Emporium has plenty of items to choose from, but the list is limited, and quite simply a lot of things that adventurers want are usually bought quickly.
Then enters the laws of supply and demand…
If adventurers want it then the price increases.
If it’s hard to obtain, the price increases.
If an adventurer is lucky, he might find an item at merely double the standard cost.
If it’s something incredibly useful to an adventurer, then expect the price to be disgustingly high.
Do you want a wand of Cure Light Wounds?
They have one, but not at 750gp. Try 4000gp.
Would you like a pair of Gauntlets of Ogre Power?
They have a set of those as well, but it’s not 4000gp.
Shell out 25,000gp and it’s yours.
Could the players go somewhere else and buy the magic items there?
Absolutely, just create a new character while your current PC is out of the game for 2 weeks or so while he travels to the nearest city that sells that stuff.
Am I cheating the players out of the equipment they need to survive?
No, I’m just not supplying them with an easy access source of magic items.
But nonetheless the party deals with the situation presented to them quite well and manage to improve their equipment.
Indeed they even improve their situation when they go see the old potion lady to get some potions identified. Audrasa, as they find out her name, helps them quite eagerly.
The PC’s aren’t exactly thrilled with Tantagel and his magic emporium, but have no other options. They rediscover that Audrasa has no love for Tantagel after he killed her potion making business by selling potions for cheaper than she could make them and now she has to scrape by day to day.
The group decides to help her get back on her feet by fronting her 250gp she needs for replacement materials, and then they preorder several potions. She’s cautious about this arrangement because she fears that the same thing will happen as last time, but agrees to do it.
In all of this role-playing the party is able to get plenty of information from Audrasa. She is more than helpful to her new benefactors when it comes to this.
There are several rumors the group has heard about the dungeon and its surrounding areas which Audrasa sheds some light on and adds some wisdom to.
“The only mountain that is visible from the village is Blanguck’s Mountain. It’s named after a solitary giant who likes to knock intruders off his mountain to their deaths.”
Audrasa: “I’ve heard those rumors as well. You have skills in mountain climbing right?”
They don’t, so they scratch the plan to go to that mountain for now.
“A secret force of Heironeous’s faithful is gathering in a shrine nearby. They intend to cleanse the countryside then expunge the evil of the dungeon.”
Audrasa: “That rumor appears from time to time, and it is occasionally true.”
She reveals that she is a follower of Heironeous and confirms there is shrine, but can only give vague directions to the shrine.
“Head north along the faded road and at some point it to the west.”
The stone obelisk:
“That thing’s been appearing all over the place for the longest time, and no one knows why.”
Rappan Athuk:
She offers no conclusive help.
The ruined tower:
She heard some rumor about some insane wizard in his tower, but there’s always some insane wizard doing something.
Next on the party’s list: finding someone in town that knows anything about being bitten by a wererat and if anything can be done about it.
Campaign note: 7 days until the full moon at that time.
Jorgleen of the Temple of Wee Jas fills them in, from a distance. She is very cautious and keeps the party at reasonable distance once the subject is brought up.
When asked if she can cure it, she replies that she can’t but adds that if they can’t cure it before the full moon then they should make sure that anyone afflicted (never looking at Spot) should be “taken care of”.
Aaron: “Eh, we’re not likely to make it a week.”
Spot buys 30’ of chains so he can be tied up really well if things don’t work out.
Since I don’t want a TPK, I informed the group that going to level 3 might be suicide for the party, and that they should gain a little XP outside the dungeon.
Which is why they were asking about Blanguck’s Mountain and the shrine of Heironeous.
So off they marched along the worn and almost gone road leading out of town to the north, hoping to find the shrine of Heironeous.
They only rolled twice for random encounters, because there was a planned encounter.
Audrasa had mentioned something about old guardhouses on the old roads that might have something of value in them, and here up on a hill overlooking the old road was a dilapidated stone building that looked about to fall over from disrepair, complete with worn parapets, doors off the hinges, and a large hole in the wall.
The party walked up to the building and was greeted by a man-sized creature with blades growing out of its body (a bladeling).
Since the creature bothered to talk to the party, they decided to talk back.
But really, the bladeling was sporting for a fight.
The party decided ask him questions, he said “Sure, 100gp a question.”
After a few minutes of getting nowhere and having their manhood questioned multiple times, the party walked away.
With that, other bladelings came out of the guardhouse while the speaker demanded gold.
“Come get it.”
Now the 8 bladelings themselves were a footnote in this fight, it was the babau (horned) demons that made this fight a nasty one for the party.
Here is about how the fight went…
Saver starts of the fight by casting Sound Burst and taking out half the bladelings in a single spell.
That tells the babaus where they need to start, so they teleport into flanking positions around Saver.
Spot attacks a babau, hitting twice but only manages to total 4 points of damage thanks to their damage resistance 10/good or cold iron.
The rest of the party starts mopping up the remaining bladelings while the bladelings only manage to do damage with their razor storm ability.
Saver casts Magic Missile at the same Babau that Spot hit, and manages to break through its spell resistance.
But the babaus put an end to that pretty easily with their flanking and sneak attack abilities.
Saver is left a bloody mess on the ground, but luckily for him we’re using the new rules on death and dying.
Afterwards when the babaus can’t get flanking through movement, they’ll teleport into position so they can next round.
Teleport w/o Error at will is a nasty thing when combined with sneak attack.
One by one the party drops to the babau’s 2 claw attacks at +12 to hit and 1d6+5 damage and 2d6 sneak attack.
First it’s Saver, then it’s Spot, and then Javier.
The group had a brief discussion about running, but there’s no point when your opponents can teleport.
But by the time Javier drops, GI has healed Saver, who then casts Magic Missile every single round and amazingly never fails to beat spell resistance.
Had it not been for Javier getting a crit with a power attack, Saver would have done 90% of the damage to the babau rather than 50%.
After probably a dozen rounds of combat, the party finally dropped one babau.
The second babau decided that he couldn’t take out this party with the amount of healing that have, so he teleported away.
Everyone in the party had less than 20 hit points by this point, and were glad to see the demon leave.
At least they got some platinum and a magical ring for their trouble.
Brian: “I sure hope we got more than 150XP out of that.” (Saver was 150XP from level 5.)
That fight earned them over 2000xp, putting Javier at level 5, and Saver and GI at level 6.
Dale now has Fireball. Dale loves Fireball. Dale would marry Fireball if he could.
In addition to Fireball, Saver also now has Remove Curse, which can, with a little risk, remove lycanthropy.
Exhausted after one fight the party returned to Lhend.
Much too late I thought about giving them some dice.
That leads to two questions:
#1) Does that make me a major gamer geek?
#2) Would those dice burn my skin whenever I touched them, or just roll 1’s all day long for me?
This session had a little bit of everything.
We had some pointless non-D&D discussions.
We had some D&D 4E discussions.
We had some role-playing.
We had some paperwork gaming.
We had a combat.
The non-D&D discussions were our usual messed-up stories or politics.
The 4E discussions were about the usual:
We will be playing 4E. If it ends up being worse, we’ll switch back to 3.5. But we are definitely going to give it a fair shot.
We will not be playing in the Forgotten Realms and probably not any WotC campaign worlds. They’ve gone from Tolkien fantasy to an anime and Warcraft.
Until I get some solid opinions from a trusted source that WotC is making good modules again, we will not use any WotC modules. Other companies’ modules I’ll keep an open mind about.
Dale is probably going to run the first 4E campaign, while I will prep up for another Valley campaign.
We will probably start it a few weeks after the release, which is about 2 months away.
Also, Joy will be on a hiatus for a while. She and many of her friends recently graduated college. So rather than skip every other week to go to some party until reality seeps in, she’s just leaving for awhile.
That also means we might be looking for someone new when we start 4E if she’s into returning.
Dale has kind of been looking around for new players, but so far he’s only turned up someone who will not be switching to 4E under any circumstances.
That sounds foolishly short-sighted and narrow-minded, but to each his own.
Remember:
4E crunch (to me) is looking good and gives me hope.
4E fluff (to me) is a pile of Dungie that will ruin FR.
As for Eberron, who gives a rat’s ass?
Now we move on to our game.
The coupons seem relatively popular. Instead of me keeping track of bonus rolls, all I do is hand out coupons at various times. So far the only drawbacks are people misplacing and losing their coupons or the inevitable “oh crap” moment where a coupon would have come in handy, but the player forgot about it.
I haven’t boosted that many monsters to counter the coupons yet. There simply has not been a need.
Once the gestalt power starts to kick in, then I might need to boost some monsters. But for now I’ve killed too many PC’s to make it a need.
In the past month we’ve somehow added PC’s, lost PC’s, and generally left them all over the dungeon.
So for my sanity’s sake, we just plopped everyone in the village of Lhend so they could buy, sell, and identify equipment as was needed.
For this session we had:
Gehei (GI), level 5 knight/favored soul (Nerull), played by Aaron
Saver, level 5 sorcerer/favored soul (Pelor), played by Dale
Javier, level 4 fighter/favored soul (Heironeous), played by Brian
Spotted Dragon (Spot), level 5 fighter/monk, played by Justin
I see a lot of fighting and healing power, but not much in the way of dealing with traps.
I’ll have to make a mental note of that for later.
After everyone sold off their gems and equipment they didn’t need, they wanted to upgrade their equipments.
Upgrading their non-magical equipment was relatively easy, and if it could be bought from Trake’s Armory the upgrades were decently priced.
But when they wanted to spend their newly gained thousands of gold on something magical, well they were in for sticker shock.
Tantagel’s Magic Emporium has plenty of items to choose from, but the list is limited, and quite simply a lot of things that adventurers want are usually bought quickly.
Then enters the laws of supply and demand…
If adventurers want it then the price increases.
If it’s hard to obtain, the price increases.
If an adventurer is lucky, he might find an item at merely double the standard cost.
If it’s something incredibly useful to an adventurer, then expect the price to be disgustingly high.
Do you want a wand of Cure Light Wounds?
They have one, but not at 750gp. Try 4000gp.
Would you like a pair of Gauntlets of Ogre Power?
They have a set of those as well, but it’s not 4000gp.
Shell out 25,000gp and it’s yours.
Could the players go somewhere else and buy the magic items there?
Absolutely, just create a new character while your current PC is out of the game for 2 weeks or so while he travels to the nearest city that sells that stuff.
Am I cheating the players out of the equipment they need to survive?
No, I’m just not supplying them with an easy access source of magic items.
But nonetheless the party deals with the situation presented to them quite well and manage to improve their equipment.
Indeed they even improve their situation when they go see the old potion lady to get some potions identified. Audrasa, as they find out her name, helps them quite eagerly.
The PC’s aren’t exactly thrilled with Tantagel and his magic emporium, but have no other options. They rediscover that Audrasa has no love for Tantagel after he killed her potion making business by selling potions for cheaper than she could make them and now she has to scrape by day to day.
The group decides to help her get back on her feet by fronting her 250gp she needs for replacement materials, and then they preorder several potions. She’s cautious about this arrangement because she fears that the same thing will happen as last time, but agrees to do it.
In all of this role-playing the party is able to get plenty of information from Audrasa. She is more than helpful to her new benefactors when it comes to this.
There are several rumors the group has heard about the dungeon and its surrounding areas which Audrasa sheds some light on and adds some wisdom to.
“The only mountain that is visible from the village is Blanguck’s Mountain. It’s named after a solitary giant who likes to knock intruders off his mountain to their deaths.”
Audrasa: “I’ve heard those rumors as well. You have skills in mountain climbing right?”
They don’t, so they scratch the plan to go to that mountain for now.
“A secret force of Heironeous’s faithful is gathering in a shrine nearby. They intend to cleanse the countryside then expunge the evil of the dungeon.”
Audrasa: “That rumor appears from time to time, and it is occasionally true.”
She reveals that she is a follower of Heironeous and confirms there is shrine, but can only give vague directions to the shrine.
“Head north along the faded road and at some point it to the west.”
The stone obelisk:
“That thing’s been appearing all over the place for the longest time, and no one knows why.”
Rappan Athuk:
She offers no conclusive help.
The ruined tower:
She heard some rumor about some insane wizard in his tower, but there’s always some insane wizard doing something.
Next on the party’s list: finding someone in town that knows anything about being bitten by a wererat and if anything can be done about it.
Campaign note: 7 days until the full moon at that time.
Jorgleen of the Temple of Wee Jas fills them in, from a distance. She is very cautious and keeps the party at reasonable distance once the subject is brought up.
When asked if she can cure it, she replies that she can’t but adds that if they can’t cure it before the full moon then they should make sure that anyone afflicted (never looking at Spot) should be “taken care of”.
Aaron: “Eh, we’re not likely to make it a week.”
Spot buys 30’ of chains so he can be tied up really well if things don’t work out.
Since I don’t want a TPK, I informed the group that going to level 3 might be suicide for the party, and that they should gain a little XP outside the dungeon.
Which is why they were asking about Blanguck’s Mountain and the shrine of Heironeous.
So off they marched along the worn and almost gone road leading out of town to the north, hoping to find the shrine of Heironeous.
They only rolled twice for random encounters, because there was a planned encounter.
Audrasa had mentioned something about old guardhouses on the old roads that might have something of value in them, and here up on a hill overlooking the old road was a dilapidated stone building that looked about to fall over from disrepair, complete with worn parapets, doors off the hinges, and a large hole in the wall.
The party walked up to the building and was greeted by a man-sized creature with blades growing out of its body (a bladeling).
Since the creature bothered to talk to the party, they decided to talk back.
But really, the bladeling was sporting for a fight.
The party decided ask him questions, he said “Sure, 100gp a question.”
After a few minutes of getting nowhere and having their manhood questioned multiple times, the party walked away.
With that, other bladelings came out of the guardhouse while the speaker demanded gold.
“Come get it.”
Now the 8 bladelings themselves were a footnote in this fight, it was the babau (horned) demons that made this fight a nasty one for the party.
Here is about how the fight went…
Saver starts of the fight by casting Sound Burst and taking out half the bladelings in a single spell.
That tells the babaus where they need to start, so they teleport into flanking positions around Saver.
Spot attacks a babau, hitting twice but only manages to total 4 points of damage thanks to their damage resistance 10/good or cold iron.
The rest of the party starts mopping up the remaining bladelings while the bladelings only manage to do damage with their razor storm ability.
Saver casts Magic Missile at the same Babau that Spot hit, and manages to break through its spell resistance.
But the babaus put an end to that pretty easily with their flanking and sneak attack abilities.
Saver is left a bloody mess on the ground, but luckily for him we’re using the new rules on death and dying.
Afterwards when the babaus can’t get flanking through movement, they’ll teleport into position so they can next round.
Teleport w/o Error at will is a nasty thing when combined with sneak attack.
One by one the party drops to the babau’s 2 claw attacks at +12 to hit and 1d6+5 damage and 2d6 sneak attack.
First it’s Saver, then it’s Spot, and then Javier.
The group had a brief discussion about running, but there’s no point when your opponents can teleport.
But by the time Javier drops, GI has healed Saver, who then casts Magic Missile every single round and amazingly never fails to beat spell resistance.
Had it not been for Javier getting a crit with a power attack, Saver would have done 90% of the damage to the babau rather than 50%.
After probably a dozen rounds of combat, the party finally dropped one babau.
The second babau decided that he couldn’t take out this party with the amount of healing that have, so he teleported away.
Everyone in the party had less than 20 hit points by this point, and were glad to see the demon leave.
At least they got some platinum and a magical ring for their trouble.
Brian: “I sure hope we got more than 150XP out of that.” (Saver was 150XP from level 5.)
That fight earned them over 2000xp, putting Javier at level 5, and Saver and GI at level 6.
Dale now has Fireball. Dale loves Fireball. Dale would marry Fireball if he could.
In addition to Fireball, Saver also now has Remove Curse, which can, with a little risk, remove lycanthropy.
Exhausted after one fight the party returned to Lhend.
posted by BlueBlackRed at 11:43 AM
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