KotS #8
(Sorry for the lateness - I've had a cold. Mmmm, cold medications)
No quote this week. There were no notable comments that I can remember. Well, unless you want to count us mimicking stand-up comedy jokes or SNL Jeopardy skits.
This session was the final session for Keep on the Shadowfell.
For the most part, this module has been pretty well written. The majority of the challenges were done in a manner that we liked and the module appeared to be setup nicely that allowed for the DM to guide the players through the module without forcing them to follow the module.
As a group we have 2 complaints about the module.
#1 – Please stop using dark background images under the writing for the module. Way too many gamers have vision problems and you’re not helping by making parchment look a little too authentic.
Not for me though. My vision kicks ass. Yeah, that’s right. Suck it gamers.
(Just kidding)
#2 – We know that the D&D R&D team was looking for a way to make the non-combat aspects of the game a bit easier to run as a game mechanic, but what you came up with for non-combat challenges was just plain sad and unworkable. But, like I said in last week’s entry, it’s a start but it needs a lot of work.
Our lineup for this session:
Me, playing Tornok, the level 3 tiefling warlord
Aaron, playing Valenae, the level 3 eladrin rogue
Justin, playing Stout, the level 3 dwarven fighter
Scott, playing Earl, the level 3 dragonborn paladin
Brian, playing Hadarai, the level 2 wizard (I think)
Mike, playing Ander, the level 3 half-elf cleric
We last stopped in dungeon beneath the keep, and we jumped right into the game because we wanted to get this module over with before Dale had to start skipping sessions.
Pretty much Dale just shot-gunned the encounters at us, which was smart because we barely finished the final encounter before it was time to stop.
The first encounter was a large room irregular room with the center filled by a large column. It was full of zombie minions, a pair of zombies, a ghoul, and a clay scout homunculus.
In a strategy that kind of reminded me of the game Space Hulk, we formed up a line on one side of the split room while Earl ran off and held the other side by himself.
The zombies were slaughtered wholesale, the ghoul foolishly jumped into our midst – and was euthanized as a reward, and the clay scout tried to fly away but his escape was short-lived.
Next up was an altar to Orcus, with a nice open area for us to play in. Granted there was blood everywhere, but you tend to expect that with evil cults.
Our opponents was some kind of priest of Orcus, a pair of human barbarians, a dark creeper, and 5 vampire spawns.
What we thought was going to be a rough combat turned out to be a combat we outright owned.
The highlight of it was when Ander sent an unhurt dark creeper down a pit with a Command spell.
(Later we found out that this wasn’t as good as we had thought.)
When the last of those guys dropped we searched around and couldn’t find any other places, but we knew we weren’t done because we hadn’t fought Kalorel or closed the rift.
The only option was to climb down the blood-covered chains in the pit.
Four of the six of us failed that DC15 climb check and landed face-down in a large puddle of blood right next to a giant statue of Orcus.
Kalorel was chanting, trying to open the rift to the Shadowfell, but he stopped once he heard 4 large splashes.
Everyone (except Valenae and Tornok) took 3d10 points of damage from the fall, and was lying prone in the pool of blood.
Combat began immediately without the diatribe you usually get from evil villains.
Against us this time was the dark creeper from before, a pair of skeletal warriors, a deathlock wight, Kalorel, and some tentacles waving at us from the other side of a portal that really wanted out (its title was “Thing in the Portal”).
To make things even lovelier, they received a surprise round because of the dark creeper’s warning.
We were in a bad spot, but thanks to Earl and Ander, most of us were healed in the first round or two.
In fact, our daily abilities, magic item special powers, and action points were flying this combat. And healing surges were being uses left and right, even though some of us only had 1 or 2 left to use.
Kalorel immediately teleported to a magic circle near the Thing. Then he set about blasting us with his ranged attacks.
The Thing just kept waiting for something other than Kalorel to get near it. It was going to wait awhile because none of us were foolhardy enough to get near that thing. Or were we?
The skeleton warriors rushed up to us to keep us pinned in while the dark creeper tried to get some flanking attacks in.
The deathlock wight was harassing us with ranged attacks, and since we were all occupied with our other problems, he was pretty safe for awhile.
Once Stout dropped a skeletal warrior, he charged the deathlock wight. He refused to admit it, but he was afraid to go after Kalorel with the Thing right there behind him (and with a reach of 4).
Stout did accomplish something we didn’t realize. By staying on top of the deathlock, he prevented it from re-raising the skeletal warriors to give us even more grief. In fact when he tried to bulls’ rush the deathlock into a pit, some of us wondered what would happen if Kalorel was pushed into the portal.
Given no better targets and a daily ability that requires melee combat, Tornok decided to rush at Kalorel with his Lead the Attack daily ability.
I missed, by a lot.
Then I used an action point to attack him with Tornok’s Warlord’s Strike encounter power.
I missed, by more.
Note: A warlord’s highest stat must be strength. Too many of his abilities require hitting his target to get any effect.
Then the Thing smacked Tornok a square closer to the portal.
With some Knowledge – Religion checks, we were told that entering the portal would be very bad for a living person. We wondered if that included Kalorel.
As each of the group finished off their personal adversaries, they converged on Kalorel.
At first we began trying to hurt him, but the Thing began healing him.
Then we decided to try to knock him into the portal.
This was not as easy as you’d think.
We’d push him a square, but then he’d shift back.
One particular round Kalorel went nuts and once again Tornok took the brunt of it and was knocked to under 0hp. Next the Thing smacked Tornok with a crit, which killed him.
After that the Thing began pulling Tornok 1 square closer to the portal every round.
Then, finally, the combined efforts of everyone were able to knock Kalorel into the portal.
With that, Kalorel, the Thing, and the magic of portal all disappeared.
Anticlimactic huh? Oh well.
The group ransacked the area, grabbed Tornok’s body to give him a proper burial.
They didn’t feel like raising him from the dead this time, mainly since I’ll be running next week’s first session of Thunderspire Labyrinth.
No quote this week. There were no notable comments that I can remember. Well, unless you want to count us mimicking stand-up comedy jokes or SNL Jeopardy skits.
This session was the final session for Keep on the Shadowfell.
For the most part, this module has been pretty well written. The majority of the challenges were done in a manner that we liked and the module appeared to be setup nicely that allowed for the DM to guide the players through the module without forcing them to follow the module.
As a group we have 2 complaints about the module.
#1 – Please stop using dark background images under the writing for the module. Way too many gamers have vision problems and you’re not helping by making parchment look a little too authentic.
Not for me though. My vision kicks ass. Yeah, that’s right. Suck it gamers.
(Just kidding)
#2 – We know that the D&D R&D team was looking for a way to make the non-combat aspects of the game a bit easier to run as a game mechanic, but what you came up with for non-combat challenges was just plain sad and unworkable. But, like I said in last week’s entry, it’s a start but it needs a lot of work.
Our lineup for this session:
Me, playing Tornok, the level 3 tiefling warlord
Aaron, playing Valenae, the level 3 eladrin rogue
Justin, playing Stout, the level 3 dwarven fighter
Scott, playing Earl, the level 3 dragonborn paladin
Brian, playing Hadarai, the level 2 wizard (I think)
Mike, playing Ander, the level 3 half-elf cleric
We last stopped in dungeon beneath the keep, and we jumped right into the game because we wanted to get this module over with before Dale had to start skipping sessions.
Pretty much Dale just shot-gunned the encounters at us, which was smart because we barely finished the final encounter before it was time to stop.
The first encounter was a large room irregular room with the center filled by a large column. It was full of zombie minions, a pair of zombies, a ghoul, and a clay scout homunculus.
In a strategy that kind of reminded me of the game Space Hulk, we formed up a line on one side of the split room while Earl ran off and held the other side by himself.
The zombies were slaughtered wholesale, the ghoul foolishly jumped into our midst – and was euthanized as a reward, and the clay scout tried to fly away but his escape was short-lived.
Next up was an altar to Orcus, with a nice open area for us to play in. Granted there was blood everywhere, but you tend to expect that with evil cults.
Our opponents was some kind of priest of Orcus, a pair of human barbarians, a dark creeper, and 5 vampire spawns.
What we thought was going to be a rough combat turned out to be a combat we outright owned.
The highlight of it was when Ander sent an unhurt dark creeper down a pit with a Command spell.
(Later we found out that this wasn’t as good as we had thought.)
When the last of those guys dropped we searched around and couldn’t find any other places, but we knew we weren’t done because we hadn’t fought Kalorel or closed the rift.
The only option was to climb down the blood-covered chains in the pit.
Four of the six of us failed that DC15 climb check and landed face-down in a large puddle of blood right next to a giant statue of Orcus.
Kalorel was chanting, trying to open the rift to the Shadowfell, but he stopped once he heard 4 large splashes.
Everyone (except Valenae and Tornok) took 3d10 points of damage from the fall, and was lying prone in the pool of blood.
Combat began immediately without the diatribe you usually get from evil villains.
Against us this time was the dark creeper from before, a pair of skeletal warriors, a deathlock wight, Kalorel, and some tentacles waving at us from the other side of a portal that really wanted out (its title was “Thing in the Portal”).
To make things even lovelier, they received a surprise round because of the dark creeper’s warning.
We were in a bad spot, but thanks to Earl and Ander, most of us were healed in the first round or two.
In fact, our daily abilities, magic item special powers, and action points were flying this combat. And healing surges were being uses left and right, even though some of us only had 1 or 2 left to use.
Kalorel immediately teleported to a magic circle near the Thing. Then he set about blasting us with his ranged attacks.
The Thing just kept waiting for something other than Kalorel to get near it. It was going to wait awhile because none of us were foolhardy enough to get near that thing. Or were we?
The skeleton warriors rushed up to us to keep us pinned in while the dark creeper tried to get some flanking attacks in.
The deathlock wight was harassing us with ranged attacks, and since we were all occupied with our other problems, he was pretty safe for awhile.
Once Stout dropped a skeletal warrior, he charged the deathlock wight. He refused to admit it, but he was afraid to go after Kalorel with the Thing right there behind him (and with a reach of 4).
Stout did accomplish something we didn’t realize. By staying on top of the deathlock, he prevented it from re-raising the skeletal warriors to give us even more grief. In fact when he tried to bulls’ rush the deathlock into a pit, some of us wondered what would happen if Kalorel was pushed into the portal.
Given no better targets and a daily ability that requires melee combat, Tornok decided to rush at Kalorel with his Lead the Attack daily ability.
I missed, by a lot.
Then I used an action point to attack him with Tornok’s Warlord’s Strike encounter power.
I missed, by more.
Note: A warlord’s highest stat must be strength. Too many of his abilities require hitting his target to get any effect.
Then the Thing smacked Tornok a square closer to the portal.
With some Knowledge – Religion checks, we were told that entering the portal would be very bad for a living person. We wondered if that included Kalorel.
As each of the group finished off their personal adversaries, they converged on Kalorel.
At first we began trying to hurt him, but the Thing began healing him.
Then we decided to try to knock him into the portal.
This was not as easy as you’d think.
We’d push him a square, but then he’d shift back.
One particular round Kalorel went nuts and once again Tornok took the brunt of it and was knocked to under 0hp. Next the Thing smacked Tornok with a crit, which killed him.
After that the Thing began pulling Tornok 1 square closer to the portal every round.
Then, finally, the combined efforts of everyone were able to knock Kalorel into the portal.
With that, Kalorel, the Thing, and the magic of portal all disappeared.
Anticlimactic huh? Oh well.
The group ransacked the area, grabbed Tornok’s body to give him a proper burial.
They didn’t feel like raising him from the dead this time, mainly since I’ll be running next week’s first session of Thunderspire Labyrinth.
posted by BlueBlackRed at 6:04 AM
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