The Valley #3
(Quick note - I've not proofread this...not that it'd be noticeable from my proofread ones.)
Divine Power is broken. Well maybe.
If you’re a healing cleric this book is for you.
There’s an at-will attack (Astral Light sounds right) that requires you to hit a target’s Reflex. If you hit, that target is -2 to his defenses, and the next ally that hits it gets healed for 2 + your charisma bonus + and your wisdom because it has a healing tag.
I immediately nerfed away the charisma bonus, but after thought says to add it back in since it doesn’t scale much with level.
We also dumped the paladin’s marking ability and changed it to match it to how I see a paladin should defend while not copying the marking abilities of any other classes, though maybe we borrowed some concepts.
It’s now an at-will power as a minor action that pulls the target your Charisma modifier to you and marks the target. The mark remains so long as it is adjacent to you at the end of your turn.
And yes, you can use this on an already marked target multiple times, but it’s limited to a range of 5 (burst 5). And so long as you stay adjacent to your targets, you can have more than one target marked.
It’s not 100% fleshed out, but I think it works, and it’s most certainly better than the current setup for Divine Challenge.
And although previously we never had an issue with it, tonight we had a lot of time lost thanks to powers that gave “-2 to attack until…”.
Our second combat for the night probably took 5 minutes longer thanks to me having to constantly ask what penalties I had to attack, and who.
Worse, there’s no way to fix it without totally unbalancing the game.
I can’t remove or limit those effects; too many abilities use them.
I remember saying long ago that those effects would kill combat speed.
For the past year I thought I was wrong about that, but now it’s obvious we just didn’t encounter the worst of it.
For now I’ll do nothing about it to see if it’s an isolated instance or maybe we’ll think of a better way to deal with them.
As for my campaign, it’s going very well and the players seem to like it.
Focusing on 1-2 PC’s per session, while not perfect, is going well. And the personal quests are a definite improvement to the game and work amazingly well to promote role-playing.
Now our session had less XP compared to the last two.
I’m wondering if there’s a coincidence between that and longer combats because there we no minions this time around.
Our cast:
Admon (Scott); level 2 human war wizard
Duncan (Justin); level 2 Silverhome dwarven cleric of Moradin
Edward (Aaron); level 2 human paladin of Brekaneth
Kergan (Mike); level 2 Silverhome dwarven rogue
Because we had to quickly end the previous session, we backtracked a little bit to get some role-playing in for Duncan.
First we found out that he didn’t have Goblin as a language (an oops with the rules), so he had to talk to his superiors at the temple of Moradin to get a copy or three of them.
(I also had him roll a check from last session to determine if he understood that the formula he found was indeed a formula.)
He was able to get 1 copy in Dwarvish for him and his church leader and one in common for Mayor Ryan. His reasoning was that it was best to have 2 separate groups with the recipe.
Next we jumped to Duncan handing the copies to the mayor. He was not happy that someone else had a copy of the formula, but he conceded that it was best to have another copy of the formula in their hands just in case.
He went on to say that he knew the party would work well together and he was glad that he could trust Duncan, but he stressed that if he needed something kept secret, it had to remain secret.
Next he mentioned something about a party the following week that might have a lot of people in it that Duncan may want to get to know on a political level.
He then handed Duncan something that was found a while ago that he had forgotten about until recently, but he thought that Duncan would be able to put it to good use: a holy symbol of Moradin +2.
Next we jumped to Admon.
He was walking home when a giddy red-haired woman in her mid-20’s named Muriel and her bodyguard (Harold, a man in full platemail) stopped Admon and asked if he was Admon.
She was looking for a wizard that could help her with a ritual, and that his name came up several times but the people at the School of Wizardry were giving her the runaround.
She said she’d pay him 100gp to help and that she’d like to do it tonight. It would be in a “fire cave”, and the ritual would be cast into an orb which would then be used to summon fire elementals. It had to be in that cave because the strange magicks of the Valley gave the “fire cave” its special features.
He wanted to get his friends to help, and she readily agreed. She said she would meet him at the Roaring Bull Inn and would be anxiously waiting to get this ritual done.
While that was going on Edward was imbuing his sword with a magical ritual that only paladins of Brekaneth know. He can take a magical weapon and move its enchant onto his sword, and the same with his armor.
And Kergan went about trying to make contact with the Thieves’ Guild. He heard nothing, as in not a thing when he would usually hear something.
Eventually they all wound up at the Roaring Bull Inn. Well a little more than that happened, but it’s all pretty mundane.
Bull, the owner of the inn, made friends with everyone in the party except Edward, who mistrusts him for not being a believer.
After some drinks and negotiation, it’s 6pm when the party leaves for the fire cave, with Muriel skipping happily along the way. The party had the feeling that Harold dealt with her antics on a daily basis.
Yeah, it’s a trap.
You know it.
I knew it.
And the party knew it.
I’ve really got to learn better ways to spring traps.
So she puts the orb on a small rock in the center of the cave, and has Admon stand on the opposite side of the side of the rock while the party chooses their own positions in the room.
Luckily for my trap they didn’t quite get that the 3 large rocks in the room were part of the trap and didn’t set up a defense for that.
Just as she was about to begin casting the supposed ritual, she shouts out “Now!” and the boulders spring to life as 3 magma claws.
Admon had the living daylights beaten out of him and could hardly get a spell off every other round. He was knocked out early in the combat until the party came to his rescue and kept him healed up.
Harold spent the first half of the combat guarding Muriel, but when Muriel shouted out “Kill him! Kill the Silverblade!” his attitude changed.
He shouted “Prove you’re a Silverblade, use your weapon.”
When Admon used his family’s longsword (he was pinned down and couldn’t cast a spell without being pounded with opportunity attacks) and hit with it, Harold switched sides and began attacking the magma claws (but never Muriel).
While the rest of the party was focusing on the magma claws, Kergan focuses on Muriel.
Edward said to capture her and not kill her and Kergan responded later with “I couldn’t hear you over the screams.”
To make a long story short, between this point and the rest of the night, Harold tells his story after pulling up his visor and Admon recognizes him as an old employee of his family’s business.
Prior to the fall of the Endarian Empire, the Silverblade family ran a company of bodyguards. For reasons unknown they failed and the empire fell. The Silverblades fled to the Valley and with the quick wit of Admon’s grandfather they were able to re-establish their business, albeit much smaller.
Ever since then they’ve believed that the Herollus family was at the root of the betrayal, but never had proof.
Harold, once a loyal hired sword in the Silverblade family’s business, had signed on to the Herollus family as a personal bodyguard after the Silverblades disappeared. Over the past eight years he has seen and heard snippets of information about what the Herollus’s have been doing; dealing with beings in the Shadowfell, dark magic (Admon suspects they may be behind the Zombie Elixir), and searching and destroying anything in their way.
He had not known what Muriel Herollus was up to specifically, but when he saw the family sword design of the Silverblades and the style in which Admon wielded it (though in the clumsy hands of a wizard) he knew he had found his previous, and decidedly less evil employers.
Of course if they sent one of their own to assassinate Admon, who or what would they send to go after the rest of the Silverblades?
Encounter #2, entitled “The Insurance Policy”, happened during this discussion.
It was past 8pm, so the sky was dark enough, plus the group missed their perception checks.
A dragon, either black or shadow when they finally saw what they could of it, landed in their path and asked them to hand over the Silverblade.
Negotiations didn’t make it too far after that.
And this combat took forever thanks to the number of “-2 to attacks” that hit the dragon, and the penalty wasn’t the same for everyone.
Other than that it was fun while the dragon taunted the party, especially the paladin.
Most of the taunts were about Edward’s church, but Edward, being the faithful paladin listened to none of them.
And worst of all, no treasure.
Where’s a flying dragon going to hide his hoard?
When they make it back to the city they immediately go to Admon’s family’s home to warn them and so on.
They wisely set up defenses within and around the house, with the party defending the hallway to the bedroom where mother, father, and grandfather or holing up.
When the attacker showed up the party was in bad shape immediately thanks to bad rolls, bad choices, and bad hits.
Their attacker: a shadow bat, a shadow hound, a dark creeper, and a shadowy goblin (notice a pattern?)
The fight was in tight quarters within the hallway and the party had a simple goal, do not let anyone into the bedroom.
And they didn’t, though they had the crap beat out of them defending it.
Admon now has a new quest – Destroy the Herollus family.
And that’s where we stopped.
Quests completed:
Admon: The Search [Level: 1. Reward: 100XP. Find information leading to the whereabouts of the Herollus family.]
Duncan: Secret [Level: 1. Reward: 100XP. Details are hidden. Telling the other players of this quest voids it.]
New Quests:
Admon: Vendetta [Level: Unknown. Reward: Unknown. Destroy the Herollus family.]
Next session should be all of us.
Divine Power is broken. Well maybe.
If you’re a healing cleric this book is for you.
There’s an at-will attack (Astral Light sounds right) that requires you to hit a target’s Reflex. If you hit, that target is -2 to his defenses, and the next ally that hits it gets healed for 2 + your charisma bonus + and your wisdom because it has a healing tag.
I immediately nerfed away the charisma bonus, but after thought says to add it back in since it doesn’t scale much with level.
We also dumped the paladin’s marking ability and changed it to match it to how I see a paladin should defend while not copying the marking abilities of any other classes, though maybe we borrowed some concepts.
It’s now an at-will power as a minor action that pulls the target your Charisma modifier to you and marks the target. The mark remains so long as it is adjacent to you at the end of your turn.
And yes, you can use this on an already marked target multiple times, but it’s limited to a range of 5 (burst 5). And so long as you stay adjacent to your targets, you can have more than one target marked.
It’s not 100% fleshed out, but I think it works, and it’s most certainly better than the current setup for Divine Challenge.
And although previously we never had an issue with it, tonight we had a lot of time lost thanks to powers that gave “-2 to attack until…”.
Our second combat for the night probably took 5 minutes longer thanks to me having to constantly ask what penalties I had to attack, and who.
Worse, there’s no way to fix it without totally unbalancing the game.
I can’t remove or limit those effects; too many abilities use them.
I remember saying long ago that those effects would kill combat speed.
For the past year I thought I was wrong about that, but now it’s obvious we just didn’t encounter the worst of it.
For now I’ll do nothing about it to see if it’s an isolated instance or maybe we’ll think of a better way to deal with them.
As for my campaign, it’s going very well and the players seem to like it.
Focusing on 1-2 PC’s per session, while not perfect, is going well. And the personal quests are a definite improvement to the game and work amazingly well to promote role-playing.
Now our session had less XP compared to the last two.
I’m wondering if there’s a coincidence between that and longer combats because there we no minions this time around.
Our cast:
Admon (Scott); level 2 human war wizard
Duncan (Justin); level 2 Silverhome dwarven cleric of Moradin
Edward (Aaron); level 2 human paladin of Brekaneth
Kergan (Mike); level 2 Silverhome dwarven rogue
Because we had to quickly end the previous session, we backtracked a little bit to get some role-playing in for Duncan.
First we found out that he didn’t have Goblin as a language (an oops with the rules), so he had to talk to his superiors at the temple of Moradin to get a copy or three of them.
(I also had him roll a check from last session to determine if he understood that the formula he found was indeed a formula.)
He was able to get 1 copy in Dwarvish for him and his church leader and one in common for Mayor Ryan. His reasoning was that it was best to have 2 separate groups with the recipe.
Next we jumped to Duncan handing the copies to the mayor. He was not happy that someone else had a copy of the formula, but he conceded that it was best to have another copy of the formula in their hands just in case.
He went on to say that he knew the party would work well together and he was glad that he could trust Duncan, but he stressed that if he needed something kept secret, it had to remain secret.
Next he mentioned something about a party the following week that might have a lot of people in it that Duncan may want to get to know on a political level.
He then handed Duncan something that was found a while ago that he had forgotten about until recently, but he thought that Duncan would be able to put it to good use: a holy symbol of Moradin +2.
Next we jumped to Admon.
He was walking home when a giddy red-haired woman in her mid-20’s named Muriel and her bodyguard (Harold, a man in full platemail) stopped Admon and asked if he was Admon.
She was looking for a wizard that could help her with a ritual, and that his name came up several times but the people at the School of Wizardry were giving her the runaround.
She said she’d pay him 100gp to help and that she’d like to do it tonight. It would be in a “fire cave”, and the ritual would be cast into an orb which would then be used to summon fire elementals. It had to be in that cave because the strange magicks of the Valley gave the “fire cave” its special features.
He wanted to get his friends to help, and she readily agreed. She said she would meet him at the Roaring Bull Inn and would be anxiously waiting to get this ritual done.
While that was going on Edward was imbuing his sword with a magical ritual that only paladins of Brekaneth know. He can take a magical weapon and move its enchant onto his sword, and the same with his armor.
And Kergan went about trying to make contact with the Thieves’ Guild. He heard nothing, as in not a thing when he would usually hear something.
Eventually they all wound up at the Roaring Bull Inn. Well a little more than that happened, but it’s all pretty mundane.
Bull, the owner of the inn, made friends with everyone in the party except Edward, who mistrusts him for not being a believer.
After some drinks and negotiation, it’s 6pm when the party leaves for the fire cave, with Muriel skipping happily along the way. The party had the feeling that Harold dealt with her antics on a daily basis.
Yeah, it’s a trap.
You know it.
I knew it.
And the party knew it.
I’ve really got to learn better ways to spring traps.
So she puts the orb on a small rock in the center of the cave, and has Admon stand on the opposite side of the side of the rock while the party chooses their own positions in the room.
Luckily for my trap they didn’t quite get that the 3 large rocks in the room were part of the trap and didn’t set up a defense for that.
Just as she was about to begin casting the supposed ritual, she shouts out “Now!” and the boulders spring to life as 3 magma claws.
Admon had the living daylights beaten out of him and could hardly get a spell off every other round. He was knocked out early in the combat until the party came to his rescue and kept him healed up.
Harold spent the first half of the combat guarding Muriel, but when Muriel shouted out “Kill him! Kill the Silverblade!” his attitude changed.
He shouted “Prove you’re a Silverblade, use your weapon.”
When Admon used his family’s longsword (he was pinned down and couldn’t cast a spell without being pounded with opportunity attacks) and hit with it, Harold switched sides and began attacking the magma claws (but never Muriel).
While the rest of the party was focusing on the magma claws, Kergan focuses on Muriel.
Edward said to capture her and not kill her and Kergan responded later with “I couldn’t hear you over the screams.”
To make a long story short, between this point and the rest of the night, Harold tells his story after pulling up his visor and Admon recognizes him as an old employee of his family’s business.
Prior to the fall of the Endarian Empire, the Silverblade family ran a company of bodyguards. For reasons unknown they failed and the empire fell. The Silverblades fled to the Valley and with the quick wit of Admon’s grandfather they were able to re-establish their business, albeit much smaller.
Ever since then they’ve believed that the Herollus family was at the root of the betrayal, but never had proof.
Harold, once a loyal hired sword in the Silverblade family’s business, had signed on to the Herollus family as a personal bodyguard after the Silverblades disappeared. Over the past eight years he has seen and heard snippets of information about what the Herollus’s have been doing; dealing with beings in the Shadowfell, dark magic (Admon suspects they may be behind the Zombie Elixir), and searching and destroying anything in their way.
He had not known what Muriel Herollus was up to specifically, but when he saw the family sword design of the Silverblades and the style in which Admon wielded it (though in the clumsy hands of a wizard) he knew he had found his previous, and decidedly less evil employers.
Of course if they sent one of their own to assassinate Admon, who or what would they send to go after the rest of the Silverblades?
Encounter #2, entitled “The Insurance Policy”, happened during this discussion.
It was past 8pm, so the sky was dark enough, plus the group missed their perception checks.
A dragon, either black or shadow when they finally saw what they could of it, landed in their path and asked them to hand over the Silverblade.
Negotiations didn’t make it too far after that.
And this combat took forever thanks to the number of “-2 to attacks” that hit the dragon, and the penalty wasn’t the same for everyone.
Other than that it was fun while the dragon taunted the party, especially the paladin.
Most of the taunts were about Edward’s church, but Edward, being the faithful paladin listened to none of them.
And worst of all, no treasure.
Where’s a flying dragon going to hide his hoard?
When they make it back to the city they immediately go to Admon’s family’s home to warn them and so on.
They wisely set up defenses within and around the house, with the party defending the hallway to the bedroom where mother, father, and grandfather or holing up.
When the attacker showed up the party was in bad shape immediately thanks to bad rolls, bad choices, and bad hits.
Their attacker: a shadow bat, a shadow hound, a dark creeper, and a shadowy goblin (notice a pattern?)
The fight was in tight quarters within the hallway and the party had a simple goal, do not let anyone into the bedroom.
And they didn’t, though they had the crap beat out of them defending it.
Admon now has a new quest – Destroy the Herollus family.
And that’s where we stopped.
Quests completed:
Admon: The Search [Level: 1. Reward: 100XP. Find information leading to the whereabouts of the Herollus family.]
Duncan: Secret [Level: 1. Reward: 100XP. Details are hidden. Telling the other players of this quest voids it.]
New Quests:
Admon: Vendetta [Level: Unknown. Reward: Unknown. Destroy the Herollus family.]
Next session should be all of us.
posted by BlueBlackRed at 7:20 AM
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