RangerWickett
Legend
Couple of spoilers here.
So we're in part 3 of the Red Hand of Doom. Big party - 7 PCs - and the GM has been feeling a bit unsuccessful because we've owned a couple of fights, especially ever since the wizard got fireball. The latest part of the adventure series required us to try to negotiate with a lich named the Ghost Lord who is working with the bad guys. The bad guys had his phylactery, and were using it to blackmail the lich into creating minions to aid their army. We killed the people who had the phylactery, and so we went to tell the lich "stay out of the coming war, and we won't smash your phylactery for good."
Because we didn't want to actually bring the thing with us, we waited until midnight, struck it once to do some damage, then hid it some place safe, leaving orders to an ally to unearth it and destroy it if we weren't heard from in X days. We knew the lich was connected to his phylactery, so we could go up to him and say, remember that thump you felt a couple days ago at midnight? That was us.
This session, we press into the Ghost Lord's lair, having spent the two previous sessions fighting guardians and the Red Hand agents who were there keeping tabs on him. We run afoul of his bonedrinkers (think bad-ass goblin zombies with tentacles that give them 10 ft. reach and improved grab). First round we lob in a fireball. Then, get this, one bonedrinker hits the wizard, who is behind the party's tank, a knight. It succeeds its grapple check, and so pulls the wizard into its square, which actually causes him to pass through the knight's square. Then, the next round, another bone drinker further back in the room attacks the wizard and pulls him yet deeper into the room, so that we have a horde of nearly a dozen of these things between us and the wizard. Very zombie-movie-esque.
The GM is sad, because he doesn't even manage to kill the wizard. The wizard did get dropped unconscious, but we prevailed.
Then, after that fight, we figure we've faced the worst of it, so we're gonna go knock on the Ghost Lord's door, tell him we have his phylactery, negotiate, and leave. Unfortunately, we'd apparently messed up, and somehow the Red Hand had figured out where we'd hidden the phylactery, and they had it back. Word of this had reached the Ghost Lord, and so he refused to negotiate. We got the sense that he didn't particularly mind us killing the undead, though, because he was making those for the horde, and he wasn't too keen on helping them. He told us to leave or die.
We looked at his room, where the druidic lich stood surrounded by three ghost brute lions and two ghost dire lions, and we decided to leave. The GM was happy, because he scared us off.
And then, as soon as we were out of earshot, we began discussing how our only option now was to kill the lich, because we could not risk letting him bring his undead allies to the coming battle.
Now we as players know, "We're 8th level. He's a lich, which means he's at least 11th level, +2 CR for being a lich, makes him CR 13. He's also got ghost lions. We're boned." But we as characters think that this is a crucial turning point, and if we don't succeed here, all may well be lost.
So we go outside, camp a mile away, and make plans. There's dissent, because some PCs are afraid of dying and think we're better off coming back later, or even going, finding the phylactery, and bringing it back. But eventually we all agree to fight the good fight. The GM shakes his head and tells us that the module designed this encounter to be patently lethal for a party, and he actually bumped up the EL a bit by adding levels to the lich, to balance out that we're such a large party.
We go inside, and thanks to a combination of good tactics (concentrating fire, protecting our casters), useful items (we'd stocked up on 'ghost touch weapon capsules' when we learned we'd be fighting ghost lions, and the module includes a staff of life as treasure, with 7 charges -- we cast 5 heals in the fight, 3 of them offensive), plus great luck (nat 20 on a dispel check to take out the lich's anti-life shell), we killed him.
The party's barbarian was harmed to death; the wizard dropped to -9, and his cohort was slain by a flamestrike; my character ended up with 4 hit points after narrowly saving against a flame strike (plus, I'm bow-oriented, so at the end against the lich's DR 15/magic and bludgeoning I was resorting to lassos and tanglefoot bags); the dragon shaman was hit by poison and contagion and is nearly dead; and we all have strength drain and charisma damage thanks to the ghost lions. But we beat the lich.
And now he's going to come back in 1d10 days. The GM was frustrated because we managed to beat the overwhelmingly difficult encounter, viewing it as his weakness instead of our bad-assitude, but we as players were blinkin' thrilled, because we expected to die and have maybe one PC manage to flee. Instead, victory!
So we're in part 3 of the Red Hand of Doom. Big party - 7 PCs - and the GM has been feeling a bit unsuccessful because we've owned a couple of fights, especially ever since the wizard got fireball. The latest part of the adventure series required us to try to negotiate with a lich named the Ghost Lord who is working with the bad guys. The bad guys had his phylactery, and were using it to blackmail the lich into creating minions to aid their army. We killed the people who had the phylactery, and so we went to tell the lich "stay out of the coming war, and we won't smash your phylactery for good."
Because we didn't want to actually bring the thing with us, we waited until midnight, struck it once to do some damage, then hid it some place safe, leaving orders to an ally to unearth it and destroy it if we weren't heard from in X days. We knew the lich was connected to his phylactery, so we could go up to him and say, remember that thump you felt a couple days ago at midnight? That was us.
This session, we press into the Ghost Lord's lair, having spent the two previous sessions fighting guardians and the Red Hand agents who were there keeping tabs on him. We run afoul of his bonedrinkers (think bad-ass goblin zombies with tentacles that give them 10 ft. reach and improved grab). First round we lob in a fireball. Then, get this, one bonedrinker hits the wizard, who is behind the party's tank, a knight. It succeeds its grapple check, and so pulls the wizard into its square, which actually causes him to pass through the knight's square. Then, the next round, another bone drinker further back in the room attacks the wizard and pulls him yet deeper into the room, so that we have a horde of nearly a dozen of these things between us and the wizard. Very zombie-movie-esque.
The GM is sad, because he doesn't even manage to kill the wizard. The wizard did get dropped unconscious, but we prevailed.
Then, after that fight, we figure we've faced the worst of it, so we're gonna go knock on the Ghost Lord's door, tell him we have his phylactery, negotiate, and leave. Unfortunately, we'd apparently messed up, and somehow the Red Hand had figured out where we'd hidden the phylactery, and they had it back. Word of this had reached the Ghost Lord, and so he refused to negotiate. We got the sense that he didn't particularly mind us killing the undead, though, because he was making those for the horde, and he wasn't too keen on helping them. He told us to leave or die.
We looked at his room, where the druidic lich stood surrounded by three ghost brute lions and two ghost dire lions, and we decided to leave. The GM was happy, because he scared us off.
And then, as soon as we were out of earshot, we began discussing how our only option now was to kill the lich, because we could not risk letting him bring his undead allies to the coming battle.
Now we as players know, "We're 8th level. He's a lich, which means he's at least 11th level, +2 CR for being a lich, makes him CR 13. He's also got ghost lions. We're boned." But we as characters think that this is a crucial turning point, and if we don't succeed here, all may well be lost.
So we go outside, camp a mile away, and make plans. There's dissent, because some PCs are afraid of dying and think we're better off coming back later, or even going, finding the phylactery, and bringing it back. But eventually we all agree to fight the good fight. The GM shakes his head and tells us that the module designed this encounter to be patently lethal for a party, and he actually bumped up the EL a bit by adding levels to the lich, to balance out that we're such a large party.
We go inside, and thanks to a combination of good tactics (concentrating fire, protecting our casters), useful items (we'd stocked up on 'ghost touch weapon capsules' when we learned we'd be fighting ghost lions, and the module includes a staff of life as treasure, with 7 charges -- we cast 5 heals in the fight, 3 of them offensive), plus great luck (nat 20 on a dispel check to take out the lich's anti-life shell), we killed him.
The party's barbarian was harmed to death; the wizard dropped to -9, and his cohort was slain by a flamestrike; my character ended up with 4 hit points after narrowly saving against a flame strike (plus, I'm bow-oriented, so at the end against the lich's DR 15/magic and bludgeoning I was resorting to lassos and tanglefoot bags); the dragon shaman was hit by poison and contagion and is nearly dead; and we all have strength drain and charisma damage thanks to the ghost lions. But we beat the lich.
And now he's going to come back in 1d10 days. The GM was frustrated because we managed to beat the overwhelmingly difficult encounter, viewing it as his weakness instead of our bad-assitude, but we as players were blinkin' thrilled, because we expected to die and have maybe one PC manage to flee. Instead, victory!
