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Rangda's Zeitgeist Campaign (SPOILERS)
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<blockquote data-quote="rangda" data-source="post: 5989025" data-attributes="member: 86125"><p><strong>8/12 Session</strong></p><p></p><p>Finally had another session today after a 3 week layoff. Not much in the way of plot advancement today as the “defend the gate mechanism” scene took most of the session. Because my party is classic old school kick-the-door-down-and-kill-the-bad-guys types, I opted to run this scene as the 3 combat encounters rather than a skill challenge. That ate up most of the night.</p><p></p><p>The session starts with the party outside the keep wall, ready to enter. A brief recap of what has previously occurred (made much easier by these write ups) gets everyone up to speed quickly. Thanks to whoever suggested the idea of a recap at the start of each session! Ford reads a Passwall scroll, the party gets lucky not having a random patrol right in front of the hole as it materializes, and in they go. Despite having characters with 1 and -1 stealth skills, the party manages to make their way to the water edge with only 3 failures, avoiding any contact with guards or patrols. (Note that we use the LFR cards in our game and the “That'll Do” cards allowing a retroactive take 10 on a skill check make a huge difference here.) Along the way the party comes across the prisoners in the stable, but decide they would rather leave that alone and not trigger a keep-wide alarm with them so far from their primary objective (wise decision). The party does come up with the idea to use a water breathing scroll for an easy stealth approach to the lighthouse. This also gives them the advantage of being able to get a good look at the area without exposing themselves. A die roll of an 18 on a perception check reveals the wizard in the 2nd floor of the lighthouse, and they stay to watch the patrol patterns of the guards. Looking at the battle map, they see no good place to come out of the water, as coming out by the ship still requires you to come up the ramp which makes the lighthouse effectively ~200 feet away. instead they decide they want to come up on the seawall and approach from that direction. I allow this going with the general description of gas lights ever 60' with small patches of darkness between. They pick a patch 3 lanterns away from the battle map, giving them plenty of room to avoid being spotted on the ascent to the wall at the cost of possibly being detected in the lantern light. They do, however, come up with a reasonably cunning plan for that.</p><p></p><p>Lacy being the best climber in the party climbs the sea wall and drops a rope from one of the dark patches. The stealth team, Ford and Carlie, climb next (Carlie barely avoids falling into the water, she's an awful climber). Ford sneaks over to the gas lantern and then makes a stealth check to slowly fade the lantern down with nobody noticing, letting the poor stealth types avoid having to deal with the light. They repeat this process moving from darkness patch to darkness patch, going back to turn on the lanterns behind them. This way no more than 1 lantern is ever dimmed. Given the relative lack of perception on the part of the guards I figured this had a semi-reasonable chance of working long enough for them to get to the lighthouse. I left the move around stealth checks for Ford in the light at the general DC of 8 and set the DC of changing the light level to 15. Despite the 15 DC Ford makes every check but one, I hit them with 2 failures to the threat level for blowing that check as a guard notices something odd with the lights on the sea wall. This brings the alert level to Elevated; however at this point the party is at the lighthouse making it somewhat moot.</p><p></p><p>I'm feeling generous since they came up with such a good plan for an approach so I give them a trap door on the roof of the machine room next to lighthouse. This lets them sneak into that room without alerting the guards outside. I put one guard In the room but Ford sneaks up on him and takes him out. (D&D rules don't really allow it, but I told them if they could sneak next to a guard w/o the guard being aware they could do a one shot take-down as long as they don't role a 1 on the attack roll). The stealth team (Ford and Carlie) then sneak back on the roof, down the wall and stealth take-down the guard by the lantern right outside the machine room. This gives them a 2 pronged attack on the lighthouse from both doors. I figure someone would notice the missing guard outside pretty quick, but given that they'll be launching an attack in a couple of rounds that would occur first.</p><p></p><p>They get surprise on the guards in the tower, who I have playing cards at a table. Lacy, Cyrus and his mechanical bear, and Ford swarm them, Savanna moves to cover the door, and Carlie makes for the second floor to deal with the wizard. As luck would have it Carlie goes before the wizard & drake in the initiative order, so on the first non-surprise round uses Elemental Escalation on her Elemental Bolt, hitting the drake and critting the wizard. The drake takes 20 I think and the wizard takes 37 for the crit; killing the wizard and almost killing the drake (certainly making him a non-threat) without any chance for the bell to go off to sound the alarm<strong><span style="color: Red">[1]</span></strong>. Ford and Lacy also beat the initiative of the guards downstairs so a good chunk of guards are down before they even get to go, making this a quick fight.</p><p></p><p>With the alarm silenced the party gets a short rest before opening the gates and signaling the fleet; they use the time they have before wave 1 to build some barricades in front of the doors to the keep. Savanna being a Yerasol Vet comes up with the boiling oil idea and heating it is easy enough with a fire sorcerer around. The plan is to use commandeered crossbows to shoot anyone that approaches while the Savanna is waits to dump oil on anyone by the front door if it gets hairy. The first wave drops pretty quickly although the party's tactics aren't so good. They just aren't all that great with the crossbows lacking a DEX character, leaving most of the dirty work to Carlie. This means that Carlie also takes most of the return fire, they take out the wave at the cost of a couple of Carlie's healing surges.</p><p></p><p>The downtime between waves is spent repairing the barricades and erasing the evidence of Carlie's fire area attacks. The party had the bright idea of trying to make it non-obvious that there was an area caster, which would encourage the attackers to cluster together making the area attacks more effective. Since space is cramped and that's what they'd be trained to do I let this work (at least until the area's started flying). They now adjust their tactics a bit, making an additional barricade outside and putting Lacy there to try to bottle the attackers up before the lighthouse, and waiting to launch attacks until the attackers get right up to the barricade. On the surface this seems like a good plan, it turns out to be a bad one. While the barricade on the 5' wide section outside means that only 1 attacker can be next to it (so it can only lose 1 point per round) it also means that the barricade can be bypassed entirely by climbing the 10' up to the area right at the lighthouse entrance. The second wave also had the bright idea of sending a separate team along the sea wall (there were so many models if I put them all in the 15' wide area they'd be stacked up like cord wood). Letting the attackers get so close means the heroes cannot kill them fast enough (in my game you need two hits to kill a minion; you really have to do this or something like this when you have at-will area attacks or minions are useless). Lacy gets swarmed as she has no support outside and drops right at the point of death. Ford and Carlie do some damage to the horde but not nearly enough; a couple of rounds of return fire leaves Ford dying and Carlie with 3 HP despite them having total cover (I rolled a lot of 14+ on those attack rolls). At this point I was staring to worry about a TPK as I had 2 dying players and 1 almost dying player out of 5, but never underestimate the resourcefulness of your players. Two leaders helped, that got people on their feet quick but used up the last of the healing words. Cyrus also bought some time to let second winds go off by basically sacrificing his mechanical bear to hold one doorway and holding the second doorway himself. Once combat was shifted to through the doorways of the first floor this greatly favored the defenders as Carlie could toss areas out there from places that were hard to shoot back at, thanks to the mechanics of area attacks. It was a close call but they managed to hold out against the wave and Lacy only failed 1 death save. I think the Warlord came in really handy here as she was able to hand her attacks to Carlie so the party got striker damage but at the same time got the Inspiring Word's, kind of the best of both worlds.</p><p></p><p>For the 3rd wave I gave them their encounters and ability to spend AP/second winds back but did not let them heal up; I felt it would be a bit brutal without that. Of course this wave was also substantially larger. That said the party tactics were much better this time and they decimated this wave while remaining relatively unscathed. The let the attackers come right up to the (repaired) barriers and take them down. At this point Lacy poured the boiling oil down on the doorway. I made her make an attack roll to see how well she placed it and she rolled a 15, I let that kill 5 minions and bloody two soldiers that were at the main door. Attackers had poured into the machine room as it was easier to swarm that way but Cyrus held the door and kept them penned in in the machine room. Carlie used an action point to drop two area attacks in there, one with her damage add; which was ugly, even with needing two hits to kill a minion that dropped and bloodied a bunch, killed one drake, almost killed the second drake, and yet again one shot killed the wizard (note to self, every monster must have > 25 hp from now on). I thought this wave might kill a PC but they tore right through it with excellent tactics and fortuitous dice rolling (none of their attacks that mattered missed while the few monster attacks that mattered did).</p><p></p><p>They mop up the remnants of the last attackers just as the fleet pulls in to the harbor, turns broadsides to shore and opens up with cannon/archers/gunners at any other rebels pushing towards the lighthouse. Score one for the good guys. At this point the party heads to the Impossible to report in. They make their report, get a half hour or so to rest while the army establishes a beach head, and are then requested to head to the front lines so they can be present when the duchess is captured. This is when to witness the devastation that is Asrabey Varal as he single handedly sinks a ship. My players having just come off of completing WotBS, are greatly perturbed to see what they perceive to be an epic level bad guy (we're not tall enough for that ride!). Fortunately for them they don't have to, at least for now. <img src="data:image/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAIAAAAAAAP///yH5BAEAAAAALAAAAAABAAEAAAIBRAA7" class="smilie smilie--sprite smilie--sprite1" alt=":)" title="Smile :)" loading="lazy" data-shortname=":)" /> They investigate the wreckage of the ship, they have appropriate investigative skills so I give them the DC 12 information for free, they spend Arcana & History IP to get the appropriate DC 19 info. Thus forewarned they decide to head to the prison they saw earlier and see if they can get anything useful from the prisoners, and maybe with some luck find Nathan. The army has by now captured the prison and is trying to figure out what to do with the prisoners, and promptly dumps this in the PC's lap when they show up. Lacy spends her bull**** detector IP point to get a read on Marseine, which allows her to figure out how he needs to be dealt with. Since an IP got spent in this scene I don't bother asking for die rolls as long as they give him what he wants, which they do. He and ~25 other Danoran's arm up to attack the rebels (they'll probably attack the Risuri too eventually but the plan is to be long gone before it would get to that point). Armed with the key to the keep and the map of the sewers. They head towards the keep and once again encounter the Asrabey Tasmanian devil as he invokes the Immurement. At this point nobody is real happy about the thought of playing with him but despite this they press on, taking advantage of the Immurement to head through the inner wall. They are rather surprised to find a hedge maze where their intel indicates there is no such thing but rationalize this as the fey doing something since they saw Ethelyn riding away from the Coaltongue on the back of one of the archfey.. Right on cue they come across Gillie Dhu furiously beating out flames with his shillelagh, he gets in his soliloquy that “None shall pass!!!”, and disappears into the hedge maze. The session ends with the party standing at edge of the maze, giving them two weeks to ponder the wonders of Asrabey and Gillie...</p><p></p><p><strong><span style="color: red">[1]</span></strong> I know RangerWicket was somewhat surprised by these damage numbers but they really aren't that hard to get. Most essentials classes can crack 25 @L1 with their reds if they get lucky. Carlie's red gives her 1d12+1d10+1d6+9 or 2d10+9 depending on which green she uses (and that second number is an area); Cyrus' double attack can do 2d12+12 if both attacks hit, Ford with Bladesong up can do 1d8+12, even Lacy as a defender can do 2d10+4 with her red. So if you give monsters < 25 hp there is a very real chance they get one shot'ed.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="rangda, post: 5989025, member: 86125"] [b]8/12 Session[/b] Finally had another session today after a 3 week layoff. Not much in the way of plot advancement today as the “defend the gate mechanism” scene took most of the session. Because my party is classic old school kick-the-door-down-and-kill-the-bad-guys types, I opted to run this scene as the 3 combat encounters rather than a skill challenge. That ate up most of the night. The session starts with the party outside the keep wall, ready to enter. A brief recap of what has previously occurred (made much easier by these write ups) gets everyone up to speed quickly. Thanks to whoever suggested the idea of a recap at the start of each session! Ford reads a Passwall scroll, the party gets lucky not having a random patrol right in front of the hole as it materializes, and in they go. Despite having characters with 1 and -1 stealth skills, the party manages to make their way to the water edge with only 3 failures, avoiding any contact with guards or patrols. (Note that we use the LFR cards in our game and the “That'll Do” cards allowing a retroactive take 10 on a skill check make a huge difference here.) Along the way the party comes across the prisoners in the stable, but decide they would rather leave that alone and not trigger a keep-wide alarm with them so far from their primary objective (wise decision). The party does come up with the idea to use a water breathing scroll for an easy stealth approach to the lighthouse. This also gives them the advantage of being able to get a good look at the area without exposing themselves. A die roll of an 18 on a perception check reveals the wizard in the 2nd floor of the lighthouse, and they stay to watch the patrol patterns of the guards. Looking at the battle map, they see no good place to come out of the water, as coming out by the ship still requires you to come up the ramp which makes the lighthouse effectively ~200 feet away. instead they decide they want to come up on the seawall and approach from that direction. I allow this going with the general description of gas lights ever 60' with small patches of darkness between. They pick a patch 3 lanterns away from the battle map, giving them plenty of room to avoid being spotted on the ascent to the wall at the cost of possibly being detected in the lantern light. They do, however, come up with a reasonably cunning plan for that. Lacy being the best climber in the party climbs the sea wall and drops a rope from one of the dark patches. The stealth team, Ford and Carlie, climb next (Carlie barely avoids falling into the water, she's an awful climber). Ford sneaks over to the gas lantern and then makes a stealth check to slowly fade the lantern down with nobody noticing, letting the poor stealth types avoid having to deal with the light. They repeat this process moving from darkness patch to darkness patch, going back to turn on the lanterns behind them. This way no more than 1 lantern is ever dimmed. Given the relative lack of perception on the part of the guards I figured this had a semi-reasonable chance of working long enough for them to get to the lighthouse. I left the move around stealth checks for Ford in the light at the general DC of 8 and set the DC of changing the light level to 15. Despite the 15 DC Ford makes every check but one, I hit them with 2 failures to the threat level for blowing that check as a guard notices something odd with the lights on the sea wall. This brings the alert level to Elevated; however at this point the party is at the lighthouse making it somewhat moot. I'm feeling generous since they came up with such a good plan for an approach so I give them a trap door on the roof of the machine room next to lighthouse. This lets them sneak into that room without alerting the guards outside. I put one guard In the room but Ford sneaks up on him and takes him out. (D&D rules don't really allow it, but I told them if they could sneak next to a guard w/o the guard being aware they could do a one shot take-down as long as they don't role a 1 on the attack roll). The stealth team (Ford and Carlie) then sneak back on the roof, down the wall and stealth take-down the guard by the lantern right outside the machine room. This gives them a 2 pronged attack on the lighthouse from both doors. I figure someone would notice the missing guard outside pretty quick, but given that they'll be launching an attack in a couple of rounds that would occur first. They get surprise on the guards in the tower, who I have playing cards at a table. Lacy, Cyrus and his mechanical bear, and Ford swarm them, Savanna moves to cover the door, and Carlie makes for the second floor to deal with the wizard. As luck would have it Carlie goes before the wizard & drake in the initiative order, so on the first non-surprise round uses Elemental Escalation on her Elemental Bolt, hitting the drake and critting the wizard. The drake takes 20 I think and the wizard takes 37 for the crit; killing the wizard and almost killing the drake (certainly making him a non-threat) without any chance for the bell to go off to sound the alarm[b][COLOR="Red"][1][/COLOR][/b]. Ford and Lacy also beat the initiative of the guards downstairs so a good chunk of guards are down before they even get to go, making this a quick fight. With the alarm silenced the party gets a short rest before opening the gates and signaling the fleet; they use the time they have before wave 1 to build some barricades in front of the doors to the keep. Savanna being a Yerasol Vet comes up with the boiling oil idea and heating it is easy enough with a fire sorcerer around. The plan is to use commandeered crossbows to shoot anyone that approaches while the Savanna is waits to dump oil on anyone by the front door if it gets hairy. The first wave drops pretty quickly although the party's tactics aren't so good. They just aren't all that great with the crossbows lacking a DEX character, leaving most of the dirty work to Carlie. This means that Carlie also takes most of the return fire, they take out the wave at the cost of a couple of Carlie's healing surges. The downtime between waves is spent repairing the barricades and erasing the evidence of Carlie's fire area attacks. The party had the bright idea of trying to make it non-obvious that there was an area caster, which would encourage the attackers to cluster together making the area attacks more effective. Since space is cramped and that's what they'd be trained to do I let this work (at least until the area's started flying). They now adjust their tactics a bit, making an additional barricade outside and putting Lacy there to try to bottle the attackers up before the lighthouse, and waiting to launch attacks until the attackers get right up to the barricade. On the surface this seems like a good plan, it turns out to be a bad one. While the barricade on the 5' wide section outside means that only 1 attacker can be next to it (so it can only lose 1 point per round) it also means that the barricade can be bypassed entirely by climbing the 10' up to the area right at the lighthouse entrance. The second wave also had the bright idea of sending a separate team along the sea wall (there were so many models if I put them all in the 15' wide area they'd be stacked up like cord wood). Letting the attackers get so close means the heroes cannot kill them fast enough (in my game you need two hits to kill a minion; you really have to do this or something like this when you have at-will area attacks or minions are useless). Lacy gets swarmed as she has no support outside and drops right at the point of death. Ford and Carlie do some damage to the horde but not nearly enough; a couple of rounds of return fire leaves Ford dying and Carlie with 3 HP despite them having total cover (I rolled a lot of 14+ on those attack rolls). At this point I was staring to worry about a TPK as I had 2 dying players and 1 almost dying player out of 5, but never underestimate the resourcefulness of your players. Two leaders helped, that got people on their feet quick but used up the last of the healing words. Cyrus also bought some time to let second winds go off by basically sacrificing his mechanical bear to hold one doorway and holding the second doorway himself. Once combat was shifted to through the doorways of the first floor this greatly favored the defenders as Carlie could toss areas out there from places that were hard to shoot back at, thanks to the mechanics of area attacks. It was a close call but they managed to hold out against the wave and Lacy only failed 1 death save. I think the Warlord came in really handy here as she was able to hand her attacks to Carlie so the party got striker damage but at the same time got the Inspiring Word's, kind of the best of both worlds. For the 3rd wave I gave them their encounters and ability to spend AP/second winds back but did not let them heal up; I felt it would be a bit brutal without that. Of course this wave was also substantially larger. That said the party tactics were much better this time and they decimated this wave while remaining relatively unscathed. The let the attackers come right up to the (repaired) barriers and take them down. At this point Lacy poured the boiling oil down on the doorway. I made her make an attack roll to see how well she placed it and she rolled a 15, I let that kill 5 minions and bloody two soldiers that were at the main door. Attackers had poured into the machine room as it was easier to swarm that way but Cyrus held the door and kept them penned in in the machine room. Carlie used an action point to drop two area attacks in there, one with her damage add; which was ugly, even with needing two hits to kill a minion that dropped and bloodied a bunch, killed one drake, almost killed the second drake, and yet again one shot killed the wizard (note to self, every monster must have > 25 hp from now on). I thought this wave might kill a PC but they tore right through it with excellent tactics and fortuitous dice rolling (none of their attacks that mattered missed while the few monster attacks that mattered did). They mop up the remnants of the last attackers just as the fleet pulls in to the harbor, turns broadsides to shore and opens up with cannon/archers/gunners at any other rebels pushing towards the lighthouse. Score one for the good guys. At this point the party heads to the Impossible to report in. They make their report, get a half hour or so to rest while the army establishes a beach head, and are then requested to head to the front lines so they can be present when the duchess is captured. This is when to witness the devastation that is Asrabey Varal as he single handedly sinks a ship. My players having just come off of completing WotBS, are greatly perturbed to see what they perceive to be an epic level bad guy (we're not tall enough for that ride!). Fortunately for them they don't have to, at least for now. :) They investigate the wreckage of the ship, they have appropriate investigative skills so I give them the DC 12 information for free, they spend Arcana & History IP to get the appropriate DC 19 info. Thus forewarned they decide to head to the prison they saw earlier and see if they can get anything useful from the prisoners, and maybe with some luck find Nathan. The army has by now captured the prison and is trying to figure out what to do with the prisoners, and promptly dumps this in the PC's lap when they show up. Lacy spends her bull**** detector IP point to get a read on Marseine, which allows her to figure out how he needs to be dealt with. Since an IP got spent in this scene I don't bother asking for die rolls as long as they give him what he wants, which they do. He and ~25 other Danoran's arm up to attack the rebels (they'll probably attack the Risuri too eventually but the plan is to be long gone before it would get to that point). Armed with the key to the keep and the map of the sewers. They head towards the keep and once again encounter the Asrabey Tasmanian devil as he invokes the Immurement. At this point nobody is real happy about the thought of playing with him but despite this they press on, taking advantage of the Immurement to head through the inner wall. They are rather surprised to find a hedge maze where their intel indicates there is no such thing but rationalize this as the fey doing something since they saw Ethelyn riding away from the Coaltongue on the back of one of the archfey.. Right on cue they come across Gillie Dhu furiously beating out flames with his shillelagh, he gets in his soliloquy that “None shall pass!!!”, and disappears into the hedge maze. The session ends with the party standing at edge of the maze, giving them two weeks to ponder the wonders of Asrabey and Gillie... [b][COLOR="red"][1][/COLOR][/b] I know RangerWicket was somewhat surprised by these damage numbers but they really aren't that hard to get. Most essentials classes can crack 25 @L1 with their reds if they get lucky. Carlie's red gives her 1d12+1d10+1d6+9 or 2d10+9 depending on which green she uses (and that second number is an area); Cyrus' double attack can do 2d12+12 if both attacks hit, Ford with Bladesong up can do 1d8+12, even Lacy as a defender can do 2d10+4 with her red. So if you give monsters < 25 hp there is a very real chance they get one shot'ed. [/QUOTE]
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