A great session - and HELP (please)!

[Inconsequenti-AL]

Had a really memorable session last night! Most dnd combat fun I can recall having.

Morrus ran us through a unusual encounter:

Our group is a 4 person 10th~12th level party, with 3 cohorts.

We started by trying to teleport into a temple of Orcus to steal an evil artifact. In hindsight, this may not have been our greatest plan! Anyway, we were redirected onto a 5' wide bridge, over a bottomless pit in a dark antimagiced room. Only my half orc fighter and a pseudodragon familiar could see.

Some skeletal fighters and a huge swarm of bats threw themselves at us pretty much straight away. A real tooth and nail fight followed. No-one had any light sources - too reliant on magic - so improvised torches were the order of the day. Trips and bullrushes aplenty with the skeletons. An aging bag of thunderstones saw off the bulk of the bats - deafness + sonar = bad day

Even featured a very heroic selfless 'divine intervention' from our exalted paladin - saving my character from an untimely death! I owe him bigtime.

Showcased some fun bits of combat - particularly suprise, fear and improvisation! Seriously challenged an 11th level party with 6 CR 6 skeletons and 64 CR 2 bats. I love it when that sort of thing happens. Was a great piece of R.B. DMing!

 

[Inconsequenti-AL]

And now onto the HELP!

Having examined the room we're in:

We're in the middle of a 60' radius room.
There is a 5' wide bridge spanning the middle.
There is an iron door - 100' above the bridge and perpendicular to the center of the bridge. It has no window and is fairly flush to the wall.
There is a (possibly) bottomless pit underneath us - we dropped a thunderstone into it and it's fallen for several minutes now.
There is an antimagic field - at least over the whole bridge.
The walls are made out of sheer smooth unclimbable adamantine.

We have a load of 'standard' gear, plenty of rope and 1 adamantine sword. The guy that can climb is unconcious.

Some things we've considered:
Waiting for a 'prison guard' to turn up. We're on a time limit, so this is not a great idea.
Jumping into the pit... Last resort. It has some obvious drawbacks.
I'd really like to steal this adamantine room and sell it down the market. I could buy all the shiny gizmos I'd ever need.
Some sort of swing from the bridge? - we got about that far. It was late. Our brains hurt.

If you can think of any ways to help us escape, preferably with enough time to save the City of Greenridge from Certain Doom (tm), then we'd be really grateful.


One final thing. We've been told to direct some of our thanks for this towards Mr Piratecat. The vicious swine.

 

[Eccles]

Sounds like you all did well.

So how come you need help? (In block capitals, no less?)

 

[Eccles]

Ah. I was a little hasty.

And if it's a Piratecat creation, and you hear running water, be very very afraid.

OK. Barring some way to turn off the antimagic effect, I've got a few possibilities.

1. Use the adamantine sword to hack at the adamantine walls to make them a bit more climbable. This sounds horrifically dangerous to me, but it's a possibility. (also - adamantine chips!)

2. Bottomless pits are rare. If it was me, I'd take a very deep pit and cover the bottom with a silence spell to make it seem bottomless. Try lowering either a player or a lit magic item on a length of rope (after lowering something you can afford to lose first, I guess!) If the null-magic area runs out down there somewhere, it's likely to open up a whole stack of options.

3. Wake the climber up.

4. Get off the d*mn rope bridge if you have a chance. I hate those things.

5. This is a long shot, but have you considered the possibility of it being an illusion? You are talking about a galaxy-bankrupting quantity of adamantine, after all.

6. I'm almost tempted to suggest the use of tanglefoot bags as a climbing aid. Throw 'em at the walls and then stick yourself to the glue and 'Spiderman' up the wall. Depends how much Morrus likes Spiderman...

 

[Whisper72]

Hmm... some things to try out:

to test whether the anti-magic field is only active on the bridge, lower someone from a rope below the bridge to see if magic works there, then maybe s/he can try to fly up to the wall (keep this person tied to the rope tho, should the antimagic field be active higher up, and the fly effect be cancelled)

try to shoot the adamantine sword into the iron door with a large crossbow, or otherwise use some type of magical arrow (maybe it will act magical near the door and still be able to pierce it) or similar missile gambit

if thunderstones worked, then alchemy does work (don't know how you rule alchemy versus magic), so maybe there is a way to blow up the door using alchemical means??

if animated skeletons can be brought in etc, then it must be possible to somehow turn the antimagic off??

 

[Morrus]

Ha! That was a fun, if somewhat grueling session. A very long, tense fight - one of those combats where half the party is down to under 10 HP or so, where you can feel the sense of relief and jubilation when the final foe falls. Desperation turning to triumph - one of the sweetest emotional recipes in D&D.

I must thank you folks for helping me with the ideas. I won't link to the original idea thread, because I haven't finished using it yet and I wouldn't want any of my players to accidentally click on the link.

 

[diaglo]

Inconsequenti-AL,

my suggestion...


take your armor off.

bend over and kiss your sweet...

oh wait...



do you have a continual flame item? when the item leaves the antimagic zone it should relight...do as was suggested with the rope. dangle it down to test the limits of the antimagic zone. or whirl it around and toss it up into the air to test the height.

 

[Darmanicus]

Oh what a night, it totally rocked!

I've fought demons, evil wizards and clerics, a rakshasha, 2 dragons and a beholder and they had nothing on the critters of last night!!! I never thought a swarm of bats and a few skellies would ever produce the kinda emotions that were flying about last night.

Ok so it was all about our surroundings that these things caused us so much pain/fear/desperation and god knows what else, but what a deliciously wicked combination!

My hat off to Morrus and all of ya that made last night one of those sessions that's gonna stick around for a long time.

Eccles…..

1. Not too sure about using the sword vs the walls, (wouldn't want to break me unconcious buddy's favourite toy even if he does think he owes me big time), but W72s suggestion of possibly launching it into the iron door seems a good place to start.

2. We never thought of a silenced effect down the pit, definitely worth checking out.

3. Climber is at about -8 HPs or something so there's no waking him in a hurry unless we can find a spot that the AM field doesn't cover.

4. Not too sure if it's a rope bridge. If it was I would have definitely expected the skellies to have hacked away at it.

5. Good point, will start making those will checks.

6. What a great frickin' idea, now where's me spandex? Cheers Eccles.

 

[Inconsequenti-AL]

Great ideas with the continual flame item.... we don't have one, but a +4 sword (with glowy aura) ought to make an incredibly overpriced replacement - make it useful as something other than an ornament. Definitely need to prepare myself better for no magic in the future.

try to shoot the adamantine sword into the iron door with a large crossbow, or otherwise use some type of magical arrow (maybe it will act magical near the door and still be able to pierce it) or similar missile gambit

That's a great idea. I think the Adamantine would work even in an antimagic field... it's a property of the material rather than magic. Anyone know if I'm right in thinking that?

I think an improvised propelling device is definitely needed. Door is ~115 feet away if my maths is working today ((60^2 + 100^2)^1/2) - too far to throw. Making a crossbow might be tricky, wonder if an improvised spear hurler might do.

Either that or try and hack a lump out of the wall big enough to fire from a crossbow.

We have a ranger archery specialist with far shot, which could be extremely useful here.




When this is done, I'm going to have to take a peek at that thread. Need to find out who goes on the Hoover style revenge list.

I've been itching to look at the Clawron Shattersoul thread as well - but we still havn't dealt with him. On a bookmark for later!

 

[Eccles]

Ooops...