Commentary thread for that “Describe your game in five words” thread.

[John Dallman]

"Ogre magi release many undead"

Some of you may remember the old-time module Tegel Manor. It's been sitting in the DM's world since it was first published; last night some ogre magi let out undead from it, while we were defending the nearby village.

 

[Tun Kai Poh]

(Blades in the Dark)
Centuralia Club? Burn it down!

To expand on this, things were going really well. The alarm had not been raised, nobles were being conned, two enemy leaders had been drugged unconscious, and they had gotten their hands on blackmail material, including secret plans to restore the world's shattered sun.

Then the crew's Whisper met the ghost of a murdered servant girl. She had been caught stealing leftover food to feed her family, and was sacrificed to feed the murderous urges of one of the leaders of the Circle of Flame.

Enraged, the Whisper and the Leech set a controlled fire in one of the Club's guest suites, climbing curtains and wallpaper to eventually set the entire wing ablaze.

So much for a quiet heist...

 

[glass]

Fought Baku, Vulnudeamons, each other.

The vulnudaemons were a fairly straight forward fight, with the (dead) baku who was a former ally animating and joining the fight.

Prior to that, the party got hit with a song of discord effect, and one of the two PCs* failed his will save. The PC in question then failed the first five percentile rolls to act normally in a row (and six out of eight in total), so threw a considerable amount of magical firepower at his colleague (who for his part was trying to take him down without doing any permanent damage, with limited success - he may not have been able to make a percentile roll, but his saves were red hot).

The discordant PC was a sorcerer//summoner, so when he finally did regain his senses for a round he instructed his eidolon to ignore his commands to attack the other PC. And then contradicted himself when he fluffed the roll the following round. Which gave me an interesting decision to make regarding how the eidolon interpretted the conflicting instructions. In the end, I decided to give him a fairly easy Wis check, which luckily he passed.

_
glass.

(* To account for the fact that there are only two PCs, they are gestalt and have slightly better stats and a few other bennies compared with normal PCs.)

 

[aramis erak]

The end of my marriage.

Character's marriage or player's marriage? And if character, how?

 

[Thunderfoot]

Character's marriage or player's marriage? And if character, how?

my marriage...IRL it was...messy

 

[aramis erak]

my marriage...IRL it was...messy

Condolences.

 

[Thunderfoot]

Condolences.

Thanks man, it means a lot. Especially from you (she was also on my playtest team).

 

[uzirath]

Vicious turtle killed by staring.

I definitely want to hear more about this one! Petrifying gaze? Something more subtle?

 

[John Dallman]

I definitely want to hear more about this one! Petrifying gaze? Something more subtle?

This is the Pathfinder Adventure Path "Kingmaker", being run under GURPS Dungeon Fantasy. There's a very vicious and heavily armoured turtle, apparently known as "Old Crackjaw" who we found in a large pool beside a lake. After he'd crippled our best fighter, we pulled back from the pool edge, and the turtle stayed on the surface watching us. Our magician went invisible and used Lightning Stare to kill it.

It sank to the bottom of the pool and we left it there for half an hour to make sure it was dead before we hauled it out and searched for loot.

 

[glass]

Thursday: Will o' wisps are pain.

Continuing our Shattered Star PF1 campaign, we spent almost the entire session fighting six varient will o' wisps.

My character ended up unconcious (and one hp from actual death when I was stabilised), and a couple of other ended up on single-digit hp, but we just about made it through. If I had died, that would have been all kinds of interesting, as we are kinda in the middle of nowhere and my character is the only one who can cast heal, raise dead, restoration, and teleport (we have some scrolls that a couple of the other could potentially UMD, but scrolls are tricky and in any case we do not have raise dead).

Sunday: Sail down river, approach dam.

The Sunday sessions are a it of a side-gig; a one- or two-player game were we tend to play one-offs or short sequences of adventures, and often use them to playtest homebrew stuff - starting with a set of boosts (that I think I have mentioned before) to allow one or two PCs to take on normal adventures. Previously, these had been for PF1, but last night was our first attempt at a PF2 adaptation. So far it seem to be working OK.

ETA:

I remembered: "Megaton Strike is hyperbole, right?"

Megaton Strike is an Inventor class feat; an attack which does a little extra damage but does not level entire cities (which is handy, as my character was stading considerably closer than minimum safe distance for a MT blast).

_
glass.