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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Richards" data-source="post: 8537739" data-attributes="member: 508">Our last "Raiders of the Overreach" session was suboptimal.  As two of our PCs needed atonement (they had agreed to secretly serve the illithid Elder God we were supposed to be fighting, swayed by the prospect of a permanent +6 CHA bonus for the sorceress and a permanent +6 CON bonus for the barbarian), and had only recently come to the realization their bargain had consequences - as in there was a good chance they were going to mutate into tentacle-monsters the next time they were exposed to the chaos energies of the Far Realm.  So this whole adventure was a trip to the Halls of Redemption, a hall of mirrors overseen by a celestial, where one could face one's demons (in the form of mirror duplicates who would try to kill you).It should have been a pretty easy mission, too - and would have been, if anyone had listened to me.  There are mirrors on either side of the Hall with a wide red carpet going down the middle.  It's only when you stray off the carpet that you get within range of the mirrors to spawn a mirror duplicate.  So I thought it would be in our best interests to have all of us stay on the red carpet, then have only one PC at a time step forward to summon a duplicate.  That would then be a 5-on-1 fight in our favor; five such fights and we'd be in the clear.So what did the party do?  They sent both of the two PCs who actually needed the atonement (the other three of us were just along for the support) to opposite ends of the Hall, to summon two mirror duplicates at once.  The cleric and barbarian had worked out this scheme where the cleric would cast a silence spell on the barbarian, who would then use his great speed to run over to the mirror-sorceress, preventing her from spellcasting.  Of course, the mirror-duplicates each got their own initiatives, so the mirror-sorceress got to act before the cleric.  And as soon as the duplicates of the barbarian and the sorceress stepped out of their mirrors, the +6 ability score bonuses were stripped from the PCs and added to the duplicates (who had stepped out with a +6 bonus already in play, so this bumped them up to +12 each - a tough fight indeed, but who ever expected an atonement to be a cake walk?).And, as a mirror-duplicate, she had the exact same spells known as the real sorceress.  And to make things worse, we had just leveled up to 18th level the session before, so the sorceress had just gotten her first 9th-level spell and she had chosen wail of the banshee.  So that's what the mirror-sorceress went with as her opening salvo (and can you blame her?), resulting in the immediate deaths of the sorceress and our dwarven fighter.  The remaining three of us had all we could do to take out the mirror-barbarian (fortunately for us, the mirror-sorceress returned to her mirror upon the death of her original), at the end of which I was ready for a full-fledged retreat, knowing our cleric could return the two slain PCs to life.But the DM went easy on us, with the celestial providing a free true resurrection on our fallen PCs and offering another attempt.  So I used my lizardfolk PC's low Intelligence as a means of asking questions he didn't understand.  "Why did we activate two mirrors at once instead of one at a time?  And why not two mirrors right next to each other instead of two across the room from each other?  If we wanted the mirror-sorceress to be inside a silence spell, why didn't we have the spell cast on a coin and thrown over by the mirror she would step out of, so she couldn't cast a spell before we were able to get the spell over to her?  If our barbarian's mirror-duplicate has already been slain, couldn't he stand by the mirror with his greataxe ready to strike the duplicates when they stepped out of the mirror?"Eventually, we started using some more solid tactics (although after having slain the mirror-sorceress in one round while inside a silence spell, the cleric stepped forward to do the same thing to his mirror-clone, only to point out after he had done so that he had a rod of silent spell that allowed him to cast spells of up to 6th level inside a silence spell - sometimes, we're our own worst enemies!) and were eventually successful.  The three of us "companion" PCs who hadn't needed atonement spells got to choose between "knowledge" and "power" as our rewards; the cleric used his "knowledge" reward to check on a friend's satisfaction with his status as a drow matron's "boy toy" while the dwarf fighter and my lizardfolk both got free weapon upgrades.  My PC might only have a 6 INT, but he's no dummy!Johnathan</blockquote>

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