Ptolus: Midwood - "The Dark Waters of Moss Pond"

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

As I recall, that dwarven book on the undead was a bit of fluff from the introduction of Libris Mortis. I love stuff like that, personally.

As you'll see in later adventures, I like to ground the game in classic (and pseudo-classic) D&D tropes. One of the NPCs from the back of the 1E Rogues Gallery just showed up recently in the current game, for instance.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

Tucker is, of course, referring to the skeletons in Fibber's Cairn. They were the very first monsters fought in the campaign, when the group assembled to discover (and hopefully plunder) one of the cairns of the Tulgey Barrow.

 

[Trench]

And here begins my absolute favorite fight scene of the entire campaign so far.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

Flower makes the crack about how dumb it would be to get caught in the area of an entangle spell because that very thing had just happened to all of us in another game.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

The swarm is a murder of crows from the Tome of Magic. The group got lucky with big damage from the bomb.

 

[Emus Graymullet]

Luck? Psh.

That was solid Dwarven strategy, it was!

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

And here begins my absolute favorite fight scene of the entire campaign so far.

I'm editing the next section right now and I think I may agree with you. Apparently I have an inner serial killer I'm able to tap into.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

The undead version of Artos Nachtmann was the first time I got to do straight-up from-the-depths-of-Hell evil in this campaign. Sure, Pick is Lawful Evil and Khenemet-Apep is nobody's friend, but both of them have rational motivations that are understandable to normal people.

Artos Nachtmann, on the other hand, is something else, and I didn't want him to be a mindless foe trading blows with Emmerson and that's all. So I made the choice to make him a form of intelligent undead (he's a former paladin-turned-blackguard now undead and using the Bone template from the Book of Vile Darkness). And I figured he'd be interested in psychologically destroying the group before doing the same to their souls.

And luckily, Bufer's never able to resist chatting with the enemy and he has a big Guilt button right in the middle of his forehead, which Artos was only too happy to begin poking.

Turning a level 3 (as I recall) paladin into a level 3 blackguard (with no fighter class levels) is non-standard, but I wanted to reflect that the abbey's taint was a special kind of evil, and capable of abnormally strong corruption.

 

[Trench]

Yay Artos.

What readers have to realize is that this is a PbP campaign. So combat can be stretched out over days. Actually, this doesn't make it tedious, but almost maddeningly exciting as we wait for the next round's actions to be posted.

With Artos, it all built slowly- starting from being chased into the skeleton room by the flock of ravens, the skeleton attack, and then the resultant seperation become battle with Artos. This battle is my favorite simply because it built and built and you really got the sense that the PC's were stuck and royally screwed as the situation kept getting worse and worse.

Plus, I LOVE Bufer's badass moment of dumping his healing spell into Artos.

 

[Gnome Quixote]

The Bufer moment was one born of deperation--three of us (well, two of us and an NPC I'd helped strongarm into tagging along) were on the ground dying, most of the rest of us were in bad shape after the encounters with the skeletons and the ravens, and I couldn't get past him to heal without provoking an attack of opportunity from Artos, who was one-hitting people. Like Trench says, it just kept on getting worse. After Emmerson dropped, I began to get the sinking feeling that we might be facing a TPK, or damn near.

With only a couple rounds to spare before somebody died--I think Redshirt actually came within one point of dying--it was all I could think to do was dump a Cure Lesser Wounds into Artos, hope I rolled high, and pray that we'd chipped away enough of his health for it to make a difference. It didn't kill him outright, as I'd hoped, but it was gratifying to see that it turned the tide.

Definitely one of Bufer's prouder moments...although, at the time, I was thinking "Man, if this doesn't work, they're going to be ticked that I wasted a heal on this."