Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Sagiro" data-source="post: 5400525" data-attributes="member: 726">Run #47 is in the books.This week’s game featured two distinct encounters, as we continued our exploration of, and escape from, the house of horrors that is Tomberlin Riverlimb’s basement.Among the papers stolen from the desks of Tomberlin and his evil genius daughter, we discovered that one of their primary projects was the capture and power-draining of a certain sword.  Hey, we have that sword!  It’s the one we captured from Alene, the Deva-turned-Rakshasa that we thwarted back in Floodford.  On the one hand:  oops, we just brought Tomberlin what he wanted.  On the other hand, we discovered the ritual room for the draining all set up for us, with the required reagents already collected.  And on the gripping hand, the ritual was dual-purpose, and could be used not only to drain the sword, but to re-align it to a more pleasant divine power.  We chose Demis, the God of whom the evil Sklar (the sword’s current patron) is merely one twisted aspect.  The ritual involved a circle of small shrines, one each of the 15 Gods of the realm.To back up for a moment:  at the end of the previous game, we had discovered a secret door that was activated by twiddling the doorknob depicted in a painting.  At the start of this game, we went through this door, and took the painting with us.  This resulted in us being safely barricaded in a wing of the basement, and controlling the only way in or out.  So while Tomberlin and his daughter pursued us, they had no way to access our suite of rooms, or to stop us from performing the ritual at our leisure.  (In fact, we could hear the daughter berating the father about the idiocy of his “security measure.”)The ritual involved Logan turning in a slow circle, pointing in turn to each of the 15 shrines.  The sword itself sat in the center of the circle next to Logan, and it turned out that this Sklar-ish blade objected to being re-consecrated to another deity.  Thus began a half-combat, half-skill challenge, with the party chopping through vines that sprouted out of the sword to kill Logan.  Each round, for three rounds, more vine-tentacles would emerge, added to any tentacles we hadn’t killed on the previous rounds.  The first time through we killed them all before new ones sprouted, but there were still one or two left when the third set burst out.  Worse, the vines grew tougher with each new set, and in order to kill one, a PC had to do damage equal to its HP.  (Damage didn’t accumulate from one PC to the next .)Meanwhile, Logan was spending his turns getting healed (since the tentacles were attacking only him) and making Endurance checks not to flub the ritual.  He did fail once, but we succeeded at the challenge, lopping off the final set of tentacles, and allowing Logan the time to complete the ritual.  Oddly, the sword itself chose the God to whom it would be rededicated, and it wasn’t Demis, but Solais, God of Shining Light.  Logan had a strange out-of-body experience, where an angel/avatar/aspect of the God offered to transform Logan.  He took the opportunity to change his class to Avenger, the better to seek out and take vengeance upon Reymus, his personal nemesis.  (In other words, this was Piratecat’s fictional justification for allowing Logan’s player to radically alter his character concept.  It worked beautifully.)The ritual complete, we found ourselves besieged, effectively at an impasse with the Riverlimbs, who clearly didn’t have any way of getting to us.  There was a moment of panic when Gilran mistakenly thought that the secret-door-painting would open a real door on whichever wall it was hung upon.  Before anyone knew what he was doing, he hung the painting on a different wall and turned the doorknob, thinking it would make us an alternate exit.  In fact, it opened the wall section that the Riverlimbs were still trying fruitlessly to batter down.  Oops!  We did manage to slam the door closed (automatically re-sealing it) before they could get in.  And this brief opening allowed us a glimpse of the Agglomeration of Wizards that Piratecat described in his previous post.   Yuck!  (It also allowed the Wizard Ball time to turn Cobalt temporarily to stone, which gave us a sense of how dangerous it probably was.  Eeek!)We rested up in our little enclave, restoring used-up dailies and much-needed surges, before opening the door again early the next morning.   We found that the Riverlimbs had gone to bed, but had left their Wizard Ball to guard the door.  Fight!The new beholder is a great piece of solo monster design.  In addition to getting attacks with its multitude of rays (2 on its turn), it gets to fire off a random beam, for free, at the start of every PC’s turn!1.    Charm Ray (dominates target)2.    Wounding Ray (damage)3.    Sleep Ray (immobilization, then unconsciousness on failed save)4.    Telekinesis Ray (slides target 4 squares)5.    Slowing Ray (damage plus slow)6.    Brilliant Ray (damage plus blindness)7.    Terror Ray (damage plus target “pushed” its speed)8.    Petrifying Ray (target turned to stone until it saves, then immobilized until 2nd save)9.    Death Ray (damage, then dazed/weakened on failed save, then dead on 2nd failed save)10.    Disintegrate Ray (damage plus more ongoing damage)Fortunately for us, we chose to emerge at 5:00 AM when the Riverlimbs were asleep, and so only had to fight this one creature, which was (I think) a Level 9 solo.  (We’re all 10th level at this point.)  It had 392 hit points, which may sound like plenty, but as you know if you’ve been following this thread, a party of 6 with 4 strikers can pile on the damage quite efficiently.  Bramble made a huge difference as usual, giving us +2 to hit the Wizard Ball through the whole encounter, and giving us all Resist Damage 4 as well using the Protective Roots utility power.  Realizing that ranged combat was its forte, we swarmed around the Wizard Ball, delivering massive melee attacks and using various powers that granted us combat advantage (since, with its all-around vision, we couldn’t gain CA by flanking it).  The best two moments of the fight:-    Gilran running right at it, sliding under the Tenser’s floating disc upon which it sat, and snapping the metal chain that was channeling the main head’s power-inhibited ability.-    Strontium describing her use of the “Taunting Phantom” power as inviting all of the monster’s component wizards to argue about a seeming paradox in magical theory.  When they all started bickering instead of remembering to fight us, the Caducity head had to bite one of them to get them to focus.  Brilliant!Also, I'm still in love with the Knockout/Bloodbath combo.  Cobalt climbed up the arms of the wizards, clocked the Caducity head unconscious, and then used an Action Point to slit its throat as the head lolled backward.  75+ damage in a single round!  It would have been more total, but we killed the beast before the Ongoing 21 could kick in.  During this battle, a golem of some sort started banging a gong, presumably to alert the Riverlimbs that we had come out of hiding.  Next game we will certainly have to deal with Tomberlin and his daughter, so we’re not out of the woods yet by any means.  It does feel good, though, to be chewing up his vile menagerie.</blockquote>

Verification