RangerWickett
Legend
You plan for a week, create a nice penultimate chapter for your campaign to set up all the dominos that will fall next week, and then . . . you're all set for the game, but two players can't make it, so you put it off until next week.
And then you find out one of your other players will be too busy to game after this weekend, so this is your last chance to let his character shine, and now that chance is gone.
Then you find out, hey, one of those players can come, so you're only down one, . . . and you go for it, hoping things will turn out well.
7 hours later, you've finished the campaign, and the group celebrates. *grin*
So, some highlights?
Well, we start off at the cliffhanger from last week, with the 13th level party facing a 20th level monk/psion in a psychic world he himself created. This villain was infamous for being, truthfully, the evillest person in the world. He was the master of a temple that could alter and tap creature's souls, and this man had consciously chosen to remove all parts of his soul that had been at all good or decent. So, they're fighting an entity of pure evil, enhanced with claws of the bear, brutalize wounds, and schism so he can manifest powers while attacking. Pure, brutal munchkinness of all the best of 3.0 psionics and all the brokenest of Malhavoc's Mindscapes. How could they possibly defeat him?
Well, did you know that Tasha's Hideous Laughter has a duration of one round per level? And even with a +22 Will save, you can still fail on a 1.
Being of pure evil, beaten nearly to death, and laughing as he goes.
That fight had some other oddities. At the beginning of combat, the psion/monk has manifested Fate Link on himself and one NPC ally, so that any damage to him would also be dealt to her. Also, whenever you hit someone in this mental plane, you had to make a Will save, and if both people failed, you swapped bodies. This came up earlier as a complication when they fought some other weak foes, but in the fight with the psion/monk this got used as a bizarre tactic. The psion/monk voluntarily failed his Will save against this effect so he could hop into a less-injured, non-laughing body.
To keep the fate linked ally from dying as they wailed on the monk/psion, PCs kept on punching her to switch her into an uninjured body. Tactical body-swapping, always fun.
The monk/psion was finally defeated when he swapped bodies with the party's gnomish psion -- a psion whose body was living crystal, vulnerable to certain attacks. And the party knew all his weaknesses. A few fireballs, acid blasts, and sonic attacks later, the villain was reduced to shards of crystal, his soul trapped in a single crystal, which they had to keep to make sure their NPC ally wouldn't die from the fate link.
Best part? When the mindscape collapsed and the gnome psion woke up, in the monk/psion's body, a few hundred miles away in the lair of the main villain, Shaaladel. Before being found out as a fraud, he managed to kill Shaaladel's chief bodyguard, a vampiress wizard.
'Safely' out of the mindscape, the party tried to regroup and heal, when they're NPC ally excused herself to rest and recover spells. A few minutes later, she began to complain of feeling something in her mind, and then she grew very serious and started to teleport away. One PC, figuring out her mind had been hijacked by the monk/psion they thought they'd defeated, jumped onto her so they'd teleport together. This led the group to go rushing after as quickly as possible, with nearly no time to heal up or prepare.
. . . In my group, the PCs made this revelation: "Our enemies all have a lot more allies than we do. If we take time planning our attacks, they will plan a defense, and it will be a better defense because proportionally they'll have done more planning. Thus, the more time we spend planning, the worse off we are."
Well, they didn't plan this time.
The rest of the adventure is a little too heavy in plot elements for me to get into at 3:30 am, but suffice it to say we managed to find a way to defeat the main villain Shaaladel without anyone feeling cheated, we had some great moments of tragedy and triumph, and overall a blast of an ending. It wasn't a happy ending, sadly, but I think all the players knew a few months ago that they had chosen a road where victory was unreachable, and the best ending would be survival with the least loss.
Again, though, I realize, high-level villains really need Rings of Freedom of Movement. *grin*
And then you find out one of your other players will be too busy to game after this weekend, so this is your last chance to let his character shine, and now that chance is gone.
Then you find out, hey, one of those players can come, so you're only down one, . . . and you go for it, hoping things will turn out well.
7 hours later, you've finished the campaign, and the group celebrates. *grin*
So, some highlights?
Well, we start off at the cliffhanger from last week, with the 13th level party facing a 20th level monk/psion in a psychic world he himself created. This villain was infamous for being, truthfully, the evillest person in the world. He was the master of a temple that could alter and tap creature's souls, and this man had consciously chosen to remove all parts of his soul that had been at all good or decent. So, they're fighting an entity of pure evil, enhanced with claws of the bear, brutalize wounds, and schism so he can manifest powers while attacking. Pure, brutal munchkinness of all the best of 3.0 psionics and all the brokenest of Malhavoc's Mindscapes. How could they possibly defeat him?
Well, did you know that Tasha's Hideous Laughter has a duration of one round per level? And even with a +22 Will save, you can still fail on a 1.
Being of pure evil, beaten nearly to death, and laughing as he goes.
That fight had some other oddities. At the beginning of combat, the psion/monk has manifested Fate Link on himself and one NPC ally, so that any damage to him would also be dealt to her. Also, whenever you hit someone in this mental plane, you had to make a Will save, and if both people failed, you swapped bodies. This came up earlier as a complication when they fought some other weak foes, but in the fight with the psion/monk this got used as a bizarre tactic. The psion/monk voluntarily failed his Will save against this effect so he could hop into a less-injured, non-laughing body.
To keep the fate linked ally from dying as they wailed on the monk/psion, PCs kept on punching her to switch her into an uninjured body. Tactical body-swapping, always fun.
The monk/psion was finally defeated when he swapped bodies with the party's gnomish psion -- a psion whose body was living crystal, vulnerable to certain attacks. And the party knew all his weaknesses. A few fireballs, acid blasts, and sonic attacks later, the villain was reduced to shards of crystal, his soul trapped in a single crystal, which they had to keep to make sure their NPC ally wouldn't die from the fate link.
Best part? When the mindscape collapsed and the gnome psion woke up, in the monk/psion's body, a few hundred miles away in the lair of the main villain, Shaaladel. Before being found out as a fraud, he managed to kill Shaaladel's chief bodyguard, a vampiress wizard.
'Safely' out of the mindscape, the party tried to regroup and heal, when they're NPC ally excused herself to rest and recover spells. A few minutes later, she began to complain of feeling something in her mind, and then she grew very serious and started to teleport away. One PC, figuring out her mind had been hijacked by the monk/psion they thought they'd defeated, jumped onto her so they'd teleport together. This led the group to go rushing after as quickly as possible, with nearly no time to heal up or prepare.
. . . In my group, the PCs made this revelation: "Our enemies all have a lot more allies than we do. If we take time planning our attacks, they will plan a defense, and it will be a better defense because proportionally they'll have done more planning. Thus, the more time we spend planning, the worse off we are."
Well, they didn't plan this time.
The rest of the adventure is a little too heavy in plot elements for me to get into at 3:30 am, but suffice it to say we managed to find a way to defeat the main villain Shaaladel without anyone feeling cheated, we had some great moments of tragedy and triumph, and overall a blast of an ending. It wasn't a happy ending, sadly, but I think all the players knew a few months ago that they had chosen a road where victory was unreachable, and the best ending would be survival with the least loss.
Again, though, I realize, high-level villains really need Rings of Freedom of Movement. *grin*
