last few days
Dec. 14th, 2003 04:31 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
cellioThis afternoon we watched the first few episodes of an anime series called "Infinite Ryvius". Dani picked it up recently after seeing a couple episodes at a con. It looks like it will be good. I'm not all that familiar with anime. (This edition has an English dialogue track, which I consider to be a requirement. I think Dani's content with subtitles, which is good for him because I think most anime comes that way.)
Yesterday we had some folks over for gaming. We played History of the World in the afternoon; I think this was my first game with a full six players. If my die-rolling on the final turn hadn't absolutely sucked, I might have been able to win. (I spent most of the game in the vicinity of third place.) Britain in its 19th/early-20th-century colonial phase, with "naval supremacy" to boot, is not supposed to get whumped everywhere it tries to invade. Not that I'm bitter. :-)
After dinner one person had to leave and we had one new arrival, but I was feeling gamed out and didn't want to play more. That left five people, the optimal number for most Rio Grande games, so they broke out Puerto Rico and had fun.
Thursday night was the D&D game. One of the players had basically forced us into a fight with a vampire, which the GM had not planned for some time yet. (The vampire is an enemy we had just found out about. We had no evidence that he knew about us. Therefore, the intelligent thing to do would have been to watch and wait.) The player caused enough stress that it was frustrating the GM, and eventually the three players who were objecting strongly agreed to go along with it for the sake of the GM. This implied that there was some plausible outcome that didn't involve total party death, because that would have been a very unsatisfactory end to a campaign that's now been going for over two years. But that was all meta-game; in-game, I'm still trying to justify going along with it in my character's head. (I think my character is going to assume that the instigating character was using diplomacy-magic.)
So anyway... the characters:
Prolix, 9th-level gnome wizard (illusionist), instigator
Turok, 7th?-level half-dragon fighter
Kyle, 8th-level halfling rogue/ranger (maybe 4/4?)
Liandra, 9th-level half-elf druid
Larissa (moi), 8th-level sorceror/1st-level paladin, human
Charlos the friendly ghost (long story)
Prolix had successfully scried the vampire (Garrett) once, and his plan was to load everyone up with relevant magic, scry, and teleport through the scry, right into his den. No subtlety involved. The vampire is known to have been a high-level rogue or assassin, and he has a very dangerous weapon (a dagger) that we were trying to retrieve.
Everyone got improved invisibility, see invisible, fly, protection from evil (from a wand, which meant a short time limit), and a second-level stat enhancement of his choice. (Prolix had to write some scrolls to do this.) I set, as a hard requirement, that we have a scroll of teleport for the return trip; I was not willing to rely on Prolix' continued ability to cast the spell. This turned out to be important, but not for the obvious reasons.
Instead of protection from evil, Larissa had a magic circle of protection from evil (from a scroll we'd been given). This is like protection from evil, but in a 10' radius and, more importantly, it lasts for almost an hour, not a minute. So anyone who was getting near the time limit on the personal spell was to dive for Larissa's circle and get renewed. (Larissa kept the wand.) It might have been greedy for me to demand the magic circle for my own character; the druid would have been an obvious choice. My character has a special vulnerability that I was worried about, though, and the druid couldn't use the wand. No one objected, as it turned out.
Larissa polymorphed into a troll for the fight (and even made the saving throw to not be -2 on all attacks and saves, woot!). Larissa and Turok were both too heavy for a teleport, so Prolix cast reduce on both. (Half height, 1/8 weight.) The game effect on strength is only -2, so being a reduced troll was still a win over being an ordinary human with ordinary-for-sorcerors strength. (Yeah, I'm playing a paladin with strength as the lowest stat. Paladinhood came later in her career, and anyway, it's about more than combat. :-) )
The plan for the first round (recorded here for the sake of amusement): we would teleport in; Larissa would hit him with a searing blast of daylight (from a magic item), Liandra would hit him with a flame strike, Kyle would lob two vials of holy water at him, Prolix would shoot two crossbow bolts (silver, magicked), and (I think) Turok would rush him and strike to disarm. After that, the plan called for flexibility but surely involved fireballs, Larissa's specialty, and probably Larissa getting into melee with her magic, holy, undead-bane sword. Also Turok and Kyle in combat, of course, and Prolix shooting his crossbow. (He has the various shoot-safely-into-melee feats, so that's not stupid.)
So, what actually happened...
We teleported into Garrett's throne room. Garrett won initiative and heard us, so he opened by dropping a wand out of his sleeve and firing off a stinking cloud. He then climbed up a tapestry to a network of ropes and whatnot near the ceiling. (Garrett was wearing boots of haste, as it turned out. So was Turok.) A couple people failed the saves against the cloud and had to spend a couple crucial rounds gasping for breath instead of fighting. Larissa made that save, but had to also make a special one of her own against the overwhelming disease in the room (from the dagger, I presume), and even if you've buffed yourself up to a +18 fortitude save, rolling a 1 is still a failure. So she got to spend a few rounds vomiting instead of fighting.
Turok flew above the cloud to engage Garrett, attacking to disarm per the plan. He succeeded in disarming him, dropping the dagger to the floor. Prolix picked it up using a levitate spell, but since the dagger had fallen straight down and he was raising it (for reasons unknown to me), what he succeeded in doing was to bring the dagger within Garrett's reach, whereupon he grabbed it. So Turok disarmed him again, and Garrett ended up grappling and pinning Turok. Thus began Garrett's snacking upon Turok's blood. (Somewhere in there, Prolix grabbed the dagger and put it in his pack.)
Turok and Garrett ended up down near the floor again. Other attempts to hit Garrett were unsuccessful. I think Kyle dinged him with holy water once, maybe. Liandra smacked him with healing spells, which do damage to undead; that might have been the most effective attack of the entire fight. I'm not sure what else was happening then; I didn't take a lot of notes.
Garrett forced the grapple onto the floor in front of the throne, revealing a hidden trap door. Down they went, and Kyle managed to keep the door open (but was taken out of the action while doing so). The pit was 20 or 30 feet deep, with some cold-emitting mold at the bottom. There was also a grate in one wall; clearly the plan was to kill and dump the victim and then escape in gaseous form through the grate. Good vampire defense, that.
Turok was in pretty bad shape from all this -- not only was he getting negative levels (and damage) from the vampire, but he was also getting damage from the cold and was on the verge of passing out. Liandra flew down to cast restoration on him, and Larissa flew down to smack Garrett with her holy sword. (I had hoped that this would cause Garrett to turn toward Larissa, thus releasing his hold on Turok and setting up a flank -- or an escape -- but such was not to be.) I did hit him and do pretty good damage on my only swing of the sword in this fight; I need to remember this in-character.
Then came the Big Mistake of the fight. Prolix observed that so long as Turok was reduced, there was basically no way he could break free of the grapple. So Prolix dropped the reduction spell, and then cast an enlarge spell to boot, and Turok broke free. All characters in the pit flew out and Garrett turned gaseous. Temporary lull.
So why was that a mistake? Because Prolix wasn't carrying another reduce spell, either in memory or on a scroll. He used to have scrolls; I don't know what he did with them. Result: there was no way this group was teleporting out together, because Turok was now too heavy and Prolix wasn't carrying another teleport spell, only the scroll. Prolix has an insufficient appreciation for redundancy in planning, apparently. Here we had had all this dicussion of what constituted grounds to flee (via teleport), and who got to make the call (final answer: any party member could say flee and we were all obliged to go along with no arguing), and now it was all useless because we couldn't flee. And because we teleported here, we had no knowledge of the rest of the palace or dungeon or whatever beyond this room. We didn't even know where we were geographically. (We have a broad theory, but couldn't point to this place on a map.)
Around about this time the personal protection spells were beginning to run out, so Larissa renewed them from the wand. Of course, this meant Larissa wasn't doing other things, like hurling fireballs. Our ratio of "support function" to "primary function" was way off for this fight.
We decided to try running (well, flying) out, going through the one door and seeing where that led. We encountered a second vampire in the hall. She dispelled invisibility on Prolix and Kyle, and some spells on Turok (not his invisibility, though). We ran the other way down the corridor, and Prolix threw up a wall of force behind us. Then we noticed the numerous cracks and fissures in the walls -- plenty of room for gaseous vampires to get through.
The corridor looped around (with no branches or doors) and there was the second vampire again. This time she put up a wall of force, trapping us. Yes folks, let's contemplate that for just a moment: the secondary vampire is high-enough level to cast walls of force. That's at least 9th level if a wizard, 10th if a sorceror. This might have been the point where I told Prolix' player "I told you so"; he had scoffed at my assertion that the main bad guy, in addition to being a vampire wielding a dangerous weapon, was probably at least 15th level besides.
So there we were, trapped between walls with the vampires. Prolix said something about dimension-door (a short-range teleport spell, good for about 700 feet), which he was carrying. This spell has the same weight limits as teleport, though. At this point I had what might have been my best idea of the night (well, after "don't do this"): Larissa took the teleport scroll, Kyle, and Liandra and headed for our base, while Prolix and Turok d-doored away. (I have some side grumpiness about some implementation details here, but it worked out.) So the result was that the three characters (and players) who didn't want to do this in the first place got back to temporary safety, while Prolix and Turok ended up several hundred feet from the vampires. And Prolix has the dagger, so the vampires will definitely go after them.
Oh, and: Garrett had succeeded in dominating Turok, though the effects were surpressed by protection from evil. Remember what I said about that spell lasting only a minute? And that Larissa has the wand? I presume that this means Garrett will command Turok to attack Prolix and bring his dagger back, but the two of them are having a private game session before the next one to resolve what happens next on their end.
My character is very pesimistic about all this; we did no lasting good (e.g. killing one of the vampires), and now we've alerted them to our existence (and interest in the dagger). This is very bad. At a player level, I know the GM has some resolution in mind for the story, so the campaign can go forward, but of course I don't know what it is. I think the campaign will certainly still be fun, at least for most of us, and I'm kind of glad that the trouble-making character is probably going to see some direct consequences to his arrogance.
Charlos did not make it out with us. He was very much playing the hero (he was also a paladin bent on revenge against this vampire). I hope we'll learn his fate, and my character hopes it involves escape.
I hadn't realized until we got home just how much the excitement of the game was having a physical effect. Adrenaline -- whee!
(no subject)
Date: 2003-12-14 07:48 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2003-12-14 09:46 pm (UTC)Kyle is 9th (5 ranger/4 rogue). Also, he won the initiative, yelled, "Die you horrible beast!" and threw both of the vials of holy water at Garrett. Both missed wildly.
I'll take some blame for suggesting enlarging Turok. It seemed to be the only way to actually get Turok away from Garrett while he was still alive.
(no subject)
Date: 2003-12-15 05:25 am (UTC)Once the reduce was dropped, enlarge didn't affect our escape plans.
(no subject)
Date: 2003-12-15 07:29 am (UTC)