Pathfinder 26 – One month after the fact.

First some news!

I will be out at Game Knight DMing for (or playing in) Weekend in the Realms this Saturday. As in tomorrow, Oct 25. This is despite the fact that this is supposedly an RPGA event, and I have no idea how RPGA events are supposed to work. But if you’re free, come on down. There are definitely some people around her I’d love to game with again. The event starts around 10:00 am, and is supposed to last up to 8 hours (6 pm), but you can probably come/leave as you need.

Oh, and there are no real pregens for this game. They expect people to bring their own level 1 characters. But I’m going to bring a stack of pregen sheets anyways, just so we can get started faster if we want to.

Alrighty.

So, about a month ago, we finished the Pathfinder game. It was one session after the last post, but then university decided to kick my ass for a while, so I’m just posting about it now.

We shortened the final dungeon for three reasons.

1. We didn’t want the characters to be too drained going into the final battle.
2. A fair amount of the final dungeon battles were repetitive “hey, look, more giants” battles (seriously, like 30-40 storm and cloud giants). Which would have pleased Thorbar and his Giantbane axe, but even still.
3. I wanted to finish the game before school kicked my ass. It seems I got it done just in time.

So, as a quick summary, we started off with a battle with giants, which I thought was boring, but at least some of the players had a lot of fun with. The giants were huge sacks of hit points that took forever to kill, and they nearly killed a few party members. In a random inconsequential battle! Bah!

Defeating them, we moved inwards. There may have been a fight here with Khalib, Karzoug’s apprentice, but I don’t remember. We then fought a slightly modified battle against three lamia harridans (cat-centaurs), including Most High Ceoptra. This battle was actually somewhat fun, once I removed the Wis drain. Ceoptra’s timely casting of Heal on herself aggravated the party just enough to be fun.

In the room with the harridans was also a large crystal, pointing at a sarcophagus carved in the shape of Karzoug. The group decided they needed to do something about this crystal.

So they try moving it, making knowledge checks, etc.

Until someone gets fed up and says “Fuck this, I hit it with my weapon!”

*Poof!* they disappear.

And the party is nervous as fuck!

Someone else tries. *Poof!*

Eventually everyone does it and I actually describe what happened. It turns out that hitting the crystal opened up a bit of a tear in reality, into a pocket dimension.

A pocket dimension containing Karzoug, a giant floating gem, and a runewell.

The group laughs, and rolls initiative against the floating Karzoug.

Karzoug wins initiative, and opens up with a Meteor Swarm, Quickened Time Stop, Wall of Force, Globe of Invulnerability, and True Seeing.

The party stops laughing.

I’ll note that I decided to play Karzoud exactly as written, no fudging SR or anything. The only thing I did was change save-or-die spells. This last battle was to be an example of what high-level 3.Xe combat was really like.

Spells are cast. Some fail against SR. Reza casts the surprisingly useful Holy Aura, giving the entire party a higher SR than Karzoug even has, plus other stuff. Thorbar gets frustrated because he needs Karzoug to be in melee.

Nox attempts, round after round, to leap up (teleport) and grab Karzoug, to bring him down. She is unsuccessful.

Ristan gets the picture and summons a giant celestial eagle/owl to try the same tactic.

Thorbar shoots his bow, which isn’t that effective.

Nonnie uses his metamagic rod and fires off a maximized Disintegrate.

Bypasses SR.

Rolls to hit… critical hit! (fails save)

32*6 damage = 192 damage! Woot!

Someone casts Wind Walk on Thorbar. This not only lets him get up to Karzoug, it lets him charge!

Thorbar runs up and tackles Karzoug, bringing him falling to the ground, with a Dwarf Barbarian on top.

One final hit from Nox, and he’s finished.

So, altogether, a pretty good encounter. Reza felt a little useless, since most of her abilities are melee or close range. Thorbar was incredulous at the fact they defeated him, and he never even used his axe! As well as the fact that they never used their Runeforged weapons to damage him.

With the big boss destroyed, I go into epilogue mode, and the group gets to go through the final “what do you do now” parts. I won’t go into those in detail in this post. Maybe another day.

And, a couple weeks later, we started in on 4e.

With Nox DMing!

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