Arden Vul - Session 9
The party
Skeggi Arnbjorgsson, the Elf Thief.
Andreas Choumnos, Archontean Fighter.
Basil Cydones, Archontean Magic-User, member of the Order of Thoth.
Maximos, Archontean Monk, from a Monastery of the Twin Gods. Twin of Satyrion. Lost.
Satyrion, Archontean Fighter, ex-monk from a Monastery of the Twin Gods. Twin of Maximos.
Kaliban, the Thorcin Fighter, former child gladiator. On bed-rest.
Petronas Phocus, Archontean Thief.
Titus Tullius, Archontean Magic-User, member of the New School of Arcane Might.
Extras
Freydis, the Wiskin Cleric of Thor (hireling).
Prosper the Doughty, Archontean Paladin of Mitra, wielder of a powerful magical blade and his two torch-bearers.
Summary
We resume clombat
- 4 halfling guards and the blond leader they dealt with before have arrived from the north. Skeggi and Basil both notice that their weapons are covered with a sticky green substance. The hands of the guards (but not the leader) are also covered with poison.
- The party can hear a spell being cast to the east.
Round 1:
- The bulk of the party quickly retreated back to the broken gate and gathered darts. Prosper instead charged the group of halfling guards and drunkingly failed to connect any blows.
- The halflings surrounded and attacked Prosper, one making contact with their poisoned weapon.
Round 2:
- Andreas charged and Satryion followed, and with Prosper they slayed the blond leader.
- The rest of the party arranged themselves in a defensive formation.
- Prosper is hit multiple times with poisoned blades
- A human magic user appears from the east, covered with a Shield spell, and cast sleep on the party's fighters. Prosper and one of Prosper's hirelings began trying to rouse them.
Round 3:
- One of the halfling guards pukes a horrible red mess and dies instantly.
- The magic user pulled out a scroll and walked backwards while the party pursued.
- No one in the party can interrupt the spell before it goes off. The party, Prosper, and all the halflings in the crossroads are incinerated by a fireball.
- In the moments before the fireball torched everyone, Prosper's magic blade, sitting on the ground next to him, began glowing blue and spread frost on the ground. Satyrion and Skeggi both jump to grab it, but Skeggi got there first. The magic of the blade decreased the damage of the fireball just enough for Skeggi to barely survive. He passed out.
- Both Skeggi's magical blade and the wand of Set that could have been sold for a relative fortune are destroyed. Basil's magic staff survives the blaze.
Prosper, having survived the fireball, took a look around. He grabbed his magic blade and made a decision. He picked up Skeggi and limped back to the secret door that brought them to this floor and started making his way back to safety. On the way through the goblin warrens, Prosper fell and puked red several times. Barely having survived the poison, he made his way back to the Inn and deposited Skeggi into the bed next to Kaliban and took a bunk for himself and passed out.
Maximos' Tale
Maximos, out of light, felt his way back to the room with the maws and slept until the next day. Luckily, no one found him. He made his way back north, towards the room with the torture but found that it is empty today. Inside are several 10' stone columns with torches on the top, a huge throne made out a single ruby, and dais where someone was clearly tortured, and a massive pile of coins.
Maximos stole several torches and investigated the throne, finding two buttons on one of the arms. He activated the buttons which opened up matching pits on the east and west sides of the room, one containing two crocodiles and one holding a large aberration. He closed the pits and gathered as many coins as he could carry before continuing to scout more.
He made his way around the south of the light puzzle, finding spaces that seemed to be lived in. After passing by a hallway filled with debris, he and a group of large spiders were startled by each other. Maximos got the drop on them and waved his torch until they fled. He hid and spied on the spiders and watched a troop of albino baboons appear and beat the spiders to death, losing one of their own but taking several of the spiders as trophies.
Maximos continued to the south and found a large library. Several tables close to the door sat 6 humanoid figures in huge robes who sat motionless, with no books in front of them. Behind them was a large desk with a magic user engrossed in a huge tome.
Maximos closed the door and knocked. A voice called out for him to enter and he did so. The magic user waved him forward and Maximos told him his story, including the mechanisms of the pyramid that led him here, and the magic user grew excited. He asked Maximos if he would like to get out of here in exchange for performing a dangerous task. Maximos agreed.
The magic user, named Isocristis, led Maximos and two of the robed figured back to the north to the room with the ruby throne. Isocristis explained that if they found missing control rod that he might be able to teleport back to the matching pyramid, the way he arrived here. Isocristis used the ruby throne to open up the east pit. The magic user had one robed figure (revealing them to be zombified baboons) hold a rope and sent the other to distract the aberration while Maximos was to follow behind and grab a control rod, lost somewhere in the water.
The aberration cleaved the zombie in two before it barely got to the bottom. Maximos searched the pit for the control rod to no avail. He took the potion he had grabbed upon entering the floor as a precaution, and felt himself grow much more intelligent. The magic user threw down another potion to him, and in his great intellect, Maximos recalled that consuming two potions had the chance to backfire.
He decided to not take the potion and continue searching. He found the control rod soon after and started to climb back up as the aberration took swings at him. He survived the first two blows but took a grievous wound from the beast's awful mouth. He wrapped himself with the rope and let himself be pulled up the rest of the way, control rod safely in hand.
The magic user looked over the dying Maximos, and decided to spare one of his healing potions. Unfortunately, the two active potions in Maximos' body canceled themselves out and Maximos perished. In his last moments, he could see the magic user pocket the control rod.
My take
Another great session. By far the most PCs I've killed in a single session but everyone present had a blast (haha).
I did a lot of prep for this session. We used the battlemaps I talked about last time, plus I wrote out a general Order of Battle (which was pretty disrupted by the parties surprise attack). I also altered the poison Mortality from written, since it's absurdly powerful.
It was fun to use the item saves table finally! Skeggi's magic sword melting is sad but, to me, the loss of the Set wand is even worse. I assumed they would still have the 9000 gold sale waiting for them, which would really boost their new PCs, but not anymore!
It sounds like we're going to both pass a week in-game and start the next session in the town of Gosterwick with a 'new' party. We're going to assume that Skeggi or someone else wrote a letter detailing their adventures and that it managed to make it way to a cousin or something. I also want to start in town so they can actually learn about what town services are available (plus I will give the opportunity to learn about a few more hooks).
Based on this blog post, I have embraced my spreadsheets a little more. I started working on one that is a list of factions and institutions and it seems like it will be very helpful. I really have been wanting a way to track news items that factions know about and this will help a lot.
Poison changes
I made some changes to the poison the Halflings use (named Mortality) because, as is, it's wildly powerful and way too cheap.
Arden Vul describes the poison as:
- slow acting (2-8 rounds onset)
- damage: 20 hp or 10 hp if a save is made
- sold for 100 gold
Stat-wise, it's sort of a combination of the ingestive and insinuative poisons as described in the adnd 1e dmg. Mortality has the onset time and damage of an A rank ingestive poison but is able to be coated on weapons and costs 10x more.
Mortality is also missing the saving throw bonuses that low-rank poisons have, as you can see in the chart.
My problem with this is that the ingestive poisons seem to be balanced around how difficult it is to get someone to drink poison. It's a lot easier to cut someone with a weapon, and doing +10 hp worth of damage by default is wild.
My changes
In addition to Morality's given stats, I added a +4 saving throw (and an 80% to taste/smell/see). I also implemented Blue Bard's poison use rule (applying poison to a weapon requires a poison save at +4). The Blue Bard rule doesn't state whether failure means the poison is wasted or inflicted on the user, but I thought the latter was more fun, which is why the halfling guards were slated to die in not that many rounds, since they all rolled terribly.
I think this is more balanced for the cost. Doing the extra damage by default is still huge.