Heart of Darkness
Feb. 15th, 2005 12:48 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
terryclothWe had another session of Jeff's Darksun campaign, after skipping a week because Jeff was sick. We returned, better prepared to face the hideously powerful evil priest, with an ally on the inside this time... and still only barely won.
Then, I decided to become evil.
The party coordinated with Ronza, letting him know exactly when they planned to strike so that he could ensure his erstwhile comrades would be incapacitated. Or, you know, betray the party to the worshippers of Girdak, ensuring their demise. Because they weren't quite sure which, they came in loaded for bear -- as protected as they could manage by their spells and powers, and with several pre-cast astral constructs besides. They dimension-doored into three different spots, and the battle began.
The first part of the battle was against the deceased gladiator, who'd been raised as undead. Her own attacks weren't very fearsome, but she had a spell on her, or possibly a special power from her undeadishness, that seemed to reflect all physical attacks back on her attacker. [actually, it had a 35% chance of working, but Jeff only rolled it failing to work twice during the entire battle] She was surrounded by constructs, who proceeded to slowly kill themselves against her damage shield, but was taken down by magic attacks from Saurian and April and Moghli.
Ronza, who'd been watching from the roof, yelled to the party that Slate was in the cellar praying to Girdak, so without delay the party (and their constructs) rushed inside. The stairway to the cellar was dark... so they sent the constructs in first. As April followed them down, she ran headlong into a blade barrier -- the first of a series of barriers that had chopped all the constructs to bits. She survived by retreating and telling the party about the danger.
So, instead, they blew a big hole in the floor and jumped down into the cellar that way. It was a 30 foot fall, but most of them had ways of coping.
Slate was in plain sight in the still-lit area of the cellar, and led off with an acid storm in the room above before the party could jump down. Fortunately, one of the protections the party had put up before storming the castle was against acid...
The battle was slow going -- Slate was very, very hard to hit in melee, and had a high spell resistance, and a globe of invulnerability that protected him from the remaining construct and most of the spells the party had to throw his way, and (the clerical equivalent of) a forced share pain contingency that attached to Cypher. April and Cairn spent FOUR ROUNDS trying to get rid of the share pain and the globe respectively, before finally succeeding... in the meantime, the other party members were just-barely-surviving Slate's attacks (Moghli got Treed, but lived, and destructed, but was immune) and oh-so-slowly chipping away at his hitpoints, while Cypher spent each round healing the half of the damage that was channeled to him.
Finally, though, Cypher was freed of the spell, and Cairn managed to at least temporarily take down the globe (it was generated by an item, so it would come back shortly, but that was good because otherwise he'd have failed entirely). Unfortuantely for the party, this was just *after* Slate cast his Heal... because with the globe down, the silence on Moghli negated any further spellcasting, forcing him to rely on his melee.
His melee was pretty nasty, though. He cut down Cypher (who lived, thanks in part to April healing him through the Status she always kept up on everyone), but then got blasted by Saurian, flanked by Ronza and Moghli, and doused with eleven oversized vials of alchemist's fire that Cairn fabricated and then telekinetically thrusted in his direction...
So he jumped off a cliff to escape the silence, down into the chasm where the Gith lived. It didn't save him -- Saurian swooped down and blew him up.
The party then looted everything portable and valuable from the bodies of him and his followers (who Ronza coup-de-graced and, doubtless, looted himself first) and took Ronza back to Tyr, as per their agreement. There were many valuable prizes to be found among the treasure... but perhaps the most enigmatic was a stone tablet that formed from the remains of Slate's body, entitled 'The Precepts of Girdak'.
Cairn, already a worshipper of Earth, decided that even though he'd always been taught that Girdak was insane, clearly he had ample power to pass out to priests like Slate who followed him, and decided to study his precepts to see if there was wisdom among the insanity. In a way, there was, but he was changed for the worse as well as for the better -- he gained hard, stony skin, tremorsense, and great magical power, but lost a significant portion of his strength of will, gained a compulsion to defend all 'creatures of the earth', and became evil.
Saurian had also been intrigued by the prospect of reading a magical tome, and after Cairn's conversion he talked up the benefits and convinced her to take the jump. She also gained a few benefits from the process, and *didn't* turn evil (she turned neutral), but became a sadomasochist megalomaniac with a compulsion to kill any flying creature (hi, Laika!) and to obey any non-suicidal order given her by a higher-ranked cleric of Girdak (hi, Cairn!).
All this took several weeks, which gave the rest of the party time to commission items and do the other time-consuming things that were necessary whenever they came into large amounts of money.
last session | next session
Trying to think of how to play 'Lawful Evil' properly without becoming a completely unsuitable character to be in a party of mostly good folk. I'm thinking that I'll need to take full advantage of my power over Stacey's character. "Now that we worship Girdak, we should coordinate our possessions to make sure they're used to best effect. What objects of power did you own before you converted? Give them to me, and I'll see which would be best used in your possession... oh, and of course I'll be managing your share of the treasure from now on."
Somehow, I don't think the rest of the party would let me get away with that. So I'll have to do it in private. };)
Then, I decided to become evil.
The party coordinated with Ronza, letting him know exactly when they planned to strike so that he could ensure his erstwhile comrades would be incapacitated. Or, you know, betray the party to the worshippers of Girdak, ensuring their demise. Because they weren't quite sure which, they came in loaded for bear -- as protected as they could manage by their spells and powers, and with several pre-cast astral constructs besides. They dimension-doored into three different spots, and the battle began.
The first part of the battle was against the deceased gladiator, who'd been raised as undead. Her own attacks weren't very fearsome, but she had a spell on her, or possibly a special power from her undeadishness, that seemed to reflect all physical attacks back on her attacker. [actually, it had a 35% chance of working, but Jeff only rolled it failing to work twice during the entire battle] She was surrounded by constructs, who proceeded to slowly kill themselves against her damage shield, but was taken down by magic attacks from Saurian and April and Moghli.
Ronza, who'd been watching from the roof, yelled to the party that Slate was in the cellar praying to Girdak, so without delay the party (and their constructs) rushed inside. The stairway to the cellar was dark... so they sent the constructs in first. As April followed them down, she ran headlong into a blade barrier -- the first of a series of barriers that had chopped all the constructs to bits. She survived by retreating and telling the party about the danger.
So, instead, they blew a big hole in the floor and jumped down into the cellar that way. It was a 30 foot fall, but most of them had ways of coping.
Slate was in plain sight in the still-lit area of the cellar, and led off with an acid storm in the room above before the party could jump down. Fortunately, one of the protections the party had put up before storming the castle was against acid...
The battle was slow going -- Slate was very, very hard to hit in melee, and had a high spell resistance, and a globe of invulnerability that protected him from the remaining construct and most of the spells the party had to throw his way, and (the clerical equivalent of) a forced share pain contingency that attached to Cypher. April and Cairn spent FOUR ROUNDS trying to get rid of the share pain and the globe respectively, before finally succeeding... in the meantime, the other party members were just-barely-surviving Slate's attacks (Moghli got Treed, but lived, and destructed, but was immune) and oh-so-slowly chipping away at his hitpoints, while Cypher spent each round healing the half of the damage that was channeled to him.
Finally, though, Cypher was freed of the spell, and Cairn managed to at least temporarily take down the globe (it was generated by an item, so it would come back shortly, but that was good because otherwise he'd have failed entirely). Unfortuantely for the party, this was just *after* Slate cast his Heal... because with the globe down, the silence on Moghli negated any further spellcasting, forcing him to rely on his melee.
His melee was pretty nasty, though. He cut down Cypher (who lived, thanks in part to April healing him through the Status she always kept up on everyone), but then got blasted by Saurian, flanked by Ronza and Moghli, and doused with eleven oversized vials of alchemist's fire that Cairn fabricated and then telekinetically thrusted in his direction...
So he jumped off a cliff to escape the silence, down into the chasm where the Gith lived. It didn't save him -- Saurian swooped down and blew him up.
The party then looted everything portable and valuable from the bodies of him and his followers (who Ronza coup-de-graced and, doubtless, looted himself first) and took Ronza back to Tyr, as per their agreement. There were many valuable prizes to be found among the treasure... but perhaps the most enigmatic was a stone tablet that formed from the remains of Slate's body, entitled 'The Precepts of Girdak'.
Cairn, already a worshipper of Earth, decided that even though he'd always been taught that Girdak was insane, clearly he had ample power to pass out to priests like Slate who followed him, and decided to study his precepts to see if there was wisdom among the insanity. In a way, there was, but he was changed for the worse as well as for the better -- he gained hard, stony skin, tremorsense, and great magical power, but lost a significant portion of his strength of will, gained a compulsion to defend all 'creatures of the earth', and became evil.
Saurian had also been intrigued by the prospect of reading a magical tome, and after Cairn's conversion he talked up the benefits and convinced her to take the jump. She also gained a few benefits from the process, and *didn't* turn evil (she turned neutral), but became a sadomasochist megalomaniac with a compulsion to kill any flying creature (hi, Laika!) and to obey any non-suicidal order given her by a higher-ranked cleric of Girdak (hi, Cairn!).
All this took several weeks, which gave the rest of the party time to commission items and do the other time-consuming things that were necessary whenever they came into large amounts of money.
last session | next session
Trying to think of how to play 'Lawful Evil' properly without becoming a completely unsuitable character to be in a party of mostly good folk. I'm thinking that I'll need to take full advantage of my power over Stacey's character. "Now that we worship Girdak, we should coordinate our possessions to make sure they're used to best effect. What objects of power did you own before you converted? Give them to me, and I'll see which would be best used in your possession... oh, and of course I'll be managing your share of the treasure from now on."
Somehow, I don't think the rest of the party would let me get away with that. So I'll have to do it in private. };)
