[Games] Pathfinder & Iron Kingdoms

[jordangreywolf]

Saturday: Iron Kingdoms - The Dead Land
With the added time to prepare for a delayed session, I padded out my plans with more and more ideas. Would this player be present? Then X. Would this player be absent? Then leave out Y (but maybe save it for later when it would be more relevant). What if the players avoid this hook? Then Z. But of course, there's no way I could account for everything.

My guesses weren't half bad, though. Everyone showed up except for HZ (so "Stinky Pete" the Alchemist was absent for maybe the 4th session in a row or so). I just did a bad job of predicting how long it would take to work things through.

I judged a little poorly in that I had a "side-questy" thing planned for the part where the PCs would be traveling through the blighted jungle. Basically, Ximena (Digital_Rampage's character) wanted to do some research about draconic lore, dragon shards, blight, and all that, and a myriad of what-if scenarios. Even with high rolls and lots of books on the subject, mostly I could tell Ximena the various ways in which her peculiar situation DOES NOT match up with what is recorded about such things, and I underscored about how each of these writers never really had access to "the whole picture." Bottom line is, if you want to know what happens when you do thus-and-such with a blighted dragonspawn creature, you'll probably have to do some experimentation on your own.

So, they passed through a jungle teeming with dragonspawn and dragon-blighted plants, animals, and things. Ximena idly expressed that she could do with some samples. I asked, "So, how are you going to go about that?" Apparently, by merely expressing a wish, and not actually declaring any action to be taken about it. So we completely bypassed a couple of possible encounters I had in mind for dealing with blighted creatures that could be fought, captured, possibly even interrogated, to learn some more about the dragon that spawned them, and its own theories about Ximena's identity and so forth.

I wasted perhaps a little too much time going about and asking people, "So what will you be doing?" Once upon a time, certain characters would be making use of time between adventures to craft new equipment, but I think the problem here is that the PCs have essentially gotten what they want or need -- at least, anything that is obtainable via their own skills. Brah-Lurh has tattooed every last inch of his own body, apparently, with magical tattoos, turning his own fists into magical weapons. Thale has more warjacks than he can realistically lead into combat at a time. Pete the Alchemist was absent. The Reclaimer has some blacksmithing skill, but his main concern was to keep his magical "dancing" sword in good repair (which was pretty easily done).

We did have an interesting interlude for a chance at some character-building that went a bit better than I expected. Anya, the creepy little "soulless" elven assassin girl, had been bedridden for a while because of the condition the Circle Orboros druids had left her in, in their attempts to "disarm" various inherent magical enchantments she had. (Soulless assassins of the Retribution get a bunch of magical tattoos and inlays from whence they derive some of their magical abilities, as they have no knack for spellcasting on their own. The Circle, upon capturing her, sought to "disarm" her so that she couldn't simply escape via magic upon regaining consciousness.) After some time, she was hobbling around the ship on crutches, and this attracted the attention of the little Satyxis girl, Jhura, rescued by Ximena in Blackwater ages back.

This led to a few oddball situations where Anya had heard of "bedtime stories," and declared that it was Thale's job to read her one each evening. Jhura put her up to it. Anya also seemed to take "pity" on the disembodied Cryx cortex/head that Thale had sitting around (perpetually angry) and took it upon herself to use spare parts to make a "new body" for it, with some creative input from Jhura. Soon, the cortex was angrier than ever, as it had a new "body" made of random spare metal parts bound together with wire, and a pink dress and bow made from leftover scraps of Ximena's old ruined dress.

Goober_Chris did an awesome job of making up some mythic stories to share in the abstract about a sort of sibling rivalry between Nyssor, the god of winter, and Scyrah, the goddess of spring, in their bargaining for when winter should end and spring should begin, resulting in a sort of "explanatory myth" for how much longer winter is going to last any given year, in a parallel to the idea behind Groundhog Day. When Anya started asking him questions about the Iosan gods and the matter of souls, rather than just going abstract and falling back upon some "Lore: Iosan" rolls and some hand-wavy general strategy responses, Goober_Chris waxed eloquent about Thale's viewpoint on the matter, and his own struggles with his own morality.

Thale apologetically noted that he was not a priest, and hence not an expert on such things, but one thing he thought about having a soul is that having one put certain imperatives upon a person to behave in a way pleasing to the gods ... whereas he couldn't hold it against Anya that she had been instructed to take his journal and then assassinate him, because she knew no other way. Anya's immediate response was a bit of a stumper: If he did not see her as evil for trying to kill him, since she did not have a soul, then was it possible for her to be GOOD without having a soul? And he confessed that he'd have to think a bit longer about that.

Eventually, the group passed out of the Blighted Lands and into a vast grey sludgy expanse known as the Dead Land -- the edge of the area that had been utterly dominated by the Orgoth and then offered up as sacrifice to the Orgosis (their infernal patrons). Here and there were a few blackstone ruins jutting up from the sludge -- as blackstone itself had been created through infernal dealings, and hence would persist even when the sacrificed land did not. There was also evidence of a large island of sorts in the distance, with the base of a collapsed colossal statue. The PCs decided to explore one of the larger ruins before pressing on, and ended up taking on some Orgoth War-Witches still lingering in the area. (Not ORIGINAL Orgoth, but ... eh, the PCs will have to do a little more research to figure out why there are still living, breathing human beings still around, if this land collapsed so long ago.)

Ximena got plenty of Orgothy stuff to play with, Brah-Lurh got to knock down WALLS, and everyone got to fight some big nasty monsters. They also rediscovered Ivan the Fool, who had separated from the others when his Grymkin horse vanished, and learned a bit more about the strange "island" further on down the way. (It would seem that the Orgoth war-witches were making forays to this island to get footstuffs -- and to find victims for their dark rituals -- as the island was large enough to support life.)

The PCs only got through the first level of the tower before I wrapped things up (as it was getting late). We might wrap up the rest of the "Dead Land" adventure in another session ... but I have a lingering suspicion that, depending on how long they spend here, it could be another entire session dealing with the Island. I have been aiming to wrap up by the end of February, and since we only play every other week, that puts me in a bit of a pinch. I dread the idea of dragging this out much further, but we DO have some loose ends to tie up.

Once they get to the top of the tower, they might run into someone who can answer a few questions ... that is, if anyone's in a mood to ask questions, and not just kill each other on sight.

We'll see. :)

---

Pathfinder:

Normally, my online Pathfinder (every other Sunday night) is staggered off from my Iron Kingdoms games (every other Saturday), but we altered the schedule since Digital_Rampage is running his "Superb Owl" party next Sunday.

It was a pretty tough game. My bard had blown a good chunk of his gold on getting a Wand of Cure Light Wounds with only half the charges (25, whereas a new wand would have 50), and ... well, I ended up fully exhausting that wand by the end of the game, and we still limped out of there with much less than full health at the end (and got ambushed on the way out, but thankfully survived that).

We quite nearly had a party wipe. We had one quite-nearly NON-combat encounter with an NPC that we captured (Olik the Bard used his Versatile Performance ability to INTIMIDATE her into surrendering upon being so suddenly outnumbered) and asked a bunch of questions, but I guess we didn't ask any of the RIGHT questions. Our one big battle of the night was against one Big Bad and her pet. She had multiple attacks, spells, high AC, lots of HP, and her pet had that plus Damage Resistance that negated most of what we managed to do.

Olik was juggling between burning his Cure Light Wounds wand to stabilize and revive PCs who got taken down by the Big Bad (she could do this in either one or two attacks, and with multiple attacks sometimes that meant in just ONE round), and trying to contribute to the fight. More than a few times, I'd just roll a "1" on the die for healing. Considering that I was burning through *25 charges*, statistically speaking that shouldn't be a surprise, but it sure SEEMED as if I was having quite the stroke of bad luck.

Anyway, toward the end of the battle, we only had two PCs left standing: Karin the party's elf warrior-mage, and Olik the bard (mostly by virtue of spending so much time running around healing that he wasn't exactly on the front line until the very end of the battle) -- and even then, we were both well below half HP. It really felt like all it would have taken was a slightly different roll at one point or another, and it would have been a TPK.

On the one hand, I suppose that could have been exciting (ooo! danger!) but on the other, I'm just not really sure what to do about it. Ah, we should've coordinated better, perhaps, but so often we're dealing with total unknowns. In 20/20 hindsight, sure, it's "obvious" that we should have done this or that, but even then, bad die rolls might've doomed any number of other strategies we could have tried.

I feel like we should be coming up with more clever ways to deal with the enemy, but I feel like there's so little to work with. Stone walls, plain rooms largely bereft of furnishings, and "scouting ahead" largely seems to mean, "Everybody roll Stealth, and if someone rolls low -- which, with 6 people rolling, SOMEONE WILL -- means you get ambushed ... and since the two Stealthy guys are up front, they get hit first." Of course, rogues/bards don't make the best "tanks," so this turns out less-than-optimal for the heroes.

I've tried to explain that the idea behind scouting is that the Stealthy character scouts ahead, and if he finds the way clear, THEN he leads the others through -- and it doesn't matter how badly they roll their Stealth because there's nobody there to hear. Or if there IS someone ahead, and he can't find an alternate route, he reports back and they reconsider their plans. The downside for the scout of course is that he's at great personal risk: If he fails his Stealth check, or if he fails to detect an enemy or trap, then he's the one who's going to be in immediate danger before the others can come to his defense.

Otherwise, there's no point in sneaking unless EVERYONE can sneak. I've let PCs get away with that in my own games, but maybe that's just not supposed to happen in Pathfinder?

Mostly, it was fun, and I actually learned a few new features of the software. The Fantasy Grounds mechanics are fascinating, and I see a lot of potential for it. Still, I need to work on my own attitude when I get frustrated (and I was getting VERY frustrated during the big boss battle).

Comments

[tuftears]

Yay, you survived! Sounds like the Wand of Cure Light Wounds was money well spent.

[jordangreywolf]

Yah. Upon limping back to town, Olik's first order of business was to place an order for a new wand. (Since this was a fairly small town, though, he had to pay a surcharge for a merchant to fetch one from the big city of Marramar (sp?). This isn't one of those towns where every item in the DMG is available for sale at Ye Olde Magic Shoppe on the corner. ;) )

Okay, that was his SECOND order of business. His first was a bit weirder. On the route back from the dungeon at Thistletop, we ran into THIS in the woods:



Basically, it was a goblin druid and his animal companion, a "firepelt cougar." The goblin druid dropped a "tangle" spell on the party that only caught two of us (Olik being one of them) and unleashed the cat on us, but I guess after so many bad die rolls it was only natural that we'd get in some good ones, and the cougar went down pretty quickly -- but it didn't go down so far that it was outright DEAD, and the combat was over quickly enough that Olik, on a whim, rushed over and stabilized the cat.

Why? Because, good grief, it's a big purple cat with fiery red stripes, and it looks AWWWWESOME. Plus, thanks to Versatile Performance, and a ridiculously maxed-out Perform skill, Olik gets +17 to Handle Animal. My thought was, hey, maybe this druid didn't have much loot on him to make this encounter worth our while, but surely that awesome CAT would be worth something!

So Olik managed to haul the wounded kitty on a travois, and back in town made arrangements for boarding. No one was the least bit interested in buying, however (on a meta level this was probably because there was no entry on "how much is this creature worth if you capture one to sell in town?" for the GM) so Olik's Plan B was to nurse the thing back to health, train it NOT to try to eat him, and eventually train it to do tricks to aid Olik in his performances in town. (According to the rules, that's 5 weeks of work and a DC of 15, and since I have *+17* to the roll, it means I just have to roll anything but a "1.")

Training the cat as a battle-cat for adventures would be a fool's errand, I think. For one thing, unlike an Animal Companion included as a class benefit for a Druid or Ranger, the battle-cat would NOT gain experience and levels.

(Also, stat-wise, a "Fire Pelt Cougar" is just a Leopard with a bizarre fantasy color scheme. Reading up on the "fauna" native to the region we're gaming in, it looks like this is a common theme: take some ordinary animal, give it some fancy-sounding adjective to add to its name, and some unusual color to paint the mini in. So, a "storm raptor" sounds very scary, and its coloration scheme sounds awesome ... but its stats are exactly the same as for a standard Pathfinder bestiary "eagle.")

We've already witnessed that Garfield the Tiger (who *does* level), while being somewhat useful as a "tank" at the start of a new adventure, is fairly limited offensively. (That is, he rarely hits anything, and if it's anything with Damage Resistance, his claws and bite usually end up with 0 points of damage getting through ... and judging from precedent, we're going to be up against many more enemies with Damage Resistance.)

So ... I think Olik will be keeping the kitty-cat in town as just a strange "conversation piece," and once he trains the cat enough to do some tricks, maybe I can persuade the GM to see if it could give me a competence bonus on earnings for performances -- maybe enough to offset how much it costs to keep the big kitty fed and happy while in town. ;)

[tuftears]

It *does* look AWESOME. ^.^ And remember, you're a bard. Looks are part of your arsenal! It may be worth having the cat just for style!

[jordangreywolf]

'Xactly! I was thinking about asking the GM how much it would cost to buy a house in town, and then I could start decorating it with furnishings lifted from dungeons.

I mean, hey, that's probably the most fun I have in Fallout 4, is fixing up a settlement, then finding interesting decorations to scrounge to spruce up my private workshop/lookout/sniper-spot at the heart of the settlement (combination workspace, game-save spot [you can only save game at a bed in Survival mode], loot cache, and spot to rain down fiery death on raiders when they attack the settlement). Actually, I did some of that in Fallout 3 and New Vegas, too, but it was partially accomplished by cheating: I'd travel the landscape, find some really cool doohickey (a variant of jukebox that didn't look so dinged-up, an art-deco espresso machine, a nice couch, etc.) and then switch to the console to select it and see if it had a REF ID (i.e., whether it was an in-game object, vs. just being an immutable part of the environment).

Depending upon the object type, once I got back to my home base in Novac, I could either spawn one into existence with "placethere" if I could figure out its BASEID, or else I *might* be able to relocate it with "moveto.player." Maybe. Then, I could use "modpos" and "modangle" commands to carefully relocate it to JUUUUUUST the right spot in my already-cramped apartment. For whatever reason, the game engine for Fallout: NV, Fallout 3, and carried over to Fallout 4 will keep custom furniture-shuffling to a certain extent.

(If I relocate an item already in the room, or DELETE an item in an attempt to make room, it MIGHT pop back into place at some point when the cell "resets," but it generally leaves any additions I make intact if it's a "player home" type area, such as the apartment in Novac, or the top of the Lucky 38.)

Actually, I wish that the scavenging/settlement-building mode of Fallout 4 were more like that. It's a bit weird when I gather a bunch of scrap cloth and some wood, and then I BUILD a couch, yet it looks like I just FOUND one and dragged it here rather than making one from spare parts. It'd be nice if I could, say, after clearing an area, "tag" furnishings, wrecked cars, etc., within a certain distance of my home base, and then my settlers (once my settlement reaches a certain size) over X many days (the more stuff, the longer it takes) haul those items into my workshop inventory, and then I'm free to place them around the settlement. Or ... I dunno, maybe the process just happens automatically: I raid a place, and now that all the ghouls are gone, the settlers raid it for scraps, and new construction in the settlement starts looking suspiciously like the features of whatever place I hit last time. ;)

Incidentally -- major digression here, I realize -- if you have Fallout 4, I recommend checking out Nexusmods and looking up the "Sim Settlements" mod by Kinggath. (https://www.nexusmods.com/fallout4/mods/21872) It's a step in the direction of giving those settlers a bit more autonomy, so they can actually "build" stuff on their own rather than bumming around and letting the Sole Survivor do all the work. :D I've been going back through the game after getting the DLC, and rather than repeating the whole process of building up the Commonwealth settlements, it's kind of nice to let the process be semi-automated (though I'm still free to add my own personal touches) so I can focus more on exploring what's going on in Far Harbor, Nuka World, Vault 88, etc.

Ahem. But, back to Pathfinder ... actually, the "Kingmaker" campaign is going to be a little like "settlement-building" in that a central part of the campaign involves establishing a settlement, and then the PCs somehow make choices in regards to what to build first, and where to put stuff. There's a sheet used to keep track of the layout of the town, with little markers to represent things such as barracks, stores, shrine, houses, etc., so the PCs can set aside various parts of the town for different purposes. That might be kind of fun, once that starts. :)

[tuftears]

I do have Fallout 4 but finished it and am not planning to pick it up again. That would have been nice back in the days though. :)

Maybe your bard can start up a zoo with collected animals!

[jordangreywolf]

(Re: Zoo.) Heh. Nah, I think I was already doing that too much with my Nyss character in the Unleashed campaign. (But then, it was sort of my "thing" -- my character was able to use "warbeasts," and actually got power from them.) I've often caused problems in campaigns where I want to show mercy to defeated enemies, take prisoners, patch up the wounded, etc., when it's just SO ... MUCH ... EASIER as "Bang! You're dead! Loot da bodies!" and move along. (AKA "Murder Hobo.") Even worse if I want to take critters home.

But, c'mon. Purple cat with glowy fire-stripes. That was just TOO AWESOME to pass up. :D

I'd probably be in big trouble if we ever went up against a Pathfinder Nightmare or Cauchemar (flame-maned glowy-eyed nasty horse-critter). I would *SO* want to have something like that for a mount. I'm pretty sure that would be far beyond "Animal Handling" to manage, though. (And spamming it with "Charm Monster" is guaranteed to fail sooner or later, too.)

We'll just have to hope that most of our adversaries continue to be awful and ugly (goblins, hairless diseased goblin-dogs, etc.).



(Re: Fallout.) I seriously need to finally wrap up with that game so I can move on to other things. ;) I'm just about done with Far Harbor. (I opted for peace on the island, though I'm not *quite* happy with how I went about it. Just none of the other options looked any better.) I started on Nuka World a while back, but I kept running into the problem of settlements back in the Commonwealth getting raided while I was mid-adventure.

(Hence, this play-through I deliberately didn't establish any settlements in the Commonwealth except for those with zero population, or else at Boston Airport -- which thanks to Sim Settlements I can assign a population, but it never gets attacked as long as the Brotherhood of Steel is right there to protect them. Now I'm just wondering if while I'm going through Nuka-World, I'm going to get periodic notifications about settlements being attacked in Far Harbor? I dunno. That's one aspect of the game that I hate, where you have to drop everything to personally run off to defend a settlement -- and sometimes you can't even make it back in time if you're far enough away when you get the word, or you don't notice the brief pop-up message because you were getting mauled by something at the time -- and if you DON'T get there to personally defend it, the settlement is DOOMED. Never mind if the thing is surrounded by a concrete wall, bristling with turrets, and every settler is in heavy combat armor with miniguns -- if you aren't PERSONALLY there, they're toast.)

I've been toying with the idea of trying my hand at making some custom buildings for Sim Settlements. (That is, the creator of the mod encourages people to use a toolkit to create their own houses, stores, etc. You basically make a version of the structure at different stages of construction and improvement, with some room for some randomization for a little variety. Whenever a settler starts constructing a new house, business, etc., it's randomly selected from a library of options, so by adding to that library I'm increasing the variety.) In a way it's kind of like my custom Ruins structures for Minecraft.

However ... so many hobbies, so little time. It's one thing to be interested, and quite another to actually do it.

[tuftears]

Yeah, I hated those "drop everything and defend your settlement"-- it was one motive to just hurry up and finish the game rather than take my time. :)

[jordangreywolf]

Ah, that's sad to hear. I really love being able to spend some time enjoying the surroundings, the ambiance, etc. A few of the mods I've picked up have been geared toward enhancing that part of it: more developed weather effects, water effects, some leaves on the trees (not *everything* should be dead, after all), etc. During one play-through, one thing I did was to adjust the time settings. By default, the timescale is around 20, so one minute of realtime equals 20 minutes of game time (not counting how much time you spend with time frozen in VATS going through inventory and such). I've been able to reduce it to a timescale of 6, which spreads out the raider attacks accordingly. (Any smaller than a scale of 6, however, and I've been warned that it messes with timing of scripted events noticeably.)

Really, I wish there were just some console command to disable raids for a while. There was a time in my last playthrough where I'd use the console and use "coc" to teleport to the settlement, use "kah" to simply blast all enemies in the region into nonexistence, then "coc" back to whatever spot I was at before the raid happened. But even then, there were points where I'd be in the middle of one settlement, and ANOTHER raid would trigger on another settlement far away. (COC acts like fast-travel, so some in-game time passes.) At least twice, there were THREE raids firing off during the same evening -- and these were settlements where I'd pushed the Defense rating to over 100, with turrets everywhere. It just really gets out of hand, I think. (I think the "Mechanist" DLC increases the chances of raids until that quest line is completed; I noticed a spike in raids when I got the DLC and installed it all at once, and maybe half the raids were attacks by the Mechanist's robots.)

[rowyn]

D'awww, new pet kitty!

I would totally have wanted to keep the kitty, too. :D

I kind of thought "scouting ahead" worked the same way you think it should, yeah. :|

[jordangreywolf]

The GM (Digital_Rampage) afterwards justified it in that even if we were being super-sneaky and scouting ahead to what we could see along the path, the character in full armor was clanking so loudly that someone could hear him further away than we could see when scouting.

So ... meh. My comeback could be, "Well, if he was that outrageously noisy, then we would have noticed, because WE would have heard him TOO, and we'd adjust our plan accordingly," but then I'm not sure precisely what we would have adjusted it TO. It still bugs me (so scouting simply doesn't work if anyone in the party is wearing chainmail or heavier?) but it's at least a rationale, so I guess we'll have to roll with it. It's a quiet forest. Sounds can travel a long, long distance. I know that much from experience.

I just don't know what to do (in-character) to improve the situation at that point. Of course, I'll keep investing more ranks in Stealth at each level, but that seems to have little bearing on things. Also, for the most part everyone else seems to just take whatever the GM says in stride; I don't want to establish myself as the argumentative problem-maker. (It's probably too late for that, but at least I don't want to make it worse.)

So far, despite my having a very high Sneak ability -- actually slightly better than the actual Rogue in the party at this point for some reason -- my attempts at scouting have been useless. You go, you sneak, you discover the monster ... and it sees you and attacks, and now you're in front. Thus, when the Rogue hasn't been around, the Cleric (closest we have to a "tank") has taken the lead. The closest we get to having someone sneakily scout ahead is on when the Rogue's player actually shows up mid-session.

The thing is, this is not unlike my experience when playing a Rogue ages ago in Urson's randomly-generated dungeon campaign (circa maybe 2002 or so -- before Ironclaw or the Inferno campaign). I thought I'd rolled well, but it would still never be good enough to avoid getting pasted by a trap or ambushed by monsters, to the point where eventually we gave up on having the rogue take the lead, and our tank (huh, AGAIN, a CLERIC! -- Koogrr's half-ogre character, "Large Marge") ended up taking point instead. Maybe I just have some mistaken ideas about how this is supposed to work, based on what game systems I'm used to GMing.

Or maybe it's a case of "You aren't aware of your success," where there were cases where I DID avoid something, but it's something that, because I wasn't noticed, I never got to find out about, so therefore I only notice the failures?

Just to be clear, this isn't a case of, "Oh woe! My PC is SOOOOO USELESSSSS!" I dare say that wand of healing was awfully handy. (If not for it, we most assuredly would have had a TPK, because one moment we're pretty much at full health, and then an encounter with two enemies wipes over half the party out.) There have been a few times when that humble +1 bonus from "Inspire Courage" actually made a difference between a hit and a miss for an ally. And, "Countersong" was useful to counteract a fear-inducing baying effect that was causing our "tank" (the cleric) to run away at the start of the encounter.

(Okay, so maybe in retrospect, running away wasn't such a bad idea. The GM let us know that he'd gone easy on us by leaving out a couple of special abilities the bad guy was supposed to have. To which point I told him to PLEASE stop sharing such "behind the GM screen" details, because the "meta" of it really spoils things.)