This forum could use some more stories about cracked out campaigns. Stuff in the vein of PhoneLobster's thread, "Our Favorite Edition is 2nd Edition", a thread that lent the name to this thread for reasons that will hopefully become apparent.
So the group I've been gaming with for years now--most of the people involved work for the same software company. A friend of a friend twice removed (or something) wanted to run a tabletop game. Seasoned tabletop veteran, been gaming since the late 70's or whatever, yadayada. We actually played OWoD Vampire for a while. That was interesting, but demonstated that Old School DM was more than willing to play fast and loose with the concept of rules. I chalked that up to "WoD is bad, fuck the rules." I don't care if we're playing fast and loose with the rules in WoD because the rules are awful and are essentially completely MTP anyway, so if the MTP is fun, the game can be.
Anyway, OSDM wants to run D&D next. Offers to run 3.5e in his campaign world, which has apparently seen years of previous play, including epic-level play. Mention of the ELH is always concerning, but hey, it might be fun to play D&D with OSDM, because while it has some awful rules here and there on the whole it's an entertaining game and I don't mind a little old-fashioned fuckery in my D&D. We're sitting around after an afternoon of board gaming and he announces that we should roll our stats. Okay, rolled stats, 4d6 drop the lowest x6 rolls. Not the worst thing ever...I guess? I roll pretty averagely, a bunch of 12s and 13s and a single 17. At least it isn't roll in order. Guess I'm playing a caster. I was going to do that anyway.
We're allowed to use anything from core and anything we can get specifically approved. OSDM is evidently okay with us using Pathfinder classes. We get some warning signs here:
1) The PF cleric is "broken" because it has AoE healing instead of turn undead. Regular clerics only.
2) We're only allowed to have one elf in the party, and they have to be a specific type of elf.
3) No one is allowed to play a druid or a monk, due to some handwaving about the setting and possibly both of them being too powerful.
4) Duskblades are OP because they have both full BAB and spellcasting.
5) Critical fumble tables. Extensive critical fumble tables.
6) Some whacked-out prayer mechanic where you can roll 3d6 for long-shot odds of surviving imminent death and an equal chance of pissing off the gods and being impossible to resurrect.
The setting includes races that are borrowed from Earthdawn (although I didn't know that at the time and only found out later), windlings and obsidimen. Obsidimen are not playable. Windlings are the master race for most applications: Fly 60' perfect, +2 to all saves, tiny size, +6 DEX and +2 CHA in exchange for -6 STR and -2 CON, with no level adjustment. Also, there's a fair bit of elf-wank. Elves have the ability to sense other elves, and elves have "generations" based on how far removed they are from the prognenitor elf; each member of the first six generations of elves is specifically named in the setting writeup, and older generations get better stats and a bunch of arbitrary abilities, including bonus feats (not off a specific list, just bonus feats).
I've played and run a lot of 3.x, and while I don't always have the patience to dumpster dive endlessly for TO, I know the game fairly well. Our other players include:
Z, a seasoned 3.x optimizer.
J, another seasoned optimizer who's played a lot of 3.x.
E, who is fairly good at analyzing games to build effective characters, but who doesn't have as much direct 3.x experience (although he'll take advice from others readily).
Wally, who has played 4e but no 3.x.
Character-wise, we end up with a lot of character concepts people have "always wanted to play" but didn't feel were good enough for a "real" game--the thought being that if nobody pushes optimization it'll work out.
Z playing a windling Pathfinder sorcerer with some blasty bloodline, intending to go cleric and then into mystic theurge: "It's an extremely shitty character class, but maybe it'll be good enough." Also, he takes Vow of Poverty as some kind of twisted experiment.
J opts for a human crusader.
E plays a gnomish Pathfinder alchemist. Bombs. Lots of bombs.
Wally rolls a human factotum intending to go chameleon. This is probably a terrible choice for a new player because it is all about abusing dumpster diving to be (sort of) awesome, but he really likes the jack-of-all-trades thing thematically and is prepared to get advice from the more experienced members.
I throw together a human Pathfinder summoner as a half-joke because there's a place in the setting full of volcanic calderas called "The Land of Mist" and playing "a summoner from Mist" strikes me as a great game reference. My eidolon takes the form of a quadrupedal lizard with pounce and claws, with the idea being to morph it into a dragon as more evolutions become available.
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So our first session has us on a boat toward a floating city on the coast of the sea. We fight some merfolk. It is at this point that we discover that we are not ever going to be fighing opposition with 1 HD or less and Z's sorcerer manages to contribute absolutely jack shit with sleep. For whatever reason I have not summoned my eidolon pre-fight and since it takes a minute I improvise with a fiendish octopus. When we reach the city, we discover the following:
1) The city is blockaded because there's some political problem going on and merfolk are dicks. Merfolk monopolies on waterway use have effectively shut down travel. We have to make climb checks to get over a wall to sneak into the city, 1st-level D&D "nobody can do anything!" in full effect as we fail climb checks and some of us nearly fall to our deaths in session one.
2) Nobody can swim, and OSDM is going to run this shit "by the book," so we are very likely going to drown if we try. This is actually a huge problem because the city is criss-crossed by canals at least 10 feet wide (so forget jumping them) and there is no way to get anywhere without crossing them.
3) Our party has an NPC hooded wizard who is basically not talking, but who has decided to follow us around. He is apparently like 20th level or higher, but constantly sandbagging. (SPOILERS: He turns out to be a Big Deal Immortal Elf.)
We get functionally stranded on an "island" with an inn in the middle of the city and discover that some people have been using long planks of wood to make temporary bridges and cross the planks. Dude offers to sell us his plank of wood for some outrageous price. We kick his ass and take it instead. From then on whoever was awake on watch (yes, in the middle of a city) was assigned to guard our fucking wooden plank lest somebody steal it while we were all asleep. We are given basically zero direction as far as what our characters should be doing, so I start reaching for classic sandbox hooks and suggest that we ICly search for mercenary work or wanted posters or something so that we can accomplish basically anything and maybe gain some levels and loot and quit suffering being first level because man that shit is terrible.
Doing some standard adventurer shit and clearing out bandits we grasp at threads of a plot involving the city's criminal underworld that rapidly becomes irrelevant because the merfolk are economically choking the life out of the city for some reason. Politics! Corruption! Someone claiming to be a specific awesome immortal elf is allegedly at least in part responsible, and the big reveal is that said immortal elf is not manipulating the government because HE'S THE NPC IN OUR PARTY (gasp) and therefore we must...do...something. As characters who are maybe 3rd level with basically no magic items, no real reputation, and no personal badassery we are pretty much powerless to impact BIG POLITICS PLOT but somehow we gain a foothold in the Thieves' Guild and are planning to start some kind of revolution by revealing the corruption of...man, I don't even remember. REVOLUTION. WE WERE GOING TO START ONE.
We are like 3rd level and we get in a fight with like four or five rogues that are all at least 4th level and all of them have enough ranks in balance that grease is useless. Somehow we win due to glitterdust and stinking cloud being awesome. We get some REAL TREASURE and there are lengthy arguments about how Vow of Poverty works. OSDM is totally willing to let Z's character receive favors like spells cast or consumable items from the church in exchange for tithes. Z is like, "no, VoP does not work that way" and we do some bullshit involving calculating Z's character's share of the treasure which we must summarily set on fire by giving it to priests.
Then all that shit about revolutions goes out the window and never gets revisted because we start working for an Adventurer's Guild that hires people to go do random adventurer junk and they want us to go to a mountain and get magical metal that is liquid at room temperature. They will pay us exhorbitant sums (like 1000gp per ounce, which is great, because we don't even have 1000gp between us) to recover said magical metal. So we leave the city!
Next: We travel to a mountain, almost get murdered by elves, and find no magical metal because OSDM wants to run an old-school module he converted that contains no magical metal but has lots of rooms full of demons.
25th Level Lich Wizards in France
Moderator: Moderators
25th Level Lich Wizards in France
Last edited by Archmage on Tue May 07, 2013 3:04 am, edited 1 time in total.
P.C. Hodgell wrote:That which can be destroyed by the truth should be.
shadzar wrote:i think the apostrophe is an outdated idea such as is hyphenation.
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Avoraciopoctules
- Overlord
- Posts: 8624
- Joined: Tue Oct 21, 2008 5:48 pm
- Location: Oakland, CA
Oh boy. This should be good. Last time I converted an old school module, the treasure was offensively terrible.
EDIT: The majority of the stuff was caster-only, and the centerpiece of the final stash of loot was a +0 sword, +2 versus undead. It had a curse, of course.
EDIT: The majority of the stuff was caster-only, and the centerpiece of the final stash of loot was a +0 sword, +2 versus undead. It had a curse, of course.
Last edited by Avoraciopoctules on Tue May 07, 2013 3:17 am, edited 1 time in total.
There's been some Bad DM Stories threads. Allow me to google.
Feel free to browse around while you wait, it won't be long.
--------------------------
Okay, I'm back.
Check this one out. http://tgdmb.com/viewtopic.php?t=51886
1d4chan also has some of this. Old Man Henderson and Fur Heresy, mainly
Feel free to browse around while you wait, it won't be long.
--------------------------
Okay, I'm back.
Check this one out. http://tgdmb.com/viewtopic.php?t=51886
1d4chan also has some of this. Old Man Henderson and Fur Heresy, mainly
Last edited by Maxus on Tue May 07, 2013 9:28 am, edited 1 time in total.
He jumps like a damned dragoon, and charges into battle fighting rather insane monsters with little more than his bare hands and rather nasty spell effects conjured up solely through knowledge and the local plantlife. He unerringly knows where his goal lies, he breathes underwater and is untroubled by space travel, seems to have no limits to his actual endurance and favors killing his enemies by driving both boots square into their skull. His agility is unmatched, and his strength legendary, able to fling about a turtle shell big enough to contain a man with enough force to barrel down a near endless path of unfortunates.
--The horror of Mario
Zak S, Zak Smith, Dndwithpornstars, Zak Sabbath. He is a terrible person and a hack at writing and art. His cultural contributions are less than Justin Bieber's, and he's a shitmuffin. Go go gadget Googlebomb!
--The horror of Mario
Zak S, Zak Smith, Dndwithpornstars, Zak Sabbath. He is a terrible person and a hack at writing and art. His cultural contributions are less than Justin Bieber's, and he's a shitmuffin. Go go gadget Googlebomb!
Sounds like taking VoP is a good choice with this DM.
Gary Gygax wrote:The player’s path to role-playing mastery begins with a thorough understanding of the rules of the game
Bigode wrote:I wouldn't normally make that blanket of a suggestion, but you seem to deserve it: scroll through the entire forum, read anything that looks interesting in term of design experience, then come back.
I'm sorry, it's possible I didn't read the topic closely enough, but I didn't see any 25th Level characters, any Lich Wizards, or any France when skimming.
For a minute, I used to be "a guy" in the TTRPG "industry". Now I'm just a nobody. For the most part, it's a relief.
Trank Frollman wrote:One of the reasons we can say insightful things about stuff is that we don't have to pretend to be nice to people. By embracing active aggression, we eliminate much of the passive aggression that so paralyzes things on other gaming forums.
hogarth wrote:As the good book saith, let he who is without boners cast the first stone.
TiaC wrote:I'm not quite sure why this is an argument. (Except that Kaelik is in it, that's a good reason.)
'Z' here. There's one very important houserule my friend above forgot to include.
All that "duskblades are overpowered" and "monks are too good" claptrap?
Well it turns out in OSDM's world, clerics cast spontaneously, like sorcerers.
Yes.
No, they still progress spellcasting normally. Apparently PF-style channeling is "way overpowered". Spontaneous spellcasting? That's no problem at all!
There were also some set of complicated rules about how people without the healing domain couldn't prepare heal spells. I think. I never really paid all that much attention to the specifics because I never got that far into the character, which I'm sure Archmage will cover soon.
VoP apparently was a... less bad choice? Apparently you could totally convert your character's lack of wealth into free consumable items. Having never played a game with OSDM and unwilling to basically cheat my way out of the VoP thought experiment, we informed him that the feat prohibited this.
The Lich Wizards and 25th level characters are coming, but there's a lot of crack rock to churn through before we arrive.
All that "duskblades are overpowered" and "monks are too good" claptrap?
Well it turns out in OSDM's world, clerics cast spontaneously, like sorcerers.
Yes.
No, they still progress spellcasting normally. Apparently PF-style channeling is "way overpowered". Spontaneous spellcasting? That's no problem at all!
There were also some set of complicated rules about how people without the healing domain couldn't prepare heal spells. I think. I never really paid all that much attention to the specifics because I never got that far into the character, which I'm sure Archmage will cover soon.
VoP apparently was a... less bad choice? Apparently you could totally convert your character's lack of wealth into free consumable items. Having never played a game with OSDM and unwilling to basically cheat my way out of the VoP thought experiment, we informed him that the feat prohibited this.
The Lich Wizards and 25th level characters are coming, but there's a lot of crack rock to churn through before we arrive.
@Maxus: Naturally. But we can always use more.
@Schwarzkopf: We're not there yet. Trust me. We'll get there. Not today. Maybe not tomorrow. But I promise you lich wizards. They may or may not actually be in France.
So we plan to travel to the mountains. Specifically, The Land of Mist, which is full of calderas and stuff and is my character's place of origin. Somehow we ran into some encounters between leaving the floating city and reaching the mountain. There was a stop at some wild elf village. I missed a session here, so I got this secondhand: We were told to go see some oracle because the mountain was unhappy or the oracle was not responding to mail or something. We are like 7th level somehow. Sure enough, the oracle is batshit crazy because he has been looking into the Palantir and communicating with a demon.
The oracle is a 17th level cleric and he wants to kill us.
Anyway, I'm absent from the session. I get mind-controlled and black tentacles the party. This is actually not that bad considering that we could've gotten wasted by flame strike or implosion or something. Oracle 17th level cleric guy sandbagged pretty hard and nailed us with mass inflict wounds or something silly like that so we had a chance in hell of winning.
We get through that by some miracle. We get to the mountain proper and have been tasked with finding the demons below and exterminating them because they are fucking up the oracular ecosystem or something and the mountain is very sad.
Z decides at this point that playing a VoP cleric/sorcerer/mystic theurge is going to suck too much for a game where OSDM expects us to fight shit 10 levels above our CR, and this is not the first time we have run into a massively insanely over-CR'd encounter. That was like the third or fourth encounter in row where we were looking at encounter level 6 or more above the party. We mentioned this at some point and OSDM looked at us kind of aghast:
"Oh, no, you never make people fight encounters their level, that's just wrong. It's way too easy."
So Z decides he wants to exit his character and bring in a new one. Wizard! OSDM's suggestion to Z privately is that he play an elf and he is given the choice (because a bunch of elves are existing named characters in this setting and consequently he'd have to play one of those, not make up his own elf) of a good wizard elf that was going to be stupid somehow or he could play an evil racist elf wizard and get railroaded into betraying the party. Therefore, entering the mountain we find that there is a huge underdark system and there is a city of some kind that is being run by demons. We free some slaves and one of them turns out to be an elf wizard. He doesn't seem that evil to me! I use dimension door to help him slip past various barriers so he can retrieve his equipment and spellbook. We fight a retriever with some other demons for backup and survive largely because it does not intelligently use its eye rays or make full attacks (at this point Z's player makes some offhand comment after the battle that if I had been running that encounter and playing the NPCs competently we would've all died horribly).
Thus we proceed into the dungeon and OSDM thinks we can handle like four hezrou and a nalfeshnee. Which he has nerfed by removing its feeblemind at will (that would be too much~!) but we don't all die to blasphemy stunlock from the hezrous because OSDM does not actually know how blasphemy works and adjudicates the spell in some weird manner despite more than one of us commenting that blasphemy does not offer a saving throw to avoid stunlock if your HD are too low.
Z is deciding he has to continue upping his optimization ante due to an endless stream of outsiders way above our CR with stupid-high spell resistance. So he starts talking to OSDM about PrCs. J's character did not go with us into this dungeon at all because he was physically absent for several sessions and we wind up rescuing his new character in the dungeon, some kind of wildshape ranger build that resulted in insanity later.
OSDM is like "you should totally play an Incantatrix, it fits because [story reasons]!"
Then one of OSDM's treasure parcels seriously contains a set of dolls that reduce metamagic level adjustments. So Z seriously gets like +2 free metamagic levels on everything for no goddamn reason and starts wrecking face with force orb BS because literally nothing else has any chance of working. Monks are OP, duskblades are OP, but 2-3 metamagic levels for free? Sure!
@Schwarzkopf: We're not there yet. Trust me. We'll get there. Not today. Maybe not tomorrow. But I promise you lich wizards. They may or may not actually be in France.
So we plan to travel to the mountains. Specifically, The Land of Mist, which is full of calderas and stuff and is my character's place of origin. Somehow we ran into some encounters between leaving the floating city and reaching the mountain. There was a stop at some wild elf village. I missed a session here, so I got this secondhand: We were told to go see some oracle because the mountain was unhappy or the oracle was not responding to mail or something. We are like 7th level somehow. Sure enough, the oracle is batshit crazy because he has been looking into the Palantir and communicating with a demon.
The oracle is a 17th level cleric and he wants to kill us.
Anyway, I'm absent from the session. I get mind-controlled and black tentacles the party. This is actually not that bad considering that we could've gotten wasted by flame strike or implosion or something. Oracle 17th level cleric guy sandbagged pretty hard and nailed us with mass inflict wounds or something silly like that so we had a chance in hell of winning.
We get through that by some miracle. We get to the mountain proper and have been tasked with finding the demons below and exterminating them because they are fucking up the oracular ecosystem or something and the mountain is very sad.
Z decides at this point that playing a VoP cleric/sorcerer/mystic theurge is going to suck too much for a game where OSDM expects us to fight shit 10 levels above our CR, and this is not the first time we have run into a massively insanely over-CR'd encounter. That was like the third or fourth encounter in row where we were looking at encounter level 6 or more above the party. We mentioned this at some point and OSDM looked at us kind of aghast:
"Oh, no, you never make people fight encounters their level, that's just wrong. It's way too easy."
So Z decides he wants to exit his character and bring in a new one. Wizard! OSDM's suggestion to Z privately is that he play an elf and he is given the choice (because a bunch of elves are existing named characters in this setting and consequently he'd have to play one of those, not make up his own elf) of a good wizard elf that was going to be stupid somehow or he could play an evil racist elf wizard and get railroaded into betraying the party. Therefore, entering the mountain we find that there is a huge underdark system and there is a city of some kind that is being run by demons. We free some slaves and one of them turns out to be an elf wizard. He doesn't seem that evil to me! I use dimension door to help him slip past various barriers so he can retrieve his equipment and spellbook. We fight a retriever with some other demons for backup and survive largely because it does not intelligently use its eye rays or make full attacks (at this point Z's player makes some offhand comment after the battle that if I had been running that encounter and playing the NPCs competently we would've all died horribly).
Thus we proceed into the dungeon and OSDM thinks we can handle like four hezrou and a nalfeshnee. Which he has nerfed by removing its feeblemind at will (that would be too much~!) but we don't all die to blasphemy stunlock from the hezrous because OSDM does not actually know how blasphemy works and adjudicates the spell in some weird manner despite more than one of us commenting that blasphemy does not offer a saving throw to avoid stunlock if your HD are too low.
Z is deciding he has to continue upping his optimization ante due to an endless stream of outsiders way above our CR with stupid-high spell resistance. So he starts talking to OSDM about PrCs. J's character did not go with us into this dungeon at all because he was physically absent for several sessions and we wind up rescuing his new character in the dungeon, some kind of wildshape ranger build that resulted in insanity later.
OSDM is like "you should totally play an Incantatrix, it fits because [story reasons]!"
Then one of OSDM's treasure parcels seriously contains a set of dolls that reduce metamagic level adjustments. So Z seriously gets like +2 free metamagic levels on everything for no goddamn reason and starts wrecking face with force orb BS because literally nothing else has any chance of working. Monks are OP, duskblades are OP, but 2-3 metamagic levels for free? Sure!
P.C. Hodgell wrote:That which can be destroyed by the truth should be.
shadzar wrote:i think the apostrophe is an outdated idea such as is hyphenation.
Is there anything more entertaining than tales of terrible RPG sessions? Possibly scathing reviews of game systems, but it's a close run thing.
Simplified Tome Armor.
Tome item system and expanded Wish Economy rules.
Try our fantasy card game Clash of Nations! Available via Print on Demand.
“Those Who Can Make You Believe Absurdities, Can Make You Commit Atrocities” - Voltaire
Tome item system and expanded Wish Economy rules.
Try our fantasy card game Clash of Nations! Available via Print on Demand.
“Those Who Can Make You Believe Absurdities, Can Make You Commit Atrocities” - Voltaire
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CapnTthePirateG
- Duke
- Posts: 1545
- Joined: Fri Jul 17, 2009 2:07 am
Aside from the weird things he thought were OP, he doesn't sound really terrible. I mean, he hasn't complained about the face-rocking at least.
Vebyast wrote:Here's a fun target for Major Creation: hydrazine. One casting every six seconds at CL9 gives you a bit more than 40 liters per second, which is comparable to the flow rates of some small, but serious, rocket engines. Six items running at full blast through a well-engineered engine will put you, and something like 50 tons of cargo, into space. Alternatively, if you thrust sideways, you will briefly be a fireball screaming across the sky at mach 14 before you melt from atmospheric friction.
I actually hadn't posted further because I was trying to figure out what module it was that OSDM actually converted. It was totally White Plume Mountain. I don't think it was the official 3.5 conversion, though, and he definitely added a lot of stuff. Talking to Z about it, he recalled us finding Blackrazor and either discarding or selling it because it was crappy or something.
As observed by fectin, OSDM wasn't exactly bad, and he never took offense to us winning...he just pulled out a lot of really arbitrary crap and made us fight shit we had no chance of beating without serious cheese. So we responded to his increasingly-ludicrous challenges by increasing the amount of cheese we were willing to throw around. Z's original concept for his character involved prismatic effects, but it quickly became apparent that the only way to win encounters was to throw no-SR conjurations at things, preferably with piles of stacked metamagic, and hope he killed them before we all died. I have no idea how we got past some of the stuff that we did. OSDM's reasoning for throwing this crap at us: "You can always roll a 20!" We spent most of our time fighting outsiders so far above our CR that we only overcame SR on 18+ and our fighter-types (and my eidolon) only hit on 20. You know you're in deep when you are power attacking for full because you only hit on natural 20 anyway.
I actually really enjoyed OSDM's game overall, but probably had more fun ranting about the utter insanity with my fellow players than I did during the game. It's the only game I've ever played where, for better or for worse, it really felt like the DM was trying to murder our entire party. I would play it again, given the chance, but man.
Much of the rest of my posts will probably be about the insane encounters we faced and the cheese required to overcome them.
A recurring theme in this game was boss encounters with demon lords. This started when we were like...10th level. OSDM has some rule that celestials don't need to expend components for exalted spells. We know we are going to fight some demon lord and have not yet attracted his attention, he's just chilling in the dungeon or whatever. So we have buff/prep time. Recall that our party included a factotum/chameleon, a summoner, a wizard, and a wild shape ranger that went into master of many forms or something. We were engaging in absurd amounts of dumpster diving. Buff/prep time turns into planar binding a trumpet archon and getting it to blow all of its 6th and 7th level slots casting call faithful servants (remember, clerics cast everything spontaneously and celestials ignore exalted costs), summoning up something like 6d4 lantern archons. Lantern archons have a ranged touch attack that deals 1d6 untyped damage that explicitly overcomes any type of DR. A big ball of lantern archons dies to a sneeze (they do have to be sort of close together because the light ray only has 30 feet of range), but it is also a hilarious laser death platform. We get the trumpet archon to buff the lantern archons with group buffs like bless or whatever. Then we go kill some CR-20ish unique demon by ambushing him with 20+ lantern archons shooting 40 light rays on turn one and then unloading with metamagic rays and crap.
This was only going to work once, and I'm surprised it worked even that many times. Had we lost initiative blasphemy or something surely would've blown all the lantern archons back to the heaven they came from. I think the majority of the archons died as a result of the demon casting storm of vengeance or something equally silly. OSDM didn't play demon lords (or, indeed, spellcasters) terribly optimally--which is on some level good, because optimally-played spellcasters higher level than the PCs are basically a recipe for TPK--which probably contributed significantly to our overall chance of survival.
We found a deck of many things. Nobody except E's character wanted to touch it. E's gnome played with it and drew death. Good luck fighting that dread wraith, buddy. He was promptly murdered, unable to be resurrected by any means.
The end-boss of the dungeon was yet another named demon lord who opened the fight with a sonic damage AoE that killed my character outright. I don't recall how Z's wizard survived. Pretty sure said boss got blasted with force orbs and then J's ranger turned into an octopus tree or something and tried to grapple the life out of him.
Following our dungeon-delving expedition, our party wound up taking on a crazy quest. E's new character (windling wizard/initiate of the seven veils) shows up and recruits us to join the Order of the Seven Veils, dedicated to overthrowing the setting's magical hegemony. Wizardry in general was pretty much bound up in the iron grip of a wizard cabal that considered the practice of any form of magic by anybody except their order to be a crime punishable by death. I don't know what you do about a hundred-odd spellcasters in the level 16-30 range wanting you dead. Well, I do (you don't let them know you exist until it's too late), but you get the point. For some reason we throw in with this (hey, it's player-directed plot, that's pretty neat). At about the same time we end up going to Sigil and officially joining the artifact retrieval company/international adventurer's guild on a grander level. Our missions from this point on consisted of stuff the interplanar adventurer's guild threw at us (we agreed OOCly that we were not going to go fuck off to the planes because we actually wanted OSDM to be able to use his extensive and detailed setting) and our personal plans to kill or subjugate all these order wizards in the name of FREEDOM OF ARCANE EXPRESSION.
A big thing in this setting is wizard's towers. You need a key to a tower to get inside, but that on its own isn't enough; towers are semi-sentient (or at least have controlling wills) and do all kinds of crazy crap like be bigger on the inside like the fucking TARDIS. So we do some shit and get a tower key by exploring a dead city (actually legitimately cool stuff, everyone and everything in it was petrified by a deity for refusing to get involved in a war with an evil god's forces).
There's a tower in the dead city. We are like...14th or 15th level. I recall nothing else about this dungeon, but the end-boss was a fucking phane, and it just came out of nowhere, no foreknowledge of the battle or buff time. Yeah, my eidolon and its +18 to hit or whatever has a chance in hell of landing meaningful blows on some incorporeal AC 50 monster with regeneration AND fast healing 15 AND DR 15/epic AND by the way it has SR 37 AND it can summon a duplicate of another party member AND a Will save DC 30 or do jack shit aura...you know, I really have no idea how we won this fight. Looking back on it, it's entirely possible that OSDM let us win shit like this somehow and just kind of made it look like we were always in terrible danger, but...I honestly don't think so. I am certain victory was achieved with liberal amounts of metamagic cheese and by dint of OSDM not actually knowing how things like regeneration work by the rulebook.
It was at this point that we all commissioned permanent mind blank items so that we could have a chance in hell going to war against a bunch of wizards.
Now, the title of this thread is derived from PL's thread, in which for some reason he was required to be from France to be a generalist wizard and the PCs encountered a typical "DM penis NPC" who turned out to be a 25th level lich. At some point during our game I had taken to muttering "25th level lich wizards in France" or variations thereof when we were thrust into some particularly absurd encounter. (I think I was moderately drunk during one of the demon lord fights and was basically chanting "France, France, France..." which made it difficult for Z to keep his composure. Neither of us wanted to explain the joke.)
So when we go to assault a rival wizard's tower we get upstairs and lo and behold there are four epic-level lich wizards. (Not actually in France.)
We are supposedly advantaged because the wizards want to fight us in a series of wizard's duels, which are normal combat except one on one only and the participants get a free counterspell once a round for some reason. To OSDM's confusion we waive the right to this and start dogpiling on people because one of the wizards is wielding an artifact staff of some alignment that among other things acts as a rod of absorption that can soak up 100 spell levels and doesn't break when overcharged, which squarely ruins orb cheese. So J's ranger turned into something silly (favored forms included war troll, octopus tree, and overseer) and most of the party spent their actions trying to not die, creating distractions, and dumping junk spells into this guy's staff (which was fortunately almost full already, I don't think it would've been sanely possible to actually throw a hundred spell levels at the thing before we all died).
As observed by fectin, OSDM wasn't exactly bad, and he never took offense to us winning...he just pulled out a lot of really arbitrary crap and made us fight shit we had no chance of beating without serious cheese. So we responded to his increasingly-ludicrous challenges by increasing the amount of cheese we were willing to throw around. Z's original concept for his character involved prismatic effects, but it quickly became apparent that the only way to win encounters was to throw no-SR conjurations at things, preferably with piles of stacked metamagic, and hope he killed them before we all died. I have no idea how we got past some of the stuff that we did. OSDM's reasoning for throwing this crap at us: "You can always roll a 20!" We spent most of our time fighting outsiders so far above our CR that we only overcame SR on 18+ and our fighter-types (and my eidolon) only hit on 20. You know you're in deep when you are power attacking for full because you only hit on natural 20 anyway.
I actually really enjoyed OSDM's game overall, but probably had more fun ranting about the utter insanity with my fellow players than I did during the game. It's the only game I've ever played where, for better or for worse, it really felt like the DM was trying to murder our entire party. I would play it again, given the chance, but man.
Much of the rest of my posts will probably be about the insane encounters we faced and the cheese required to overcome them.
A recurring theme in this game was boss encounters with demon lords. This started when we were like...10th level. OSDM has some rule that celestials don't need to expend components for exalted spells. We know we are going to fight some demon lord and have not yet attracted his attention, he's just chilling in the dungeon or whatever. So we have buff/prep time. Recall that our party included a factotum/chameleon, a summoner, a wizard, and a wild shape ranger that went into master of many forms or something. We were engaging in absurd amounts of dumpster diving. Buff/prep time turns into planar binding a trumpet archon and getting it to blow all of its 6th and 7th level slots casting call faithful servants (remember, clerics cast everything spontaneously and celestials ignore exalted costs), summoning up something like 6d4 lantern archons. Lantern archons have a ranged touch attack that deals 1d6 untyped damage that explicitly overcomes any type of DR. A big ball of lantern archons dies to a sneeze (they do have to be sort of close together because the light ray only has 30 feet of range), but it is also a hilarious laser death platform. We get the trumpet archon to buff the lantern archons with group buffs like bless or whatever. Then we go kill some CR-20ish unique demon by ambushing him with 20+ lantern archons shooting 40 light rays on turn one and then unloading with metamagic rays and crap.
This was only going to work once, and I'm surprised it worked even that many times. Had we lost initiative blasphemy or something surely would've blown all the lantern archons back to the heaven they came from. I think the majority of the archons died as a result of the demon casting storm of vengeance or something equally silly. OSDM didn't play demon lords (or, indeed, spellcasters) terribly optimally--which is on some level good, because optimally-played spellcasters higher level than the PCs are basically a recipe for TPK--which probably contributed significantly to our overall chance of survival.
We found a deck of many things. Nobody except E's character wanted to touch it. E's gnome played with it and drew death. Good luck fighting that dread wraith, buddy. He was promptly murdered, unable to be resurrected by any means.
The end-boss of the dungeon was yet another named demon lord who opened the fight with a sonic damage AoE that killed my character outright. I don't recall how Z's wizard survived. Pretty sure said boss got blasted with force orbs and then J's ranger turned into an octopus tree or something and tried to grapple the life out of him.
Following our dungeon-delving expedition, our party wound up taking on a crazy quest. E's new character (windling wizard/initiate of the seven veils) shows up and recruits us to join the Order of the Seven Veils, dedicated to overthrowing the setting's magical hegemony. Wizardry in general was pretty much bound up in the iron grip of a wizard cabal that considered the practice of any form of magic by anybody except their order to be a crime punishable by death. I don't know what you do about a hundred-odd spellcasters in the level 16-30 range wanting you dead. Well, I do (you don't let them know you exist until it's too late), but you get the point. For some reason we throw in with this (hey, it's player-directed plot, that's pretty neat). At about the same time we end up going to Sigil and officially joining the artifact retrieval company/international adventurer's guild on a grander level. Our missions from this point on consisted of stuff the interplanar adventurer's guild threw at us (we agreed OOCly that we were not going to go fuck off to the planes because we actually wanted OSDM to be able to use his extensive and detailed setting) and our personal plans to kill or subjugate all these order wizards in the name of FREEDOM OF ARCANE EXPRESSION.
A big thing in this setting is wizard's towers. You need a key to a tower to get inside, but that on its own isn't enough; towers are semi-sentient (or at least have controlling wills) and do all kinds of crazy crap like be bigger on the inside like the fucking TARDIS. So we do some shit and get a tower key by exploring a dead city (actually legitimately cool stuff, everyone and everything in it was petrified by a deity for refusing to get involved in a war with an evil god's forces).
There's a tower in the dead city. We are like...14th or 15th level. I recall nothing else about this dungeon, but the end-boss was a fucking phane, and it just came out of nowhere, no foreknowledge of the battle or buff time. Yeah, my eidolon and its +18 to hit or whatever has a chance in hell of landing meaningful blows on some incorporeal AC 50 monster with regeneration AND fast healing 15 AND DR 15/epic AND by the way it has SR 37 AND it can summon a duplicate of another party member AND a Will save DC 30 or do jack shit aura...you know, I really have no idea how we won this fight. Looking back on it, it's entirely possible that OSDM let us win shit like this somehow and just kind of made it look like we were always in terrible danger, but...I honestly don't think so. I am certain victory was achieved with liberal amounts of metamagic cheese and by dint of OSDM not actually knowing how things like regeneration work by the rulebook.
It was at this point that we all commissioned permanent mind blank items so that we could have a chance in hell going to war against a bunch of wizards.
Now, the title of this thread is derived from PL's thread, in which for some reason he was required to be from France to be a generalist wizard and the PCs encountered a typical "DM penis NPC" who turned out to be a 25th level lich. At some point during our game I had taken to muttering "25th level lich wizards in France" or variations thereof when we were thrust into some particularly absurd encounter. (I think I was moderately drunk during one of the demon lord fights and was basically chanting "France, France, France..." which made it difficult for Z to keep his composure. Neither of us wanted to explain the joke.)
So when we go to assault a rival wizard's tower we get upstairs and lo and behold there are four epic-level lich wizards. (Not actually in France.)
We are supposedly advantaged because the wizards want to fight us in a series of wizard's duels, which are normal combat except one on one only and the participants get a free counterspell once a round for some reason. To OSDM's confusion we waive the right to this and start dogpiling on people because one of the wizards is wielding an artifact staff of some alignment that among other things acts as a rod of absorption that can soak up 100 spell levels and doesn't break when overcharged, which squarely ruins orb cheese. So J's ranger turned into something silly (favored forms included war troll, octopus tree, and overseer) and most of the party spent their actions trying to not die, creating distractions, and dumping junk spells into this guy's staff (which was fortunately almost full already, I don't think it would've been sanely possible to actually throw a hundred spell levels at the thing before we all died).
Last edited by Archmage on Sat May 11, 2013 3:19 am, edited 1 time in total.
P.C. Hodgell wrote:That which can be destroyed by the truth should be.
shadzar wrote:i think the apostrophe is an outdated idea such as is hyphenation.
Some more miscellaneous crack:
You control a wizard's tower by some kind of opposed Will save against a dragon that is the "soul" of the tower. I am pretty sure we managed to win this by Z casting limited wish for a +7 to his next saving throw. But once you control a tower, the tower master can do things like...shut off spellcasting for everyone in the tower who isn't him. We made a point not to fight people in their towers whenever possible. (The lich wizards did not control the tower in question, they were just...in there somehow, I think.)
We went to the Khin-Oin and a room had...like literally five hundred goblins in it, or something, which we murdered with cloudkill. The boss of the Khin-Oin was an infernal (ELH monster) that could cast the epic spell crown of vermin. Crown of vermin just kind of deals up to a thousand points of damage and kills you instantly if you get in the area and fail your Reflex save. I don't think we had a thousand hit points between us.
Except...cheese. Dumpster diving to the rescue. J transforms into a dusk giant and eats the corpses of the goblins, granting him one-hundred extra hit dice or so. Then the next room had kobolds armed with monofilament whips. They hit touch AC and didn't do damage...you just lost a random limb. J loses both his fucking legs, but can't afford to change back because he doesn't have another five hundred intelligent corpses to consume and we're gearing up to fight some demon boss. So J's transformed, legless PC was carried into battle against the big boss by a flying carpet.
You control a wizard's tower by some kind of opposed Will save against a dragon that is the "soul" of the tower. I am pretty sure we managed to win this by Z casting limited wish for a +7 to his next saving throw. But once you control a tower, the tower master can do things like...shut off spellcasting for everyone in the tower who isn't him. We made a point not to fight people in their towers whenever possible. (The lich wizards did not control the tower in question, they were just...in there somehow, I think.)
We went to the Khin-Oin and a room had...like literally five hundred goblins in it, or something, which we murdered with cloudkill. The boss of the Khin-Oin was an infernal (ELH monster) that could cast the epic spell crown of vermin. Crown of vermin just kind of deals up to a thousand points of damage and kills you instantly if you get in the area and fail your Reflex save. I don't think we had a thousand hit points between us.
Except...cheese. Dumpster diving to the rescue. J transforms into a dusk giant and eats the corpses of the goblins, granting him one-hundred extra hit dice or so. Then the next room had kobolds armed with monofilament whips. They hit touch AC and didn't do damage...you just lost a random limb. J loses both his fucking legs, but can't afford to change back because he doesn't have another five hundred intelligent corpses to consume and we're gearing up to fight some demon boss. So J's transformed, legless PC was carried into battle against the big boss by a flying carpet.
P.C. Hodgell wrote:That which can be destroyed by the truth should be.
shadzar wrote:i think the apostrophe is an outdated idea such as is hyphenation.
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CapnTthePirateG
- Duke
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- Joined: Fri Jul 17, 2009 2:07 am
A lot of the latter part of the campaign is a blur now.
Something to keep in mind is that no matter how stupid things got, all-in-all, OSDM was not a bad DM in the sense that he wanted us to outsmart him; he wanted to see what cheese we could leverage to get past the ever-escalating crazy, but clearly didn't really understand the power imbalances and whatnot in D&D because he was firmly convinced epic level barbarians were totally fine and would've argued with a straight face that a barbarian would be a contributing member of our party that routinely abused planar binding. The one thing we never chanced was wish because it was very clear that OSDM played wish as though the forces granting wishes were incompetent, malevolent, or both.
One of our next adventures involved a foray to the frozen wastes to get...something. I don't remember what. Maybe we were just gaining allies in our mad quest to overthrow the wizard hegemony. The barbarians/snow elves/whoever it was that lived there required us to do some kind of "spirit trial" or whatever, which involved fighting a lot of sirrushes (CR 24 or 28 for the three-headed variety) reskinned as bears. But like so many threats in the ELH that rely on big numbers, sirrushes can do jack shit against anyone who can fly. OSDM, with his "you can always roll a 20!" mindset, was firmly against handwaving encounters; we had to go through the mop-up manually if our enemies weren't actually dead. So we spent some inane number of rounds hovering in the air in a cavern out of reach of however many sirrushes pinging them with ranged attacks. Average durability for a sirrush is 900 hit points and they have fast healing. Somehow we won eventually, whether it was endless orb spells or enemies eventually rolling a 1 and failing a save I don't know.
So one of the setting's evil gods was imprisoned inside or maybe was just connected with this giant black pyramid in a desert. I like black pyramids, that's an awesome setting feature. The only thing to be concerned about was the fact that OSDM had mentioned a fondness for atropals, and I just kind of assumed "giant black pyramid somehow associated with imprisoned evil god has got to have an atropal inside." Sure enough, it did.
As has become a recurring theme, I have no idea how we killed an atropal, but we were at least 17th level or so at that point. D&D is over by that point, but OSDM had no concept of "over" and thought the ELH was perfectly playable and great. I know we were 17th level because Pathfinder summoners upgrade their "summon monster 3 + CHA mod times per day as a standard action" thing to "gate 3 + CHA mod times per day, duration is 1 minute/level, summon creatures only, no travel function, how awful." Because you totally need a dozen gate spells a day. Since it was mutually exclusive with the eidolon I swapped over exclusively to being angel summoner at this point in my adventuring career. OSDM saw exactly zero problem with summoning advanced versions of monsters, so "I call forth and command a 34 HD solar" became a staple phrase at that point.
We do some stuff in the pyramid. We break some ancient seal. Shock and awe, an ATROPAL busts forth. Who would have thought! Then OSDM does some quick math based on how long the atropal has been imprisoned. Spell-like abilities require no components. Consequently, OSDM determines that since an atropal's spell-like create greater undead requires no components, which apparently means no corpses, imprisoned atropal has spent every single standard action possible for the past however-the-fuck-long casting create greater undead and the cavern in which it is imprisoned is literally filled with devourers stacked like cordwood. So we release an atropal plus its cohort of 8,000-something devourers, which OSDM clearly expects we will fight and kill lest they find their way to the nearest city and raze it.
A miracle happens here and we kill an atropal. We are then left trying to figure out how to clean up 8,000 devourers. Z's wizard also has loremaster levels and can make basically any "know stuff" check conceivable, which OSDM actually takes to mean "if you want to look at a monster's stat block and basically know it in character you can with a sufficiently good check." Z makes these checks more or less effortlessly and we spend however long poring over the devourer statblock trying to figure out how to kill thousands of the stupid things. Oh, and OSDM notes that each devourer can cast lesser planar ally an average of 50 times. So the devourers prepare en masse to spend the next 50 standard actions casting lesser planar ally to summon 400,000 6 HD outsiders. I think OSDM decided to have them summon bearded devils. Four-hundred thousand bearded devils. The CR and ECL system officially gasps its last breath and dies.
We teleport away to plan our next move so we don't get swarmed by 400,000 anythings because OSDM totally could've decided to have them summon something with flight or significant ranged abilities. Devourers have INT 16, but no Knowledge (Planes), so maybe they didn't know they could summon anything that would actually threaten people who can move in three dimensions. Naturally, we investigate how far away we have to be from devourers to be completely safe from all their abilities (they can't fly and are wandering around in an open desert). If you're immune to mind-affecting and aren't undead they do really nothing if you're outside of melee. We try to determine the most efficient way to kill them presuming safety from attack and it turns out to be...summon an army of angels. Not sure how many we actually called up. Astral devas have holy word at will and devourers have the extraplanar subtype, so on a failed save they get banished to their home plane even though astral devas don't have a high enough caster level to kill them outright. Since the devourers were created on the prime material, I'm not sure where they went, but OSDM accepted the argument that they had the (Extraplanar) subtype and were native to the astral. They might've gotten banished to the astral; they might've gotten banished to the realm of the deity; either way, massed stealth angels swooping in and dropping enough holy word spells to cover a quarter mile of desert or something cleaned up 400,000 bearded devils right quick. That was the closest to handwaving an encounter because we had clearly won OSDM ever allowed, probably because he did not want to roll saving throws for 8,000 devourers or track the individual deaths of 400,000 bearded devils.
I think that while the angel army cleaned up the desert we sat miles away in our captured tower scrying on the battlefield.
Edit: I am pretty sure that the summoning/bartering for favors required with planar ally/planar binding went exactly like this:
Devourers: We summon 400,000 bearded devils! Bearded devils, we will raze the material plane, you in?
Devils: HAIL SATAN
Us: Hey, archons, you're chaotic good and there are 400,000 lawful evil bearded devils over there
Astral devas: JIHAD
Something to keep in mind is that no matter how stupid things got, all-in-all, OSDM was not a bad DM in the sense that he wanted us to outsmart him; he wanted to see what cheese we could leverage to get past the ever-escalating crazy, but clearly didn't really understand the power imbalances and whatnot in D&D because he was firmly convinced epic level barbarians were totally fine and would've argued with a straight face that a barbarian would be a contributing member of our party that routinely abused planar binding. The one thing we never chanced was wish because it was very clear that OSDM played wish as though the forces granting wishes were incompetent, malevolent, or both.
One of our next adventures involved a foray to the frozen wastes to get...something. I don't remember what. Maybe we were just gaining allies in our mad quest to overthrow the wizard hegemony. The barbarians/snow elves/whoever it was that lived there required us to do some kind of "spirit trial" or whatever, which involved fighting a lot of sirrushes (CR 24 or 28 for the three-headed variety) reskinned as bears. But like so many threats in the ELH that rely on big numbers, sirrushes can do jack shit against anyone who can fly. OSDM, with his "you can always roll a 20!" mindset, was firmly against handwaving encounters; we had to go through the mop-up manually if our enemies weren't actually dead. So we spent some inane number of rounds hovering in the air in a cavern out of reach of however many sirrushes pinging them with ranged attacks. Average durability for a sirrush is 900 hit points and they have fast healing. Somehow we won eventually, whether it was endless orb spells or enemies eventually rolling a 1 and failing a save I don't know.
So one of the setting's evil gods was imprisoned inside or maybe was just connected with this giant black pyramid in a desert. I like black pyramids, that's an awesome setting feature. The only thing to be concerned about was the fact that OSDM had mentioned a fondness for atropals, and I just kind of assumed "giant black pyramid somehow associated with imprisoned evil god has got to have an atropal inside." Sure enough, it did.
As has become a recurring theme, I have no idea how we killed an atropal, but we were at least 17th level or so at that point. D&D is over by that point, but OSDM had no concept of "over" and thought the ELH was perfectly playable and great. I know we were 17th level because Pathfinder summoners upgrade their "summon monster 3 + CHA mod times per day as a standard action" thing to "gate 3 + CHA mod times per day, duration is 1 minute/level, summon creatures only, no travel function, how awful." Because you totally need a dozen gate spells a day. Since it was mutually exclusive with the eidolon I swapped over exclusively to being angel summoner at this point in my adventuring career. OSDM saw exactly zero problem with summoning advanced versions of monsters, so "I call forth and command a 34 HD solar" became a staple phrase at that point.
We do some stuff in the pyramid. We break some ancient seal. Shock and awe, an ATROPAL busts forth. Who would have thought! Then OSDM does some quick math based on how long the atropal has been imprisoned. Spell-like abilities require no components. Consequently, OSDM determines that since an atropal's spell-like create greater undead requires no components, which apparently means no corpses, imprisoned atropal has spent every single standard action possible for the past however-the-fuck-long casting create greater undead and the cavern in which it is imprisoned is literally filled with devourers stacked like cordwood. So we release an atropal plus its cohort of 8,000-something devourers, which OSDM clearly expects we will fight and kill lest they find their way to the nearest city and raze it.
A miracle happens here and we kill an atropal. We are then left trying to figure out how to clean up 8,000 devourers. Z's wizard also has loremaster levels and can make basically any "know stuff" check conceivable, which OSDM actually takes to mean "if you want to look at a monster's stat block and basically know it in character you can with a sufficiently good check." Z makes these checks more or less effortlessly and we spend however long poring over the devourer statblock trying to figure out how to kill thousands of the stupid things. Oh, and OSDM notes that each devourer can cast lesser planar ally an average of 50 times. So the devourers prepare en masse to spend the next 50 standard actions casting lesser planar ally to summon 400,000 6 HD outsiders. I think OSDM decided to have them summon bearded devils. Four-hundred thousand bearded devils. The CR and ECL system officially gasps its last breath and dies.
We teleport away to plan our next move so we don't get swarmed by 400,000 anythings because OSDM totally could've decided to have them summon something with flight or significant ranged abilities. Devourers have INT 16, but no Knowledge (Planes), so maybe they didn't know they could summon anything that would actually threaten people who can move in three dimensions. Naturally, we investigate how far away we have to be from devourers to be completely safe from all their abilities (they can't fly and are wandering around in an open desert). If you're immune to mind-affecting and aren't undead they do really nothing if you're outside of melee. We try to determine the most efficient way to kill them presuming safety from attack and it turns out to be...summon an army of angels. Not sure how many we actually called up. Astral devas have holy word at will and devourers have the extraplanar subtype, so on a failed save they get banished to their home plane even though astral devas don't have a high enough caster level to kill them outright. Since the devourers were created on the prime material, I'm not sure where they went, but OSDM accepted the argument that they had the (Extraplanar) subtype and were native to the astral. They might've gotten banished to the astral; they might've gotten banished to the realm of the deity; either way, massed stealth angels swooping in and dropping enough holy word spells to cover a quarter mile of desert or something cleaned up 400,000 bearded devils right quick. That was the closest to handwaving an encounter because we had clearly won OSDM ever allowed, probably because he did not want to roll saving throws for 8,000 devourers or track the individual deaths of 400,000 bearded devils.
I think that while the angel army cleaned up the desert we sat miles away in our captured tower scrying on the battlefield.
Edit: I am pretty sure that the summoning/bartering for favors required with planar ally/planar binding went exactly like this:
Devourers: We summon 400,000 bearded devils! Bearded devils, we will raze the material plane, you in?
Devils: HAIL SATAN
Us: Hey, archons, you're chaotic good and there are 400,000 lawful evil bearded devils over there
Astral devas: JIHAD
Last edited by Archmage on Sun May 12, 2013 4:02 am, edited 4 times in total.
P.C. Hodgell wrote:That which can be destroyed by the truth should be.
shadzar wrote:i think the apostrophe is an outdated idea such as is hyphenation.
You see, now it's gone through retarded and into awesome. The problem with PL's Lich Wizard campaign was the DM wanted to stop the players from doing anything crazy, whereas your DM seems to be egging you on!
Simplified Tome Armor.
Tome item system and expanded Wish Economy rules.
Try our fantasy card game Clash of Nations! Available via Print on Demand.
“Those Who Can Make You Believe Absurdities, Can Make You Commit Atrocities” - Voltaire
Tome item system and expanded Wish Economy rules.
Try our fantasy card game Clash of Nations! Available via Print on Demand.
“Those Who Can Make You Believe Absurdities, Can Make You Commit Atrocities” - Voltaire
What a weirdly specific dysfunction on part of the DM, though. He's totally all "perfect first time, perfect EVERY time", and yet he lets you break the game in whatever way you please and throw all kinds of cheese everywhere, and this doesn't offend some neckbeard impulse and make him throw a tantrum?
Hell, fair enough, I guess. It somehow just averages out as a common-or-garden high optimization campaigns. Seems like it was fun.
Hell, fair enough, I guess. It somehow just averages out as a common-or-garden high optimization campaigns. Seems like it was fun.
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CapnTthePirateG
- Duke
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- Joined: Fri Jul 17, 2009 2:07 am
Okay, so Archmage requested I chime in and write a bit about being railroaded into being the BBEG.
As he mentioned, my original character was a windling cleric/sorcerer (cleric being spontaneous casting in OSDM's world) with the assumption that "this is going to totally blow but eh, why not." To fit him in with a few of the setting's assumptions about deities and NPCs I gave him Vow of Poverty. I thought I'd get so many spells a day that this wouldn't actually be a problem, and honestly it never was.
Archmage mentions that we started in a large coastal city experiencing some sort of strike my a guild of merfolk. His campaign originally being very sandboxey, it wasn't long before our characters starting making some small progress in fixing this issue, and becoming personally invested in it. I recall some shenanigans involving a local thieves guild, goods on the docks, and mass theft that was somehow going to spur one side or the other into action. Unfortunately by the time we were level 5-6 our party barely had two copper pieces to rub together, so we were desperate for some cash and loot. Ironically the lack of reward made Vow a somewhat decent choice.
We accepted the offer of an adventuring guild to retrieve some substance for thousands of gold per ounce, thinking, "Score. We'll buy a teleport scroll to get there, grab it, be back before the week is out." We didn't make it back to the city for 16 levels. The road to White Plume Mountain, it turns out, was full of ever-increasing bullcrap involving monsters and NPCs way over our party's CR with SR so high nobody could do a thing. My mystic theurge concept having totally crapped the bed at this point, I asked to retire him and roll up a PC that stood a better chance of contributing to the party. OSDM agreed.
Now, it turns out, the elves in OSDM's setting are something akin to vampires in oWoD: They have "generations" and the earlier your generation, the more bullshit magical power you got for free. The head of the evil isolationist elves (read: all the elves even tangentially relevant to the plot) was a one armed epic-level cleric of a dead god. OSDM insisted it would be just so awesome if I played one of his sons. I say, "sure." I was given two options:
1. The "good" son, who had a whole schtick about wanting to reunify the various elf societies, and a bunch of weird elf-wank goals, and who was, I believe, some sort of martial character (a fighter or paladin or barbarian or something.)
2. The "bad" son, who was some sort of anti-human racist wizard with a bent for amassing phenomenal cosmic power.
I chose option two. When Archmage heard this, his immediate response to OSDM was, "You let Z play an evil wizard?!"
My original concept for the character was to play a focused specialist of some stripe (I don't recall, I think maybe divination) aiming for Initiate of the Sevenfold Veil, and focusing on being a diviner out of combat and using primarily prismatic spells in combat. The character picked up prismatic spray, prismatic wall, prismatic sphere, prismatic ray, color spray, rainbow pattern, the whole line of "rainbow" spells.
Unfortunately, it wasn't long after his introduction to the party that the trend of increasingly powerful outsiders began. SR:Yes spells soon proved to be "only on a 20!" As such, I was forced to alter course midstream and aim for various no-save, no-SR conjurations. OSDM handing the character a bullshit artifact of "pay less levels of metamagic" combined with Arcane Thesis and OSDM's suggestion of Incantatrix levels eventually led to abominations like "Twin Split Chained Maximized Empowered Orbs of Force" being thrown around the battlefield, dealing hundreds of damage to everything on the other side of the field per cast.
At some point in our party's misadventures, we freed an imprisoned solar of some Egyptian god, and our party was rewarded by being made into minions of various Egyptian deities. It was at this point OSDM decided that my character, a previously existing artifact of the setting, worshiped Set, the "big bad" of the Egyptian pantheon. Okay, whatever. Evil wizard worships evil god. No big.
OSDM emailed me outside of the session and outlined plans he had for my character. These were basically "Accrue phenomenal cosmic power, bring Set into the world, rule from a profane throne in previously mentioned Black Pyramid", something which he eventually did accomplish late in the campaign. I think this post brings the character more or less up to speed with Archmage's retelling so far. After the Angels vs. 400,000 Bearded Devils fight in the middle of the damn desert, the campaign returned to a fairly sandbox state and our party began our grand plans to overthrow the magical hegemony ruling all the world's mages. More to come after Archmage's next (presumably last?) update.
As he mentioned, my original character was a windling cleric/sorcerer (cleric being spontaneous casting in OSDM's world) with the assumption that "this is going to totally blow but eh, why not." To fit him in with a few of the setting's assumptions about deities and NPCs I gave him Vow of Poverty. I thought I'd get so many spells a day that this wouldn't actually be a problem, and honestly it never was.
Archmage mentions that we started in a large coastal city experiencing some sort of strike my a guild of merfolk. His campaign originally being very sandboxey, it wasn't long before our characters starting making some small progress in fixing this issue, and becoming personally invested in it. I recall some shenanigans involving a local thieves guild, goods on the docks, and mass theft that was somehow going to spur one side or the other into action. Unfortunately by the time we were level 5-6 our party barely had two copper pieces to rub together, so we were desperate for some cash and loot. Ironically the lack of reward made Vow a somewhat decent choice.
We accepted the offer of an adventuring guild to retrieve some substance for thousands of gold per ounce, thinking, "Score. We'll buy a teleport scroll to get there, grab it, be back before the week is out." We didn't make it back to the city for 16 levels. The road to White Plume Mountain, it turns out, was full of ever-increasing bullcrap involving monsters and NPCs way over our party's CR with SR so high nobody could do a thing. My mystic theurge concept having totally crapped the bed at this point, I asked to retire him and roll up a PC that stood a better chance of contributing to the party. OSDM agreed.
Now, it turns out, the elves in OSDM's setting are something akin to vampires in oWoD: They have "generations" and the earlier your generation, the more bullshit magical power you got for free. The head of the evil isolationist elves (read: all the elves even tangentially relevant to the plot) was a one armed epic-level cleric of a dead god. OSDM insisted it would be just so awesome if I played one of his sons. I say, "sure." I was given two options:
1. The "good" son, who had a whole schtick about wanting to reunify the various elf societies, and a bunch of weird elf-wank goals, and who was, I believe, some sort of martial character (a fighter or paladin or barbarian or something.)
2. The "bad" son, who was some sort of anti-human racist wizard with a bent for amassing phenomenal cosmic power.
I chose option two. When Archmage heard this, his immediate response to OSDM was, "You let Z play an evil wizard?!"
My original concept for the character was to play a focused specialist of some stripe (I don't recall, I think maybe divination) aiming for Initiate of the Sevenfold Veil, and focusing on being a diviner out of combat and using primarily prismatic spells in combat. The character picked up prismatic spray, prismatic wall, prismatic sphere, prismatic ray, color spray, rainbow pattern, the whole line of "rainbow" spells.
Unfortunately, it wasn't long after his introduction to the party that the trend of increasingly powerful outsiders began. SR:Yes spells soon proved to be "only on a 20!" As such, I was forced to alter course midstream and aim for various no-save, no-SR conjurations. OSDM handing the character a bullshit artifact of "pay less levels of metamagic" combined with Arcane Thesis and OSDM's suggestion of Incantatrix levels eventually led to abominations like "Twin Split Chained Maximized Empowered Orbs of Force" being thrown around the battlefield, dealing hundreds of damage to everything on the other side of the field per cast.
At some point in our party's misadventures, we freed an imprisoned solar of some Egyptian god, and our party was rewarded by being made into minions of various Egyptian deities. It was at this point OSDM decided that my character, a previously existing artifact of the setting, worshiped Set, the "big bad" of the Egyptian pantheon. Okay, whatever. Evil wizard worships evil god. No big.
OSDM emailed me outside of the session and outlined plans he had for my character. These were basically "Accrue phenomenal cosmic power, bring Set into the world, rule from a profane throne in previously mentioned Black Pyramid", something which he eventually did accomplish late in the campaign. I think this post brings the character more or less up to speed with Archmage's retelling so far. After the Angels vs. 400,000 Bearded Devils fight in the middle of the damn desert, the campaign returned to a fairly sandbox state and our party began our grand plans to overthrow the magical hegemony ruling all the world's mages. More to come after Archmage's next (presumably last?) update.
It hurts to look directly at this thread.
At least you guys seem to be having fun, though! : )
At least you guys seem to be having fun, though! : )
For a minute, I used to be "a guy" in the TTRPG "industry". Now I'm just a nobody. For the most part, it's a relief.
Trank Frollman wrote:One of the reasons we can say insightful things about stuff is that we don't have to pretend to be nice to people. By embracing active aggression, we eliminate much of the passive aggression that so paralyzes things on other gaming forums.
hogarth wrote:As the good book saith, let he who is without boners cast the first stone.
TiaC wrote:I'm not quite sure why this is an argument. (Except that Kaelik is in it, that's a good reason.)
yo where my liches at?
For a minute, I used to be "a guy" in the TTRPG "industry". Now I'm just a nobody. For the most part, it's a relief.
Trank Frollman wrote:One of the reasons we can say insightful things about stuff is that we don't have to pretend to be nice to people. By embracing active aggression, we eliminate much of the passive aggression that so paralyzes things on other gaming forums.
hogarth wrote:As the good book saith, let he who is without boners cast the first stone.
TiaC wrote:I'm not quite sure why this is an argument. (Except that Kaelik is in it, that's a good reason.)
E here.
I think I ended up having 3 characters over the course of the campaign.
The first was a "gnomeish PF alchemist". The thing I remember most about t his character was that the GM had insetting racism. Apparently in his setting "all gnomes were money loving bankers" which meant that regardless of how dumb something was, if there was a chance my character could made money off of it, I was compelled to try. This lead to me messing with the Deck of many things (to try for monies). As the Archmage mentioned, it didn't work out in my favor.
The second was a Drow Cleric. Apparently in this setting: Drow had some odd flavor of the "highest evolution of goblins". I do remember that due to the random stat rolls, this character was surprisingly squishy. Not that bad stats are the end of the world on a spontaneous casting Cleric. I think this character was evil. I don't even remember how this character died, they weren't around very long.
The third was a Windling specialist Abjurerer Wizard, who ended up going into Initiate of the Sevenfold veil. In the setting, I think all windlings were chaotic and had some strange "hummingbird" thing going on. I ended up taking a bunch of feats to to basically say "fvck off enemy spellcasters with stupidly high spell resistance". I ended up preparing a bunch of party buffs, and Countering spells so that we lived through some of the epic level encounters. IIRC, this character ended up dying because his patron god Bas (who we had the pleasure of meeting) told my character to "side with evil because siding with good is boring". Not wanting to argue with a God, I decided to switch sides at the last moment and was killed once someone else in the party realized that I was no longer part of the team.
A few things.
A major life goal of my windling was to get control of one of the wizard towers. I had a few discussions with the GM about it. The wizard towers were very TARDIS. IIRC, they reshaped themselves to the will of the person in control of the tower. That could be the "dragon soul" imprisoned at the top, or the person who won a duel of wills with the dragon. So yeah, they could be bigger on the inside. or if someone came inside you could wall them off. You could also set a lot of random magical properties - I don't remember them all. But you could shut off magic for select groups of people. I think they were also timeless, so you wouldn't age or need food while you were inside.
Each tower had a "patron dragon soul" that was uniquely colored. I think we took control of the "white" tower, which was abandoned due to an army of undead parked outside. As mentioned before, Z took control of this tower. I don't remember why, but we had been given an adamantine golem which we sat in the entryway of the tower on guard duty. The dragon soul orb was also removable. The owner could take could take the orb outside and use it to DOMINATE other White dragons with a range of miles. At will. I think he could also use it to communicate with other tower dragon souls, and turn into a dragon. Although by the time we had the ability to turn into a dragon we had polymorph - so we didn't care much.
Getting into the towers was also tricky. Each tower had two "magical keys" . Which could be "anything" and IIRC didn't actually radiate magic, making them hard to find. You just had to find one (many of which had been lost through several wars thousands of years ago within the setting). I think we found our first one after I used a wish to learn the location of where it was located.
A wildcard Key was a "Staff of _ alignment". In this setting there were staves of each alignment. Staff of Law, Staff of Chaos, etc. You could use these as a wildcard key for any tower. I remember the staves didn't work like normal staves (I think they were crazy easy to recharge using our own spellslots or something?). I don't even remember all of the details.
Most of the towers were claimed by a setting wide wizard guild (Order of the Stars?), who's founding members were all epic spellcasters. As previously mentioned, one of their rules was that magic could be used for evil, and so they had an iron fisted control of magic items (they confiscated them and didn't sell them ever, we couldn't even buy scrolls). We later ended up going to War with this guild, by forming our own guild, and recruiting a rival guild. Since *most* of our allies were NPCs attacking separate cities, the DM narrated a huge email about this war and the results. When Archmage gets that far in his story I'll have to make sure the narrative gets included... it was kindof a big deal.
I think I ended up having 3 characters over the course of the campaign.
The first was a "gnomeish PF alchemist". The thing I remember most about t his character was that the GM had insetting racism. Apparently in his setting "all gnomes were money loving bankers" which meant that regardless of how dumb something was, if there was a chance my character could made money off of it, I was compelled to try. This lead to me messing with the Deck of many things (to try for monies). As the Archmage mentioned, it didn't work out in my favor.
The second was a Drow Cleric. Apparently in this setting: Drow had some odd flavor of the "highest evolution of goblins". I do remember that due to the random stat rolls, this character was surprisingly squishy. Not that bad stats are the end of the world on a spontaneous casting Cleric. I think this character was evil. I don't even remember how this character died, they weren't around very long.
The third was a Windling specialist Abjurerer Wizard, who ended up going into Initiate of the Sevenfold veil. In the setting, I think all windlings were chaotic and had some strange "hummingbird" thing going on. I ended up taking a bunch of feats to to basically say "fvck off enemy spellcasters with stupidly high spell resistance". I ended up preparing a bunch of party buffs, and Countering spells so that we lived through some of the epic level encounters. IIRC, this character ended up dying because his patron god Bas (who we had the pleasure of meeting) told my character to "side with evil because siding with good is boring". Not wanting to argue with a God, I decided to switch sides at the last moment and was killed once someone else in the party realized that I was no longer part of the team.
A few things.
A major life goal of my windling was to get control of one of the wizard towers. I had a few discussions with the GM about it. The wizard towers were very TARDIS. IIRC, they reshaped themselves to the will of the person in control of the tower. That could be the "dragon soul" imprisoned at the top, or the person who won a duel of wills with the dragon. So yeah, they could be bigger on the inside. or if someone came inside you could wall them off. You could also set a lot of random magical properties - I don't remember them all. But you could shut off magic for select groups of people. I think they were also timeless, so you wouldn't age or need food while you were inside.
Each tower had a "patron dragon soul" that was uniquely colored. I think we took control of the "white" tower, which was abandoned due to an army of undead parked outside. As mentioned before, Z took control of this tower. I don't remember why, but we had been given an adamantine golem which we sat in the entryway of the tower on guard duty. The dragon soul orb was also removable. The owner could take could take the orb outside and use it to DOMINATE other White dragons with a range of miles. At will. I think he could also use it to communicate with other tower dragon souls, and turn into a dragon. Although by the time we had the ability to turn into a dragon we had polymorph - so we didn't care much.
Getting into the towers was also tricky. Each tower had two "magical keys" . Which could be "anything" and IIRC didn't actually radiate magic, making them hard to find. You just had to find one (many of which had been lost through several wars thousands of years ago within the setting). I think we found our first one after I used a wish to learn the location of where it was located.
A wildcard Key was a "Staff of _ alignment". In this setting there were staves of each alignment. Staff of Law, Staff of Chaos, etc. You could use these as a wildcard key for any tower. I remember the staves didn't work like normal staves (I think they were crazy easy to recharge using our own spellslots or something?). I don't even remember all of the details.
Most of the towers were claimed by a setting wide wizard guild (Order of the Stars?), who's founding members were all epic spellcasters. As previously mentioned, one of their rules was that magic could be used for evil, and so they had an iron fisted control of magic items (they confiscated them and didn't sell them ever, we couldn't even buy scrolls). We later ended up going to War with this guild, by forming our own guild, and recruiting a rival guild. Since *most* of our allies were NPCs attacking separate cities, the DM narrated a huge email about this war and the results. When Archmage gets that far in his story I'll have to make sure the narrative gets included... it was kindof a big deal.
Last edited by Mozoki on Sat May 25, 2013 3:36 pm, edited 3 times in total.