LoFP report

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Miryafa
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Post by Miryafa »

Roll a d20. 1-19 the creature is a bit stronger- multiplies its own HD by 1d4+1 and rerolls to get extra powers using that HD. And then of course it commences the killing rampage. Sure, getting 5x HD might be bad, but as things go... I'll take it. On a 20 roll however. Um. Well time to quote block again.
If this extra roll is a 20, the barrier between reali- ties is sundered, and innumerable monstrosities begin dropping through. Hundreds of them will come through in the first hour, then about a hundred a day for the next week, then just a few each day. All will be hostile, as their passage to this world is accidental and our reality will be unfamiliar and unpleasant to their sensibilities.
I guess on a 20, the campaign world loses.
This is hilarious. The setting is a world that would have already been destroyed by monsters uncountably many times because of level 1 magic users.

On that note, when are you going to start using Summon?

And please keep writing these logs =)
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erik
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Post by erik »

Nah. In retrospect a world destroyed by monsters isn't that likely. I walked back my comment on the world losing on that particular roll.
erik wrote: I may have oversold the danger of super-failing your domination where the entity gets a 20 rolled and floods the area with hundreds of them coming through. I'm now imagining a forest flooded with hundreds of stupid angry crystals with ghost branches and spiky tails. It would mostly be a cultural curiosity rather than an existential threat to humanity. In fact, if I ran a game I'd probably have some region where a similar thing happened. Minorly threatening entities of a similar nature roam the area because someone mad-fucked-up their summon roll once. Wizards may even go there occasionally in the hopes of catching one to dominate as their pet pokemon.
Even if you did summon up something nastier than my stupid pet rock that I rolled up as an example, a few thousand monsters is more of a local plague than an extinction level threat.

There's a greater than 1/1000 chance that coastal regions will be plunged >50' underwater (or under some sort of liquid anyway) worldwide, whenever casting Summon. That's the real danger. We have asked, but not yet received a ruling on if we would get XP for all the stuff killed if we drown the planet. Surely some of it will be bad guys and monsters, not including ourselves. Ideally we will be on a decent boat when casting. Maybe an dry-docked boat built up on a mountain.

Revelation: Noah didn't save people and animals from the flood. He was an asshole magic user gathering up animals and sacrificing them after he had his getaway boat built.

I have our latest session from this week to put up. I hope to get around to that this weekend mayhap.

With a spellbook that has Summon in my possession it is just a matter of time before all hell breaks loose.

To scribe a spell from a 'foreign' spellbook to your spellbook you need to declare how many days you want to spend on it first, then roll to see how many days you really needed to spend... and then spend the number of days you declared. Basically you can gamble and try to shave some days off, or just go conservative and invest the whole time. It also costs 10 silver per day that you invest.

Formula is Spell level X 1d3 - Intelligence Modifier.
My character being an idiot, has a -1 Intelligence modifier so it will take me 2-4 days to scribe a spell. This has to be done at a safe location of course.

So 4 days and 40 silver pieces is my entry cost to put Summon on my options for my 1 spell per day. Then I'll want to buy some critters.

I figure we get a week of downtime and we go back to town and I will get to work. We can afford this now since we've been looting the mansion and sold an art piece. Once we get to a bigger town that can afford all our wares we may have a couple thousand in silver pieces to trade. I think most players are on board with the notion that casting Summon is hilarious, so I should be able to allocate some funds towards buying a giant pack of dogs or chickens and converting them from living organisms into tools of power. We did find a room with a bunch of cages (one of which we are using to contain the Tazamack homunculus), so it's like they're already providing me the tools necessary for copious animal sacrifice.

Since we have a second mage, I may be a generous soul and let him scribe Summon as well. It did come from his dead brother's spell book and I'm not a total douche. I'll just charge him the 40 silver to cover my costs maybe.

Image

There is some desire to return to town because, I shit you not, our Specialist has reached level 2! But he cannot level up until he spends some time in a "safe zone" which this mansion technically is not. It remains to be seen whether the Specialist will live to make it to town... but yeah, I'll leave that for when I post our previous session.
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erik
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Post by erik »

Ho-kay.

We started up the session with it being dusk, our other magic user at 0 HP, our cleric already having blown the healing spell earlier in the day on the Specialist who was wounded by a dominated said cleric controlled by a brain in a jar that claimed it was St. Augustine. Our fighter feebleminded by the brain in the jar for ignoring the telepathic threat of retribution if he didn't surrender.

I'm actually down 1 HP but not too worried about it since it will heal overnight and I was expecting we were going to go to sleep and basically start our session at next day.

My mistake.

Our other MU didn't make the session so we had incentive to leave him unconscious. Our Specialist has been having a desire to keep walking off and doing his own thing and this has ramped up since he has fallen in love with a ghost of some soldier who died by hanging. So while waiting for our Specialist to get himself killed we decided to poke around some more since there are a couple hallways we haven't even gone down yet, despite exploring just about all of the first and second level otherwise. We still haven't found the kitchen/larder which I find strange. It is the greatest mystery of this place. Where's the kitchen?

Our standard protocol before entering rooms before was to use the hand drill and put a hole in a door or wall and peek in. This has been done with great success about a dozen times, but now we have a homunculus to coerce into giving us information. I don't trust him, but so far we're managing to draw out useful information. We found our way onto a 2nd floor balcony which let us see into the windows of the master bedroom whose super fancy and scaly door still remains warded with a shimmering magic field and our skeleton key does not work on (I even whacked it with my staff I looted from downstairs since Taz got all agitated when I grabbed it earlier and he said it was his master's, I figure it's magical). Windows also are super strong/unbreakable.

Further interrogation of mini-Taz informed us that the hanging ghost was killed for loving the original Taz's wife. Our specialist has a goofy plan to wear some of the clothes of the wife to seduce the ghost, but the master bed remains impenetrable. He climbed up to the roof using his rope and grappling hook hoping to gain entry from above.

Anywho while Specialist was dicking around solo, I continued interrogating. I have reasonably concluded that the body in the tub my first character found many sessions ago was the suicide of said wife (was described as an elf, same as the wife), probably in response to the hanging. Unfortunately the only characters who knew this are either dead or feebleminded. So I know it, but my character... not so much. Specialist returned down a stairwell and began working again on the warded door. Mostly hoping to get it to succumb to verbal abuse.

Mini-Taz stated that there are only 3 guardians of the house, the butler, maid and full plate skeleton guy. So it is heartening to know that we've already defeated those. We finally decided to bed down in a room on the 2nd floor not far from the masterbed room. Before bedding down I tried writing up a contract for mini-Taz to sign on as my minion but he refused. So now I'm writing up a will for our feeblminded Fighter to 'X' his signature so that I can become the next heir to the mansion. This session is actually giving me hope for the first time that we might defeat this mansion.

At this point our Specialist woke up the ghost of the dead wife and she emerged through that door because he was beating on it and yelling. Great.

The Specialist made his save vs. magic for something and then walked off downstairs not going past the party. I think he was hoping to lure the ghost downstairs to meet the hanging ghost, but it didn't work out. The Fighter who was watching the specialist made his save (remarkable since he only saves on like a 20 vs. magic) and ran past the rest of the party.

My character was alerted by the terrified egress of our fighter and the sudden super coldness. I assumed that nobody had shut the door to the balcony (because they hadn't) and went out to give some chastising. Instead I found the ghost as she mouthed soundlessly at my confused magic user "Hump me." In retrospect it was probably "Help me". I said "No, bad ghost! Go back to your room!" And she soundlessly screamed and I failed my save.

I was described as my nails and hair growing and my back stooping some, I thought I was turning into a werewolf or something, but apparently I just aged 10 years. Back stooping is a little melodramatic for turning from early 20's to early 30's, but meh. I screamed and ran away. I tried running into the last unexplored room of the floor and it was a strange room with multiple arcane circles on the floor with runes all over a large picture window and a brazier in each corner. Probably not the kitchen.

Anywho, the cleric got woken up too, and also aged 10 years after failing save. The other magic user left sleeping. We ran to make our stand in the magic circle room, maybe it would trap the ghost? We don't have a lot of promising options. Our Fighter tanked by fighting defensively and the ghost obliged by rolling horribly. The cleric only managed to annoy it by presenting a holy symbol. Our weapons, even the magic sword passed through the ghost (but possibly due to miss chance or poor rolling). Grappling didn't work. Yes, we still tried wrestling- when all you have is a hammer... (it did appear more opaque when it grabbed one of us, so hey, it might have worked).

I managed to roll a 20 with my magic staff and that got through and caused our ghost to discorporate. Actually, the magic sword might have scored a hit afterward and that was what caused the discorporation. I don't remember which of us gave the final blow, I'm just happy to prevail.

Hi-fives. Who you gonna call? End session.

We still haven't gotten to sleep for the night.
Last edited by erik on Mon Jun 23, 2014 1:36 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Longes
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Post by Longes »

A GM will probably use following homerules. Since I haven't played the game before, I'd like an opinion of more savy people here.

AB works like this:
-Strength adds to bows and weapons with damage of d8 or more.
-Dexterity adds to weapons with damage of d6 and any other ranged weapons.

It seems to me that this rule heavily favors dex over str.

Weapons get special effects:
-Swords roll twice for damage, pick highest, if you hadn't been attacked this turn yet.
-Hammers get +1 against medium and light armor (?) and lower the AC of heavy armor (?)
-Axes roll twice for damage against light or worse armor.
-Flails get +1 against medium or better armor, ignore shield AC, roll twice for damage, can be used for called shots. If you miss the target and roll lower than your AC (wat?) then you hit yourself.

Weapons have a "quality" stat which ranges from 1 to 5. When you roll less than quality on the damage roll, you get a number of "breaks" equal to quality. Once that number is bigger than the damage die, the weapon breaks. Yes, this means that quality 5 knifes are one-time items.

For armor, breaks happen when the enemy rolls more than 20-quality. Each break reduces AC by 1.

Combat options are available to everyone, not just fighters.

Your hit-points are split into Health and Stamina. Health is everything that's less than your HD+Con, Stamina is the rest. If I understand correctly, this means that health doesn't grow. Attacks that deal more than your Health destroy all Stamina instantly. If you ever get Health damage, you roll to be infected.

Lots of rules to fuck over wizards (wands can't be made - only ancient magical items can be enchanted, or magical shit like wizard's teeth; spells require 1 month to learn and you can only try to learn the spell once (and you can fail); Read Magic only works on 11-18; you can cast spells without spellslots, but that risks TPK on 3d6<11 roll)
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Longes
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Post by Longes »

First session. I tried to summon a demon. Result: 1 hp left, I got infected, and lost two fingers.
The resulting demon was made out of dream-stuff, had a smoking stinger, was explosive and radioactive.
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erik
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Post by erik »

On the house rules:
Using Dex on lower damage weapons isn't a bad house rule. I wouldn't say it heavily favors Dex so much as it makes Strength much less useful, especially since strength doesn't add to damage. That said, if you actually are dealing damage with weapons you want to be using at least a d8 weapon anyway so it won't affect much. Even rapiers are 1d8 which smacks in the face of the attempt at weapon finesse.

The only ranged weapon with d8 damage is crossbow... which is weird to make that strength based for attack.

Honestly we're talking about +1-2 difference to an attack bonus so I wouldn't really care that much. If you're a fighter you will hit stuff because your attack bonus increases as you level up, if you are not a fighter you will not hit stuff because your attack bonus remains the same. This doesn't change that fact, and that's the only thing that matters with respect to attack bonus.

Flails are suicidal weapons since you auto-hit yourself unless you have the shittiest AC possible, and even still, will hit yourself often. That's just a bad weapon rule all around. Bad plan, bad design.

The other weapons, meh. Often you aren't fighting things in armor anyway. Swords are apparently only useful if you win initiative.

But you won't be using weapons anyway unless you get quality 1 weapons, because they will all break. What a horrible system.

Armor won't last very long either. Poor fucking non-casters.

I guess it is crossbows and bows for everyone (depending upon strength/dex). Not a bad idea to get the whole party on ranged weapons anyway.

Health/Stamina seems like a way to punish people for low Con. If I am reading that right it only kicks in once you are a few HD up since your HD+Con is not going to be higher than your HP until you get multiple HD. If you have a shitty Con then it doesn't matter what your stamina is because monsters will just nuke it with a strong hit. Would have been better to just have whatever infection rule they wanted and ignore the thing about knocking out stamina entirely.

I suppose it may may Specialists deadly since they can potentially deal large damage once if they get their surprise attack. Casters of course are the big winner here since they can deal large damage. Fighters the big loser, as there's no such thing as crits, and strength doesn't even add to damage.

Most of those wizard fuckeries are just nuisances. Mostly you can't do shit without copious downtime anyway, and it's easy to prevent failure of learning spells though that may have been modified as well since the old way is just declare how many days you spend learning it and then roll to see how many days were required (and you can just declare to spend the maximum possible required). Now, since you pay silver per day taking a month to learn a spell is painful. I don't know if the economy is such that eventually you can afford to blow thousands of silver without caring, but we're certainly not there yet.

--on to my LoFP report--

We've had a couple sessions, and I'm too tired to do proper updates (been travelling a lot, school for kids just started, and otherwise been workin).

Short synopsis: feebleminded fighter Pri-Pri Prisoner got his soul trapped in some transdimensional zoo and his comatose body succumbed when we left it at the house with some food and water by it as we returned to town. I was kind of hoping it might live so I could use it for a sacrifice later, but oh well. That player has a new fighter that is a time traveler form the future (equipment just looks a bit different, tis all fluff).

The specialist is now the only original character from the starting party as all the other players have had a character die once. Specialist, my magic user and the cleric all leveled up when we returned to town with our last shipment of stuff looted from the house. To the specialist's dismay, he leveled up and then wasted like a 1000 XP since you can only progress halfway to next level with overabundant XP, and he was just about to level and Specialists need the least XP to level up of any class.

So I'm level 2. Thanks to Con being my highest stat, I have the most HP in the party. My new spell is Light/Darkness. You are explicitly allowed to cast it at an enemy's eyes and blind them so it's a pretty pimp combat spell. Also I just finished the 4 days it took me to scribe Summon into my spellbook. I am going to get a bunch of chickens or something and summon a 4HD minion as soon as I can, but first I need to get more bankroll to afford the chickens.

Other magic user has stated that he opposes my plans to either buy slaves to sacrifice or even dogs to sacrifice. Clearly he is not on board with the plan to drown the planet and may have to be converted into a sacrificial bonus in a future summoning. Sadly if it came down to a spell duel he'd totally beat me because he has Sleep.

We're heading back to the house for one final looting since we have yet to clean out the basement or the master bedroom. Once we do that, then we will probably move on to a new location and make this our summer home or something. It has an alarm system so if we ever solve our ghost problems it might make a nice base of operations / place to store our loot from other places.

I offer another hilarious spell from the "S" section, Strange Waters II. Oddly, I just copy-pasted it from the PDF and it changed it to "StrAnge wAterS ii" on its own. I leave it that way as a salute.
StrAnge wAterS ii

Magic-User Level 3
Duration: See Below
Range: 10'

This spell creates a small sphere of water, filled with twenty small fish, in the air which immediately crashes to the ground. The fish immediately begin suffocating, and will all die in one Turn. If a fish is eaten before it dies, it delivers a magical effect to the one eating it. The following table shows what effect each fish delivers. Each fish from the sphere is identical to the others in all respects, except for its magical effect; there is no way to know what effect each fish delivers without eating one.

1. Poisonous: Save versus Poison or die.
2. Flight: Gives the power of flight, as per the Fly spell, for 1d6 Turns.
3. Diminution: The consumer shrinks to one inch tall for 2d6 Turns.
4. Climbing: Gives the power of the Spider Climb
spell for d6 Turns.
5. Gaseous Form: Turns the consumer into a gas, as per the Gaseous Form spell, for 1d6 Turns.
6. Strength: The consumer gains a +3 Strength modifier for 1d6 Turns.
7. Fire Breath: The consumer is able to deliver one breath of fire for 2d6 damage. This attack automatically hits with no saving throw.
8. Time Stop: The consumer is able to take 1d4+1 Rounds worth of actions before anyone else can act.
9. Dexterity: The consumer gains a +3 Dexterity modifier for 1d6 Turns.
10. Haste: The consumer gains speed as per the Haste spell for 1d4 Turns.
11. Invulnerability: The consumer becomes completely immune to non-magical weapons for 1d4 Turns.
12. Levitation: The consumer gains the ability to Levitate as per the spell for 1d4 Turns.
13. Enspelled: The consumer is able to cast one random 1st level Magic-User spell once and once only. Clerics are instead poisoned and
must save versus Poison or die.
14. Mirror Image: The consumer gains 1d6 mirror images for 1d4 Turns as per the Mirror Image spell.
15. Invisibility: The consumer becomes invisible, as per the spell, for 1d6 Turns.
16. Begone: The consumer is teleported d6 × 1d100% feet in a random direction. The character will appear in the open area closest to the target area.
17. Energy Blast: The consumer releases a pulse of energy which inflicts 1d8 damage to all within 20', save versus Breath Weapon for half dam- age.
18. Blinding Flash: All within 30' must save versus Paralyzation or be blinded for 3d10 Turns as the consumer's skin releases a flash of light.
19. Poison Kiss: The consumer’s lips are filled with a poisonous liquid, and the consumer must kiss another living being to deliver the poison within one Turn or suffer the poison himself. The poisoned character must save versus Poison or die.
20. Giant Strength: The consumer receives a +6 Strength modifier, and does +3 damage in melee combat, for 1d4 Turns.

Although a character can eat more than one fish at a time, the magical effects granted are not guaranteed to work in tandem or altogether. When a character eats more than one fish, roll on the table above to see what the magical effect is for each one, and then roll on the following table to determine the result of the magical fish melange:
1. The two fish cancel each other out; neither is effective.
2. No issue; both fish take normal effect.
3. One fish overpowers the other; only one effect
occurs (50% chance for each). 4. One fish has half duration, the other has half-again duration (determine which is which randomly).
5. Poison! Death! No save!
6. Only one of the fish works, but for 10 times the
listed duration.
7. Both fish take effect, but the consumer is struck
blind for 1d6 hours.
8. Both work, but the consumer is drugged
(–2 Strength and Dexterity modifiers, –3 Intelligence and Wisdom modifiers).
Now, yeah, there's a fair chance of dying if you try to make use of this spell, especially if you eat multiple fish. But that's what Halflings are for! Their saves are even better than Dwarves. Get a +1 Wisdom modifier and you have a Save vs. Poison of 1 by level 6. Sure, as a halfling you cannot do jack shit in combat, but that's why you are scrambling to stuff a summoned fish in your face from off the floor whenever the Magic User says so.

I should add that despite the name, there is no Strange Waters I or anything remotely similar to that.
This is how things roll in LoFP.
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Longes
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Post by Longes »

ERIK, READ THIS.
This is important!
When you sacrifice dogs - make sure they are properly bound and can't launch at you taking two of your precious fingers. The GM will probably do that to you. Our campaign is taking place somewhere in asia, so once we are done with the mission, I'm going to go on a slave-buying spree.

As the first session showed, yes, Stamina rules are there to fuck over low-con low-hitdie people. My magic-use ('maleficar') has 4HP (because 1d4 is the hit-die and con is 10) and 12 stamina. An angry dog that bit me rolled 6 on 1d6, which left me with no stamina and 1 hp in one attack.
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erik
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Post by erik »

Yeah, I haven't worked out all the grim details yet but in one of the rooms of the mansion were a pile of sturdy wicker cages so whatever is being sacrificed will definitely be in something like that. I'll probably go with chickens or goats or something just to use livestock and avoid conflict with the dog loving magic user.

Is health HD Type+Con modifier then? I was thinking Con score (which is far kinder), I was also thinking it was total HD rather than the HD type.

I would stay Stamina is there to fuck you over, but in retrospect otherwise you would be starting with 3 HP as a Magic User (unless you rolled a 4) and no other layer of protection. So LoFP is already fucking the low con low HD characters, and anything you get from Stamina is a boost. We lost our first magic user to a single wolf bite because it put him to -3 from full health.
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Post by Longes »

erik wrote:Is health HD Type+Con modifier then? I was thinking Con score (which is far kinder), I was also thinking it was total HD rather than the HD type.

I would stay Stamina is there to fuck you over, but in retrospect otherwise you would be starting with 3 HP as a Magic User (unless you rolled a 4) and no other layer of protection. So LoFP is already fucking the low con low HD characters, and anything you get from Stamina is a boost. We lost our first magic user to a single wolf bite because it put him to -3 from full health.
Yeah, I'm probably not explaininng it very well. That 4HP 12Stamina is on 4th level MU. The GM claims that stamina is supposed to increase survival rate because it regenerates with 10 minute rests, but I'm skeptical.
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Post by Longes »

JimLotFP wrote:
The Wyzard wrote:I actually suspect that this is not as true as you think. Go ahead and tell me what games you like, if you don't mind?
GURPS and HERO are the ones that come to mind as a sort of theoretical perfect engine, but in practice they're much too complex with character customization (which is a big reason I rejected 3.0 when it came out) and the expectation of battlemats (ditto!).

Back in the day I really enjoyed Marvel Super Heroes (although I didn't much use the Karma system because it didn't reflect well on heroes like Punisher or Wolverine, and to a pre-teen/teen screw that!), TMNT, Robotech (and other Palladium games pre-Rifts, that one killed it all for me), Star Frontiers, played a bit of Twilight 2000 and Justifiers and for a good while in the early 90s Bureau 13 was all the rage with my game group.

Whenever I tried to homebrew a system it was either a poor man's GURPS or one notable (?) prolonged effort was trying to recreate the system from SSI's Wizard's Crown and Eternal Dagger games.

I've played a ton more games than that, but found myself fighting with the system (Over the Edge, DC Heroes, Top Secret, Runequest, Warhammer FRPG 1e, etc etc etc etc).

(Over the years I've gotten rid of most of my RPGs, but the ones that remain are things like Dogs in the Vineyard, Sorcerer, and Truth & Justice, not because I intend to ever play them but they have interesting essays or setting bits in them.)
I think this explains a lot. JimLotFP is Raggi, author of LotFP.
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Post by erik »

Ho-kay, it has been a while and stuff has happened.

Last night I came as close to player vs. player killing as I think I ever have.
I effectively wound up killing another character by playing chicken with a ghost. I had about triple his HP and a smidge more survival instinct so I survived and he didn't [/spoiler alert]
But we'll get to that.

Our MC was previously bemoaning that his module for this creepy mansion was expected to last maybe 3-4 sessions, and here we are 5-6 months in on nearly bi-weekly sessions and the mansion isn't safe for habitation yet. Part of the reason is that we have an infrequent player who is becoming more frequent, and a newcomer to the roleplaying scene has joined our group. Our newbie has come a long way but it's strange watching go through all the adolescent phases of fantasy gaming and basically it's causing more friction in the group since it is no longer universally accepted that the game is a cooperative exercise (even if we nominally give each other a hard time). Anyway I can actually sum up our last 3 months of play with relatively little exposition.

Another cleric joined the group (our newbie player). We basically had to metagame that he was a PC since otherwise we would have executed him for being a burglar who blatantly tried to steal stuff from our mansion or would threaten combat against the entire group.

We found the kitchen finally! There were like 2 sets of doors on the main level that we somehow missed (I think we thought they led outside) and sure enough one led to the Kitchen (and attached Larder with completely dessicated and ruined 400 year old food), and a dining room that is full of like 8 trapped shadow ghosts. Out of sheer luck my character was the first to open the door to the dining room and I made my search check (1 on a 1d6) to notice them and I shut the door as the second part of my action after I opened the door.

In the kitchen there were 2 things of note, a Cookie Jar that I burned my 1 Read Magic spell of the day on to learn that it was a "Magic Jar" that contained a trapped soul. I don't know who is stuck in it, but I have the distinct impression that if we fuck around with it then one of us will be replaced with an evil bad guy who may kill us all. The other thing of note was a glass case marked "break in case of fire" with a wand in it.

We decided to get down to business and start killing the monsters in the house. Our first target was the fire monster in the fireplace. We used the wand of "Extinguish" and it apparently had only 1 charge which hurt fire-man some, but not enough to finish him off. I used mini-Taz (in his wicker cage) as a 'human' shield when a fire bolt was sent my way, and then dramatically got out my waterskin as though I was going to save him, uncorked it, and instead threw it on the fireplace finishing off the fire beast. Laughs all around.

One more monster down!

Taz needed a new cage before this damaged one gave out so we went up to the cage room to get a new one for him. Letting lil Taz get wounded and intimidated is a good way to pump him for more information about the house. Honestly he's been an invaluable source about things, we just have to keep our bullshit filters on since he wants to kill us so badly. The shadows in the dinner room are apparently trapped souls kept there by the ever burning candles on the chandelier.

I realized that the room full of wicker cages (and tons of other crap) is directly above the dinner room. This is important since we had become aware ages ago that the floor in that room is sagging and is clearly a nasty trap. Even nastier now that we realize that if the floor had given out on us we would have fallen into a room full of shadows. Anywho, we plan our attack, we are going to make a hole in the floor of the 2nd floor room and strike from above!

We spend a couple hours (game time only thank god) clearing out the crap from the room, and then inspiration strikes when there is a big wooden bed on the opposite of the room. The specialist tosses a rope across and I help tie it on before exiting the room so that we can all pull the bed across over the weak point of the floor. It works like magic and we drop a big bed through the floor, destroying tons of valuable dinner furniture and also the ghost-chandelier that was trapping the shadows and making them stay there. Dinner Party Ovah! So yeah, another menace defeated, though at the cost of some treasure (which translates into XP).

We find out how to get into the Master bedroom by climbing up the chimney which connects the Parlor below to that room. Lots of moderately valuable stuff there. It turns out that bringing treasure back to town is how we get about 80% of our XP. 15% of various roleplay awards (making the MC laugh with word play, bringing food, taking notes/map making, etc). 5% comes from slaying monsters. Seriously we get jack shit for defeating monsters. Anyway, when getting XP from recovered loot magic equipment actually isn't well valued by the markets so they don't give you tons of XP, but something like fancy artwork or jewelry is XP in da fuckin bank. You don't even need to sell it, just bring it back to a safe location. So we do metagamey trips where we load up our newly bought cart that my mule pulls and bring stuff to town, claim our XP and then bring it right back to the house so the poor stupid villagers don't steal our shit.

Anyway, back to the master bedroom, it has stuff in it. My favorite thing it has in it is a closet reminiscent of a monster-generator from Gauntlet. A new skeleton came out of it every round after we opened the door. That shit nearly got out of hand, we had to force the door closed and then mop up the remaining skeletons. Who keeps a fucking closet of infinite skeletons in their bedroom? Goddamn.

We still cannot open the doors to the master bedroom, but there is an animated broom a la Fantasia that we have seen going around the house, tidying up the messes we make. Apparently a bit after we made messes of piles of bones, the doors opened for it to come in and tidy things up and then it left. So next time this happens we'll just prop the door open (and we can summon it by just making another mess in the bedroom after climbing the chimney). Another mystery solved!

All that remains is the TV-static ghost in the Library who may be an illusion, and the ghost who lives in the basement (And whatever else is in the unexplored basement), the giant frog in the pond in the back yard, and the dryad... and the other ghost lady who we haven't seen lately, that I thought resided in the master bed room. Still a lot of pins to knock down, but it doesn't seem insurmountable. Especially since we know the basement ghost and ghost lady were starcrossed lovers maybe we can put them to rest together somehow.

Anyway we do various trips to town and back on occasion. We pick up a townsfolk lady who wants to join us as a servant and we decide we can afford a lackey who can do various cleanup tasks like help us bury the bodies of our fallen adventurers and generally clean up things that are of a non-dangerous nature (or if dangerous, her demise would alert us to such things).

In the basement we found the soldier ghost again among many barrels of wine (what does a ghost drink? boos! ha ha, yeah). A poorly hidden secret door that was more like an obvious archway that was bricked up was the only exit of note, and we bashed it down to discover a hallway to a wacky rube goldberg room filled with an incomprehensible contraption thing. A couple sessions were spent intermittently with people running past the ghost, and bypassing the magic rune filled hallway that has a fear effect (so sometimes we get through, sometimes we run back upstairs) into the crazy room. A couple sessions ago my character activated something on the machine that made it create a sort of sliders portal to a new location. I nearly was compelled to go through it solo since it matched one of a set of paintings that my character had previously perused wherein each painting had a location painted and a compulsion to anyone who failed a save vs. magic after looking long enough that they really want to go there.

After that session we decided that we're as a group mostly on board with not trying to resolve *every* monster/ghost of this house and instead going Sliders to a new location. Maybe we could even leave our hireling behind with instructions to call up that location every could days in the morning or something just in case we need to exit that way.

But things happened.

Our hireling was kidnapped by gnomes. Goblins? Some sort of weird short cloaked humanoids. I had encountered them previously and tried to negotiate with them but the house has a security system controlled by whoever holds the House Key (I currently hold said key), and I decided to lower the defenses as the guy approached, and the dumb gnome thought I was raising them instead and he ran away while verbally impugning my reputation as a fair dealer. Anyway, they kidnapped our hireling and demanded treasure or else. I don't know exactly what their demands were because the first one who tried to deliver said demands was turned to stone by our now active alarm system/Gorgon door knockers on the front Doors, and we could only read a bit of the stone-ified parchment in his calcified hand. I intend to turn him into a garden gnome once I figure out how to detach his hand from our knocker.

Somewhere around this time our newer cleric decided that he would rather play a fighter so his cleric just left the house and another Fighter time-traveller from the future joined the group with the desire to stop our Senior Fighter from doing something terrible that affects the future. A bit of confusion and comedy ensued since both our senior fighter and our hireling were hired as maids and one of our maids had been kidnapped and we didn't know where the other maid (our fighter) was currently.

Our party was split up around this time, senior fighter and specialist were in the attic fighting a copy of the specialist created by a Mirror of Opposition. New fighter eventually managed to find Senior Fighter and the specialist rejoined the rest of us.

The other magic user spent a fair bit of time investigating the defense system/front door to such a degree I was nearly certain that he was going to get turned to stone himself. Our MC says it is triggered a specific way and he didnt do it. Later the same other magic user tried to steal my master house key because he wants to- I don't know- give in to the gnome demands or something. We hobo-wrestled and I threw him to the ground. I have seriously had some clutch rolling when it comes to combat and wrestling especially. Thus begins my jealous guarding of the master house key. Also I decided from now on my vote for best player of the night goes to whoever did the most suicidal act(s). The other magic user got my vote for his in depth investigation of the fully armed front doors.

We waited in the house and eventually a gnome delegation came and we were able to talk them down from their initial demand of 2000 silver pieces (which we do not have) to something like our 15 iron rations (which I was unwilling to part with for our hireling, we'd starve!). Anyway, our two fighters snuck around back out the house and managed to find our hireling and free her at the same time the negotiations took a turn towards violence as our specialist walked out to greet the gnomes and I and our senior cleric backed him up.

Our specialist was reminded of his mortality since he had already taken some damage in the mirror-match fight, and well, he's only level 2 with like <10 HP to begin with. Anyway, he got knocked down to -1 by the gnomes, then our cleric and I rushed into the fray. Surprisingly our cleric was struck down my an angel of god and also reduced to -1 HP. Now, this is our cleric who wields the evil sword of a fallen bad ass skeleton guy, and was dominated by an evil brain entity, and may also have been possessed by something at some point. Occasionally he hears voices telling him to do bad things. I have no clue what was the final straw for his clerical powers getting revoked. I did have a good laugh at the angel since it sounded VERY dramatic and turned out to do a whopping 7 points of damaged. Fuck, my magic user could take that standing (but, having 11 HP I was the tank of the group).

Anyway, I kicked ass with my +1 staff (which cancels my -1 strength) based on the strength of my good rolling and their poor rolling. Our other magic user cast sleep to knock out a gnome, and the fighters killed a few gnomes and rescued the hireling before the rest of the gnomes ran away.

We managed to stabilize the downed specialist and ex-cleric. There's no bleeding rules that I'm aware of, but our MC decided to make up a Heal skill (1d6 like all skills +Int) and have some rate of bleeding.

I utterly failed on my heal check and tried prodding them with my +1 staff. As it turns out my staff poked some grass and the grass grew taller! I then delighted myself by beating the ground all around and causing plants to grow. My +1 staff is a staff of plant growth, sort of.

Anyway, we brought our wounded back into the house along with the sleeping gnome. Around this time it was decided that we should probably err on the side of the sanitary and make use of our creepy graveyard in the back of the house and begin burying all the bodies of our fallen comrades. A discovery is made that the Dryad in the back yard is faring poorly having foolishly decided to put on the manacle that our Specialist gave her as a gift (she uses Suggestion to make demands for baubles), and the iron was making her slowly wither and die. I decide to perform first aid again using my staff! I paddled the nearly dead dryad with my staff and she got reinvigorated. She actually looked a bit scary once she fleshed out again so I ran away promptly. Her first menacing words upon becoming conscious was "Who gave me this gift?!" The two fighters both pointed at my fleeing form, misunderstanding her query as the gift of health, rather than the gift of the iron anklets. Oy vey.

And that brings us up to last session near enough.

There was much confusion as the Dryad commanded the fighters to get the Key to unlock her manacle and the only key they knew about being our newest comers was my Master Key to the mansion. The key that I am not giving up easily, god dammit.

Sadly almost the entirety of last session was spent with our cleric and specialist at 0 HP, sleeping it off. What was supposed to be an open-shut series of actions:
1. Bury Pri-Pri Prisoner our fallen hero, along with other dead comrades
2. Heal up 1 night
3. Return to town with treasure (possibly go to larger town to sell some treasure and get more equipment)
4. Come back to the mansion and go Sliders style to new adventure!

began to get new addenda:
1a. Appease the Dryad
3a. Go somewhere to get our ex-cleric Exorcised and re-sanctified so he can cast our much needed Cure light wound spells!

and then further complications:
At some point almost every conscious character threatened to kill me. The ex-cleric was given a message "Silence him!" by the MC and he tried to draw her magic greatsword and stab me, then we remembered he was staggered so he just fell down again. Our other magic user woke up the gnome (you know, from the group that was kidnapping our members in order to steal our treasure) and was about to show him our treasure stock pile... for no reason I can find any justification for. Instead he stopped short and just opened the door to the closet we had piled our loot in (the gnome didnt have a view into the room), and brought out some fancy crystal liquer container to have a peace-drink. I was made out as the bad guy for not sharing a drink with the gnome while 10 feet from 2 party members recovering from nearly fatal wounds, and for declining his black moldy bread he offered me. Whatevar.

Our new fighter decided that our most useful asset "Mini Taz" is evil (well duh) and should be destroyed. Yeah. I had my hands full staying out of combat.

In the end we were feeling bad that there was like constant drama and zero things being accomplished this session, while our poor specialist and ex-cleric lay at 0 HP. Our senior fighter eventually managed to knock off the manacle with a hammer/pick/chisel or somesuch.

We did band together briefly to battle the giant toad in the back yard when it reared its ugly head during the burial service for Pri-Pri. We didn't quiet kill it before it retreated back into the water, but we put a serious hurt on it.

Afterward I decided that for Taz's safety I would put him in a relocation program- carry his cage to one of the rooms I could lock/unlock with my master key and not inform the others unless necessary. Over the course of many adventures I've often carried Taz around with me as an information source. Occasionally he calls me Master since I tried to get him to sign a contract to be my familiar many sessions ago. Anyway I did not expect to be followed by a player intent on Taz's death. I especially did not expect to be followed by the other magic user since he stated he was going to the Kitchen instead. But he decided to metagame and it was allowed. When I told our MC of my plan to carry Taz's cage to the office where I could lock it up safely, he decided instead that his character would just follow me around, wherever I went. So I went wandering around the house, constantly followed by our other magic user (whose character does not trust mine and generally does not enjoy my guy's outlook on things). I decide to play chicken with the ghost in the library that looks like TV static. My plan is basically we are both going to get scared and run for it, and I can lose him then.

Anywho, I enter the library. There she is, the library ghost who looks like the one from the opener of Ghostbusters, except more of a static black and white TV appearance. I step on a creaky floor board. She shushes me. I step on another and the ghost lady gets a crazy violent face and starts to scream.
INITIATIVE!
Other mage first, then ghost lady, and I am bottom of the order,
Other mage just stands there at the door way.
The ghost flips out and lets out a ultra painfully loud scream. Me and other magic user take damage. like 2 for me, 3 for him. I'm looking way better HP wise than him, but any HP loss is fucking scary since I was already down 2. I run past him at the door way and make my way for a doorway out of the house. I make special pains not to use the closest door since that would lead the ghost near to the party members recuperating in the Parlor and if they get damaged just from hearing her this could become a TPK. I almost but not quiet make it to the door.

Next round. Rather than running farther than me or in another direction, other mage knowing my plan is to lose him and still place Taz somewhere safe decides that he is going to just catch up next to me.
Ghost lady catches up to both of us and I take 5 more damage. One more of those and I'm dead. Other mage on the other hand, takes less damage, but still easily enough to put him down on the floor. I make it to the doorway on my turn and can open and close it behind me.

I keep running next round and eventually collapse at what hopefully is a safe distance, hugging my knees and having a good cry while scared out of my mind. This is what happens when you play ghost-chicken.

Apparently it was not actually a ghost but a hive-mind swarm of insects that can make a terrible painful noise. They ate about 60% of our other wizard. My character did finally return to the house and placed Taz in the safe room, promise to Taz I will return for him (unlike his master who left him locked in a different room for 400 years). Cried for a while, then found the remains of our fallen wizard. I discovered that his spellbook has been ruined by the swarm as well. My character cry some more.

I got enough courage to check the library again (we have drilled peep-holes in most rooms of the house, the library is no exception. The door has been closed again (possibly by the bugs, more likely the magic broom) and I saw the ghost (bug) lady floating there reading a book again. *gulp*

I haven't tried to explain the remains of our mage yet. Instead we slept that night and packed up some modest amount of treasure into the cart and returned to town. Our senior fighter leveled up to level 2 (he is now our badass tank at 18 HP). Our ex-cleric leveled up to level 3. I am 500 XP from level 3. I think our specialist is if not also reaching level 3, then is on the cusp of level 3.

Our other magic user is going to have the 3rd brother (his first 2 magic users were brothers) join us next session. Ah, running gags.
Last edited by erik on Sat Nov 01, 2014 3:35 am, edited 2 times in total.
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erik
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Post by erik »

In rules notes for LotFP, I have discovered that Grindhouse rules and "normal" rules apparently call for different economies. We must be using the Grindhouse books since 1 gold piece = 50 silver pieces, and I just downloaded a separate free copy of the rules on this computer and was baffled when I saw it have a 1:10 ratio instead and players start with gold instead of silver since the economy runs on gold mostly.

And now a spell from the archives.
Identify
Magic-User Level 1
Duration: Instantaneous
Range: Touch
This spell allows the Magic-User to discern the
magical properties of an item. The spell
requires one uninterrupted day in a laboratory
worth at least 1,000sp to cast. At the end of the
day, the Magic-User will have successfully
determined one magical property of an item.
The character will not know if there are additional
properties unless the spell is cast one
more time after all properties have been discovered;
this “wasted” day will confirm no further
properties. Note that a cursed item will not
identify as cursed, but as the item it pretends
to be. This spell does not reveal command
words. Each casting of the spell, successful or
not, requires the expenditure of 100sp worth of
ingredients.
I find this spell entertainingly atrocious because those costs in the non-grindhouse version are in gold pieces. Thus making it 50 times as fucking ridiculous, in my eyes, before I learned about the economy disparities between rule sets. It does highlight the bullshit coin loss features built into being a magic user. Keep spending 100 sp until you waste 100 and learn nothing. Yaaaaaay.

I suppose eventually if you ever get high enough level you have shit loads of coins and nothing to spend them on since the only way to get magic items is by killing stuff for it, and spending them to figure out which magic items which likely as not are cursed is probably a worthwhile expense. But at the bottom of the well here it looks outrageous.

[edit: Nevermind I don't know what I was blathering about. As you can see, identify doesn't let you know if an item is cursed and that is the main concern. I think at least 50% of our magic items found so far if not cursed at least give negative area effects that include the user. [/edit]

I'm hoping that if I survive to level 3 that I randomly roll one of the good level 2 spells to learn instead of the horrible one.

Level 2 has lots of good ones thankfully.
1. Audible Glamer
2. Change Self
3. Detect Invisible
4. ESP
5. Force of Forbidment
6. Forget
7. Invisibility
8. Knock
9. Levitate
10. Light, Continual*
11. Locate Object*
12. Magic Mouth
13. Mirror Image
14. Phantasmal Force
15. Ray of Enfeeblement
16. Speak with Animals
17. Stinking Cloud
18. Wall of Fog
19. Web
20. Wizard Lock
The only one that I would never ever cast is Ray of Enfeeblement. It does 25% penalty to strength. +2% per caster level. For each caster level above level 3. So like at level 13 you can inflict a 45% strength penalty. IF they fail their save vs. magic. You know, in case you wanted to avoid doing any useful actions or spells.

First off. Fuck you for using % penalties to attributes. Second off. Super fuck you for pretending anyone cares about +2% per level, and then rubbing it in by starting it at level 4.

At least I could use the spell slot to prepare a level 1 spell though, so it wouldn't be a total wash.
Last edited by erik on Sat Nov 01, 2014 6:31 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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OgreBattle
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Post by OgreBattle »

why did everyone decide to antagonize your character?
deathdealingjawa
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Post by deathdealingjawa »

erik wrote: Revelation: Noah didn't save people and animals from the flood. He was an asshole magic user gathering up animals and sacrificing them after he had his getaway boat built.
Possibly my favorite quote on the den.

This system sounds horrible but the narrative is great. Please keep posting.

Do you have reports for your Earthdawn game?
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Post by erik »

The system is horrible, no doubt about it, but we still have fun.

I think it was a confluence of coincidences mostly for why I was a central target. Our ex-cleric is still suffering from possession of some flavor. Our fighters were compelled by the dryad to get the key, and I was the only person with a key they knew about (having joined the party after our specialist had told others about his attempt to trap the Dryad with his manacles). And the other magic user has a bit of rivalry with mine especially since I own his dead brother's spell book and while the player knows it, his character doesn't (but he metagamingly suspects it and thus has always treated my character with suspicion... which made it hard to share the spellbook later).

To be fair to some, the Homunculus that I was protecting is 100% evil. He's the homunculus of some evil time-travelling BBEG mage guy and he frequently chortles about how he is going to slay us all or that his master shall do so when he returns. That I am willing to protect him suggests not nice things about my character, even if I mostly just find him a useful source of information.

Also it's no great secret at the table that my goal as a player, will at some point be doing horrible things by sacrificing animals or what-have-you in order to cast the Summon spell. Now, my character hasn't let this on yet, but some of my group have a harder time filtering out the metagame. So far my character just describes himself as an "entrepreneur" since magic users are likely to get hanged/burned at the stake. The only time I've cast a spell in front of the group was casting read magic on the Magic (Cookie) Jar in the kitchen in front of a fighter who didn't know what was going on. I now have a combat spell "Light" but it's not like I'm sand bagging. The gnome fight was the first opportunity I had to use it on a proper foe (I doubt it would work on ghosts) and it seemed more tactically advantageous to offer my body as a meat shield instead.

Earthdawn stuff:
I'm a bit overwhelmed on Earthdawn since we actually started that campaign like 7+ years ago, then it was on hiatus for 6+ years before we started up again. I forgot a lot of what happened during the first run but I could possibly do a similar thread on current adventures sometime except barring time limitations- that and Earthdawn doesn't have the ridiculous mechanics to mock.

Our party is mostly comprised of players who were sent out from the same Kaer in order to assess if the world was safe to explore. I guess things are set earlier in the setting where most of the other Kaers and kingdoms have been open for 20+ years and we are late-comers to the scene, but relationships are still being formed. We are the second group of adventurers that has been sent out from our Kaer to investigate and the entrance to our Kaer will open again in 2 years for us to return and report the state of the world. The first group never returned and we have found a couple of them since we started adventuring.

Our starting party:
Dwarf "social" thief (party leader)
Elf fighting thief (patterned after Gambit from X-Men)
Troll sky raider (player absent from half the sessions, but when there is basically a big brute)
Orc Warrior (my wife, deals massive damage with her pole-axe)
T'skrang Elementalist (me. I decided I didn't like Elementalists and the MC allowed me to convert it to a Nethermancer since we hadn't played in over 6 years).
Ork Cavalryman (quit playing- I don't remember his character at all)

Our current party:
• Dwarf "social" thief (party co-leader)
• the clone of our Dwarf social thief (party-co leader)
found in an abandoned underground facility. We still haven't figured out which dwarf is the original, and the player and DM alternate which Dwarf they play
• Elf fighting thief (second in command)
anti-human/theran racist; becoming mentally unhinged at the dual-dwarves and now at the dual-t'skrangs since I learned spirit double and blew his mind with it last session... We were supposed to share intelligence reports and I didn't have anything to report yet so I figured it was a perfect time to make it look like I had a twin too by sending in a spirit double ahead of me and relieving it 1 minute into the meeting, thus derailing the whole meeting and avoiding getting in trouble for not having anything to report.
• Troll sky raider (not much to report)
• Orc Warrior (not much to report. mrs erik usually plays strong silent characters)
• T'skrang Nethermancer
my character is best described as a cross between the Chamberlain Skeksis, and Star Scream. He tries to usurp leadership but am cowardly and everyone knows we would be far worse off under his deranged leadership. *Skeksis voice* "HrMmmmmm. Iiiiii should be the leaderrrr."
• Human Troubador
we discovered him in a cryo-tube thing in an abandoned underground facility, I took to calling him a mole-man since he was hairless and found underground... and to create a pretense for why our anti-humanist elf wouldn't hate him, and it caught on, he thinks he's a mole man
I dunno if I have the stamina to do proper reports for Earthdawn at this time. If anything it is a bit crazier than LotFP, I cannot even keep straight which dwarf is which sometimes. I have a hard enough time getting it all down for the Lamentations game. I'm often remembering things that have been omitted. Here's a few odds and ends.

Like I forgot to mention the well that is outside the house. It doesn't hold water, but instead it goes to outerspace, I think. We pushed some of the stones in the well and they just drift off into the void there. Our senior fighter made a search check and managed to hear voices that he thinks are either demons or cultists. Anyway, we have used the space-well to dispose of corpses of enemies.

There's a dog house outside that I think a boar lives in. I don't know what that is about, but it hasn't hurt anyone yet so we leave it alone. When our other magic user first told us about it we thought it was a drunken hallucination especially since it wasn't there when we checked afterward. It was since seen by multiple witnesses on a later date before it ran into the woods tho.

We encountered blood sucking bats on our way back to town last session as a random wilderness encounter, but this was not even worth a combat since it is our second time with them and we curb stomped them since blowing a dog whistle (myself and the specialist have one each) causes them to be stunned/helpless. We discovered that right away the first time we fought em.

I tried out my plant growth staff on my pet dog and it just made a tiny bit of moss grow where some grass bits were on his back. It also had little effect on the topiary beast sculptures.

I found a magnifying glass that gives +1 to search rolls, so that went to our Specialist since he has some pips in search and does most of our sleuthing. I swear Search is the most useful skill bar none. We roll it like 20 times a session and it can be the difference between noticing the Fire monster in the fireplace that kills your first character in 1 hit, and not. Or just finding treasure vs. not.
Last edited by erik on Mon Nov 03, 2014 3:56 am, edited 2 times in total.
deathdealingjawa
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Post by deathdealingjawa »

erik wrote:There's a dog house outside that I think a boar lives in. I don't know what that is about, but it hasn't hurt anyone yet so we leave it alone. When our other magic user first told us about it we thought it was a drunken hallucination especially since it wasn't there when we checked afterward. It was since seen by multiple witnesses on a later date before it ran into the woods tho.
So do you mean the dog house ran into the woods, or the boar ran into the woods? Normally I would guess you meant the boar, but with how this game is going, I did not want to assume anything.
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Post by Longes »

We encountered blood sucking bats
I read that as "blood sucking hats", and thought that the original house owner REALLY likes his solitude. Unnecessary so.
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erik
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Post by erik »

Next session:

The player for our primary fighter was under the weather tonight so his time-travelling character phased out of our dimension and we took that in stride.
Nobody really remarked upon the bug-eaten corpse of the other magic user either. I guess we're getting kind of jaded.

Anywho, we picked up with us arriving at town after having packed up valuables onto our cart and heading back to the podunk town to sell our wares (and more importantly get XP for returning them to a "safe zone"... the rules really do demand you metagame this garbage in order to get XP from loot). We didn't get much XP, but we did manage to sell all our crap to the general store owner and get about 800 silver after our expenses (we have to pay for lodging and food and crap). It took 5 days of resting to heal up our most wounded party member.

Highlight of our journey back was realizing that only 2 of the current 4 party members bothered to have waterskins (myself and the specialist) and the rules for dehydration are rolling a save vs poison if you don't drink water that day and if you fail 3 consecutive days of saves then you die. Thankfully it was only a 1 day trip as the other party members failed their saves.
Starvation
A character must eat at least one full meal a day and drink water every day or suffer ill effects.
For every 24 hours that a character goes with- out food, the character must make a save versus Poison or one Constitution point is lost. For every 24 hours that a character goes without water, his Constitution drops by half unless he makes a save versus Poison. After three such failed saves against Poison due to a lack of water, the character will be dead.
Constitution damage heals back faster than normal from starvation and due to the way bonuses are calculated (8-12 has no modifier, so dropping from 12 to 6 is only a -1 change) it didn't have much of an impact on those afflicted and they recovered fast enough since they weren't terribly hurt.

The way healing works in LotFP is as follows:
If you are at more than half your HP total you heal at normal rates. 1 freebie each night's rest, and if you spend a full day resting you get an additional 1d3 HP healed back.
If you are below half your HP total you get nothing for resting at night, and only 1 HP if you spend the whole day resting.
At some point we are going to have to hire a physician, which doubles your rate of healing when resting. I'll have to go into hirelings in more depth in one of my exposés on the rules of LotFP. It's looking like that will be an important aspect once we actually can afford them.

Healing would have been super easy since our ex-Cleric hit level 3 (giving her 3 level 1 spells per day), but so far she's still barred from casting spells. Le sigh. Since she leveled that gave her a bump in HP that put her over half HP and allowed her to heal back rather quickly while the Specialist and I took 5 and 4 days respectively. During our down time the ex-Cleric sold our wares, which kind of worked out since the Specialist and I were banned from the general store since we kind of activated a magic harp we had found last time we were there and all of us *and* the general store owner were afflicted by its "Confusion" type effect and nearly killed each other (mostly kicked the owner's ass in a wrasslin match free for all).

Anyway, at town we were surprised to discover that the sleepy burg is becoming more bustling as people come to see artifacts that we've recovered from the mysterious legendary mansion. We struck a deal with the local tavern where some of the tapestries and a full suit of armor etc. were put on display in order to drive up tourism and put this shitty town on the map. So it was nice to see that working out.

We also encountered a weird astral construct man-thing that stated he was a tool generated by some other powerful guy to observe us and "the event". Sounded ominous so I tried to maximize distance between myself and this guy. He originally appeared as a glowing white featureless human in a robe, so we dubbed him "Whitey". Even though he's since calibrated his appearance to look less disturbing. Anyway, he occasionally makes references to our ex-cleric who he is most interested in monitoring. I was initially thinking he was following us as a time-tourist to watch when I finally cast the Summon spell and unleash armageddon, but apparently it's not all about me. Whatevers.

In town we also have now encountered our other magic user's next character. Straining even more than ever our credulity and metagaming at allowing PCs to join our party. This one is a lawyer on retainer from the family of the two deceased magic user brothers who insists on getting the share of the estate (i.e. the loot from the house) that belonged to them, since the original hook for the adventure was that several characters were declared heirs to that estate. So basically he's a lawyer guy (another Specialist) with 4 giant attack dogs who shows up and demands 1/5th of all the treasure you've ever found, and he follows us alone into the woods where the house resides all while harping on how he's so rich and he's going to sue us and take 1/5th of our treasure.

Lucky for him none of us are evil characters, per se. I did rub my hands gleefully at his bringing 4 dogs into the party since that's a +2 bonus to my dominate roll later when I sacrifice them whenever I finally cast Summon, but out of character he let me know that his character would have to kill mine then. We all know how well that worked out for his last level 1 character.

Anyway, he didn't get a water skin on his character sheet, or any food, but he made his save vs. Poison on the way to the mansion as he followed us back to the manor. Then our cleric relented and provided some of our own food and water to this guy who is just going around inventorying our stuff so he can try to legally steal it later.

Naturally interactions and what not are colored through my own personal bias, but at least one other player was at first hinting, and then directly suggesting that maybe he should try to ingratiate himself a bit rather than be antagonistic to the entire party so we have at least some reason to want to have him adventure with us, or at a bare minimum keep him from starving to death. The suggestions were in vain, the closest we got to civility was his character at least paying the 3 silver to cover the 3 days rations we fed him while he was following us (he initially wanted to just run a tab and pay it at some future date out of the 1/5 treasure that he'd be confiscating).

Knowing that our house is still a bit of a death trap I'm not too concerned. I'll try to briefly go over a few suicidal things our newfound auditor did.

1: discovered a couple 2x4 boards that were nailed together in order to seal some sort of item thing between them. Sure enough a voice emitted from between the boards implying that it was a blade of some sort, and frankly it didn't sound that wholesome. He demanded that we open up the wood to free the person inside of it. I made a run for it before they unleashed whatever it was, but our primary specialist was able to wrest it from his hands and throw it into the pond where a giant man-eating Toad lives (assuming it survived the tail-kicking we gave it about a week ago in game time before it hopped back into the pond). Magic items in this game so far have had a >>50% rate of bad things happening to those who use them. Intelligent items... that's just playing with fire. Malicious intelligent fire.
2: Auditor guy then waded into the pond to retrieve it and had a rush of brains causing him to flee the pond after something large brushed up against his leg.
3: As we unloaded other loot from the attic we got the Mirror of Opposition and we narrowly stopped the auditor from uncovering it from under its sheet (which no doubt would have caused a double of one or many of us to appear and start fighting).

It's so damned tempting to suggest to the auditor guy that our library has valuable books that we haven't taken out yet (which is likely true) and then just slamming the door loudly behind him after he enters, thus provoking the bugswarm into eating this character as well. But again, not an evilly evil character.

Honestly there's probably a dozen ways to die in this house still and he has like zero survival instinct. The doorway that is a dimensional soul prison. The well that goes into space. The cookie jar "magic jar". The closet of infinite skeletons. The petrifying front door. The library bug swarm. The basement ghost. The master bedroom ghost. I'm sure I'm forgetting some things, and I'm sure there's some not yet discovered. Oh yeah, wolves that enter the house at night is a good one.

Yes, wolves came in and killed my mule in the night. We forgot to re-erect the makeshift door/barricade to the conservatory where we pen my mule while staying at the mansion. So a pack of wolves came in and ate my trusty steed. I think the wolves returned while we were away and ate the corpses of our fallen adventurers that we had not yet buried as well. I guess that's tidy, except for that it's training the wolves to come here for meals.

I was initially worried that the missing bodies had turned into zombies or something, but I queried the dryad whose tree was nearby (I basically had a hollered conversation from a safe distance so she wouldn't use her suggestion wiles on me) and she indicated wolves had come. Wolves frankly are scarier than zombies anyway. We've killed several zombies, but a pack of wolves are still a potential TPK encounter.

So with no mule it took us double the time/(and rations) to use human power to haul our cart laden with stuff back to town to get more XP for bringing it to a safe zone.

Our primary specialist (and lone survivor of the original party) finally made it to level 3, and I'm less than 200 shy from level 3 myself. One more session and I should hit level 3 (assuming I get to a "safe zone" where I can level up). I think at level 3 I'll be well situated money-wise to start buying livestock and planning for my ritual Summon. Then let the good times roll!

I'll probably do something like summon a 6HD monster, 1 for each party member, and assuming I mega-win my dominate roll I can command them to follow their party member as if their command was my own. Then our campaign turns into a kind of digimon adventure or something. Yeah!

Assuming a 6HD monster with 3 powers (a generous assumption), That is +9 to its domination roll for a maximum potential of 29. I need to beat that by 19, so I want to be guaranteed or very likely at least to get 48 on my check (so +44 bonus from animals, i.e. 88 1 HD animals put to the sword). I could chance things a bit by sacrificing a few less animals. If I have at least 52 animals sacrificed that gets me to a minimum of 30 on my roll (1 on the d20, +3 for caster level +26 for critters) and at least prevents the nastiest effects of losing the domination roll-off... but once you're killing scores of creatures you might as well go whole hog and git er done guaranteeing the desired result.

I'm thinking we'll throw a meat buffet for some village and my character will be in charge of the preparations.
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erik
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Post by erik »

I'mma update this with a brief summary since I wound up playing over a year after the last post with almost bi-weekly sessions. It was some of the most fun when I got into my groove and decided to always use a Irish Traveller/Irish accent in character, even when using my disguise spell to impersonate Jesus to a christian/monster worshiping cult.

Despite having a 7 Int I was totally clutch at rolling to learn languages, and wound up knowing about a half-dozen before the end (twas ruled that if the penalty on the language skill brought you to 0 or worse, you could still learn on a "1" roll, but you had to give up ever being able to learn some other language not yet encountered).

Some players stopped coming to sessions, or came only once every few months. A few are on their 3rd or 4th characters. I'm still going strong on #2, and our highest level Fighter only barely has more HP than my Magic User (high Con and Charisma, low Str, Int and Wis).

I wound up almost making it to level 5 as a Magic User in that game, but things went more and more off the rails with an accumulation of house rules and weirdness, so I dunno how representative it was.

I got forcibly converted into some spider-mutant cult. and with my help they converted the rest of the party too... so our new missions involve making the world a safer place for Mother Spider and expanding our spider family with her mutating mind control venom. I got pointy needle teeth, our main fighter got like 3 more arms (each with a cumulative +1 to grapple, and he has a +1 garrote!!!). I wound up wearing a scarecrow mask to disguise my features oft times.

Image

I wound up casting Summon twice. Once I rolled rather weakly and only managed to get a minor monster's service for a couple d10's of rounds, so I just had it butcher all the animals I'd killed to at least use them as rations.

The second time I summoned a monster in service of the spider cult to show them what fantastic feats I could perform. I killed most of their livestock and rolled like a loser again, so the monster wound up rampaging a bit after he just barely won the dominion contest. I tried to fool him by using Change Self (or whatever it is called) to look just like him, and pretend to be another outsider. I did manage to delay him from killing cultists for a couple rounds before he vanished.

When feeling pessimistic I sometimes would prepare Summon as a last resort F-U spell in case of a hopeless combat, but haven't had call to use it in that kind of situation. yet.

Sadly that game is on hiatus since February, with me just a session or two away from level 5. We had so much money that we just needed some downtime to buy and slaughter a bunch of animals. Assuming female characters in the party let me. I wound up wearing a cursed item that lets nearby women sense whatever I am about to do as an action and they can veto it and make be stunned for a round.
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