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.