Rantings of a Bastard

So, my Rules Cyclopedia D&D game ended (for now), and we're looking at what to do next, but I realized that I never posted how the final fight went.

So, the game previous to the 'epic boss fight' ended with the PCs on top of the boss' (a thousands of years old lizardman mage) tower, looking towards where the guy was conducting ritual prep, inside the caldera of a smoking, semi-active volcano.

At the start of the game, they rush back down a couple of floors, and exit the tower to the walkway towards the volcano. They take about 10 steps along the walkway when a booming voice (the lizardman mage) activates his first line of defenses. Wherein the railings of the walkway animated as giant stone snake golems, and the carved pillars inside the floor of the tower that they just exited from break loose as more golems and rush them from behind.

This is where the PCs start fucking with me immediately. One of the clerics casts "Protection from evil, 10' radius" and keeps one set of golems at bay because they can't get past him. The rest of the party splits between dealing with the snake golems and shooting the stone golems at the rear (because ranged attacks don't break the protection from evil effect), and over time, take out all the snakes and three of the stone golems (one golem slipped on a rogue-placed oil puddle and fell off the walkway).

Shortly after dealing with that, the rogue (who is up front) notices some sort of incorporeal/energy/magic cloud barreling down the walkway at them (he had a Detect Magic potion active), warns the party, and bungee-jumps (well, not really) off of the walkway.

Cue the second encounter.

By the time he gets back up to the walkway (he thought it was going to be some weird effect AOE magic), everyone else in the party is frozen in place, apparently paralyzed.

In reality, they're all locked in a mental battle with the incorporeal thing, which has an AOE attack, heals off of damage it deals, and other fun effects. Since it's a mental battle, it's actually impossible for anyone to die, and any spells or abilities or items used, weren't really used, and dropping to 0 HPs in the battle means you're knocked unconscious (and would have been open to mental domination in the final battle). Unfortunately for me, the magic-user in the party figures out what's going on (the bastard actually cast ESP during the previous battle and it was still in effect), and helps the rest of the party beat the thing in the mental battle.

So they snap out of it, with the rogue still going "What the fuck?" because he wasn't in the mental battle.

They race down the walkway to the lizardman mage, who, as I mentioned earlier, was going to cast a Mass Dispel on them to get rid of all of their spells (haste, pro vs. evil, bless, etc.), only the PC mage fucking counterspells it. He did admit later, his other option was hurling the turtle (polymorphed stone drake) during the Mass Dispell.

So, more golems, a vast magical energy build-up blasting anyone within a certain range of the end boss, and a "lava tentacle" bashing the party, and what do they do?

The PC Mage (are you seeing a pattern here?) polymorphs one of the other PCs into a Stone Giant to grapple the end boss (and my first response was "Fuck you, I'm not looking up the grapple rules."), so they can stuff his soul into the MacGuffin they retrieved a few games earlier. Said soul-stuffing was done by the same cleric with the Pro vs. Evil STILL UP. And now he has it as a guarded relic in the religious order he's founding.

Mind you, I did manage to bring all but one of the PCs to single-digit HPs, but I didn't even kill one of them.

The most important thing though, was that my players had fun, and I gave them several "OH FUCK" moments.

A couple of my players weren't able to make it to my game last night. So I improvised and made their characters part of the "they've been captured" group. Originally, it was going to just be the NPC sailors who had been captured, but oh well.

The remaining PCs did still do fairly well, though. One of the remaining clerics finally got to use 'Animate Dead' (the other cleric, who had not been saved yet has issues with that spell), and had a 6 HD sahaugin zombie for a little while. Alas, it was still only a zombie, and got turned to dust (even underwater) by the sahaugin cleric later on, who was not horribly amused at what had happened to one of his buddies.

And then, once again, the magic-user successfully used 'Polymorph Other' on the big bad of the night. And turned him into a cow. Underwater. About 300 feet underwater. The cow drowned in 3 rounds. And they ended up hauling the cow corpse back to shore, where they cooked and ate it. (Oddly enough, a couple of the sailors, who saw how it became a cow, switched to vegetarianism for a while.)

Still, they had fun. Hopefully next week, all my players will be able to make the game.

So the PCs are investigating a 'somewhat legal' drug den/pub in the Outer City of a Dwarven Stronghold. (Think all the buildings and stuff what is outside the mountain.)

One of the PCs responds with his usual idea of how to deal with it.

PC 1: We should just set it on fire and watch it burn to the ground.
PC 2: No.
PC 1: Why not?
PC 2: With the amount of drugs they seem to have in there, you'd get the whole city fucked up.
PC 3: Dwarves stumbling around, high as shit, saying things like "My beard is so huge. It can touch everything but itself."

This was followed by a brief side discussion of using Fred Saberhagen's "Farslayer" as a melee-range ranged weapon. (Instead of hurling it at someone miles away, use it to kill the guy 10 feet away and closing in on you. Then just pull it out of his chest, rinse and repeat.)

For me, at least.

Just got back from running D&D ("old skool" Rules Cyclopedia version), and goddamnit, the players steamrolled practically everything. They were able to ambush the lookouts, avoid the trap, and kill most of the bad guys without a scratch. (Okay, their dwarf hireling took some damage, but still...)

And to think I was worried that the 'boss encounter' might have been too tough.

So, last night, being Thursday, was the D&D game. Off-topic conversation and bad puns were rampant. In fact, I made a point of noting that Deec's humor was up to par, in that his puns were truly terrible (not the Spider Robinson "hold your nose and flee into the night" terrible. No, just the "man, that pun is bad" kind of terrible.)

But we keep Deec around for other reasons, like for his character to absorb 5 critical hits in one night.

Anyway, after I made numerous comments about other people's sense of humor (as in their sense of telling jokes), I could feel the backlash heading my way. I could tell that the next joke I told, if it did not get them all, would have the responses that my humor wasn't much better.

So naturally, the Gods of Laughter came to my rescue.

In the middle of a fight versus various creatures, including a gibbering mouther (an ooze creature covered in mouths, for those who don't know), I said, "What is difficult terrain for an ooze anyway? A colander?"

The game stopped. The players and GM paused.

And then they all started laughing.

Winner, and still champion: Me.

Pretty much done with work for the night. Only one thing I could work on, and we kind of want to talk to the customer first before running it. I did do all the major set-up on the order, so on the off chance that I am making all the correct assumptions on the order, it's an hour's worth of printing and some small amount of finishing work.

The WoW forums are not readable. I mean, beyond the normal trolling, whining and stupidity... all the links and text are showing up very oddly on the work computers (at least in IE, and I cannot even run Firefox as a remote process), and I left other reading material at home. Quite by accident, of course. I had to go back upstairs to grab an umbrella, and I left the book I was bringing in.

I'm blaming early onset Alzheimer's.

However, I was reminded yesterday that the 10th anniversary of one of my favorite D&D characters had occured. 10 years ago, last Saturday, was when I joined the "Company of Dawn" campaign, bringing in my Wizard (Wu-jen kit from 2nd ed.) Haruhiko. Much fun was had with mithras's character, aptly named Mithras, jimcyl's characters (first a Lizardman swooshbuckler, who got permanently polymorphed into an elf, and then a humanoid cat thing which was a monk), and some other friends (who I believe are not on LJ) a human paladin (with a touch of silver dragon blood) named Serin, a "reformed" drow named Eldrikor, and an Athasian half-giant who, although he later died, still managed to be part of the adventuring party as a penitant (I think that's what it was called...)

This was mildly important because I'm going to be creating a new character for a 4th ed. game that will start in the next couple of weeks. I'm leaning heavily towards a Tiefling Warlock, but that may change after I look at some of the other material. The game is being run by the same guy who ran the "Company of Dawn" game, and it's taking place about 125 years later in roughly the same setting (Planescape). Apparently, my old wizard Haruhiko is still going to be around, living on his own little demi-plane.