Happy Trails

Yesterday was the final session of Brian's Pathfinder game.  He's leaving Korea soon, Robbie as well.  But we've really developed our gaming group in the past couple of months, with quite a few new players, and now it looks like there will be a plethora of choices for what games to play next.

I'm actually going to take a break from the Sunday games for a while.  The options tend to be more Pathfinder, 3.0, possibly a 4E game.  However, Justin started a G+ hangouts game on Saturday, running Labyrinth Lord.  He's up in Pohang, a bit far from Busan, but we're in the same time zone, unlike most of the other G+ ConstantCon games I've looked at.  In addition to it being Labyrinth Lord, it's also short duration and will allow me to have all of my Sundays free to spend with my family. 

Anyway, enough about the future plans.  This session was a lot of fun.  Robbie again couldn't make it - but he's leaving for Japan, and I'm planning a move back to Japan next year, so hopefully we'll get to game more in the future.  We'll both be in the Tokyo area.  Without Robbie we didn't have Toki the Sorcerer, but Shard was there again with Sinesret the Human Wizard (dancing lights was his specialty).  The rest of the usual crew was there as well: Oxide the Warforged Fighter (Jeremy), Red the Half-Orc Cleric (Greg), Zesser the Half-Orc Alchemist (Jesse), Brother Repose the Human Cleric (Dean), and Elwood the Human Paladin (me).

And one more time, SPOILER ALERT for the Age of Wyrms Adventure Path

We ended the last session in media res, with us exploring a narrow labyrinth and being constantly ambushed by tengu.  Aided by magical goggles that added to perception checks, Zesser was able to spot the secret doors easily (and listen better too...with magic goggles.  Um, how does that work anyway?  Never mind, we had villains to slay.)  With a bit of logical thinking about my map, we found the missing secret door to the boss area after finding a tengu spellcaster and his guards and slaughtering them quickly.

In the hidden chambers, there was an oddly shaped room with lots of pillars and strange semi-circular protrusions on the walls.  In the next chamber were what we thought was the "boss" fight.  There was a chamber with an altar to Vecna, with three hooded figures around it.  As soon as they were alerted to our presence they attacked, along with the protrusions opening into eyeballs, which summoned the remaining tengu.  The was also a fear effect upon entering the room, which caused Zesser and Brother Repose to flee, even going through a web spell that one of the acolytes cast in the entrance to escape.  The fleeing heroes encountered the tengu with the necklace of fireballs (we encountered last session, but it got away after frying us - and itself).  Brother Repose fell to negative hit points from the fireball, but Zesser came out of his panic and beat the tengu down with his mutagen-induced claws and fangs.

Meanwhile, back in the big chamber, Red and Elwood were taking on the spell-casting acolytes while the main hooded figure walked through a wall and disappeared.  Oxide got out of the webs and helped keep Sinesret alive from the tengu.  Elwood's opponent managed to quaff a potion of gaseous form and escape after getting damaged, so Elwood helped dispel the other acolyte's mirror images so Red could beat him down.  We found their sleeping quarters and a supply room, healed a bit, buffed a bit, and went into the next room where the real boss was.

The Faceless One, the high priest (or was he a mage of some sort? not sure) of Vecna was there, along with a pair of the worm-zombies (Sons of Kyuss, I think), the incorporeal undead spellcaster thing (never did figure out what exactly it was), and the acolyte that fled, in an alchemy lab with a sinister, sealed cauldron in the middle of the room.  In the battle, the priest summoned a large grick-like beast, the worm-zombies proved resilient (coming back unless destroyed with fire), and the wraith-like thing had a paralyzing touch that made everyone sickened (-2 to hit/damage/saves/skills).  Luckily for Elwood, my "mercy" power with Lay on Hands that I'd chosen was to remove the sickened condition, but I didn't have time to do more than use it on myself, as I'd declared Smite Evil on the leader, and was intent on bringing him down.  I did, with a nice critical hit (the only one I rolled the whole campaign, I think).  The grick-thing (like a grick, only bigger and tougher) was doing a number on me, though, but we managed to eliminate the zombies and everyone stayed alive until the monstrosity disappeared.  Sinesret was in bad shape, though, from the undead thing sapping his Strength (which being a Wizard he didn't have much to begin with).  But with all of the others defeated, the wraith-thing fled, never to return. 

We looted the bodies, then headed back towards the entrance.

Surprise!  At the entrance chamber, rising out of a pit of slime (which Red had thrown a statuette of Hextor the first time we came through) was an aspect of Hextor (I assume, it was a big, demonic thing with six arms).  Crap!  Luckily, I'd saved my second Smite (I came close to declaring it on the undead wraith thing), and Brother Repose had the Vecna-priest's rod of summon monster III, summoning a pair of lantern archons to help us with Aid spells.  We used what buffs we could (we'd more or less ran out), and somehow managed to dish out enough damage to kill the aspect.  If I hadn't had that smite left, we likely wouldn't have made it.  Or at least not everyone.  I was dishing out a lot of damage for once, since the smite damage bonus is doubled against evil outsiders (and undead and evil dragons).  Plus it ignored all damage reduction. 

Anyway, that was the end of the game.  Brian awarded us with an increase to 5th level, and said, "you cut open the body and find one magic item of your choice each."  I joked about finding a pair of revolvers that act as Holy Avengers (since my patron deity was a cowboy with six-gun 'wands of magic missiles'), but I'll likely take something more sane like a flail +1, holy in case I ever get a chance to use Elwood again.

And our various characters rode off into the sunset as the campaign came to an end.