Session Roundup #18

Hello kids. I am effing exhausted, so there'll be a really short Roundup tonight. Which is kind of a shame, because we played Mage this evening, and it was super bloody awesome. I mean, really cool. Cool enough that I want to spend more time parsing it before I dive into talking about it, but what the hell? Our cabal was in the midst of deciding whether we were gonna help bonus dudes escape from this misty spirit labyrinth, (see last session for sort-of how we got here-- basically, we freed some dudes with the Ghost Bees and Tigers, but there's some other guys we could free too, if we come up with a challenge...) when we, well... basically unlocked this whole nested sideplot about basically evil bits of our own souls, trapped in gems. Apparently, we are, or were, Total Recall style sleeper agents. For serious. So we got deep into trying to figure out what the hell we were going to do about that, which meant that Tommy spent a lot of the game talking to the spirits of gems with his super cool Spirit 3.

Also, I totally bought Space 3 with my xp from last session. Now we're thinking in portals!

Only, well... the paradox. :)

Anyway, we left on a cliffhanger-- we've just sort-of come up with a plan to convince the spirits in the woods to let everyone in the labyrinth go, by exorcising the gems with our evil selves in them, and offering the spirits a place in them.

I am not doing the plot, or the session justice here, for which I feel really bad. I'll try to do better later. Culture Packets for Dust to Dust are finally over, for the most, so I am relieved, but wiped. Plus, I have some other writing obligations.

Finally, I've been playing Echo Bazaar on Shieldhaven's recommendation, and I really love the feel here. It is super creepy and awesome. Personally, I love it when things are odd and deep and don't really make sense for a long time. It's deliciously overwhelming, and that says yes to me.

Now, sleep. No really. It's important.

Session Roundup #1

Partially for my own benefit, and partially to satisfy my own nonsensical desire to order the universe, I am going to try, each Thursday, writing up a brief rundown of the previous week's games. It is possible that All My Gaming will be changing up soon, which makes me very sad. Also there's been some breaks in the schedule of late, but the past two sessions of various games have been worth mentioning.

B's Game, last Tuesday-- We finished up a storyline in which, from the little we could tell, the Raven Queen sent her minions after Hane, my Revenant Assassin. We didn't find out much of what was going on, but she'd taken over the Imperial Palace, and we had the Crown Prince (a 6th level warlord) with us. We had him wait outside the door to the throne room while we tackled a couple of Ebony Guard and two Gawd Awful Hounds with a nasty fear aura, that dropped our attacks by 2 when we were in aura 5. Yeah, bad times.

On top of that, after we'd committed to wiping out the Guard as fast as possible (so we could deal with the hounds, which we'd fought before and which have unholy hit points), a Revenant Lurker showed up, with poison daggers and an eye towards making our lives bloody miserable. Fortunately, (though the player wasn't there, we had a Bard.

And the Bard had Insult to Passivity.

Insult To Passivity basically dazes an enemy until their are attacked. This is important-- they can take damage and stay dazed, so long as they're not attacked. Enter My Assassin's Shroud, and the feat that allows me to deal shroud damage without removing the shrouds when I use my Dark Reaping racial ability.

So this chick was super unhappy, trying to get close enough to hit us with daggers on her next turn, and eventually trying to run off... but we got there first and shut the doors on her. So sad for her, not having phasing. Finally, after we'd (well, mostly I'd) been wrecked by the hounds, and pretty much put them down, Our Mageblade went and started wailing on her, so she could finally use her powers. Which were pretty brutal-- she immediately went invis on us and hid behind some tapistries.

Shame I'd put Hunter's Eye on her, since she was my shroud target, and thus could find her no matter where she went. It also gave me +2 to attack her, but that's neither here nor there. Also, Norman-the-Runepriest-Barbarian-Hybrid-Dwarf (Also my Assassin's descendant) had Earthsense, and could tell where she went.

Oops.

So we wrecked her pretty hard, and that was awesome. I have to say, this was a really cool fight, and everyone got a chance to feel pretty awesome. Our Mageblade has specialized in AC improving stuff, and the things that targeted AC were balanced in such a way that while they could get most of us, they couldn't get him, most of the time. Norman also did some splendid damage, combined with healing like a madman, and our Wizard was... well, our wizard. But enough about Magic Missile in 4e. Because we wrecked her so hard, we didn't find out much more about what was going on, but the Crown Prince and the Emperor were very happy with us, the Raven Queen's shroud went away, and we all were extremely satisfied to leave the encounter with pretty much nothing left but at-wills.

Chessenta, monday-- Chessenta: Book of Serpents is run by He Who Stands in Fire, and is the most brutal game in which I play. This session was no different.

As of last session, we wound up in the town where we'd received our first quest-- we had the Axe that we were supposed to return to the town's church, and had, uh... gotten sidetracked helping out some Brass Dragons before taking it back. Of course, when we get there, the entire town's been swallowed by the Shadowfell.

Oops.

We made our way into the Shadow-Copy of the town last session, via a pretty darn neat gating system which stuck each of us in a black room with a horrible monster. For me, this meant sitting there trying not stay alive while my poor Shaman was wailed upon brutally. The others killed their monsters and teleported to another of the four rooms. Naturally, they got to me last.

But I was just fine.

Anyway, after I was rescued by my buddies, we found ourselves attempting to sneak through a city full of undead and shadow creatures towards a church. It was really just one of those sessions where we could not pass a skill challenge to save our hides. The sheer quantity of 1s rolled on 20 sided die were staggering. Thus, we wound up in two really quite brutal encounters with shadow creatures and horrible undead fleshy-monsters, one of which dropped some interesting papers. The second encounter involved these dudes who not only were able to turn invisible (and threw poisoned daggers), they created huge freaking zones of total darkness. Ultimately, we had to just frigging run away, and then try to lay in wait for them, hoping that they'd go back visible. That worked all right, and once we could, you know, hit them, we did so with much vigor. Also, our combat rolls suddenly got better. We then got to the church, rescued the mayor of the real town, and realised that we were going to have to go into the creepy sewers beneath the shadow town after all. The best part was hanging the axe back up in the church, which got us a happy quest reward: all of our weapons now do Radiant Damage as long as we're in the Shadowfell.

Hurrah super useful quest rewards!