Tomorrow begins the madness that is Gencon, the crush of the crowds, the heated toilet seats, the Fantasy Flight and CMON booth lines, the selling of THE OTHERS to people that didn’t kickstart it while those of us that did have to fucking WAIT FOR IT in the mails, the signs that tell people politely to PLEASE SHOWER DURING THE CON and finally, those that such signs were written for walking around in a thick crowd stinking up the entire vendor area. Some of the people you can smell a certain smell from the front (jungle rot?), and a different smell from the back (rectal sauces?).
I’m not in a lot of games this year, it being impossible to get into an event with friends due to the player to game ratio these days, but I am running one session of Lamentations of the Flame Princess, so we’ll see how that shit goes with fucking strangers. I’m hoping for some non-insane people. That’s all I ask. The game I got in to play was Mythras (runequest) Classic Fantasy which is the RQ take on the Old School D&D genre. Really looking forward to that.
Otherwise I have to say, after going to Gencon for at least 22 years straight now, I’m thinking I may take a break after this year and rely on some local cons for the gaming.
Stuff I really like to do though:
Go through Warhammer bits boxes that these guys bring. Epic, Blood Bowl, WFB– so much good stuff…
Talk to the Dungeon Crawl Classics guys. People put a lot of onus on LotFP, but DCC is the other “leg” of the OSR, one that puts out great shit consistently.
Get drunk at the ram
Taking pictures of strange looking people– and they keep getting stranger and stranger both in costumes and people you think are in costumes, but aren’t. Granted when I started going as a wee lad it was all bearded fat guys hunched over hexboards.
This has been long gone off the internet, but I wanted to keep it for posterity because it is a poignant run down of the failed design of Diablo 3 and its crippling interaction with the Real Money Auction House. The article is a great nostalgic read and a grim reminder of how far a license can fall when in the hands of the wrong company, the wrong developers and the wrong game designers.
A lot of the problems this guy notes I never experienced, I wasn’t even able to get through act 1 before quitting. Things have changed for Diablo 3 from what I hear since the above was written, but my issues with the game had little to do with the RMAH in the first place, rather the core ARPG gameplay itself, which is not good and the core character models, which are silly looking and all run funny. I’ve always thought of doing a review, but Diablo 3 is one of those special games that is so bad it’s not worth reviewing. It gets the patented: unplayable/unreviewable rating a la the Onion.
It’s been 2 years since our last HORROR ON THE HILL session with the famed Ashtel Lumberton, Snachus Maximus 2, Nerdlinger and Tor Horst (and Ulug and Glug the Mongoloids). So I bring you, in as little detail as possible to not put you immediately to sleep, part 2 of our sad story of murder, robbery and death.
Mongolioids! have courage!
I want to preface this with the following few statements. Old School D20 games are not great for combat, focused more on getting through combats fairly quickly and having MORE rather than having few, but meaningful combats (like, say, Runequest) and yet, many of the old school modules involved nearly only combat throughout. Things have changed since 1981, and while the occurrence and ability in combat is still an important thing in OSR games, in most systems, fighting a lot means you are doing very, very badly and your party is likely to get wiped out. In many cases in the description of play below, the only way through certain obstacles is to fight through. This module began to feel like playing Advanced Heroquest and that’s because that’s what it is. So this is not indicative of what a normal Lamentations of the Flame Princess adventure is like- if indeed there is such a thing.
In addition, unlike 4E, 5E and 13th Age, there is no concept of short or long rests, recoveries or anything like that in LotFP or Labyrinth Lord. Any time heavy damage is dealt to characters, and especially with the brutal healing rules in Lamentations of the Flame Princess, it requires multiple, multiple-week trips back to town to recover from injuries rather than fighting onward deeper into the dungeon. Remember, unless the characters find a polder, they cannot rest in the dungeon at all. Since the play is so brutal (most players had multiple characters die), play is naturally conservative, so even the M-U being out of spells may require a trip back to town. This seemed to frustrate the GM, but what choice do the players have really? 13th Age and 5E added recoveries and rests in to keep it in the dungeon and not back at the tavern after every fight.
Lastly, we were not high enough level for this adventure, and it became painfully obvious! Now let’s go!
PC’s
Snachus Maximus 2: Fighter level 2
Ashtel Lumberton: MU (with sleep) level 2
Tor Horst: Fighter level 2
Nerdlinger: Cleric (bless most of the time) level 1
Mcunty Ruffbottom (not his real name): Fighter level 1
NPC’s
Lars: linkboy
Colon Defiltch: rescued thief
Grul and Uleg: rescued Mongoloids
Ashtel’s dog (the last one remaining from last session)
Another VERY fighter heavy group, with no Specialists of any kind, we were bound to have problems. Clerics at level 1 are nearly useless, and MU’s can be based on their random spells.
This was about the third time we hit this dungeon, and it got restocked repeatedly. Exploring slightly beyond the areas we’d been in before, we found a pile of human bodies with some gibberish hobgoblin words of warning written in blood. Shortly after a fight with two Bugbears ensued. Ulug, bravely, took the brunt of the attacks and went down and out before the bugbears were disposed of. Tor Horst broke his axe.
This took Ulug and Grul out of the story a bit as Grul dragged the limp body of Ulug back to his people.
After a fortuitous secret door check, we found what I feel is one of the most terrible magical items in D&D: the invisibility ring. The cleric grabbed it and put it on. Since we didn’t have a specialist and he was level one, no one minded much, but if you want a character to take center stage and do everything, give the adventurers an invisibility ring with no drawbacks at all to use. It’s pretty much a “I’ll survive the adventure no matter what” card.
After a fight with some glowing birds (?!), we were on to the final fight of this level with the Hobgoblin King, or so we thought. Using the invisibility, we were able to draw out a barracks of hobgoblins into a fork in the passageway and a massive fight ensued. Colin the thief was decapitated, Ashtel’s dog was also nearly killed and Snatchus Maximus 2 was dropped to zero HP before Sleep was cast to end the encounter. We opted not to go on to the now more vulnerable Hobgoblin king fight, instead running back to town to heal– for five full days.
This caused some GM frustration who wanted to get to the next part of the dungeon (it being 2 years and all in the same area). Given the number of fights this module presents (pretty much constant fighting) you can see why recoveries, short rests and long rests made it into the D&D’s design with 4th Edition and beyond, to try to keep players in the dungeon! Lamentations has no such niceties, so if you are going to fight fight fight, best to be running multiple characters.
After the rest up, we were back in the dungeon ready to face the Hobgoblin King, who, for simplicity sake, looks like he just waited in his throne room for us. Rather than rush in and fight, or sneak in and fight, we challenged the Hobking to a duel, which he accepted readily. He was to fight the first level character: McCunty Ruffbottom. The plan was that McCunty was to fire off his brace of pistols, then we would all rush in, cast sleep, and start killing hobgoblins in earnest. Since the barracks was all cleaned out, there weren’t that many left anyway.
The plan didn’t work out too well. Mcunty did fire his pistols, but missed and was struck down by the Hobgoblin King forever. While the multiple sleep spells from Ashtel helped cut the hobgoblin numbers down, that couldn’t save poor Grul, the last of the Mongoloids, nor Ashtel’s “lumberdog” who was crushed underfoot by the Hobgoblin king. Eventually, the 20 AC fighters wore down the King and he was eventually dispatched.
That wasn’t the end to the killing, as another well found secret door revealed a couple of trapped chests, and Tor Horst failed his saving throw vs poison and instantly died.
The treasure was bountiful, and since we had a Portable Hole at this point (as well as the invisible ring) it was off to town to collect experience for the three survivors: Nerdlinger, Ashtel Lumberton and Snatchus Maximus.
Stay tuned for part three! Where more characters die and there aren’t any mongoloids…
After a pretty long wait, backers got an email from CMON about the OTHERS, which is a game by the design team that brought you such games as BLOOD RAGE (my pick for 2015’s best board game by FAR). It’s a big game with a lot of miniatures as is CMON’s purview. It’s been a bit late, but like Blood Rage, not terribly so. The game is apparently on the boats from the China manufacturers as we sit here. With Blood Rage, I actually TRACKED the boats coming in as I was peeved that I did not pick up a second copy at GENCON and had to wait months to actually play it. I was overly excited and Blood Rage, as many of you know because I’ve made nearly everyone play it, was worth the wait.
The Others I just can’t tell yet how great it will be, but fuck…while I was amazed at the Blood Rage kickstarter and vast amount of stuff you get– the OTHERS is ridiculous. I couldn’t afford to get all the add ons either. And where would I put them? The boxes do look great though…
The (addon) good guys.
I’m a huge sucker for Adrian Smith’s art. Look at that shit!
I spent part of the day looking for BLACK PAINT. The GW store was closed, and none of the other gaming stores had it in stock. I’m not even looking for Vallejo game color here and even would have settled for P3 black which I’m sketchy about until I’ve tried it. There was no black paint anywhere at all. I guess there was some new game out and people in the area are painting. A LOT. I should have called first right? Fuck…
I had four Legends of the Old west guys to finish up and I almost did until my Vallejo BUFF exploded (my fault, as I squeezed the tube too hard) across the backs of two of them. No terrible damage, but they had to be rinsed off with water which ruined the sand/PVA glue bases and touched up. It was one of those moments that I’ve had before where you just want to throw in the towel and quit painting for a time, but unfortunately this can last YEARS. I pushed through and the other two are done and the splatted cowboys are all touched up just waiting for the bases to be finished. I dropped a miniature and chipped the paint a few years back and quit painting for a year or so after that. Fixing would have taken about 30 minutes of work, but I was EMOTIONALLY MAIMED from frustration and couldn’t bear to do it. I won’t let that happen again.
Otherwise it’s been a weekend of children birthday party with today the first day I can do stuff. I played a lot of Mount and Blade: Warbands and must say, that is an addicting game. While I like the campaign and collecting guys, I really enjoy riding around with my massive meat cleaver — cleaving. This is why I can’t get into FIRE AND SWORD because it has guns and you just can’t do that… cleaving …any more. I took my first castle with my new guy today, so that’s progress.
I’ve got two more days left of vacation before it’s over (effectively due to a camping trip) so we’ll see what sort of painting I can get done. It sorta sucks to be off when no one else is off, but them’s the breaks.
Otherwise I’ve been working on a design for a miniature focused RPG. Sounds insane? Maybe. It’s something I’ll experiment with probably on Roll20 for a bit before posting about it more. The core thing is it will strip down the stat line compared to all but the most OSR-based games and the fights will be unapologetically for many, many miniatures.
I tried to spend as little as possible, knowing that I have so very little time to play games that many games I get can never be played. There were some that I bit on and need to give the college try. I probably should have picked up Far Cry 4 in retrospect, but that can wait a bit. This is what I picked up.
Battle Brothers:
This is like a turn based Mount and Blade where you go from city to city getting quests and fighting in order to build up a group of mercenaries. It does not have the visceral excitement of mount and blade where slaughtering enemies from horseback is one of the greatest things ever programmed. However, for those mouse and keyboard challenged, Battle Brothers is an interesting take on it. Jury is still out as I’ve played so far only 3 hours.
Subterrain
This was an impulse buy. Looks a bit like LOADED (from PS1) but with some RPG/ Tower Defense elements. I haven’t installed this one yet. Looks neat, could suck.
Prison Architect
Was cheap, will play this eventually. Looks real silly.
Hand of Fate
I’ve been looking a this for months now but it was never low enough in cost to get. This is an RPG deckbuilder along the lines of DreamQuest for the iOS. Haven’t played it yet, but going to get in on this action.
Depth
Graham gifted me this and I need to install it. It’s a SHARKS vs Divers multiplayer game. Looks fantastic!
Salt and Sanctuary
I’ve been suffering helping my childes play Terraria and while I recognize it as a good game, I fucking hate it. Salt and Sanctuary will burn away all those shitty Terraria memories as the essential 2D dark souls clone. Installed and ready to go, but have to finish dark souls 2 first. Fuck…
Wolfenstein the new Order
I just need to play this and it was finally cheap enough to pick up.
I was off to the West for a long training and there’s been no time to really post so this is going to be a splatter of crap on the side of the bowl.
Steve and I went to the new Games Workshop (now WARHAMMER) store in Boulder to get some paints and saw a bunch of AOS crap but amidst it was the new Heroquest style Silver Tower game. Miniatures looked great, the card board pieces that came with it are up their with Rackham’s Hybrid and Nemesis (read: good) and while not as cool looking as those, it looks to be a more playable game. Though everything fantasy related from GW these days is really, really, really:
While out west, I didn’t get inside any headshops or smoke them tweeds as the saying goes. The thought was there, but it didn’t really count for much in the end. I saw a place called “Starbuds” and thought that was clever and likely going to be sued soon! I did walk through MANY clouds of THC both indoors and outdoors. For a little while at least, I could pretend we were (collectively, instead of just Western CO) living in the better times imagined during the mid/late 90’s rather than a billionaire dominated, post citizen united, Swift boat veteran style country.
Blood Bowl is coming out. There are pictures of people playtesting and some of the miniatures. This is the first thing I’ve been really pumped about from GW that wasn’t a video game since Warhammer 8th Edition. While AOS is garbage compared to the Lord of the Rings Strategy Battle game and Warhammer proper, with the announcement of a new Epic, Blood Bowl and Necromunda, things may turn around for my interest in their stuff at least.
The BB miniatures look… awful chunky. I’m not sure I dig the look of the orks, but the humans, especially the human catchers, look great. The dwarves I’ve seen are very very blocky, and not the drunk, bearded short-fatties we’re used to. It’s not the olde worlde style, since they blew it up and all that. I’m VERY glad the humans aren’t Sigmarines. That helps a lot.
For weeks now, Warhammer Total War has been out and it’s gotten good reviews. …and I am going to wait to buy it, not because it isn’t great (it’s been the fastest selling TW game to date) or buggy (reports are that it’s a cleanish release by CA, which is a ..second?), but because I want to get a new video card first and play DOOM, then dish out the cash for Warhammer TW. Plans, plans– all go to ruins when I just start up Torchlight 2 again, or Fallout 4, or Darkest Dungeon.
I started playing LISA before I went off to training. Wow. Some broken people are responsible for that shit. While I haven’t gotten anywhere, I want you to share my pain. Highly recommended. Buy it.
Other stuff along the RPG front:
There are two new releases from Lamentations of the Flame Princess. One is by the guy who did Dwimmmmmermmmmmount and the other is by some English bloke set during the English Civil war. Remember that shit? I got them in the mail and plowed through Cursed Chateau, which reminds me a bit of Castle Amber (a good thing) and started on England Upturn’d. With World of the Lost, Towers Two and these new ones, I’m going to need to run some LotFP again soon.
SLUGS is coming on Free RPG day. Look at that purdy cover. It even has the GENCON booth for this year.
“The inspiration for LotFP is the basic belief that the life of an adventurer is a hellish thing that nobody sane would want – full of danger and violence with no real home, no real family, no certainty, ever. Think of the classic RPG adventure form: You’re going into some dark hole with a sinister history, fully expecting to encounter death traps and supernatural monsters and all sorts of things that want nothing more to kill you and probably eat you, and you’re doing it for some money. …
That’s LotFP.”
This weekend is TALISMAN Weekend with Keneda. We will drink, play Tobal 2 and play a massive couple of games of Talisman with (nearly) all the expansions. This will include the new board, which is quite a work of art and a full on deconstructionist version of the original 4E and 2E’s boards.
While the 4e board is good, it really needed the FF artistic touch, so here it is!
Runequest 6 is becoming Mythras this year, and after the first release with Classic Fantasy, the base rules are the next item to come out for the system. They are free right here.
To show off the combat system for those who had not experienced it yet (and Matt, who has), I decided to put together a little player vs player gladiatorial combat action using Runequest 6 based on this article. I rolled about 15 Gladiators for RQ, priced them based on their stats (mostly looking at AP, Combat Style, Damage mod, Evade and Endurance) and had the players buy them with 1000 sectartiis. Most gladiators were about 300s, but a few hardcore guys were more. The only requirement was that they had at least 3 fighters for 3 rounds of that day’s games. The winner of each round would receive $$ and if any gladiators were killed, the owner of the killer would have to pay up, just like in real life.
If they had $$ left over after buying fighters, they could buy luck points for 50s. These could be used at any time for any gladiator to force a reroll on another player, or reroll the dice themselves. Once used for the day, they were gone.
I did use miniatures for this fight to keep things clear. Everyone was close together and there were no ranged weapons, so it made it easy. We had three players for these events, again with 3 gladiators each and a few luck points between them.
When Animals Attack
The first round was a fight with a bear, naturally (I recommend all new players and GM’s start with an animal combat of some kind, like a hunt or bear attack). The players threw in one gladiator each and they went to town. The combatants were:
Beaire the Nasty, a Thracian (note, these guys have big shields, but only a hooked DAGGER)
Nesset the Ugly, a Provocator (huge shield, shortsword)
Tecocia the Reaver, a Retiarius (the net and trident dudes)
There was some early confusion as to what the bear would do with the net being thrown onto him, but I made the call since he didn’t know what it was, he wouldn’t parry. Needless to say, the bear didn’t spend a lot of time parrying, and mostly spent his time attacking.
Nesset was able to impale with his short sword, but it did not hinder the bear’s skills at all (based on a size chart of weapon to creature/person size). As a group, they were able to fend off the bear for a bit, long enough for Tecocia to net it so it had difficulty attacking and then impale it with the trident (which did quite a bit of damage). Unfortunately, the poor Retiarius decided not to parry a blow from the bear and had his leg torn off for his trouble. The remaining two gladiators were able to hack the bear down with the trident still sticking out of him, and survive unscathed to the cheering of the crowd. While it seems forgone conclusion, things could have gone terribly, terribly wrong for the gladiators. Without the retiarius, I think they would have been bloodied meat in the sand mostly because the Thracian and Provocator use their weapon special effects to good use vs humans, but not so much vs the brawn monster that is a bear.
Individual Fights
The second event was the individual fights between gladiators. The players put forth their champions and lots were drawn to determine the fighters. I stepped in because we had only three players in order to give a fight to the odd man.
The combatants in the first fight were
Coprica – Murmillo (Large shield, short sword, Heavy head armor)
Pepominili – Hoplomachus (Short spear, tiny shield and a dagger)
This went back and forth and really caused us to look in the rulebook a lot for being prone, tripping, different weapon lengths and a few other rules since the spear and the short sword were two weapon lengths apart. While I love the RQ6 book, not everything you need for a rule is in the same place, so there’s hunting and pecking. Also in this fight we ran into some trouble with players taking a long time to pick special effects– the android app would have helped here, but no one had an android, so we had to use sheets of paper and my homemade GM screen.
This was a reach fight. The Hoplomachus was able to keep the Murmillo at bay for most of the fight, despite his small shield he was able to defend mostly by backing away. There was a big difference in combat style % here, with the Hoplomachus at 82%!
Eventually due to sheer luck, Coprica kept getting hit in his unarmoured arm (among MANY armored places) and passed out from the shock and blood loss for a win for Papamillia the Hoplomachus.
The second fight was the fastest RQ6 fight I’ve ever experienced. The combatants were:
Nesset the Ugly (the Provocator from the first animal fight)
Necnipro the Doomed (a Dimachaerus, which has only leg armor and two short swords !???)
I figured this would be a chance to see how the FLURRY special effect worked since that’s what the Dimachaerus’s come with, but, Nesset engaged and attacked… and fumbled his attack roll! Necnipro succeeded with her parry giving two special effects (and access to the attacker fumble special effects) which were Compel Surrender and Force Failure. This means the combatant would normally get a willpower roll to resist the compel surrender, but the second effect, only usable when someone fumbles, forced the failure. Nesset, while unhurt, was booed by the crowed and probably died of shame in his heart moments later.
The Melee
The final battle was a free for all melee with four fighters and would be a long slough to the end.
The combatants (in order of strike rank):
Misuae (I just kept calling him Mouse) – another Retiarius again with a net and trident
Necnipro the Doomed (Dimachaerus fresh of her 2 second win over Nesset the ugly!) – two short swords
Ecaubus the Monstrous (a huge Gual/Sartar with a broadsword and big shield, but no other armor).
Posttastis the Blood Drinker (Provocator, again, big shield, shortsword and armor)
Misuae charged Postastis (here on out, called mouse and potatoes) and while the Retiarius got in some shots without parries from the Provocator, his armor saved him multiple times (warding location with that fuckn big shield helped too). Mouse was just unable to close the distance for long versus that trident and even hit himself in the leg with his shield at one point. Eventually though, the Provocator was able to strike the spear arm of the Retiarius and forced him to drop his trident. Mouse carried on with only his net until…
Necnipro and Ecaubus had the exact same strike rank in this fight, and this was odd since if one declared and attack, the other parried and… could attack again? We didn’t have time to look into the rules much for this but a few times both gladiators simply attacked without parrying at the same time. In one exchange, Necnipro got a bleeder on Ecaubus and nearly severed one of her arms. She stayed in the fight and impaled Necnipro with her broadsword. Necnipro in a display of bravery, pulled the broadsword out of her abdomen, made her endurance roll and fought on, twice forcing Ecaubus to check willpower or surrender (who made very good dice rolls to stay in the fight). Nearly bled out, Ecaubus had the last laugh and took Necnipro (remember, armourless except her legs) out of action.
The Gaul (Ecaubus) then ran and attacked the Retiarius who had regained his trident from the bloody sand and was warding off Mouse again. We were not sure whether or not the longer weapon (trident) could hold off the broad sword and deemed not because one was L and one was M. Ecaubus got a special effect and compelled Mouse to surrender. Even while bleeding out (she was at formidable skill difficulty at this point) Ecaubus the Monstrous was able to hit the Provocator and that was the end of it– until the owner of the Provocator remembered a luck point and using this, was able to keep the fight going and force surrender on Ecaubus the Monstrous who would have probably collapsed moments later from bleeding…
that’s a 25mm equivalent of a penis. It’s like the evil plot from Black Dynamite happened to this guy!
So that was that. There was a lot of discussion about the nature of opposed rolls, which means that if both parties succeed, whoever gets highest without going over their skill wins the contest (an ideal roll would be 95% [corrected from 98%, which is an auto failure] if you had 100% skill). This is one of the subtle yet awesome things about RQ6 to keep the game moving and not have ‘nothing happen.’ Granted attacks/parries are not opposed rolls, so there can be times when, if both opponents have the same weapon size, that they bounce off each other in the attack-parry sequence. However, shortly something will happen when a failure, critical or fumble comes along.
There were a lot of new rules I had not had to deal with in the Vikinthulhu campaign yet, so we had to look up a lot. Things in the heat of the moment could not always be made clear. Issues we had specifically were around:
Arise (special effect) and getting up from prone, and what the effects of being prone are.
Charging – it costs an AP to charge…but you don’t get to attack as I understand it with that AP? strange!
Flurry (special effect) seems pointless? I don’t get this special effect. (only unarmed and two weapon guys can have it, so no big deal).
The use of NETS and tripping and immobilizing
Overall a good time and great practice for me as a GM. The special effect selection slowed everything down more than I would have liked, but this could be helped with a better organized cheat sheet that shows normal special effects, critical ones and ones only on fumbles. A sheet specific to each player with just the special effects they can use based on their weapon-set would be cool to make. OR if that special effect app was either web-based or on IOS would help
We’ve been playing 13th Age for over a year now and I’ve been following the balanced encounter advice in the main book (with an excel sheet some dude made to back it up). Most of the time they’ve been fighting humans, which are easy to make on the fly, but a few times I generated a monster with Raggi’s RANDOM ESOTERIC CREATURE GENERATOR FOR CLASSIC FANTASY ROLE-PLAYING GAMES AND THEIR MODERN SIMULACRA and slapped the 13th Age stats on them (and triggered powers, gotta love those). The system makes it fairly easy to create battles that won’t totally fuck the characters, but I’m finding now that maybe as published the advice leans a wee bit on the easy side and by wee bit, I mean a lot. Most of the stuff I’ve thrown at them is pretty much in line with what the characters, now at level 2, supposedly can take on, but last night I threw the kitchen sink at them, and no characters dropped! The battle was tense, and the characters got messed up, but I went for the (planned) dues ex machina without them really needing it.
Basic math suggestion is that with 4 characters at level 1, you should have 4 (normal sized) monsters of level 1 for an even fight (or equivalent). This changes with tiers to be finally about 2-1 at Epic tier, but if I was to give advice to start the calculation, I would say # of creatures at the party’s level +1. So five first level characters vs 6 first level orcs should be a balanced encounter.
I had a prepped battle ready for about 6 months to pull out when needed (wasn’t sure where it would take place, but I knew what was coming) and I tweaked it from time to time to make sure it wasn’t too hard, yet it was supposed to be a hard fight, the capstone of part of the campaign if you will. It ended up being a 2-session battle and even without the Barbarian in the first session, they mopped the floor with the bad guys including a nasty Hungry Star.
How did they do it?
Paladin (with the apt nickname “the dauntless”) has a ridiculous AC as the escalation die goes up due to a magic shield. By round 4, she was nearly unhittable by the mooks, and one of the bigbads couldn’t manage to hit her.
Bard had a power to give 2 free recoveries out during the fight. This saved a couple character’s asses and is very powerful. The bard’s song also helped quite a bit.
Doling out huge damage from the ranger, including special effects. The ranger class can stunt to get bonuses/effects and there was incredible rolling. He rolled at least two 30’s during the combat– enough to hit anything that exists!
And, as always, the Barbarian in session 2 of the fight, even without being able to Rage this battle, was destroying everything nearby with nearly comically high dice rolling.
The sorceress can and will be a mega-damage dealer as long as she doesn’t get attacked by enemies too often and dropped.
Now they get their first long rest (unless they do something… stupid) after about 6 sessions and the recovery gas tanks will be filled to the brim.
