abominationvault

[abominationvault]

Session 33: Sat 27 Apr 2024

Luna and Sprocket welcome Baby Wee Jock Number 2 into the world! The doctors want to keep Luna for a while to keep an eye on her so she and Sprocket won’t be with us tonight, a poor excuse. We will have a character sheet rolled up for BWJ2 for next week though, so he better be ready by then. :) Jorg’ath will pilot Luna, Skabb will take Sprocket and Augustus.

Sprocket is first, or rather, next. We were fighting big oil spitting spider things? Skabb, piloting them, has Augustus assess which one looks more injured - the one to the south of this little cave, she is told. He does a couple of fist slams, but both miss.

Hartvig looks at his spells. “Line? Cone! Aww, degrees…?” He throws up some ancient dust, but his character sheet isn’t working so he and the DM piece it together manually. “It’s DC35,” Hartvig tells him. DM, immediately: “That sounds wrong entirely.” The scalathrax misses the DC and takes some damage… DM calculating... “... You stinker!” Hartvig Guides Luna as she’s next.

Jorg’ath has her dash and hide, ready for next round. He’s up next, so he sidesteps and flanks the first scalathrax - taking him out of melee with the second. Do they have attacks of opportunity…?

(The DM remembers that Hartvig and Jorg’ath are both Clumsy 1 and Slowed 1, from last week due to scalathrax venom. Jorg’ath: “Son of a bitch!”)

Jorg’ath hits with his Greatsword for 25, doing a green 16 damage for 20 total! Something is starting to exude from between the plates of the scalathrax.

It’s their turn next - one shoots leg quills at Jorg’ath, 25 to hit for 10 damage. Another goes to Hartvig, but it misses. Oh no - because he’s Clumsy and Slowed, it did hit after all. Then the scalathrax shoots at Skabb, for 11 damage. The other scalathrax bites Augustus, but 16 misses. It goes again, 29 definitely hits. 14 damage. It has an action left so it bites again - 22 also hits for 13 more damage.

Skabb has a weird feeling, like a mental itch, but she has no idea what it’s about. She used Magic Missile last week, if she uses it today might it break? Yes, she is told. “Ballbags.” Can she pour a potion down Jorg’ath’s throat? Yes, for 6 healing. Not a lot but he’ll take it. What would happen if she used the wand, she asks? She can overcharge it, but will risking destroying it. Success and it’s fixable, failure and it’s broken forever. She does Slashing Gust cantrip instead. “And that is all. And I’d like it to leave me alone now please.”

Nadia has a go at sticking one to the floor with a glue bullet, even being reminded that these creatures are very oily. She was two points off a crit… Because of their slickness, they can treat any result of an escape roll as one level higher. She shoots the other one but misses. Nadia: "Sidebar - do we want to see this through or try to run away?" Jorg’ath is all in, and so is Hartvig; on we go then.

(DM: “Second sidebar, always take tactical advice off the raging barbarian. Always.”)

(Jorg’ath does some back seat piloting of Sprocket and is told to get knotted.)

Sprocket Boosts Eidolon, making Augustus a bit more tougherer, and Augustus does some battering but misses. Shove is a second attack, so he does that - 22 hits for a howdydoodis! Does the goo go far enough to reach Skabb’s open mouth? (Yes, and it also hits Jorg’ath.) He has an action left, so Augustus moves to get up to the other one. (Jorg’ath is still back seat piloting. “… Fine, but you can explain it to Sprocket,” Skabb tells him.)

Hartvig Needle Darts, but misses, looks sheepish and heals himself. For 1HP. “Yaaaaaaay.” Wait - he’s Slowed and only has two actions, so he can't do the Heal. “Okay, I’ll take that one hit point back off then.” He does get the spell slot back though, so not all is lost.

Luna peeks out from her dark corner and starts shooting - 13 misses. Jorg’ath Hero Points it, “because they’re not my Hero Points.” 16 and 9 both miss.

Jorg’ath and his six hit points are off, flanking the scalathrax with Augustus, a red 12 to hit. “This is bad.” 8 also misses, and he’s also Slowed so that’s him done.

The scalathrax is up and it bites Jorg’ath, then Augustus, then shoots a dart at Hartvig. 17 misses Jorg’ath, 23 hits Augustus (for 23! He is no more and Sprocket is down...) and 12 misses Hartvig, much to his relief.

Skabb whips a sling bullet, 25 hits for 1 whole damage. She uses the other wand to heal “lizard-tits”. She does him 10 healing.

Nadia shoots 3 times, misses twice, only does 3 damage.

Sprocketses is regretting using his Hero Point, but he’s only Dying 1 - 16 is a success on his Death Save. He loses the Dying condition, and is now at 0HP. Now he’s only Wounded 1.

Hartvig. Who’s dying the worst, he wants to know. Sprocket, probably, but Jorg’ath isn’t great either. He does a level 2 Heal on Jorg’ath for 20. “Would you like to Heal his mouth closed,” Skabb asks. Hartvig will go a bit wrong if he uses his Focus spell, so he Guides the cat.

Luna shoots with a 17, but that misses. Jorg’ath is pretty sure our crit machine is broken. “How is this happening?” 13 also misses, and Luna slinks back into the shadows.

Jorg’ath does some slashing - 10 damage. Nice. He Rages, because he forgot he wasn’t already, then finally, he will - how big is this beast? Medium. “He’s getting thrown! I’m gonna suplex this motherfucker. Oh… That’s sad.”

The scalathrax will bite Jorg’ath - 34 hits for 19 damage. It bites him again - 19 misses. Third attack is an 8.

Skabb has a death wish so she goes and flanks the scalathrax, earning herself a Hero Point and an approval box that says ‘everyone liked that’. She bites it but misses, so she Hero Points it. That also misses, so for her third action she bites again. Natural 1 for a big red 5. She starts chewing her own arm, thinking it’s a scalathrax leg.

Nadia does 3 more damage, but that’s all. Sprocket is down but stable.

Hartvig moves and casts Needles. “Ahhhh, get Needled!” 21 hits now that Skabb is flanking it, for 13 piercing damage, yeah! That’s us working as a team, that is. He gets a Hero Point.

Luna shoots but misses, then again, then hides. She’s usually better at this. “Rats,” Jorg’ath says, knowing that’s what she usually says.

Jorg’ath swings and misses. He has a go at Intimidating it, puffing his chest out. 24! It is Frightened 1! He punches at it, 21 hits for 6 bludgeoning. He gets a Hero Point!

It bites him twice, then Skabb - 30 to hit Jorg’ath, 14 misses, and 8 misses Skabb as well.

Skabb is up. She goes in with her Grill of Aberration Bane again, but misses. If she does a ray spell, will it hit the other people flanking the scalathrax? The DM will check… Nope, she’s good. 24 hits for 12 cold damage and a howdydoodis!

The legs freeze like little see-through popsicles; she snaps them off and stuffs them in her backpack.

I bow out because I’m not feeling too clever this week. Lovely Skabb takes over the notes from here…

We mooched around the cave and found two secret doors. One to the east and one to the north. No treasure to be found (apart from the delicious seafood platter). Returned to town and we’re all healed and rested in the temple. All conditions removed. We then went and did a spend, buying a repeating crossbow, 2 cartridges (each containing 5 bolts) and an extra 20 bolts for the lovely Nadia. This will work with all of her class features and if put in her bandolier will be a plus 1. She can fire 5 bolts before needing to reload. We also bought 4 holy waters given that we think all the levels of this dive will be riddled with deadites. Nadia has 2 and Luna has the other two (should be added to inventories). We bought Luna a plus 1 bow, which is in her inventory. J’orgarth bought Skabb two healing potions to repay her for his greedy ways in battle. We met a Tengu called Magiloy. He runs a hipster alchemy micro brewery. Jorgarth decided he wanted to be his buddy so sent Sprocketses and Hartvig to big him up. He’s now friendly towards jorgarth only and indifferent to the rest of us. When you are his friend you can work for him as a lab rat for his latest alchemical yum yums. We wondered if Nadia might also like to be his chum to access his alchemical know how/training? Plan for next week: More bird fancying Mischief with Skabbers Check in on Augie in our new gaff Return to crabville to check out the secret doors

#dnd #pathfinder #abomination vaults #abomination vaults spoilers

[abominationvault]

Jorg'ath searching for traaaaayyyysure

#dnd #pathfinder #abomination vaults

[abominationvault]

Session 32: Sat Apr 20 2024

Doctors. Bloody weirdos. Skabb is eating, quote, “Some kind of awful-looking salad”, so she and Jorg’ath will be on mute for a while. (There’s sea-cheese in it.) Luna is nearing her due date and ready to welcome Baby Wee Jock 2 into the world, more updates as we receive them. :)

Ooooh I forgot we’re in initiative and moved Nadia, whoops. I put her back.

Luna is up first, so she assesses the situation and does some moving and counting, spots a corpselight about to descend into a body. She toys with the idea of distracting it by pretending to be a corpse herself, but decides against it. Has she got anything chunky she can lob at the skeleton to smash it? She searches her bag, in vain. She decides to pick up a dainty little conference room chair and chuck it. Improvised weapons! She does take a -2 penalty as she’s not proficient, but she rolls a 29 so it don’t matter. 1d4+1 for 2 damage, boo. But they’re weak to bludgeoning so it ends up a 7! “How many pieces is the skeleton in now?” she wants to know.

Nadia stabs the newly risen body with her bayonet (Sprocket: “gun knife!”), and then wonders what would happen if she smashed a healing potion over the head of the body. Would it hurt it…? It’s undead… She decides to have a go, and rolls all crits for 19 bludgeoning damage and 8 more damage from the potion, earning herself a Hero Point.

Hartvig finds a wine cellar. “Ah perfect! Well, I’ll see you guys later.” No corpses in here, so he generously saves the wine for after the fight.

(Sprocket still wants his swarm of cutlery, because it can pin enemies. Hartvig: “Your homunculus can pin stuff too, just in a WWE style.”)

Hartvig wants to do Torturous Trauma, but it relies on the target having internal organs. Skeletons, not known for that. He can do a Heal? He only has two actions left. Some confusion left over from last week about how his signature spell works, he does it anyway but the corpselight saves. It does take half damage, 24 halved to 12. Hartvig, muttering: “… I was reading the wrong spell… … Right, I’m finished.”

Sprocket directs his sacrificial (“I mean, ‘good buddy homunculus’,”) to bite the skeleton in front of it. 27 hits for 4 damage, no poison damage. Again, 20 hits for 4 more. He then casts Dungeon Bidet on it, it saves but I don’t hear if it takes half damage or not. Augustus wants to throw a chair over Nadia’s head, the DM will let him try with a -2 penalty as there is an elf-tiefling in the way. 29 still hits and howdydoodis!

“Augustus brings a chair into the ring!” If his face was capable of expressions he’d be grinning, as it is he creaks like a ship under sail.

Jorg’ath stomps into the room, briefly hampered by Grabby Cat (Skabb: “hehe!”), and exits the game. On his return, he feels left out by all these people throwing things, so he picks up a table with his Oversized Throw feat and smashes it over the head of the corpse in the side room with Luna and Sprocket. 14 to hit. “Oh, come on now.” He Hero Points that for 28. 3 plus his Strength modifier (4) and some extra added by the DM for 12 damage total. He swings his javelin at it as well for good measure, but 13 misses.

Little Skabber. She wanted to jump up on the big dining table and is dismayed briefly when she thinks Jorg’ath has thrown it, but he actually threw a smaller table so the big one is still there. Pleased, she scrambles up onto it, takes out her sling and whips it around her head - 27 for 9 damage, 16 misses, Hero Point but it’s worse.

The three corpselights in light form flicker and fade, but the one in front of the homunculus claws at it. 9 misses. (Peanut gallery: “Some sub-standard clawing there.” “What a shame.”)

Luna goes in with her rapier to rattle the skeleton’s bones a bit. 26 - how de do dis! “I smash it into gravel, and roll it around on the floor like marbles.”

The remaining lights blink out. We won! Final Fantasy fanfare.

Jorg’ath finds a room - no, a black hole! - and the DM suddenly gets very excited. Storage bins, tools, lumps of stone. He rolls initiative - whuh? (Luna wants to nip over and shut the door behind him.)

A new friend!

Around him are more bodies, too broken for the corpselights to inhabit. He thinks something hid in here and got crushed, somehow? Sadly, he can’t target New Friend because it’s invisible. (Hartvig: “Experimental Chinese stealth armour!” This week, we have been mostly playing, Fallout.)

Jorg’ath uses some Battle Medicine, but rolls Poorly. He Hero Points it for Worse. He does a big squeal so we all know he needs help, and next round we can all roll and join in. Lastly he reaches into his pocket for some chalk, crushes it and throws it into the air. (Impressed noises from all of us.) 24 with his Greatsword (and it’s magical too, he learned his lesson from the last time he fought fuckin’ ghosts) and it takes 10 slashing damage.

Hartvig, with a heavy sigh: “Why do we never fight anything with internal organs, [DM]?”

The chalky bitch gets a turn, and Jorg’ath suggests it fucks off back down its hole. It declines, and hits him for 22 bludgeoning damage. “… That really hurt me. Not just physically, that hurt me emotionally too.”

Sprocket is the first to wade in. How long does he have the homunculus for? (Hartvig: “Don’t tell me you’re fed up of it already. You said you’d feed it and look after it.”) Augustus moves to the door and opens it, assesses the situation, and slowly closes the door. Sprocket moves to the big table and does a Phase Bolt for 9 damage.

Luna is next. She shoots, misses, shoots, misses. “Shit. Nothing. I’m done.”

Jorg’ath, and 18 with his greatsword misses. Wait - no, it does miss, as does the ten. (H: “Are you sure it’s a great sword?” J: “… We’ll have less of that, thank you.” H, giggling: “I got in trouble!”) Jorg’ath chugs a potion and rolls a 1 for his healing. Woof.

Hartvig didn’t see where everyone went, and whips around looking for them. He locates the door and walks to it, and instantly forgets the plan he had. “Needle darts! Oh…” He Hero Points for a 20 to hit. He is using the silver he was given, and deals 13 damage! “Fuck yeah! Get killed.”

Jorg’ath’s new friend does a Telekinetic Storm at him:

It shoots a bunch of stuff from one of the bins at him, with a -2 to hit. 20 damage. Jorg’ath: “I am fully dead. I’m having a BIG lie-down.” 16 hits Augustus as well, for 20 more damage. It screeches at us: “GET OUT! GET OUT!!!” (Jorg’ath: “I didn’t even really want to get in.”)

Skabber has two options, and doesn’t know what to do. Will Magic Missile hurt it? She could Disrupt Undead instead…? Magic Missile, 3 actions, 11 damage, plus more next time.

Nadia uses one of her ghost bombs, discovering that the poltergeist isn’t weak to positive damage. It does take all of it though. She ends her turn standing over Sprocket.

Sprocket is next, and he will not summon a homunculus again. (“Come, Gavin, from the nether realm!”) Instead he will do a little bit of Phase Bolting. “Oooh, no he won’t. Ah, I’ll spend a Hero Point.” He does it 6 damage, and Augustus will do an Electric Arc for a green 9 damage. DM: “Stinker!” The poltergeist saves against his attack, launched “with verve and panache, but very little skill” ( - Hartvig).

Luna goes for an electric arc as well, it saves but takes half her 8 damage for 4. She hides below the table height. DM: “You are confident that you are hidden.”

Jorg’ath makes a death save, while gurgling: a 12, success. He has no Hero Points to stabilise himself…

A turn late, Hartvig Heals him with a 2 actioner for 16+6, 22 total. Better than a slap in the face with a wet fish. What to do with his remaining action? He doesn’t want to make his curse worse, but what he has in mind is a good spell, and will tell him a lot about the poltergeist. And give him a +2 roll on his next attack. He decides it’s not worth getting dusty for so he gives Guidance to the Poltergeist. No wait, to Skabber.

Jorg’ath makes a request of the DM, he wants to keep some of his HP until the next round, but the DM is capricious and merciless and the poltergeist would rather he died, so she attacks him instead with a 19 to hit. Fortunately that misses, or he’d be taking 31 more damage. 32 does hit him, however, and does 14 damage. Sadly that’s also a critical hit as it’s 10 more than his AC. DM: “Excellent!” 26 more damage, and Jorg’ath has another lie-down. (He’s now wounded 1 and dying 2. We need to get him out of that room. He insists he can get to Dying 5 before he's really in trouble, but we would rather not let things spiral quite that far out of control.)

Skabber’s wand goes off again doing 4 more Magic Missile damage. She goes to do a 2 action heal on the lizard, but is asked not to. A 3 action might hurt the poltergeist…? Skabb can’t see it - would she need to move? No! She whips out her other wand (level 1 item) and does a 3 action Heal, returning some HP to all of us who are injured. 4, and that’s enough for a howdydoodis!

We all make a Religion check as we add 4 more HP to our totals. Skabb and Hartvig know the only way to put a poltergeist to rest is to do a funeral. Hartvig: “… I do it. I go in and wave my hands around in an occult way and say, ‘get out of it! You.’” Poltergeist dispatched, we sit down for some healing.

Sprocket does some Risky Surgery on Jorg’ath, who is on a whopping 4 HP. There is an outside chance that it will kill him, as it does a d8 damage first. Jorg’ath tells him to picture him as the wounded triceratops from Jurassic Park. “Do it.” Sprocket gives him a healing potion first. “Wimp.”

18 Medicine check is a success, which the feat transforms into a critical success! Jorg'ath was Wounded 2, and is now no longer wounded at all. Skabb: “Run, Sprocket, he might be about to hump you.” Sprocket: “No! I’m tiny and not load-bearing.”

Skabb snuffles for treasure. Secret DM roll, and she is confident that there is nothing here except junk and bits of skeleton. She asks Jorg’ath to lower her into the pit to search for slugs and spiders. It is a metal pipe, rusty and dank-smelling. “Oooh! I might stay here.” No bugs, but she can hear Jorg’ath's heavy breathing up top, and a faint dripping sound. Jorg’ath: “That’s just my blood.”

She sneaks and scuttles along the pipe, looking for things that are either juicy or worrisome. She hears a gruff male voice say, “I can smell you, goblin!” Is it the werewolf?

“Oh hi! Sorry. My mistake. Is this your territory too?”

“You’re damn right! Fuck off!”

So it is the werewolf. Skabb will be fucking off then. Maybe if we bought him a bacon roll he’d be a bit friendlier? There is a Gregg’s near here... Sprocket: "We want to cheer him up, not make a permanent enemy of him."

“Can you smell this?” Skabb shouts at the werewolf as she leaves, and farts. Performance check: 20! We all hear the fart, and Skabb giggling. She exits quickly, as “this is one I can taste.”

Has Sprocket been reading his book about teleportation? He has. He does an Arcana check: 17. “That many.” He is making progress, but doesn’t have the ritual down yet. (Jorg’ath is asking, as he’s found another teleportation circle.)

Jorg’ath selects some fine vintages from the wine room to give to Hartvig to thank him for saving him. It all looks a bit dusty and crap, if he had someone here who knew wines he might be able to find a good one. (Poor Society check.) Sprocket has a go, since he seems to inexplicably know things. True to form, it works - he finds 3 valuable bottles worth 20gp each in amongst the crap. “These 3 are good for drinkin’!” (Danny Glover Danny Glover Danny Glover.) Jorg’ath gives one to Hartvig.

Skabb is still snuffling for treasures. She is starting to form a picture of what might have happened here. (Is there a ye olde toaster in the bath, Jorg’ath wants to know. Again with the Fallout.)

More Perception checks from Luna - she finds a door. Skabb spots another teleportation circle, this one with the silver intact. Columbo-Skabb continues her search. (Jorg’ath is singing, Performance 7. Hartvig recognises a traditional lizard-folk war yodel.)

Luna’s door is not trapped, and if she moves some stuff in the right order it will open.

Skabb thinks she knows what happened here, so she jumps up on the table to announce it Columbo style. She believes the skeletons are the remains of some kind of thieves guild. Perhaps Velcro brought them here, but something happened so she ordered her cooks to poison them. Then the cooks poisoned themselves, also on her orders.

Luna opens her door and finds a dark, natural cave tunnel. The floor is strewn with bones and metal scraps. Old armour and weapons, she thinks. Skabb says that the tunnel will lead back to the werewolf room. She wants to send Grabby Cat for a recce, since Luna doesn’t have darkvision. As she’s not a real raccoon, perhaps the werewolf won’t smell her.

Then, this appears in the chat:

Jorg’ath, singsong: “There goes Grabby!”

Grabby Cat makes a Reflex save - nat 20 for a green 25! The DM will allow her an action. Jorg’ath wants her to draw a picture of a Scalathrax. She retreats back to us instead, and communicates what she saw to Skabb. There are two of them, in a big pool of water, and the cave splits into three directions. She thinks one leads to the werewolf.

We’ve encountered this before:

We describe it to Jorg’ath, who wasn’t here when we encountered the last one. “Big… Slathering jaws…” “Delicious!”, Skabb puts in.

They are oily and weak to fire, Sprocket remembers. (Hartvig: “And lemon juice. And tartar sauce.”) We could take ‘em! Jorg’ath might need a bit more healing first, though. Skabb has a go, but manages to roll 8 damage. “You’re going to get a really cool scar out of this,” she tells him as she splats mud in the wound from Sprocket’s surgery.

Sprocket does surgery on himself. “It’s fine as long as I roll good on the Medicine check. … Ah, Hero Point.”

Hartvig can sneak, and he can Produce Flame. Grabby has a hankering for crab, will he go and set them alight? “Don’t get too close or they’ll spit oil at you and turn you to paste.” Hartvig will Heal us all with Sprocket’s Heal scrolls before he goes. 9 HP back for us all, yay!

Skabb wants to cast something on Hartvig. “I promise it doesn’t involve mud. Or spit.” Sprocket tells her that Scalathraxes are aberrations, so she casts Blood Ward to protect Hartvig from those.

Hartvig and Jorg’ath both do a big sneak, rolled by the DM; Hartvig is more confident than Jorg’ath that he’s actually hidden. Jorg’ath will hang back until Hartvig hollers for help, at which point he will come and be a meat shield.

Produce Flame is a bit weedy so Hartvig does this:

A critical success! The closest one takes 18 Fire damage, and gives a horrible high pitched squeal. Hartvig rolls initiative, and marks off a Focus Point…

We all roll to join in, with varying levels of enthusiasm.

Nadia is up first, but requests to drop to the bottom of the order. Request granted, Sprocket steps up. He runs under the table toward the room with the tunnel entrance. He and Augustus have a thumb war, with nothing else they can really do.

Hartvig. “Already?” Does he have more fire… He kind of does, but it’s less cool. Focusing on the same one, he casts Produce Flame. DM: “Spider crab says no.” 19 misses… Hartvig Hero Points it for worse. (It was a risky one.) He hides in a corner and waits for his friends to come and get him out of the shit.

Luna is next. “Stealth cat! Do some stealth-catting!” Luna has fallen asleep, so Sprocket pilots her instead. She zips to the front of the queue and fires her bow; 20 misses. “Aaaaaand, slinking back down the corridor.”

Lizard boy has scuttled off, so Skabb goes to retrieve him. On his return, he strides in looking confident and does a big Rage roar. Then he smashes the Scalasgdpfhyjffx in the face, with more acid damage on top of his 13 slashing. 24 hits.

Now the scsdgljdfhldfjh;ljx gets a turn - it moves up and pukes oil all over Jorg’ath and Hartvig. Reflex saves, Hartvig makes his and Jorg’ath doesn’t. “It put the hurt on me, real good,” he says as he takes his 20 critical poison damage and becomes temporarily weak to fire. In addition, when he crit fails with his weapon he will drop it, as he is now oiled like a fish.

Another does the same thing, to both again. “Oh, son of a gun!” Both fail, Hartvig critically this time. (Nope - he has protection from Skabb’s spell so he takes 14 HP back.)

(The DM’s Fallout settlements need more concrete so we will go until we get back to Hartvig again and call it there.)

Skabb does Slashing Gust - 23 to hit both of them for 9 slashing damage, yeah. DM: “Stinker. Nicely done.” 23 is just what we needed to hit, so we make a note of that.

Hartvig: “We’ve got them on the ropes now. We’ve surrounded them from within!”

Nadia uses her glue bullet and misses, and with that less than stellar round complete, we call it.

#dnd #pathfinder #abomination vaults #abomination vaults spoilers

[abominationvault]

Session 31 Sat 13 Apr 2024

Lots of homework for the DM this week. He has fixed Sprocket and Jorg’ath’s AC’s, which were broken. Probably some other nefarious DM stuff as well. Sprocket’s phone and computer are talking to each other, and he is… suspicious. But! He is level 574 in Skyrim, and can now claim the title of King Thick Dick of Fuck You Mountain. Dragons bite him and simply die of it.

No Hartvig this week as he’s at some kind of nerd-con, and sending us photos to make us jealous. Skabb’s mini-Skabb has been giving trouble, and Skabb now has bite marks on her arm. BWJ is in bed and we’re off to the races.

Nadia has invented a new bomb formula called Ghost Charge that hurts undead; she makes four, using her daily reagents. These will expire on her next long rest. We do some resting and shopping. Augustus and Sprocket want to sell all Augustus’ books. Jorg’ath has Nadia take the +1 rune off his chain shirt so he can sell it.

Sprocket decides he wants a gun; Nadia lets him borrow Bluebird (without ammunition…) to see if he can hold it. Not blessed with what’s commonly known as fingers, he might struggle to fire it. Realising he has spells (with which he is proficient) that will do the same amount of damage, he changes his mind.

Grabby Cat can upgrade bombs, so Nadia passes her her freshly-made Lesser Ghost Charges and she regurgitates them as Moderate Ghost Charges!

Sprocket has Wrin make him some adventurer’s clothes. Also, our diseases are treated! Skabb wants a Sling of +1; it’s very expensive. “… Is there anyone Skabb can sleep with to get it cheaper?” Having sold all his books, Augustus has a tummy full of money, so Sprocket offers some up. “Think of Augustus as a kind of party cash point, that you don’t need a card for.” She buys a new rune and Nadia fits it for her.

Luna does some robbin’s; the DM has her make some checks and roll a series of dice. Then he goes quiet. We are all mildly alarmed. She returns with fistfuls of treasure - gems for Hartvig to use with his new feat. Skabb wants to carve something into one of the citrines and put it on a necklace.

Skabb tests her new +1 sling on Hartvig; he raises his shield. The bullet still hits him. “Ow.”

Back to the lighthouse, and down a level…

We all sneak, following the expert (Luna), and conga our way down the stairs to the next map. Super quietly with his massive clawed hands, Jorg’ath opens the door into a damp cave with a lake. Mushrooms, trickling water. In the middle of the lake is a pavilion, encrusted with fungus. On it is a camp fire. Grabby Cat sniffs the air; nothing but camp fire smoke.

There is a wolf? Jorg’ath wants to know if it’s aggressive. “I guess what I wanna know is, can I pet that dawg??” It’s just a wolf. It seems to be friendly enough with the guy it’s with, but it hasn’t seemed to notice us. Jorg’ath steps into the cave and slowly walks up to the doggie with his hand out.

As the pair sees him, the man looks shocked. Both he and the dog howl in unison; Jorg’ath roar-howls back. The man looks at him and says, “cock off.”

“… Can I pet your dog?”

“If I let you, will you leave?”

“… Yes?” He makes a nature check - 13. The dog’s hackles go up, but she doesn’t bite him. He offers her some chicken. She looks at the man for permission; it is granted. Jorg’ath asks the man what he’s doing down here.

“None of your fuckin business.”

Jorg’ath explains that he’s here with the party and we need to come through here, but he doesn’t want to get into a fight with this guy. Will he let us pass?

“This is my fucking territory, and you are not welcome.” We don’t want to take your territory, just pass through. The man looks very nervous, eyes darting here and there.

“What will it take to let us pass?” Jorg’ath asks.

“Turn around and go back the way you came. There are other stairs that come down here. You can’t pass through here.” Jorg’ath pets the dog again and returns to the rest of us.

Dilemma. Push past the guy or find another way down? Luna would like to peer through the door and see what she can discern about this man. Trained in Society, Sprocket assists her. Luna tells us that she thinks this guy fits the description of a violent criminal she’s heard of in town, who is wanted for murdering some people thirty years ago. There may well be a bounty involved. He is known to be a werewolf, and has caused problems between the hippies at Stone Ring Pond and the townsfolk.

Is werewolf-ism curable? We’re not sure. If he’s not murdered anyone for thirty years, he’s obviously trying to be good. How do werewolves work in Buffy again? We decide to leave him be, and go the other way.

Jorg’ath uses his Ring of Ventriloquism to throw his voice to the opposite side of the cavern and call the dog the other way from us. “Here boy!”

Another staircase. This one is even smaller so we all pile into the room. Jorg’ath spots a bejewelled dick. In this room is what looks like a banquet table with place settings on it. Skeletons litter the floor, some clutching their own throats. Chandeliers light the room.

Grabby Cat sniffs the air again. Jorg’ath reaches out to one of the skeletons - a light comes up from the floor and flashes into the skull, and the skeleton animates into a corpselight. Initiative!

Sprocket rolls a 30 so he goes first. He Boosts Eidolon, and Augustus will do a ‘thumpy-thumpy attack’. He bonks one of the skeleton-corpselights on the head, using Sonic damage. 7 total damage. Punch number two is a miss.

Jorg’ath has a question. If he is trained in simple weapons, does that mean he has a specialisation? He has a new feat, Oversized Throw, and wants to know how it works:

He doesn’t have specialisation, so he does a big roar and goes into a rage instead, hitting the corpselight with his +1 Greatsword. 13 damage, nice!

Skabb. “Yarp.” She does Disrupt Undead and misses, using her ‘you showed up’ Hero Point to reroll, but it’s worse. She uses her new sling and hits for 8 bludgeoning damage.

The corpselights take a turn, attacking Jorg’ath 3 times and hitting him once. Another approaches Skabb and claws at her twice, hitting both times for 23 damage, ouch. Skabb, mildly: “Okay.” Another hits Hartvig twice for 22 damage, and the fourth hits Augustus for a bunch.

Luna goes for an Electric Arc on two of the corpselights. “Ba-zing.” The first fails its save, but the second one makes it. It still takes half damage. She backs into the doorway to go for cover next turn.

Nadia uses her new ghost bomb to shoot a corpselight, and crits! 16 total Positive damage, and she’s very pleased. “I’m going to join the Ghostbusters.”

Hartvig does a big 3 action Heal, with the only corpselight critically saving against it being the one standing directly in front of him. He heaves a big, shaky sigh. 11 healing to all his friends, though.

Sprocket does Dungeon Bidet on the one in front of him, but it saves. It does take half damage though, so 8. Augustus does a fist slam, with regular bludgeoning damage. 24 hits for 10 damage.

Jorg’ath. “That’s me!” (Skabb, sarcastically: “A hero point for the thicket.”) His first attack misses, but 19 hits. If it’s versatile can he choose the damage type? Yes. Can it be bludgeoning? DM: “No, because it’s Versatile P for Piercing.” Jorg'ath, grumbling: “It’s Versatile P for Piss.”

Skabb does some bad language and poor manners, a slight fuss, and then she returns from calming the baby and takes her character back from Jorg’ath. Sling, 26 to hit.

The enfeebled one hits Skabb, even though it’s enfeebled. Second attack misses, third hits. “Oh yay, I’ve got two hit points.”

11 slashing to Hartvig, but the other two attacks miss. ("I just got those back.") Augustus, against all odds, avoids all the attacks aimed at him. 37 damage to Jorg’ath though??? He rejects it. “No thank you.” Another attacks him as well, and he goes down.

Luna has a go at healing Skabber with a 2 actioner. Nadia rinses and repeats, and so does Hartvig - healing his friends for a measly two this time.

Some other stuff happens but I’m AFK. Jorg’ath heals himself I think, then starts swinging the greatsword. Howdydoodis! He sweeps the greatsword up as he stands, striking the corpselight and shattering it.

Skabb crits with Hydraulic Push for 32 total damage! She smashes it into paste.

Another takes persistent damage from Nadia’s bombs and dies, and the last remaining one hits Augustus - and another light rises from the floor. There are no corpses in here, so it floats through the wall and animates a skeleton from in there instead. A second does the same thing. We need to clear the place of corpses for the lights to inhabit, or this is going to go on forever.

Luna hides, shoots, misses, Hero Points, same roll. Second attack is a crit! 25 crit damage as well! She smashes a skeleton to smithereens.

Rinse and repeat for Nadia and Hartvig, and Luna bows out as she’s exhausted. “I’m too fat to stay awake,” she announces, and goes to bed.

Sprocket is up, and he has some fun new spells but this is not the circumstance to use them in. He debates trying some more doors to see if he can smash up any corpses that might be behind them, before the corpselights can get to them. He is standing on Jorg’ath’s tail, so Jorg’ath lifts him up so he can reach the handle. Corpselight in there! He Summons a swarm of cutlery. It moves across the room and bites (?) the corpselight but misses. Augustus does some thumping, but the corpselight is in its light form and can’t be hit.

Jorg’ath bounds like a running lizard-alligator-thing and opens another door. No corpses in there. “Ah, bollocks.” He opens another door, to find yet another door behind it.

Skabb opens the door behind her to find two corpses, and sets about them with her staff. 15 and 21 both hit, and the skulls are smashed.

The remaining light form corpselights starts to flicker; have we got all the corpses? The one Nadia found hits her for 14 damage, and the one Sprocket found hits him for 12.

It’s getting late and we’re down a rogue so we call it for the night.

#pathfinder #dnd #abomination vaults #abomination vaults spoilers

[abominationvault]

Session 30: Sat 6 Apr 2024

Some level-up miscellanea. Hartvig has the MOST hit points! 46! Jorg’ath and Hartvig, both intimidated by the DM, have chosen feats that help them heal us and themselves. Nadia wants to know how many hit points Augie has now. “Currently none,” she is told. (He’ll be lucky if he ever sees any of them again.)

We all get a Hero Point for successfully levelling up without blowing up the DM’s phone, and with that we press on…

The DM will allow Augie to continue to exist, but only in town. We all cheer. Until he then tells us that two of us are riddled with disease…? Jorg’ath asks Skabb to peel back a few of his scales and check to see if it’s him. She shrugs and waddles over for a look. Apparently one of the first signs is a faint whiff of corpse; she does a Perception check. Crit success, and there is a definite graveyard stink about him. “Ah, piss,” he cries.

Hartvig has a new feat called Crystal Healing. Do any of us have any precious stones? Consensus is no; we can probably wait until we get back to town and then ask one of the hippies that have moved in. Someone else is sick too, we are warned; we all start sniffing each other. Luna has bonuses to her perception checks for smell, so she sniffs Jorg’ath for a control, and then tests the rest of us. Nadia seems to smell somewhat similar…

How long before we start to turn? There are several stages, and the stink is only stage 1. We’ve got some time. Depending on how we roll when we rest, we might shake it off without aid.

Grabby Cat can now carry and lob bombs; interested, Nadia gives her a Lesser Blight Bomb from her bag to see what she does with it. Sprocket, thinking himself a doctor now, does a check to see how far the disease has progressed in Nadia and Jorg’ath. No other symptoms are really visible, until the person actually turns into a ghoul. We will probably become irresistibly delicious to Augie over time, which could be a problem.

We head south again, in search of a book, or contract, I’m not sure. We find a door, and Luna checks for traps. 27, she is pretty certain that we’re good. Augustus opens the door.

Augustus closes the door.

“there’s a ghost, motherfuckers!” Sprocket shouts. She is hovering in the middle of the room; she spots Augustus (he waves) and she shouts at him to stop dawdling and get to work!!

She shouts at all of us to get in here and start working. All of the books must be copied and finished, we are told. Hartvig asks for an overview of the situation. (Skabb waits for the rest of us to go in and closes the door, because… books.) The ghost tells him he is a scribe. How hard can copying books possibly be?

We start pretending to work; the ghost isn’t really paying close attention to what we’re doing but she seems pleased. After five minutes or so she walks right through the wall next to Nadia.

The ghost’s actual skeleton is lying in a corner; Jorg’ath robs it. In one bony hand he sees a framed portrait of a beautiful male drow elf. He looks evil. Jorg’ath also finds a small iron key. He takes all of it.

The ghost wafts back in and glares at us. Sprocket lets out a little scream as she reappears. She wants to know why he screamed; he tells her it’s because she walked through the wall. She points at the place where she came through and insists it’s a door, but then seems to notice her own skeleton in the corner and screams. We roll initiative…

Nadia goes first, and looks to find a door - sure enough, there is a hidden one. Then she looks at the books we’ve been asked to copy, and spots one called “What the Worm Knows”. That was on a list of books we found; she swipes the book and stuffs it in her bag. Then she asks the ghost her name. Suddenly the ghost looks furious. “Chandriu Invisar!” she roars. The name means nothing to Nadia.

(Jorg’ath holds up the picture of the drow behind the ghost’s head. It’s grey, and Hartvig is also grey. Eh? Eh???? Hartvig manages to infer his meaning.)

Hartvig tries to placate the ghost. “It’s fine! Some of my best friends are dead! You’ve got your whole unlife in front of you.” He makes a Diplomacy check; 11. No dice. Worth a try. (Outside, Skabb starts boarding up the door.) He uses one action to raise his shield, and ends his turn there. “Hartvig the Brave.”

Loathe as she is to admit it, Skabb has grown somewhat fond of us over-washed beasts, so she opens the door to come and help. She sings a song about old women stuck in places for eternity, in the same vein as ‘oh dear what can the matter be, two old ladies stuck in the lavatory’. Performance check of 22 plus one from her feat for a 23! DC is 23, tie goes to the runner so that’s a success! The ghost is now distracted, which lowers some of her saves. Skabb wants to have Grabby drop some holy water on her, but the bottle wouldn’t smash until it hit the floor and would thus not affect her. She re-evaluates and casts Magic Missile instead, doing five Force damage. The ghost takes all of that.

It’s Chandriu’s turn, and she… hmmmm…

We are all either Slowed 1 or Slowed 2, meaning we have fewer actions on our next turns. We see Hartvig’s hand drifting to the pocket where he keeps his notebook of lyrics; Jorg’ath’s hand drifts toward his sword.

She reaches out and touches Jorg’ath with Ghostly Hand, 31 is a crit as his AC is 21. Wait, something’s hinky… the DM will give him the benefit of the doubt as a barbarian’s AC should be more than that. Jorg’ath takes just the regular 15 damage and is grateful for it.

Sprocket is up. “Madam, you need to calm down!” (Skabb: “That’d rile anyone, living or dead.”) He casts Phase Bolt, 19 to attack and that’s a miss. “… okay…” Augustus casts Electric Arc, forcing a Reflex save. The ghost rolls a 33. “… Goddammit.”

Luna’s turn, and she would like to take out her compass and cast a 3 action Heal, but she needs to move. She shuffles forward and casts a 2 action Heal on the ghost. Chandriu rolls a critical fortitude save, 28 to Luna’s 18. Luna throws the compass at her.

Jorg’ath uses his Ventriloquist’s Ring to throw his voice, and does his best drow impression. “My love I have found you! Join me in the afterlife!” (“Is a Ventriloquist's ring made from the arsehole of a ventriloquist's dummy?” Luna asks.) Jorg’ath makes a Deception check - 11, Hero Point for a 16. She doesn’t believe him, and is now absolutely furious with him. He attacks her with his great axe with a critical 30 to hit! 14, plus 18, plus 4 acid. She’s resistant to acid, and resistant 14 to non-magical attacks, so she takes 18. Not bad at all.

Nadia takes out her last Holy Water and uncorks it, splashing it on the ghost. It doesn’t do extra damage, but she doesn’t negate any of it either.

Hartvig casts Guidance on Skabb, and reduces his Slowed level by 1. “Or, as I’m a positive guy, I like to think of it as re-swifting.”

Skabb’s Magic Missile goes off again, which doesn’t count as an action. 3 more Force damage, and then she casts Disrupt Undead. Chandriu rolls a 28 to save, but Skabb’s DC should be higher than 16. It should be 20, making the success just a regular one instead of a critical one, and the ghost does take some of the damage.

The ghost reaches out and touches Jorg’ath. 25 hits for 18 negative damage. She reaches out for Nadia, but misses. “Ne touchez pas!” Then she goes for Sprocket. “Unhand me, vile woman!” (Danny Glover Danny Glover Danny Glover.) We need to get Sprocket some better armour, because 18 hits him pretty good.

It’s his turn, and he is no longer Slowed. After his level up, he now has TWO WHOLE SECOND LEVEL SPELL SLOTS! He uses one to cast Draw Ire forcing a Will save (on which she has a -1 penalty thanks to Skabb’s song) - she rolls a 16. She reduces the damage to nothing, but the spell works - now she can’t attack anyone but Sprocket without a penalty to her attack rolls. Immediately spotting the flaw in his plan, Sprocket hides inside the ghost’s skeleton.

Luna takes aim with her bow - or, wait. Electric Arc? She tries that, but Chandriu makes the save by rolling a nat 1 and still beating the DC. Luckily nothing will save you from a nat 1, so the attack hits! Sadly she’s resistant to lightning, and reduces the 6 (doubled to 12 for the crit fail) to 5. Miffed, Luna points her bow at her as well. 20 misses. “… I hate her.”

Jorg’ath swings his great axe with a 25 to hit, but she takes none of his 8 damage. Great sword? 21 misses. He uses a new feat, Battle Medicine, to heal himself a bit. (None of his weapons are plus 1 which is a shame, because they would count as magical.)

Nadia stabs at the ghost with the bayonet on Alkonost, misses, and opens the secret door she found. Beyond it is a sort of office; she steps inside and turns, shoots, and misses.

Hartvig has a second level spell he wants to test drive even though he thinks it might not work, because he laughed out loud reading the description when he levelled up. It doesn’t work on Roll20, so he copies and pastes the text into the chat:

“I call it, ‘stop hitting yourself’.”

The ghost gets a Will save (minus 1): 14, a crit fail! It takes effect on her turn, though. Hartvig, his turn over, is now no longer Slowed.

Skabb is up, and she thinks perhaps the ghost is here because of a Haunting, and wonders if the picture of the drow (who is Bollock, it turns out!) might be the object tying her to this plane.

She does her Magic Missile freebie, and then does a 3 Actioner to harm the ghost and heal those of us who need it (Jorg’ath). Chandriu makes the save, but only just, so she takes half damage.

It’s Chandriu’s turn again, and she does another Despairing Cry, forcing saves from us all. Sprocket, Hartvig, Nadia, Augustus and Luna are all slowed 2. Luna can use Cat’s Luck to reroll - 19, she is only Slowed 1. Chandriu fingers Jorg’ath again for a 31, which is still not a crit. “Just a cheeky 25 damage. Between friends.” She takes some damage from Stop Hitting Yourself, but is resistant to 7 of it. “So roll your d8,” the DM says smugly. Hartvig rolls a 6.

Can Luna dip her arrows in Holy Water? She could attach the vial to one arrow, the DM tells her. She can do it as a free action, though. 25 is a hit! The ghost ignores the piercing damage but takes 7 Holy Water damage. Luna uses her last action to step back a bit.

Jorg’ath drops the picture of Bollock onto the skeleton, and proceeds to smash both; graciously, the DM allows Sprocket to flee the area as a free action. He scuttles under the table. “How does she feel about that?” Jorg’ath asks of his plan to potentially destroy the object central to Chandriu’s haunting. “She don’t look arsed, to be honest,” the DM tells him.

Jorg’ath attacks twice and misses both times, and glares intimidatingly at her. She fails the save, and is demoralised. (Frightened 1.)

Nadia looks around the office she’s found herself in, to see if there’s anything in here that might be linked to the haunting; she spots some scrolls, but that’s it. She’s slowed, so that’s her turn as well.

Hartvig. “Hmmm, what shall I do with my one action?” he wonders. He casts Guidance on Skabber again.

It’s Skabb’s turn. The DM chooses now to tell us that she’s just a regular ghost, not a Haunt. Goddammit. Skabb deals her Magic Missile damage, and wants to know if she can try to talk the ghost off this mortal plane. “What do you want to say?” the DM asks. “‘Fuck off’?” suggests Jorg’ath.

Skabb suggests to the ghost that she just leave, as her afterlife, and our lives, will be a lot easier if she buggers off to find her lost love. Diplomacy check - 21, for some reason! The ghost looks now looks incandescent with rage, and lets out an awful, blood chilling scream. “Still in anger, then,” Skabb replies, and screeches right back at her as a free action. She scuttles across the room and into the office with Nadia.

The ghost touches Jorg’ath again (“Oh, stop it!” he says, in the most put-out voice ever.), and then again (the second hit is a miss), but she is slowed for ten turns thanks to Skabb so that’s it!

Does she look hurt? It’s hard to tell when someone’s already dead. Well, now we know she’s not a Haunt, we can just hit her until she’s dead. Again.

Sprocket is now only Slowed 1, so he has Augustus move to flank the ghost. (“Good move,” the DM approves.) He then aggressively bonks her on the head, dealing Sonic damage with his Fist Slam. She reduces the damage, but still takes 3.

Luna forgot to be slowed on her last turn, so she takes her movement back and uses an action now to do it instead. She shoots twice and hits, but the damage is reduced to nothing.

Jorg’ath. “I guess I’ll just have to keep swinging.” He does so, but his attack misses. He does a Religion check, and can see that she’s at less than a third hit points. Bad news is, we can kill her but because she’s a ghost she’ll come right back tomorrow. (Sounds like a problem for future-us.)

Nadia fires twice and hits, but the damage is reduced to nothing. If only Augie were here.

Hartvig can choose to hurt the bad guy or heal Jorg’ath, and he’s torn; Skabb can Heal, so he chooses to hit the ghost. She makes the save, but still takes 14.

Skabber does her Magic Missile again. “One o’ them,” she says, doing 4 Force damage. She casts Blood Ward on Jorg’ath, shielding him from harm from Undead. She’s still got 2 actions, so she decides to use them to Heal Jorg’ath. “It pains me not to use it on this skank.” Jorg’ath insists that hurting the ghost is more important than healing him, so she does that instead. Chandriu fails the save. “Does it do more than 1 damage?” the DM asks.

Howdy Doodis! As the spell hits, Skabb screams that she hates her. Somehow Skabb has released the ghost - she won’t be able to reform, instead moving on! (Skabb says something about her fingering a pus-y lizard, and I am asked to strike it from the record. I was going to, but Sprocket pointed out that we shouldn't censor Skabb, so I didn't. You're welcome. :) )

Nadia and Skabb explore the office. Jorg’ath has an iron key, so he starts trying it on all the cabinets that line the walls.

Nadia picks up a fancy looking scroll, and finds what looks to be an infernal contract! She takes a look to see if there are any loopholes to be found while the others Heal Jorg’ath.

We find more books to stuff into Augustus. Wearily, he opens his mouth and accepts two more bulk of books, for a total of six bulk.

We also find Grey Feast and Secrets of the Skull books, which were also in the list; we put copies of each into Augustus’ tummy.

Sprocket does some Risky Surgery on Jorg’ath:

Which does involve doing some damage to him first. Luckily, it works. He’s an Expert in medicine as well! (Somehow. After eight or so days of being alive.) Jorg’ath receives 4d8 plus 10 hp back! Sprocket pats him on the neck wound.

Ages ago, we found a scrap of paper with the book titles, and the rest said that ‘translation will take months, but I’ll try and have them back to you soon my love’. (Something about foreshadowing that we ruined/forgot about, I missed it because I was too excited about the contract.)

With her knowledge of legal lore thanks to her hellish ancestry, Nadia spots a loophole in the contract. If Velcro does not issue a new order past 99 days, then the contract is null and void. Yay! The group of heroes who killed her named a town after the one of their party who died, so this contract is definitely past the stated limit.

We return to Korlok to give him the good news:

Nadia waves the contract excitedly at him, jabbing her finger at the line about 99 days. “You’re free!” she tell him. He smiles as he tears up the contract. He can’t give us anything, but he knows of two other devils in here. A janitor (whoops…) and a contract devil on a lower level. He is shrewd, but well known for keeping his word. We'll keep an eye out for him.

What will Korlok do now, Nadia asks him. Try and avoid getting trapped in any more contracts, he says. He can’t even remember how long he’s been here. And, this isn’t even the longest contract he’s been in. Maybe find himself a contract devil to cast an expert eye over the next one, Hartvig suggests.

Skabb has one more mischief to cause in town, so we will tie that up at the start of the next session, as well as sort out various diseased party members perhaps. Oh, and buy Sprocket some armour. And look at Jorg’ath’s AC, and get him some sort of plus 1 rune. And look at Skabb’s save DC. Lots of little jobs to clear up, and then on to the next level of the dungeon…

(I will read back through the journal to see if I made a note of what Skabb’s next mischief was, because none of us can remember.)

#dnd #pathfinder #abomination vaults #abomination vaults spoilers

[abominationvault]

Session 29: Sat Mar 30 2024

Sprocket does the recap, even though he wasn’t there. He wins a Hero point for himself and a second one for Luna, and I get one as well because it’s my birthday :) Hartvig is late, so Skabb takes out her phone to spam the group chat and wake him up in the event that he’s fallen asleep. He appears on Discord as she’s about to press send, thus negating the need; she is disappointed.

Jorg’ath reminds us about the contract we were asked to look for, for the demon who got stuck here in a bargain with Velcro. We haven’t found it yet. Hartvig takes a moment to concentrate and reduce his curse a bit before we move on. He gets a focus point back, but can’t cast the focus spell again until he’s rested, if I have understood that correctly. (Sprocket watches him, with his little beady eyes.) Jorg’ath does a Medicine check and regains some much needed HP, and then mutes so he can eat some cake.

Augie may or may not join us; the DM asks us to make a convincing argument for why he would help us. He decides ultimately that Augie will join us, but only for the rest of this section of the dungeon.

Skabb can’t seem to separate her token from Grabby Cat’s; she wants to team up with Augie and do one-two-three-wheeeee’s with Grabby in the middle.

And on through the double doors to the last boss of this floor…

Jorg’ath and Hartvig take either side of the doors and the rest of us arrange ourselves in strategic places. Sprocket does a quick medicine check (and fails, so Skabb slaps some mud on him instead), and Skabb casts Mystic Armour on herself:

Hartvig and Jorg’ath throw open the doors - there is a large room with smashed display cases and a huge figure of a woman. The statue smells awful. In front of it stands this:

She smiles at us. “Guests! Give up your equipment and your lives, and you can join the Cult of the Canker. If you accept the gift of ghoul fever we will lock you away until your transformation is complete.”

We decline. Jorg’ath counteroffers his broadsword.

She demands that we hand Augie over so she can add him to the effigy behind her. It is made up of parts of many different creatures. Jorg’ath flips the double bird and attacks her. “Your art is puerile and derivative!” Hartvig cries, earning him the DM’s amusement and a Hero Point.

Off we go!

Sprocket is up first, to his mild dismay. “What on earth can I do,” he wonders. He casts Boost Eidolon, and Augustus leaps up onto one of the display cabinets in front of a cultist. He proceeds to violently assault the ghoul in the robes, 23 to hit. 9 total damage, a good start.

Hartvig. “Right.” He casts Needle Darts at the same cultist. Green damage number, 15! Battle mage! He casts Guidance on Lizard Boy for his last action.

The cultist uses all three actions to cast Harm, forcing a Fortitude save from everyone within 30 feet - Grabby, Augustus, Skabb and Jorg’ath. Everyone fails, but no-one critically. It is a Necromancy spell, so Augustus gets a bonus to his save, and succeeds! The other cultist moves to hit Nadia and Hartvig with Grim Tendrils. “Bad touch,” Nadia shouts. Both fail, and take 6 Negative and 1 persistent Bleed damage.

Jorg’ath is next, and he Rages as he strides toward the named one. Nakhhkdslfjgnn. Nagini? Naghhhhhh. Nhakazarin, that's it. He smashes her with his greatsword, but 18 misses. Even with the +1 from Guidance, 19 still misses. DM: “She’s the boss.” Jorg’ath: “Yeah, but… come on, now.” He uses his last action to grapple her. (DM: “Ne touchez pas!”) He rolls 17 Athletics, which is a miss.

It is the ghouls’ turn, and one moves to flank Augustus and claw him in the back. 28 hits, Fortitude save. Critical hit, 8 damage, but he passes the save. (The DM is as disappointed as we are relieved.) He has to make another save, for what sounds like bullshit DM reasons to me. Augustus is Paralysed…

Nadia checks to see where Augie is before throwing a vial of Holy Water at the cultist. It misses, but she does splash damage. She shoots it as well for good measure.

Luna is hidden, so she puts her head around the door frame to see what’s what. She can aim at the boss, so she does. Or not, with a 15. She Hero Points that, but a 19 is still a miss. She tries again - wait, the boss is flat footed, so the 19 hits! She gets her sneak attack damage as well. She uses her third action to re-hide with a 21.

Nhakasdlgjlfg;hjjjh does Vampiric Touch on Jorg’ath, 23 hits. He fails his save, and takes 23 ‘little’ negative damage. “Well… I don’t agree,” Jorg’ath counters. She bites him, and the damage number is green… He makes two Fortitude saves - 20 and 19. “Swines!” the DM cries, but Jorg’ath is Paralysed.

Grubby Gobbo. “This ugly bastard that’s come up for a kiss, is he just a regular ghoul?” She wants to know if they have attacks of opportunity, but none of us can remember. She wants to have Grabby fly over to the meat effigy and steal the head. Can she do that in one turn? No, because she would have to move-interact-move and she only gets two turns, and also the head is much too big for her to carry.

Skabb uses her Wand of Healing to cast Heal on the ghoul in front of her instead. It fails the save and takes 4 damage increased to… I assume, a bigger number. “It did not like that,” is all we find out. She casts Hydraulic Push on Bitch Tits; the idea is to knock her into the effigy. The roll is a critical against a ghoul, but would only be a regular hit against the boss for 7 damage. Not bad, but doesn’t push her over.

Augie Augie Augie! He runs in and attacks a ghoul with a a 28 to hit. “The best thing about Augie is how miserable he makes you,” Skabb tells the DM as he laments - again - ever letting us have him.

Sprocket will bust out his second level spell slot to cast Summon Construct; we are all suitably impressed. He can summon animated silverware! That isn’t in the book, so the DM offers him an Elite Homunculus instead? It has an attack, so Sprocket will grudgingly accept this substitute.

“… That’s disgusting,” says the DM, as he reads through the stats. Sprocket: “I’m interested, go on.” The homunculus has a poison gland in its head, apparently. It also has two actions, and can use them immediately - which it does to bite the ghoul in the dick. 25 hits for 5 dick damage. “Can the second action be chewing,” Sprocket wants to know. No, but he can have a Hero Point for being disgusting. The homunculus bites it again instead, 21 also hits for more crotch damage. “Gross,” says the DM.

Hartvig is up. “Meeee. Okay.” He does Needles at the same cultist again - 22 hits! Howdy Doodis! “I perforate it. I imagine that releases some amount of… corpse gas.” He moves back, stands on Sprocket by accident, and respectfully side steps.

The remaining cultist casts Harm, but a 2 actioner this time. It runs up to Nadia. “Ew! No!”

Augustus does a save against his paralysis - 20! He is freed from paralysis.

A ghoul runs up and bites at Nadia, and misses.

She stabs the ghoul, now flanked by it and the cultist. First attack is a crit for 10 damage, then four more, then a miss. She will now await her commuffins.

Luna hits the ghoul twice, with no bonuses from Nadia being next to it because that’s D&D, not Pathfinder. She hides again and disappears into the shadows.

It’s Boss Bitch’s turn. The DM deliberates how to murder us all the most effectively. She does Vampiric Touch again on Augie but misses. He has to make a Fortitude save - but the DM is reminded that negative damage will heal Augie, so he retracts the attack. BB would know not to do that. “Please fail your save, you rotten little creature - oh goddammit.”

“That’s what it feels like, [DM], that’s what it feels like,” Sprocket tells him as Augie aces his save, and we are threatened with the removal of Augie’s person from the entire campaign.

Jorg’ath can repeat his save and succeeds - he is no longer paralysed.

Skabb was going to do a Heal, but is reminded that Augie is there. She bites the bad ghoul with her Grill of Aberration Bane - 13, Hero Point, 25, Howdy Doodis! “I bite a hole in it and slurp all the juice out. Like one of them yogurt tubes.”

“I blame Augie for this,” the DM says. “You’ve taken an already bad goblin and made it worse.”

“Would you mind if I let you die?” Skabb asks Jorg’ath, and Hartvig interjects to tell her that he will heal him in a minute. Skabb rolls up her sleeves and casts a 2 action Heal on Boss Bitch. She makes the save. “That’s alright, if I get close to her I’m gonna bite that tongue out of her head.” Sprocket’s homunculus wants to start at the feet and work his way up, so maybe they’ll meet in the middle.

Augie does some bites and the first two hit! 27 damage total, yeah. Augie Augie Augie!

Sprocketses! Augustus repositions so that the last cultist is flanked with Nadia, and Sprocket re-casts Boost Eidolon. Augustus Fist Slams the cultist by slamming him into the floor. Homunculus will squeak past the meat statue and - “Oh he can fly! Fuck me!” But he wants to eat Boss Bitch from the feet up, not the head down. Would Skabb be happy to swap places with it, and start from the feet instead? Yes, and it’s very polite of him to ask, she says. The homunculus bites Bitch Tits and hits with a 26. “He’s et a lump out of her head.”

Hartvig is up. “Yessssss!” The DM invites him to cast Heal on Augie, but he declines and casts it on Jorg’ath instead. 22 HP back for Jorg’ath, who will take it, thank you.

The cultist is up, and will start by biting Nadia, and forcing saves which she makes. So it bites her again, and crits. Nadia has a little sleep, and does another Fortitude save, 14. It may have done something else to her, but the DM declines to tell me what it is. Skabb, outraged: “It’s her birthday, you monster!” Pitiless DM is unmoved.

Jorg’ath leaps at the cultist and misses, Hero Points, and hits. Did being paralysed interrupt his Rage…? There is some discussion, but it is decided that no, it doesn’t. Howdy Doodis! “Violently.”

Jorg’ath has an action left, so he slams a potion for 5 more HP back.

Nadia uses her Hero Points to come back to 1HP.

Luna is up. “Is it just this bitch next?” Skabb suggests surrounding her and ripping her limbs off. 26 is a hit, and Luna gets sneak attack as well. 18 is a miss, and so is the 10.

Bitch Tits rips a piece off the meat statue behind her, and uses it to regain some HP. Then she bites the homunculus - “You keep your hands off Gavin!” Sprocket shouts, but 33 is almost definitely a crit. 44 damage. DM, very pleased: “Bye Gavin!” Sprocket and Augustus both fall to their knees and cry, “Nooooo!” A single tear falls from Skabb’s eye; that’s another potential friend gone.

We will join the cult of the Canker either way, Bitch Tits tells us. Dead or alive.

(The next time Sprocket summons something, will it be Gavin again, or…? Jorg’ath wants to know. “Well, I tried to summon a cutlery swarm, so… I have no idea,” Sprocket tells him.)

Skabb casts Sudden Bolt, forcing a Reflex save - BT rolls a 29, which is a crit success. “Slingshot,” says Skabb dully. That was her second level spell slot. 21 hits for 2 damage. “In the eyeball, please.” Her third attack misses.

Augie! (If she kills Augie too, Skabb might drown herself in the lake.) Augie bites BT for a bunch more damage.

Sprocket is next and though he has no tear ducts, some moisture has collected on his cheeks. He does some measuring. “Goddamn you,” he mutters. “Right. Well.” He casts Draw Ire, forcing a Will save. She makes it with 1 to spare, but still takes half damage and the penalty! Augustus goes and stands next to her, menacingly.

Hartvig Heals Nadia for 24 HP so she’s at 25, and very grateful. He does a Religion check - green 25! “I know everything. I probably know where she lives.” She is immune to a shitload of stuff, Negative damage heals her, and her weakest save is Will. Also, she’s out of her high level spell slots…

Jorg’ath gives her the great axe, 28 damage plus stuff and howdy doodis! Much cheering. He slices layers off her so she gets shorter and shorter and shorter. Augie looks disappointed as there’s nothing left for him to eat. Jorg’ath saves him a couple of slices, and serves them up on the blade of his battle axe like he’s at a sushi restaurant.

Level up, level up, level up!

Would it be worth our while to destroy the statue? Augie is the only one who makes the secret roll, making the DM hate him even more. He points to something and we all make Religion checks. Skabb crits with a 21 - she is familiar with nefarious bitches of all sorts. This might have been some sort of avatar. Nagini could have been making this as a vessel to contain the spirit of Velcro.

Luna suggests we burn it, and we all agree. We pull Augie out of the way and Hartvig sets the thing on fire. Hartvig is still bleeding so he tries a Medicine check but beefs it and bleeds a bit more for a while. Nadia is also bleeding, she is surprised to be reminded, so Skabb slaps some… something… in the wound. (There may be a slug in there. Nadia is not going to look.)

Hartvig opens another door and finds a small room. Sounds like somewhere we might find a contract...? Perception checks from Hartvig and Augustus. Jorg’ath has a look around for contract-shaped things.

Someone finds something to do with the teleportation circles, which includes the ritual to open them. There is also a text called the Whispering Reeds. If we spend eight hours of study, we can learn much about the dungeon where we are. Could be helpful moving on.

Sprocket wants the book about the portals, and Nadia will study the book about the dungeon. No sign of a contract, though. Jorg’ath wants to shake the Boss Bitch down and see if she had any trayyyysure. Nothing? Gold? A ring? Cooking pot? A cheese wheel? Not a bean, it turns out. Corpse-scented robes, we are offered. Skabb prises a skull out of somewhere and brings it to Nadia to add to her frog hat. Once she’s finished her book, obviously.

Skabb runs over to Sprocket and cuddles him; they grieve together over Gavin.

#dnd #pathfinder #abomination vaults #abomination vaults spoilers

[abominationvault]

Session 28: Sat 9 Mar 2024

Notes will be minimal! Sprocket and Luna are away this week, so Jorg’ath is taking on the cat and I am puppeting Sprocket and Augustus.

Hartvig’s rotten lung is still giving him trouble. Longest cough he’s ever had, he says. The DM thinks we should be able to finish this level of the dungeon today. Hartvig: “Aw, he hasn’t played with us before, has he?”

We decide to take the sickies to the temple for healing while the rest of us shop. Skabb asks if one of the priests can 'lance her pustules'. She starts a sentence with, “Also, whatever comes out of those pustules…” and the rest of us have to interrupt her before she can finish.

Jorg’ath burritos Skabb so she won’t have to see the books. The priests cast Remove Disease on all of us who need it, including Sprocket and Augustus. We buy scrolls, potions and holy water, and make some ammunition. (Skabb makes an inquiry about using Nadia’s crafting skills to preserve her frog-head hat. It may involve the use of her own piss in the tanning process, which she reminds us is canonically thick like treacle. Nadia will need some new safety gloves.)

We ask the priests about ghouls, and the possibility of having Augie as the town guardian. After all, he only eats other ghouls. The issue might be finding him things to eat once the town is safe. He’s been surviving down there for a while now, and he can’t have been eating ghouls the entire time. He can probably eat other things, the DM tells us. After a quick medicine check, Jorg’ath thinks Augie doesn’t carry ghoul fever. He is diseased, but the ghoul fever doesn’t seem to carry over - if he were to bite you, you wouldn’t become infected.

Jorg’ath wants to buy a very specific list of meats and mushrooms, and offer each to Augie in turn to see what he likes. He also wants to buy a bow - a shortbow, for now. A longbow seems a bit overkill for dungeons. He’ll want a composite, as he’s strong like an ox. The DM consults his price list: 14gp. Nadia stumps up the cash, as he’s saved her life a few times. We sell the books in Augustus' tummy for 20gp (now in Augustus' inventory).

Skabb consults her spell list, and re-summons Grabby Cat again.

Hartvig wants to scrounge around for different metals to do different stuff with his Needle Dart cantrip. On the way back to the lighthouse, Skabb hunts high and low for bugs to eat; she rolls a 27 Nature check and is able to fill her pockets. And her mouth. We roll her the rest of the way.

Big group high five, and back into the wilderness!

Luna drops into sneak as we arrive, and we all copy her. Sprocket trips and accidentally casts Bullhorn (nat 1 stealth). We put him in a papoose so he doesn’t have to walk.

We find a little bit to the north of the map where we were just fighting, and Jorg’ath and Nadia see a small gap where the stream runs through. It looks as if it goes down - maybe by a floor or so.

Skabb sends Grabby down, but the DM hasn’t done the map yet so he just describes it - the water runs out into a room, then a cavern with a raised platform above the water. She can smell sweat and wolf, and can hear a humanoid voice. Grabby has just been re-summoned and doesn’t fancy dying again just yet, so she flies back to Skabb.

Jorg’ath finds a tunnel to the south, and makes a Perception check, 17. “Never mind!” says the DM. Nadia spots a door. Jorg’ath makes a Nature check, and he thinks these tunnels look like Purple Worm tunnels. He also thinks they probably lead back to Otari. The door leads back to the circular room outside the library - it’s locked, so Luna picks it for us.

(Skabb waits until we’ve all gone ahead to rub some wee into her frog hat. Perhaps she's getting a head start on the tanning.)

We move north to an unexplored area of the map, and Skabb finds a door. She listens - Perception 20 - nothing. She opens it - oooh, it’s locked. “Oooohhh, Luna!” she cries, before we remember the little glowing fey creature. He was reading a book, the DM reminds us. He had a key as well, perhaps...? Hartvig has two keys in his inventory - ‘key, large, silver’, and ‘library key’. It’s a different key altogether, but we do have it.

Skabb opens the door and then shuts it again very quickly. Whatever she saw looked skeletal, she says. The DM shows us a picture of what it looks sort of like, and we roll initiative:

It is carved to resemble Velcro…

Skabb goes first. “It’s made of wood, right? *looks for fire spells*." She mutters things like ‘burning hands’ and ‘fifteen foot cone’. She casts, and the golem gets a reflex save - it rolls a 29. She bangs her head on the table. The Golem then does something called Splinter Volley at her and Grabby Cat, rolling a 31 to hit Skabb and 26 to Grabby. Unfortunately its attack is a crit, and it one-shots Skabb.

It hits Hartvig with a 17 - that hits him for 13 piercing. Then it crits Jorg’ath, rolling a green 26, for 40 crit damage, and even though its attack number is red it still hits Grabby. She doesn’t go down, luckily.

Since we haven’t hurt it yet, Hartvig does a big 3-Action Heal with the scroll he’s very glad now that he bought. He brings Skabb back, and heals everyone else, and earns a Hero Point!

Sprocket and Augustus do Boost Eidolon, and Augustus charges in. He can’t quite get where he’s going so he casts Shield.

Nadia runs up and since no-one is in melee, throws her Redpitch Bomb. It misses, but the splash damage does 4d8 (17!) fire damage!

Jorgath gets in there, misses, then Hero Points his attack for a 28 to hit. “I would like to do 6 slashing damage please.”

DM: “It will take one.”

We are all outraged. His axe isn’t made of Adamantine, but it is made of Greatness. Surely that should count?? For his last action, he falls off the table he’s leapt onto and grapples it. He declares that his axe is stuck in the top of its head. He rolls very poorly on his Athletics to grapple the golem and uses another cheeky little Hero Point for a crit success!

Luna leans around the corner and takes aim with her bow - 26 to hit for 9 damage.

Skabb doesn’t have any other fire spells she can use, because she’s actually prepared her spells properly, and is suitably annoyed. She does Recall Knowledge - all golems are immune to magic, with exceptions. Wood Golems are susceptible to fire magic, but invulnerable to everything else.

Cooooooooool.

It also apparently reduces bludgeoning damage, as she finds out when she whips a sling bullet at it. (It reduces the damage by five.) She throws her weapons on the floor and storms out. (She doesn’t really, but she does start stuffing slugs in her mouth so she can eat them before she dies.)

The Golem makes an escape attempt from Jorg’ath’s grapple; it rolls a 35 to Jorg’ath’s nineteen, and punches him - but misses. It goes again and hits him for 16.

Hartvig has a big dangerous fire spell (“Do it,” we all cry.) 20 misses, so he Hero Points it and rolls worse.

Augustus approaches the Golem and gives it a Regular Fist Thump (as magic will do nothing) but it reduces the five damage he does manage to do, to nothing.

Nadia has similar luck with both Alkonost and Bluebird.

Jorg’ath Rages and does 14 slashing reduced to nine, plus four acid. It takes all four of the acid!

Luna shoots and hits for 5 piercing (it is reduced down…) She crit succeeds her stealth check and melts back into the shadows.

Skabb flanks the golem with Augustus and goes in with her grill, but 19 misses - she Hero Points it for a 26! She rolls 6 damage, reduced down to one.

The wood golem takes a swing at Augustus and gets a howdy doodis on him, taking both him and Sprocket out, and then crits against Jorg’ath.

Hartvig is up. Run? He does his Focus spell, Fire Ray, again, and hits! 32 damage, five of which is Persistent! He does now have Moderate Curse, so he is feeble, dazzled, and emitting ash for ten feet around himself. He shuffles back fifteen feet shouting “don’t look at me!”

Nadia shoots but misses, and Jorg’ath fails a death save. Sprocket uses his last Hero Point to come back up with 1 Hit Point.

Luna wants to creep into the room and grab Skabb, and drag her out. She backs out, leaving a dying Jorg’ath in the room with the golem. He uses his Hero Points to come back up to 1hp I think? No, he’s stabilised. Luna shuts the door on her way out.

Skabb uses an action to give Grabby two and sends her to fetch Augie from his spa day, and does a 2 actioner on Sprocket for 10.

The Golem takes more fire damage, 15. None of us see the state it’s in as the doors are shut now. It makes no attempt to leave the room.

Hartvig Heals Skabb, as she’s closest, for 16 plus 12! 28 total, nice. Sprocket re-summons Augustus - just as Augie arrives with Grabby Cat sitting on his head like a Davy Crockett fascinator!

We wait out a round to see what happens...

The golem takes his persistent damage and burns to a cinder! Skabb wades through Hartvig’s ash and hugs his leg.

We run in and Heal lizard-bro. He is draped over a sculpture of Absalom, bleeding green blood all over it. Skabb slaps some Healing mud on him, and Hartvig uses a scroll on Augustus and Sprocket.

Nadia makes a Society check; the model is Absalom, but she (and Sprocket) can make out no further details. Jorg’ath knows it’s not just a sculpture of Absalom. The damage on it corresponds to the damage the actual damage the city itself has taken, but only that which occurred more than 500 years ago. None of the damage on the sculpture depicts damage the real city has taken more recently in that.

There are books in here about the various siege attempts on the city, and many have been annotated. There is another 4 bulk of books we could flog; Augustus opens his mouth.

Skabb listens at doors, but hears nothing. She does feel heat coming out from under one door. “Ohhhh, Grabby Cat!” She asks Augie if he knows what is behind the door, but he has no idea.

Jorg’ath kicks open a different door. Behind it is a cave, and it looks like someone has been doing mining - seems that Velcro was planning an extension of some kind. He spots a plus 1 striking pick, and he pops that in the old pocket.

Skabb opens her door. It is blisteringly hot in here, but the source of the heat isn’t immediately obvious. Jorg’ath, a lizard, wants to bask in the heat - he goes in and is told to stop where he is…

His Intelligence score is ten; not enough. Skabb hops in - 18 Intelligence, so she must roll Initiative. “I might die twice in one game!” she announces cheerfully.

The lid of the furnace in front of her pops open, and two flaming ghosts come screaming out. She tries to put them out with Hydraulic Push. The water goes straight through the ghosts - but she was aiming at the furnace, she insists. Her attack hits, for nine damage.

She takes 7 fire damage when it retaliates, and loses some random memories. They fade like pages burned from a book. She is Stupefied 1…

Jorg’ath and Luna also see what’s going on, and both jump in. Luna busts out the Wand of Quenching, and will, quote, “quench the fuck out of that shit.” The air in the room becomes saturated with water vapour, the fire does not go out, and the ghosts ignore it all entirely.

It’s super humid in there now, so Jorg’ath is feeling real good. He takes a whack at the furnace - 16 misses. He does an Intimidating Glare, after being reminded of how we defeated the kobolds - 18 Intimidation. It doesn’t seem to work…

Luna shoots and does some damage to the furnace, but not much. Sprocket casts Dispel Magic - and the furnace becomes inert, though he has the sense that it will reactivate at a later date. We drop out of Initiative, and Sprocket earns a Hero Point!

Jorg’ath finds a Ventriloquists Ring - gives +1 to Deception checks, activates once a day to cast Throw Voice (I think).

We call it there. We are off for the next few weeks, as it’s the DM’s birthday so he’ll be hammered on Saturday. After that Dragon’s Dogma 2 comes out so both me and him will be stuck into that for a while. :)

If we take out the last thing on the other side of these doors next time, the survivors will level up!

#dnd #pathfinder #abomination vaults #abomination vaults spoilers

[abominationvault]

Session 27: Sat 2 Mar 2024

Skabb is quietly examining her spell list while the rest of us bollock on about beer and thunderstorms and such. She wants a second level spell that does 4d12 lightning damage, that features spoilers for a book we don’t have. The DM considers while Nadia and Sprocket offer their support for the adoption of this lovely spell.

Surprisingly, he doesn’t dismiss the idea out of hand! We’ll await his judgement.

Final Fantasy 7 remake is only worth spending money on if you can get it cheap; the characters are voiced and the combat isn’t turn-based so what’s the point, really. Also, they’re remaking The Crow. We are all suitably bemused by this.

The DM has prepared his ruling: Skabb can have the spell, as long as she agrees to start preparing her spells ‘like a proper witch’. She agrees, but not before telling him that he won’t be able to tell if she’s doing it properly or not.

So, we’ve just done some murdering? Yes, the little Light bastard. And Augie has been feasting. Skabb finds herself alone in a room and has to make her way back to us. She tests her new spell, and rolls 21 damage - and the number is red… The DM announces his right to play takesie-backsies if it ends up too overpowered.

The DM reminds us that Augie is still injured, even though he’s been feasting. Jorg’ath thinks we should go and make some more bodies for him to eat. Hartvig might un-Flense him…? That does negative damage, right?

Nadia remembers that there was a nasty light that healed the ghouls somewhere in here. The DM, who was likely hoping we'd forgotten about that, gives in and tells us where it is. Augie seems reluctant to stand in the light, so Skabb holds his hands and tells him, “You’re the best of us! We agreed last time!” She makes a Diplomacy check and can add 4 as he’s her friend - she rolls a 6. “… Hero point?” 16 for a 20 total!

Augie is convinced, and goes into the horrible light - he heals another 11 hit points. We send him in again for another 15. Hartvig: “Get in there and just roll around.”

Augie is back to full hit points, yay! (We would all watch the Skabb and Augie spin-off series. Jorg’ath thinks it would be like Sharky and George, The Crime-Busters of the Sea.) It turns out Augie is only about Skabb’s height! This whole time we’ve been picturing him as about human sized. Who knew.

We head back to the last room we were in, and Jorg’ath seems ready to explore the doors to the south. He opens a door! “I just had a little peek. Augie’s going to be very happy.”

There are cultists in this room, and the initiative table appears…

Nadia goes first. She shoves Luna out of the way and shoots past Jorg'ath at the nearest cultist, then dodges out of the way of any ranged repercussions. Luna is up next, and Jorg’ath will allow her to shoot past him as well. She clambers up the bookcase in front of her and shoots, the first attack hits but the second misses.

Jorg’ath does a big Rage and charges in. “Rage… Move… Smash… Is that a hit? Grand… So 12, plus 4 acid damage. 16. Is dead?”

(Is not dead.)

Gobleen. She and Grabby move forward. She Disrupts Undead! It misses. “Oh dear. Well then I’ll just sit here and await my commuffins.”

The Cultist does a 3-action Harm, doing 12 commuffins damage to Jorg’ath, Skabb and Grabby, and healing himself the same amount. Another casts Command on Jorg’ath and tell him to run away. Will save DC20 - he rolls a 14. Bums.

Sprocket is going to cast Evolution Surge on Augustus, giving him 20 feet of extra movement. Augustus will bimble in to the room with the cultists and do a big Fist Slam. 26 hits for 9 thunder-bonk damage!

Hartvig. “Euurrghhhhh…” He moves into the room and - Needle Darts! The number is a green one, so he rolls crit damage. 26! "These are some spicy pins!" Howdy doodis!

In his head he’s throwing out cards like Gambit but it’s needles, and he’s doing a bad creole accent. We all shuffle our feet until he stops.

Augie! Time to chow down. He moves twice, and lunges at a cultist mouth first - 19 hits for 14 damage!

Nadia strides in, jumps onto a desk and does some shooting with both Alkonost and Bluebird, aaaalmost getting a crit but not quite.

Luna is next, and does a big hide and then shoots - 16. She Hero points it for an 18…? Just a miss! “Rats.” She does her last attack but it’s a 13.

Jorg’ath is next and he’s got to move away - he does a U turn and comes back, and attacks, and misses.

Skabber! She Heals Grabby, while pretending she isn’t doing something nice. She does another Disrupt Undead and rolls 21 to hit! It gets a save, which it just squeaks. We all groan. It takes the damage, though.

The cultist side-steps so that Augie doesn’t get an Opportunity attack, and forces saves from Hartvig and Augustus with its Grim Tendrils. Hartvig crit-fails, taking double negative and double persistent bleed damage…

Sprocket Boosts Eidolon on Augustus, who then does Fist Bonk - and has to make a Will save? He crit-fails. Hero Point, 21. He’s absolutely fine! He’s been hearing a strange noise, but it’s just annoying and not damaging.

Hartvig has a little bleed for himself, and then takes his turn. Needle Darts again… 12 misses. He wants to do a medicine check on himself, but rolls a 5. “Oh. I’ve made it worse.” He doubles his bleeding damage again…

Augie next, and he bites the cultist three times and misses all of them.

Nadia - wait the cultist is flanked! DM, defeated: “Fine, Augie eats the cultist…”

Hartvig heals himself, and we are out of initiative.

Medicine checks all around.

Skabb and Sprocket roll Perception checks; they see nothing, but Grabby Cat points behind Skabb. There is a door…

Behind it is a short corridor and - Skabb has to make a Will save. She can hear an annoying song being sung. 14. She is Confused 1…

She must take 3 actions, to bite Sprocket, Jorg’ath and Augie, who are arrayed around her. She crits against Jorg’ath, chomping like a cat with full eye-contact the entire time.

Jorg’ath aces his Will save, but Sprocket fails his. He casts a cantrip at Skabb, but can’t physically attack Jorg’ath without being in his space so he hisses and wibbles his hand-paddles at him instead.

Jorg’ath picks them both up and carries them out of the room; now that they are in the same space, Sprocket can attack him so he does - 23 to hit! Only 1 damage, though.

Skabb sends Grabby in, as she has no attacks and is therefore functionally immune to this effect. She reports back to say that the noise is getting louder.

There is a silvery circle on the floor of this otherwise empty room. Another Teleportation circle. It is intact, and could be awoken…

Grabby continues on, opening doors and closing them behind her and sending Skabb images of what she sees until Skabb goes - “Oooooooh, there’s a nasty red thing…”

Does 20 hit GC? She takes 17 acid damage, and disappears off the map. It’s a Gibbering Mouther, and this one seems alive.

What can we do to stop ourselves hearing this noise? We all make rudimentary earplugs from various things, some more sanitary than others, mentioning no names. (Both Skabb and Hartvig earn ‘you disgust me’ Hero Points from the DM.)

It’s damp, and there is the sound of sloshing water. The chewed-gum pie is, quote, ‘flobbling around in the water.’ It has lots of eyes, and has not seen us yet, but absolutely will.

Skabb does an Occult check to see if she knows what manner of monster a Gibbering Mouther is, but fails the roll.

Jorg’ath charges in, and tries to grapple and drown the mouther. He can hold his breath for 25 times longer than other creatures!

He must roll Athletics, and must beat a 27…

“Okay!” he says, and rolls a 26. Skabb has cast Blood Ward which gives him a +1! … on AC and saves. But the DM lets him have it anyway!

Sadly, the mouther doesn’t breathe, so he can’t drown it. But he does get a free Hero Point.

Initiative!

Luna goes first, and has kept up with Jorg’ath so she can see. Skabb is in front of her so Luna hops over her and takes aim at the writhing mass of flesh. 18 misses.

The mouther will first spit at Luna - 32 definitely hits her, and is a critical. She takes 34 acid damage… “I am a dead cat.”

“Just use one of your other lives!” Skabb shouts, helpfully.

The mouther bites Jorg’ath, hitting him with a 22.

(The DM describes grappling the mouther as being like “trying to hold phlegm underwater”, and earns himself a you-disgust-me Hero Point from us.)

Nadia comes down the corridor and shoots, there being not much else she can do.

Hartvig moves, and has a dead friend and a sickly friend. For now, he does a 2-action Heal for Jorg’ath.

Jorg’ath, do some damage! He’s really angry that his cat friend has been murdered. He great-axes the mouther in the faces. He Hero Points the 19, making it a 26.

The slashing damage opens it a new mouth, and it uses it to bite him. (Nadia is sick in her mouth a bit.)

Sprocket does Phase Bolt, and crits both the attack and the damage! He has no fingers to do finger guns, but earns himself a Hero point. “Give up, punk!”

Skabberlina does her new spell, misses, and the mouther aces its save. “Sorry Skabb,” the DM says, sounding not very sorry at all. He does give her a Hero point to re-roll it, if she wants. (He is scraping the bottom of his benevolence barrel.) This time it just makes the save. It does take half damage though!

She whips a sling bullet at it, but it misses.

Augie uses all his actions to flank the mouther, leapfrogging us all as he goes.

Luna is up, but she’s dead so she makes a death save: a 5. “Whoops. Sorry.”

The mouther is next, and the DM thinks it is going to attack Augie first. It bites him, doing 17 damage, and 4 persistent damage.

(It turns out that Hartvig’s Ancient Dust cantrip does negative damage, which heals Augie, so he can just spam-puke dust at him until he’s better. Yeah!)

The mouther bites at Jorg’ath but misses, and spits at Hartvig and misses.

Nadia shoots a bit but it doesn’t do much, so Hartvig heals Luna as an ambulance screams past his flat. (“There’s bloody loads of ‘em!”) He heals her for 28 hit points. She would be wounded 1, but she was already wounded 1 (as pointed out by her loving husband) (who is coincidentally susceptible to bludgeoning damage IRL, as well as being within melee range) so she’s wounded 2 instead. Hartvig Guides Jorg’ath for his last action.

Jorg’ath punches the Mouther, as the axe does slashing damage and he doesn’t want to give it more mouths. It does almost nothing, so he picks up the axe again anyway. That also misses so he gives it an Intimidating Glare. It fails, and is Frightened 1! “Yeah! Fuck you! You gibbering bitch!”

Mr. Clementine wants to know how long ago the fight with the cultists was. Longer than ten minutes? Yeah, the DM decides. No, wait… No, not longer than ten minutes. So, Augustus still has extra movement! He wades into the water and up to the mouther. Sprocket casts Boost Eidolon, and Augustus punches it in the head. 23 hits for 5 thunder-bonk!

Skabbling does Hydraulic Push and just hits, for ten bludgeoning damage. Then a sling bullet, for two more damage. Nice!

Augie bites it, and spits out whatever comes away in his mouth - 14 hit points’ worth, by the looks. His second attack misses, but the third one hits for 14 more damage!

Luna skitters a bit further away, as she doesn’t want to be spat on again. She doesn’t want to get her paws wet either so she stays out of the water. 15 misses so she Hero points it and crit fails, then crit fails her last attack as well. (Her laptop is going out the window at this rate.)

The mouther bites Augie and crits, doing 26 damage… (Skabb made the DM promise not to kill Augie so we are assured he is not dead.) 25 damage and a persistent bleed though…? Augie is down, I repeat, Augie is down... Then it bites at Sir Augustus of Clementine, but misses.

(Nadia’s guns don’t seem to be doing enough damage, so there’s a short pause while we figure out what her damage should have been; Skabb determines that she has actually done about 25 more than previously advertised!)

Hartvig does Ancient Dust, and coughs up a cloud of grey soil. Lovely. He does heal Augie with it a bit! Since Augie is down… hold on. There is some complicated maths involving positive and negative damage, I am still confused from trying to work out what Nadia’s damage should have been, so I’m not even going to try to parse this one.

The upshot is that Augie is up with 8 hp! (Once this session is done, the DM is going to check both 'guns' and 'puking' as neither seems to be working as they should.) Hartvig makes a rude gesture at the mouther.

Jorg’ath smacks it with his tail and somehow manages to miss. No Roll20 shenanigans this time, just a bad roll. He takes out the Great sword, 22 hits for 13 slashing damage so we’ve got another mouth - wait! He can choose Piercing damage instead of slashing! No extra mouth. His last attack misses.

Mr Clementine is up, and he will do a Fist Slam, and then Sprocket does Spout but it makes the save, only taking half damage - but extra because it’s vulnerable - Howdy doodis!

Something to do with turning into a big pile of water and going sploosh, like in the first X men movie!

As a quick aside, Sprocket’s ghoul fever. Now, about that. A day hasn’t passed so it isn’t worse, and neither are Skabb’s blue boils, phew.

Shall we back to town then? We can heal up, get spell slots back, and cure diseases. And maybe fuck some more shit up! (Jorg’ath grubs about underwater for “trayyyyyysure”. He spots some glittering stuff on the bottom. The rest of us see things painted on the back wall, symbols of gods. Jorg’ath finds a bunch of gold and silver! At some point, idiots have been chucking coins in here in service to Velcro! Jorg'ath scoops them all up. Somewhere, Zorya is annoyed.)

We rush Augie back to the nasty light with Hartvig straddled on his chest like a paramedic doing CPR on a crashing patient, puking dirt onto his face to heal him. He gets a Hero Point for the visual.

#dnd #pathfinder #abomination vaults #abomination vaults spoilers

[abominationvault]

Session 26: Sat 24 Feb 2024

Baldur’s Gate 3!!!! It’s great. Don't worry, me and the DM weren’t playing D&D without anyone, we were just using the Discord to talk while we fight our way across the Sword Coast.

So we found a Wand of Clench? Well, someone did. No, Quench, that was it. Jorg’ath finds a workshop - Nadia wants a go. She looks around for stuff to take with her. 16 Perception - Mostly repair materials for the upkeep of books. She does find two 2nd level scrolls of mending and one of Hypercognition. (Instantly use up to 6 recall knowledge rolls.) She offers them around. Sprocket and Skabb take the Mending scrolls but no-one can use the hypercognition one. Nadia tucks the last away, we will sell it.

More doors. For the sake of completeness, we go back on ourselves and open the one on the southern end of the corridor. A friend!

This is Jarelle Kaldrian. She is a ghost, and appears to be binding books. There is also a skeleton here in light blue robes, slumped in a corner. Jorg’ath backs out slowly. Hartvig points at the skeleton and addresses the ghost. “Hey lady! Was that you?”

She looks annoyed, but then turns sad and nods. What’s she doing?

“Binding books,” he is told.

Ghost books?

Visitors are rough with the books! If the mistress comes for a book and it’s damaged… She shakes her head. Clearly the consequences are unspeakable.

She appears to be going through the motions rather than actually working. Has the mistress been down lately, we ask her?

"Last time was a long time before my unfortunate accident." Speaking of which… this seems like a fairly low risk job, how does one… die, while binding books? Hartvig makes a Diplomacy check, already accumulating dust around his feet. 17, after a Hero point. When the mistress didn’t return, her colleagues became monstrous. Rather than become like them, she barricaded herself in here and helped herself to the arsenic.

Is arsenic a nice way to die, Skabb wonders.

Agonising, she is told. The dose has to be perfect otherwise you don’t die, but just sick it back up but it does irreversible damage.

... Yikes.

Is there a way to help her chuff off to whatever comes next? Jorg’ath suggests some axe work, but Skabb doesn’t think that will work on your incorporeals. Hartvig asks her what her job satisfaction is like. She doesn’t seem to understand. He thinks, before re-wording his question.

Why you still putting around, Skabb interrupts? Jarelle repeats her initial statement about looking after the books.

Not your responsibility any more, surely? Skabb asks. Don’t you want to go on to the next life? (Diplomacy - 20.)

Jarelle seems puzzled. "You mean I don’t need to be here?"

"Let the books rot," Skabb tells her. And just like that, she disappears.

“I thought we had a rapport, but whatever,” says Hartvig. He seems put out. What sort of books are they in here? He finds a key on the skeleton. The books are all sorts, none especially interesting. He finds a gold paperweight and a crafter’s eyepiece. It is etched with square patterns. While worn, you get a +1 item bonus to crafting checks. Nadia wants it. “Gimmegimmegimmegimme!” Hartvig hands it over, and she puts it on straight away.

We find more books for Augustus to carry as well, so we do some book tetris to get them all in. (Well; we put the books in his tummy and he jumps up and down a bit to settle them.)

There’s a conversation about goblin piss, which I will not document.

(Nadia squints at Skabb through her eyepiece to see if she looks any different; an error message pops up: “Unfixable”)

Hartvig grumbles about Skabb banishing the ghost lady before he could get her number. She has been trying to come up with a new title for herself, and immediately one comes to mind: “Blocker of Cocks!”

We move on and find another room. Luna, and only Luna, can hear laughter.

It sounds like it’s coming from the other side of the door at the other end of a short corridor, that Jorg’ath has opened. The laughter is mean-spirited, like a naughty child.

Skabb pings for magic - the chandelier pings back. She sends Grabby Cat for a - gentle! - poke around up there. There is an ever-burning torch up there. Grabby Cat tries to get it down. Nat 20 for a 24! Skabb adds it to her inventory. (Will it shine through her bag, she asks? She can deactivate it. It will never run out of fuel, she is told.)

This room is full of comfy furniture, more books, a fountain, and this fella:

(Hartvig: “Who’s this prick?”)

It is giggling, and annotating a book as it does so. Luna wants to catch and eat it. “ekekekekekkekekekekek,” she says involuntarily, pupils wide, tail swishing.

Jorg’ath admires the carpet. “I may be a big lizard, but I have exquisite taste,” he announces.

Luna jumps on the - thing? Lurker - and tries to snatch it. “I want to cram it into my mouth.” 20 Athletics! And… Initiative, though the rest of us are reluctant to get in the way of her fun.

The Lurker goes first, and casts Mote of Light, dealing 7 Force damage. Now she is affected by Lurker’s Glow:

“I don’t mind him being able to see me while I eat him,” says Luna. It claws her face.

Skabb, who speaks Sylvan, hears it say a number of disgusting things about how he’s going to rip Luna’s eyes out and peel off her skin. It uses its last action to make an escape attempt, but has a -6 penalty: it fails miserably, and she manages to hold on to it. She does want us to help her kill it after all, however, as it’s done significant damage with its claws.

She stabs twice but the second one misses even though she rolls a 20. And it’s flat footed as well so she technically rolled a 22 and it still missed.

Uhhhhh… we might be fucked.

Should she drop it and run away? If she dies she won’t be any use to anyone. It might hit her as she runs away though…? There is some discussion about attacks of opportunity. (Can it do that? Luna wonders. You'll find out when you run away, Sprocket tells her.)

“…No, fuck it, I’m going to hold on to him,” she decides. Her third attack misses by a country mile.

Sprocket casts Draw Ire, forcing a Will save. It rolls a 26. “… Fuckbiscuits.”

Save the day, Ash-man! He does Needle dart and crits! (Someone’s found his mojo.) 18 damage! Wait - he did a crit, so that’s double damage AND persistent bleeding. Woof. Wouldn’t want to be that guy. Oh wait again, the 18 WAS the crit damage. Hartvig’ll take it.

“Do I know what kind of creature this is?” Skabb asks.

“A dickhead,” Jorg’ath tells her.

She sends Grabby in to see what the light source is in here. She thinks the thing will be hurt by the dark, so she wants Grabby to put the light out or steal it.

GC rolls too low to grab it, so Skabb gives her two more actions to try again - wait, can she do that? No she can’t, balls. GRabby’ll just have a little sit on the chandelier. Skabb does Slashing Gust instead, for 16 damage.

Jorg’ath does a big Godzilla roar as he Rages and will "bash him up with a Great Axe". 12 damage, including 4 acid.

Nadia sticks it to the floor with a glue bullet, yeah. It’s stuck for six rounds! (Sprocket wants her to find a revolver, and get a feat he will call “empty the chamber”. Nadia: “I cast ‘Uzi’!”)

Luna has earned a Hero Point for roleplaying seamlessly as a cat, which is poor consolation as she’s dead when the Lurker hits her. Then it disappears, muttering about how it’s going to skin every last one of us… Uh oh. (Nadia is outraged that it escaped her glue bullet. It used Dimension Door. She's happy to find out that it is still stuck to itself, wherever it went.) Hartvig Heals Luna for 27 hit points.

“Did I eat him?” she asks as she awakens.

Someone does recall knowledge - the Lurker is fey, and evil. They sometimes hide their wings, and like to murder things for fun. They hate noble humans, and especially hate gnomes. (Jorg’ath: “Me too.”)

We look at the book it was reading; it’s in Sylvan. Skabb sighs.

There is a picture of someone being skinned alive. The annotations say things like “This looks like fun, must try that one".

Jorg’ath makes a Perception check. He spots another key between two of the chairs; it’s iron, with a symbol of Aradin (?). More books, about hauntings I think? Jorg’ath takes that one, as he’s a big fan of Derek Acorath. (Ha-cha-cha.)

Luna makes a grab for the other ever burning torch, on direction from Grabby Cat.

Jorg’ath finds a rubber ducky and is inordinately excited about it. It is in a suspiciously clean bathroom.

(He has found a book about how to create poltergeists and ghostly weapons! He gives it to Sprocket. It’s called Ineffable Hauntings.)

More doors, quick! Skabb finds some stairs that go down, and we are briefly paralysed with indecision. Skabb asks if she can send Grabby downstairs to scout, as she can be re-summoned if she dies? The DM hasn’t done the map for that layer yet, so no.

Jorg’ath finds another suspiciously clean bathroom, and then a pile of cultists and the Light Lurker - oh shit!

Initiative, and we all call for Augie…

Does 33 hit Jorg’ath? Yeah, he would say it does. In fact it is more than ten over his AC which makes it a crit - it does 24 damage to him with Mote of Light, and Lurker’s Glow.

“Help…?” he asks.

Sprocket. (“This room is a real shithouse,” Jorg’ath remarks, earning himself a Hero Point.) Augustus strides in and smashes a ghoul for 8 damage, and casts Shield on himself.

Skabb casts Disrupt Undead, and the ghoul fails its save. “Hah.” She then pours a Minor Elixir of Life down Jorg’ath’s throat.

Nadia rushes in and throws a Holy Water at a cultist and hits! She then glues him to the floor with a crit and a glue bullet. Then she spots how many ghouls are in this room. “Uhhhhhhhhh…”

Augie also rushes in and starts biting, and does it so good we start chanting his name. MVP!

The Cultist casts Phantom Pain. On whom…? Can the DM get a Will save from Nadia? (Ah shit. That's me.) She rolls an 18; she needed a 20. She takes 7 damage, and 2 Persistent. He then tries to get out of the glue; he rolls Acrobatics 24 and frees himself.

Luna is up. She moves up and takes aim at one of the ghouls. Can she hide first? She’s not in the room yet, so yes. She crits with her shortbow - and then crits her damage roll for 25! She’s one-shotted a ghoul, yeah.

Jorg’ath would like to, if possible, move in and scoop Nadia up and throw her out of the room. He succeeds his Strength check (Strength? Rude) and flings her back out into the corridor. He crits with his greatsword for 13 damage. Howdydoodis! "Uh, I run in, throwing tieflings all over the place, and bisect a ghoul."

A ghoul claws Augustus, who is Sickened 1, apparently (no-one's quite sure how), 22 hits him for 4 slashing damage. 13 misses. Another slashes at Jorg’ath, and another at Augie.

Hartvig Heals Sprocket, so that Augustus is also healed. He does a 1 actioner - wait… no, a 2 actioner. 16 plus 9 back for Augustus.

The Lurker takes his turn to do Searing Light… 40 damage to Augie.

Noooooo! He then slashes him for 12 damage, but he’s still up! Yeahhhhhhhhh. (We weren't supposed to roll good enough to have Augie come with us, and the DM has been trying his hardest to kill him off ever since.)

Sprocket casts Boost Eidolon on Augustus, and Augustus has a ‘chuntering run’ toward a ghoul, and thumps some understanding into him - well, he tries, and misses.

Skabb will Magic Missile… something. I miss what.

Nadia glues Jorg’ath’s ghoul to the floor to make it easier to hit, then misses with Bluebird. Augie kills something and then eats its flesh to heal himself. (Even though he’s bitten heads off, he STILL doesn’t get a Hero point. Unfair.)

Luna is next, and I think she’s going for that little winged shit. We hear her growling from her hiding place. 30 to hit, and it’s green! she rolls minimum on her damage roll, and does “just a measly 25”, getting the howdy doodis! She pins him to the wall like a butterfly, so she can come over later and cham his wings off.

Inspired by the cat, Jorg’ath goes into a rage. 29 and it’s also green! 26 damage plus four acid and the ghoul is dead. He goes for the next one and hits, it hits back and misses all three of its attacks.

Hartvig is out of scrolls, so he has to use his own actual spell slots now, just so we all know the sacrifices he makes. (He hardly ever gets to flense anything.) 14 hp back for Jorg’ath. He could use his last action to Guide Augie, but he hardly needs it. He casts it on Augustus instead.

Sprocket and Augustus - Sprocket Boosts him, and Augustus will move… and… “give this guy a bit of a bonkin’.” Howdy doodis! Double fist slam into the ground so he makes a horrible greasy puddle for Augie to snack on. A ghoul bisque, if you will.

Augie yoms it up, and we’re out of initiative. Skabb wants to carve the eyes out of the Lurker, one for her and one for Luna, because it said it was going to do that to them. She gives one to Nadia to make a necklace for Luna. Nadia flubs it, even with her new eyepiece AND a Hero point, and hangs on to the eye for another go later.

The DM has good news for two of us - Sprocket has ghoul fever! Skabb has contracted blue blisters from eating offal, and is developing blisters on her skin and gums.

… we’ll deal with that next week.

Well, we went another week without the DM managing to kill Augie, and we are all extremely relieved. If he ever does die, the funeral's going to be half a session at least. Until he rises again as Augie the White...

"Augie the Grey, that's what they used to call me..."

#dnd #pathfinder #abomination vaults #abomination vaults spoilers

[abominationvault]

Session 25: Sat 17 Feb 2024

Lots of waffle this week. Something about searching for yellow cake uranium on Amazon. Jeff Bezos builds a rocket to fuck the moon. Musk is the worst one, and also has the worst, most slappable face. Just by looking at him, you can hear the sound it would make if you slapped him.

D&D Peasant rail gun? Hartvig explains how that works, and we immediately want to try it. Equally immediately, the DM vetoes it because he refuses to build a map big enough to accommodate one.

Hartvig then goes on to describe another D&D hack, which involves casting Enlarge/Reduce on a cannon ball so it fits in a gun, then when it fires out of the barrel it becomes a cannon ball size again. Nadia wants to try it so bad, but no matter what she says our poopy-pants DM won’t let her. Booh.

Right, initiative is rolled so off we go!

Luna’s up first but she’s still wrangling a toddler, so Sprocket will take her turn if the DM will move her and roll dice and stuff for him. (He’s in the shed being quiet to make the toddler-wrangling easier.)

Luna takes up a concealed position (keeping out of the violet fungus’ ten foot reach). She Hides first behind Jorg’ath (well; she climbs up him with her claws as cats are wont to do) and takes aim at the nearest fungus through the door. 13 (Her stealth check was a nat 1, so a 12 total) but she Hero Points the attack. 22 is more betterer. Max damage! But no sneak attack. She has an action left, so continuing Operation Crocodile Shield, she shoots another arrow at the same fungus. Rolling a green number, please. She wouldn’t roll a 7, that’s very out of character DM, please do it again and remember she is the Favoured Cat. 18 does hit, but only 5 damage. (Where's the DM Win button now?)

The fungus wants to know what Nadia’s dex is; 18, so more than them. She takes her turn, and shoots with a 22 to hit after moving forward. “Then I’m going to… shit.”

Skabb: “Please don’t, the rest of us are right here.”

She moves back out of the way, while the others debate whether lizards have tits, for some reason? Jorg’ath asks “What about the Lusty Argonian Maid?” but the book only mentions her lifting her tail. Skabb: “Somewhere, some nasty nasty neckbeard has drawn it.”

The fungus shuffles into the tiny room with us and does something at Jorg’ath and Luna. Tenacles, eurgh. (Jorg’ath has been googling, and discovers that Argonian women do in fact have tits. We are all suitably disgusted.)

Jorg’ath makes a save against Violet Rot - he rolls a 24. No poison for him. He might need some sort of shielding, as he’s a bit down on hit points. He’s nowhere near his favourite one yet though.

The last fungus dashes. Sprocket: “That is some Fantasia bullshit.” The fungus stings Hartvig - well it tries, but it misses.

Skabbo! Most of her spells are AoE, but she thinks her Wand of Magic Missile might do it. Yes; guaranteed hits, she is told. “Off I go then,” she says, and rolls, and then remembers about the chocolate in her car! Hopefully Jorg’ath won’t like it, so she won’t have to share. She rolls minimum damage, and isn’t allowed to Hero Point a damage roll. Booh. She runs to get her chocolate.

Sprocket! “Just a minute…” (He runs back in from the shed, as BWJ is down.)

(“I would just like to share my sadness with you all, he likes the chocolate,” Skabb breaks in to tell us.)

Sprocket wants to do a spell but he’s right up in it. Are there penalties for short range spell attacks? No, but it does something with opportunity attacks. Okay, he’ll cast Phase Bolt - 15 hits for 8 damage, and then he casts Boost Eidolon on Augustus. Then, Augustus is going to have “a good old thumpy fist slam bonking of the majigger.” (Apparently he has a Hero Point, and Sprocket has no idea where it came from. He uses it to re-Fist Slam, but still misses.)

Wait - the mushroom is flanked, so Augustus does hit! Well done Jorg’ath for spotting that.

Hartvig Needle Darts the one at the front. “Needle!” he shouts, and does 7 damage. The mushroom squeals, and its cap starts to collapse. It didn’t like that. Hartvig uses his last action to move away. Or - wait. Heal? He can’t reach anyone who needs healing. Flense? No, that’s two actions. He casts Guidance on Jorg’ath.

Jorg’ath hits a mushroom with his Greatsword and howdedoodis! Then he will hit another - it’s looking raggedy. His last attack is a miss, and he saves his Hero Points.

Back to Luna, who is back at her keyboard. She will stab one with her rapier - crit. “Hooray!” Howdedoodis! “Are there any more?” she asks, sounding slightly disappointed. Some confusion about her next roll, but the DM rules she can roll critical damage. Yeah. It’s looking ropey! She gets a Hero Point.

Nadia hits the last mushroom and shoots it dead for a Howdy doodis. “You know when you slice a mushroom for a bolognese or something? Like that, but with a gun.”

We have cleared the garden of mushrooms! Nadia scoops up some venom to sell while Jorg’ath patches himself up.

Nadia needs a buddy to help her with the venom-scooping - Jorg’ath and Skabb help her out, and she manages to get two vials of venom. Wait - Sprocket will re-roll his check so she gets 3. They are worth 12gp a vial, so we can use that to decorate our new house!

(Skabb and Hartvig look up cooking with guns, which is apparently a real thing. God help us all.)

Skabb splats some mud on herself, with help from Sprocket splatting his little paddle hands in the wounds. Hartvig does a Heal scroll for Jorg’ath and another for Nadia, and we move on. Jorg’ath does a sniff, but doesn’t catch anything.

We push Luna to the front so she can sneak and we can copy her homework. She and Hartvig make Perception checks; Luna makes a Will save - wuh-oh. 23, phew.

At the edge of her hearing, she can hear hundreds of horrible little voices talking to each other, and she feel momentarily nauseous but shakes it off. “Like being offered a prawn cocktail.” She is aware of it, but it’s far off and she can ignore it.

Skabb wants to be on the ceiling, but has to roll a Perception check first. She can’t hear whatever it is, so she’s fine. She casts Spider Climb and scuttles up onto the ceiling, but then is warned that if she falls she might take fall damage. She takes it back for a moment, at least until we can see what’s on the other side of the door. It only lasts an hour.

Jorg’ath opens the door and finds the lift that Joto and Skabb found earlier. There are cultists to the north, Skabb tells him. Sprocket toddles in and makes a Perception check - it’s high, so he rolls a Will save. 18, a fail...

Behind Luna, Sprocket goes strange and walks into the wall and falls on his bottom. (It makes a clown horn noise.) she picks him up and he hugs her shin. “Charlies in the trees!” he cries. Augustus fails his Perception check, so he’s fine.

Nadia comes in as well, but hears nothing. Augie rolls good on both - he claps his hands to his ears and warns us not to listen to the words. He doesn’t know what they are, but it’s not good. Grabby Cat rolls an 11. “She don’t hear shit. She got fluff in her ears.”

Skabb casts Detect Magic - it pings off the walls and comes back. She senses nothing but the magic coming off some of her friends. “Oh, no, is it a bloody haunt?” she groans.

Jorg’ath moves onward. He sees an image of a moss-adorned skull. “Oh no I’ve opened a door and there’s someone in here!”

Tiny swatches of skin marked with tattoos arrayed around the place. The tattoos were placed post-mortem, and form an image of a sinister woman...

Sitting with a piece of flesh in its hand, tattooing away, is this:

He looks up and shouts and swears at Jorg’ath for interrupting him.

Initiative!

The surprised… ghoul? goes first. He screams at Jorg’ath, who doesn’t understand him. Skabb speaks Undercommon; she makes a Perception check. She hears “Dirty stupid stinking shit-eating lizard, barging in here!! I will tattoo the vilest of obscenities on your corpse before I eat you!”

Rosk goes first, and lunges at Jorg’ath mouth first. 29 hits, and Jorgy makes a Fortitude save - 29. He’s fine. Then another - 13. He’s not diseased, but he IS paralysed. He Hero Points it for a nat 20, 30 total! Rosk bites again with a 29 to hit, doing 24 damage. He’s down to FOUR hit points… This thing has nearly taken out our tank in the first round.

“There won’t be much left to tattoo on at this rate,” Skabb observes drily.

“If you would all like to kill him before his next turn,” Jorg’ath says, hands pressed to the presumably gaping wound in his chest.

Augie puts himself in the middle while we are discussing having Hartvig heal us. And what our new characters might be.

Luna’s turn. (Sprocket is riding on her foot, so he goes with her. He’s also a level of Confused.) She squeezes in next to Jorgy and does some stabbing. 28 hits and she has Sneak Attack for 27 total. “Since I’m here…” she considers, and then stabs him again. “Fuck it.” She crits! 22 more damage, and a Hero point for being badass.

The ghoul takes umbrage at her turning him into a bag of mashed potato, and spits at her. She hisses back and does a little cat wash.

Hartvig does a big Heal, rolling max healing for Jorg'ath.

Sprocketses. “… What?!” He starts - wait. No he can’t hear the noise any more, so he comes to his senses and doesn’t have to start his turn with a Will save. He does have a mad ghoul to deal with though, so he starts off with Horizon Thunder Sphere, but 18 misses. “Uuuuugghhhhhhh…” he says. “What if I was to Hero Point it?” He can do that, if he likes. “More, bigger numbers,” he says, and rolls a 27. Apparently he can Heighten all of his spells, so he can add one to the damage - and roll another 2d6 as well, for this one. 18 total damage! Augustus leaps over Luna, Sprocket and Jorgy, onto the table.

Nadia runs into the room, elbows Luna out of the way and shoots the new horrible ghoul.

Skabberlina. “Riddle me this: If I bite a ghoul, am I exposed to nasty ghoul fever?” We know that if they bite us we make a save, but what if we bite them? She’s good, so Skabb will go grill first at the ghoul. She can reach it from atop Luna’s head so she does, apologising for dribbling on her. 20 to attack? That’s a - miss??!? Even though he’s flanked?

Skabb was expecting a delicious chunk in her mouth so she has another go - misses again, and sulks.

Jorgy shoves Augie out of the way (“No, I ask him nicely,” he tells the DM) and strikes the ghoul with his greatsword. 13 misses, so he uses a Hero Point to re-roll. 24 does hit, for 7 damage. Greataxe for his third atta- nope. 19 misses.

The ghoul spends his first action swearing at us and making threats in Undercommon about turning our skin into art (Skabb shouts back at him) and then does Swift Leap and tries to eat Sprocket!

32 to hit and it crits the damage for 21 total. “… Ouchie.” Then Sprocket has to make TWO fortitude saves. “Wait wait wait,” he says, doing maths and amending his hit point total. “I’ve just taken a horrendous amount of damage...” 12 and 29 on the saves. He’s not paralysed. “That’s a good bit of news! It’s all new experiences. I’m enjoying all of it.”

Augie has found a new food so he has a go at eating it. (Skabb thinks he deserves a Hero Point.) He crits, doing 35 total damage, yeah. (The DM laments Skabb's excellent roll in convincing Augie to come with us.)

Luna’s go. (Sprocket: “Save us all.”) She steps over and gives the ghoul another little stabbing. 24 hits for 7 damage, and he’s flanked so she gets Sneak Attack as well. Howdy doo dis! “Nastily,” she says.

Skabb looks at the bits of tattooed skin; they have pictures on. She starts collecting them and putting them in her pocket. Some have words, eurgh. The one on the table catches her eye - it looks suspiciously familiar to the ‘meaty effigy’ we found, and some of the portraits we’ve seen as well. Is that Velcro? She makes a History check. (Sprocket will help.) “Well this is a good sign,” says Skabb. “I can’t even find History on here.” (The DM has been playing Baldur’s Gate.) She rolls Society instead - yes, it’s Velcro. She casts Detect Magic on the tattooed image. Nothing.

There are two bulk’s worth of books about tattoo artistry and the history of tattoos in here - they are History books, which might be of interest to the wizard whose private musings Skabb has plastered all over town. Augustus might like to carry them, given that he’s huge and looks a bit like a bookshelf? He will. He’s made out of sunken ships, Sprocket tells her sniffily.

(Could we nap in Augustus, Skabb wonders. Sprocket says that while he is in this realm, he is the size he is, and doesn’t have a pocket plane or anything that would fit a bigger person. Sprocket himself might fit, or maybe Skabb.)

Skabb thanks him for holding the books in his tummy; Augustus gives a wooden thumbs-up. Skabb wants to raid the corpse but he has nothing but his raggedy clothes.

Jorg’ath swings open another door. The desk in here is now a butcher’s block, and there are bits of flesh strung around the room. Augie points to the meat and says, “Morlock.” Jorgy finds a hatchet - it’s plus one, low grade silver. He adds it to his inventory, and whistles for the goblin, who might want a look at all this meat.

Skabb sees five dead morlocks stored in here, presumably for the ghouls. She gives one a lick, to see if she likes Morlock meat - and makes a Fortitude save. 14 - will she become a wendigo? “What’ve I got, what’ve I caught?” she asks gleefully. Nothing - yet. She slaps some mud on her tongue. It’ll do the 3 hp she’s down, but won’t cure whatever it is that’s now festering.

We do some more healing before we move on. Skabb warns the rest of us to give her a wide berth.

Jorg’ath finds a big room. “Shall we go in the big room?” There’s another door.

Jorg’ath and Luna each have a door - they open both at once. Luna finds buckets of sand, and a wooden case with a closed lid on the back of the door. A cupboard?

Jorg’ath finds beds and chunks of bone - and two new friends, so we can all roll initiative! (Skabb warns us not to lick the chunks.)

Augie flies straight in and sets about the first ghoul. 26 to hit and 16 damage. Getting it done! He rips its arm off and chews it. Sprocket goes next and shoots a Phase Bolt in it and gets a howdy doodis. It dies very theatrically; we all think it’s a bit much. He does another Phase Bolt at the other one and hits it for 9 damage. Jorg’ath is impressed.

Hartvig is next. “Yes… Jolly good,” he says as he considers his approach. He does Needle Darts, Hero Points it and crits. Howdy doodis! “Machine gun noise! Needleneedleneedleneedle!” He’s hit something twice today. We should make him a banner.

Jorg’ath stands in Luna’s cupboard emitting light so she can see, and she makes a Perception check of 22. Barrels of water, and a latched case inside which is a very fancy looking magic wand. She makes an Arcana check - 12. She’s not sure what it does. Sprocket should know. He knows everything, despite being (7? 8?) days old. Arcana check - 11. “Yup. No idea.”

Jorg’ath wants to do an Arcana check even though he’s not trained, and rolls a 5. The DM consults his Book of Horrors and discovers that we should have been doing Nature checks! It’s a Wand of Extinguishing!

Jorg’ath knocks the top off one of the barrels and sinks it. “Yumyumyumyumyumyumyum. I am refreshed.”

Skabb dumps some of her tattooed skin bits in the barrels and we call it there as it’s getting late.

#dnd #pathfinder #abomination vaults #abomination vaults spoilers

[abominationvault]

Session 24: Sat 10 Feb 2024

BWJ is off his everything today, so Luna might have trouble putting him to bed. Baby Skabb is better this week, after a bit of a battle with a fever. Oh wait - BWJ is down, I repeat, BWJ is down. Let the adventuring commence!

Hartvig has a touch of death this week, which he announces by hacking some lung butter at us down the discord. Lemsip’ll fix it. Halo might help also.

Sprocket wants to clarify something: The idea was to get the book, let Flashbang make some changes and sneak it back, correct? Yes, so we’re one third done. But we're down one wooden guy and one dolly man. They will continue with their art installation until Flashbang has done his thing. “So please… Please quickly…” Sprocket adds, out of character.

Skabb and Flashbang are to alter the ritual, which is Primal magic. Skabb makes a Nature check: 23, and Flashbang 12. Another check, while the rest of us keep watch: Skabb 15, and a third: 18. (She’s reminded of Carol Vorderman as the DM asks for further checks.) She refrains from rage-vomiting on the book. Flashbang finishes up and hands the book back to Luna.

Sprocket has been being bathed for five or ten minutes now. The druids are dancing around him and doing drumming. He looks around and spots these:

(Top to bottom: Addled hippy, Nasty Little hippy, Shameful hippy, Smelly hippy, Smug hippy)

Luna makes a Stealth check to return the book: 19. It is returned safely, and Luna rejoins us. Flashbang says there will be more of this dancing at the festival. He will let us know when it begins so we can enjoy the fruits of our handiwork.

As soon as Luna is clear, Sprocket twitches in the druid’s hands and yells, “Get your hands off me woman!”

“You're alive, little one!” she says smugly as she sets him down. “Who are you?”

“I ain’t got to talk to no no-bathing woman. We’re leaving.”

She picks him up again. “you have some kind of magic?”

“Damn straight I do!”

“Who are you, little magical beast?”

Augustus steps forward and goes to pluck Sprocket from her hands. “You’re alive too!” she says.

Skabb, worried for Sprocket, has readied a Goblin Song about stinky hippies and starts yell-singing it from the bushes. She makes a Performance check: 16. The druid looks up. She looks back at Sprocket and asks him what the noise is. Sprocket listens. “Sounds like singin’, woman.”

“Hardly.”

“Everyone’s a critic.”

“Fine, keep your secrets. But if you are what you seem, return to the circle next time you’re in town, I may have work for you.”

Sprocket extricates himself and trots off, in not quite the direction of the singing.

Flashbang is dancing to Skabb’s horrendous singing. “Nice work!”

Skabb wants to go back into town and see the effects of her last job for Flashbang, with the diary, and we need to rest and do some shopping.

Nadia breaks off from the others to make a Tanglefoot bag and four Glue bullets, and the others find the owner of the diary. The townspeople have assumed that he’s left his diary lying around in public places where kids might find it, and are judging him for that rather than the actual contents. Everyone is gossiping about the randy mage in the bookshop. Skabb does Mr Burns steeple fingers.

Hartvig thinks he should change the name of his shop to The Randy Mage.

While we’re in town, Skabb sees a familiar face - the mayor. He approaches and asks if we’ve found anything yet. Aware that she might scupper our chances of getting a nice house, she chews her lip and says nothing. Sprocket reports the ghouls and cultists, and tells him we’re in the process of eliminating them. Are they what caused the lighthouse stuff?

They’re definitely involved, Sprocket replies, and Luna puts in about the ghost lady. She doesn’t say her name, good thing too or she'd get shushed for saying it aloud.

We have two options for a home - an old warehouse, or a smaller dilapidated house he can give us. The warehouse is somewhat nearer the marketplace and in a bit less shady of a neighbourhood. Kraken street warehouse is large and will cost more money to decorate, and that’ll be on us, but it would be a nicer house. Skabb likes the idea of shady neighbours. Crow Alley is nearer the cemetery, so we’d rather avoid that. Also, there are no neighbours in the warehouse. Skabb is sold. We could have a gym, hot tub, slug farm…

The DM sends Skabb and Nadia the floor-plan and says he will let us decide what goes where. So half slug patch, and half workshop then.

Hartvig wants to sell his scorpion venom, as he’s never used it. (it’s worth 40gp. Skabb: “Let’s find more giant scorpions!”) The casters take a look at their spells, opting for healing and light type things.

Sprocket can go to the library and do some research, or he can chat to the priests; he plumps for the latter. He has a good reputation with the temple after we dealt with the undead, so he can ask them about ghouls. After a brief moral debate, he asks them how to kill ghouls most effectively. “Regular ones and ones of a cult persuasion.” Immune to death effect, disease, paralysis, poison and unconsciousness. Negative type damage will heal them. They can eat corpses to regain HP. They carry something called ghoul fever and can paralyse you - unless you’re an elf. No specific weaknesses. Healing is bad for them, so Hartvig can just jump into the middle of them and do a big heal spell. “And it won’t hurt you guys. It’ll be nice if I hit you guys.” We can throw holy water like a bomb, that’ll do damage to them as well. They sell scrolls of healing that will hurt them, the priests say. Sprocket has a shedload of money so he buys some. 4gp for a scroll of heal, so he buys two. “Now I have three,” he says, carefully adding them to his character sheet.

“Can we buy a bunch of holy water and a super soaker?” Luna asks. “Is it cheaper by the bucket?”

Sprocket asks for five bottles of holy water. “Wait, how many are in the party? Okay, a deal on six.” He must give the priests a reason to give him a discount. “We’re ridding your town of an undead blight! Also we’re pretty cool, and I’m adorable! Uh…” Diplomacy, and he can add two. 16, for an 18 total. Alright, how about 2gp each so 12gp for six, they offer him.

“I agree, you are a credit to your people and faith.”

In arranging this deal, Sprocket has further improved his reputation with the priests.

Skabb wants to buy a Buffeting Winds scroll from Flashbang, and feed it to Grabby Cat so she can learn it. And another one of Magic Stone.

Once we all meet up again, Sprocket tells us that the hippy druid lady offered us some work. We keep that for later.

We retrace our steps - after a sleep. Ahhh, that’s better. Sprocket gives us each a vial of holy water, and he and Nadia give their healing scrolls to Hartvig and Skabb.

Jorg’ath must make a CON save - huh? He does - well, he returns from disciplining a cat (an IRL one, he hasn’t found Joto or anything) and then does it. 10… Not good. He has spent a lot of time cheek to jowl with ghouls, so he might be a little bit sick. He takes 2 (not 22!) D6’s of Negative damage, 7 total. Sprocket is trained in Medicine so he rolls that and Skabb rolls Nature. Sprocket and Nadia roll 1’s, but Skabb rolls a 26. Jorg’ath smells off. She sticks a claw in his scales - he has stage 2 ghoul fever. (Is that better than night fever, he wants to know.) He only takes half the hit points given back by healing spells and items. Well… shit. Would Goblin Fever help, Skabb asks? Like a competing virus type thing?

He’ll have to take 8 hours of downtime to get rid of it. It’ll take a while to kill him, he’d have to get to stage 6. Can he shake it off with a few good rolls, Sprocket asks? “… and a cup of tea?” Luna adds. We’d have to drag him out of here and treat him with lots of smelly mud, Skabb knows. Well, it's not all bad, there’s apparently a long list of things you’re immune to, Luna reminds him.

We go back to one of the mitflit areas to let him heal up before we press on, and he chooses Skabb as his main caregiver. Sprocket, Nadia, Hartvig and Skabb all roll medicine checks - the first 3 all roll 20s, and Hartvig’s is a crit. Skabb can add 4 to her roll as she has great support, and she rolls a 21, for 25 total! Jorg’ath rolls a Fortitude save - 28! He can add four to that on top, so now he no longer has ghoul fever. We all get a Hero Point!

(Skabb is crunching a handful of ticks that she found in Jorg'ath's scales as she worked.)

Augie rejoins us, yeah! It’s a shame we can’t bring him to town with us because he’s undead. “Perhaps if we tart him up a bit,” Hartvig suggests. “He just looks a bit peaky, he’s been ill.”

We’re in a little room just outside Velcro’s library; we head south. Jorg’ath opens the door, then another door, then we roll Initiative!

Rotting flesh heap in the middle, surrounded by ghouls. Yurck. Does Jorg’ath speak Undercommon? Nope. Skabb does, but she didn’t hear it.

“Wheee!” Shouts Augie, leaping over Jorg’ath and going straight for a ghoul cultist to bite it in the shins. “He’s got some moxie, I’ll give him that,” says Hartvig, impressed.

Jorg’ath Rages, inspired by Augie’s enthusiasm. He can add 4 instead of 2 to his Rage damage and can make it acid. “I’ll pop in the middle of these gentlemen,” he says, and stands on the pile. The flesh all seems connected, he notices. It's not a pile of humanoid corpses. Weird. 17 doesn’t hit. He Hero Points it for a 26, and 13 slashing damage plus 4 acid. Then the cultist to his left - 20 for 8 (+4) damage. Con save - 18. There is a stench in here, but he can hold his breath!

But he’s made the save and is immune.

Sprocketses! He sees one cultist being gently chewed by Augie, and has a go at Phase Bolt:

He then gives it a wash with Spout, but it makes the save. Still, Howdydoodis! Pinpoint accurate, the spout causes the insidey-bits to rupture, and exits from the eye.

Nadia can’t see anything so she runs in and stabs a ghoul with her bayonet. She hits and then makes her save versus the stink, yeah. She’s sick in her mouth a bit anyway.

Luna can shoot, but the ghoul will get a bonus to his AC. She goes for it anyway and gets a 29! That’ll do it. Second attack is a 23!

Skabb’s computer ain’t playing ball. She moves up by Luna and sits on her face, “in a non-rude way” so she can see. Does she know if any of the party are susceptible to ghoul type stuff? All of us can get ghoul fever, but Nadia won’t be paralysed as she’s half elf. Skabb can shield one of us, so she picks Jorg’ath the tank. “It pains me though.”

She takes out her slingshot and swings it around her head: 26 hits for 2 bludgeoning. She hears a wet thwack, even though they’re not technically Wet Undead.

The cultists have a go, and cast Harm on Nadia and Jorg’ath, who both get a Fortitude save (Nadia 21, Jorg’ath also good so they take half damage).

One of them moves, and casts Grim Tendrils - Jorg’ath and Nadia both save and take half damage and Persistent Bleeding (It’s up to the DM to remember about that though, so.)

Hartvig’s spell misses, even with a Hero Point, and Jorg’ath gets a Howdydoodis! I miss what he does because I’m eating cake. He does Raging Intimidation on the last one but only rolls a 12. “Well that’s upset me.”

Sprocket has Augustus cast Shield, which is Heightened. He casts a thing so he can see through Augustus’ eyes as well. Is Augustus susceptible to smells? “If he doesn’t have a nose, shall we whittle him one?” Hartvig asks, and earns himself a Hero Point.

Augustus makes a save of 16, and is Sickened 1.

Nadia moves forward and shoots, drops Alkonost and misses with Bluebird. “GET ON THE GROUND! NOW!”

Luna sneaks forward and misses, Hero Points it and hits. Her second attack misses. “Rats.”

Skabb casts Disrupt Undead. “Yeah. Disrupt your day, motherfucker.” It saves though. “Absolute wanker.” It casts Harm again, forcing another save; Luna, Skabb and Augustus do badly. From the other room we hear Sprocket go “Ow!”

Hartvig does Needle Darts again:

… aaaaand it misses again.

Augie lunges at the last cultist, mouth first, and hits with a 29. “It’s a joy to watch you work, sir,” says Hartvig.

Jorg’ath is up next, and swings his great sword for 9 slashing. Second attack misses. He tries Intimidating Prowess again and fails again to the amusement of all.

Sprocket does some measuring. Can he do Phase Bolt through the wall, and through Augie, and hit the cultist? Yes, apparently, he can, and the cover bonus is reduced by two, negating it entirely. 24 hits for a howdydoodis!

What we see is a Ray of Awful, and we’re just a bit worried for Augie, then the bolt phases out and then back in but inside the cultist, making him, quote, “aggressively dead”.

Skabb notices something written in Undercommon on the floor by the flesh pile, in spite of herself:

“Pure Flesh.”

We offer it to Augie, but he shakes his head. “Not undead.”

Is it still possessed of some mockery of life? We should burn it. Should we try to talk to it first? We could have Jor’gath intimidate it, Skabb says, laughing. She could do a nature check on it? She does that, dropping the sharp stick she was going to poke it with.

There are lots of teeth. It’s a hideous lump. Does Sprocket want to do an Arcana check? “Eurgh, not really.” He does anyway, creeping to the edge of the stink in the room. 13, and a retch. This is nothing that has been created magically.

What is it, then?

Hartvig has a go at a Religion check, and Skabb does an Occultism check. After a cursory look, it doesn’t seem undead. In a flash, Skabb realises that this is the decomposing corpse of a Gibbering Mouther - a type of Aberration. (Jorg’ath wants to do a Crafting check to try and put it back together.) Skabb thinks the cultists were worshipping the corpse.

Jorg’ath burns it with his torch.

If they’re worshipping this, is it likely that there are others down here? Not necessarily, the DM tells her.

We listen at the next door before the lizard hoofs it open. We sneak as best we can, being quiet as the ghouls can see in the dark but not necessarily hear. We all Follow the Expert, Luna, whose Sneak is 4.

Skabb hears nothing through the door. We push Luna to the front to open it. She rolls a 30 Stealth. “That’s illegal!” Jorg’ath cries. Luna gets a Hero Point.

Through the door are what look at first glance like mushrooms, but because Luna rolled so well, she can see nasty tentacles waving about. “Gross.”

It sits on a pile of dark grey soil. This seems to be a garden. We ask Augie about this. “Ghouls use them to flash-season their food.” They have flesh-rotting venom, apparently.

Fun!

Skabb and Jorg’ath roll Nature checks, while squabbling. The fungus can’t see, it uses tremor sense so Grabby Cat could fly over them for a recce. They have a reach of ten feet with the tentacles. They have a poison called Violet Rot, which enfeebles you over time. People have been known to rip off the tentacles and use them as weapons, though the poison only continues to work for about an hour.

If Jorg’ath smashes the floor with his axe, will it create a distraction allowing the rest of us to sneak through? How about a fire bomb? Skabb has a spell that lets her rain down rubble…? They are weak to fire, apparently.

Nadia knows that if someone can harvest the venom, she can preserve it with a crafting check and make Violet Venom which is quite valuable.

Hartvig could torch all three of these things with a cantrip. Skabb does Burning Hands, and they fail the save. 8 fire apiece - so 13 fire damage each, and we roll initiative. We stop there as Luna is falling asleep, and it’s better to pause here than in the middle of combat.

#dnd #pathfinder #abomination vaults #abomination vaults spoilers

[abominationvault]

Session 23 Sat 3 Feb 2024

We are almost all running late this week (due to Warhammer, among other things) so we start a bit later than advertised. Last week we defeated some cultists and two (?) of the cult leader bastard ones. Running low on hit points and spell slots now, the DM teleports us back to town for a well-deserved long rest. We arrive to the Otari map landing page:

Skabb wants to know what happened about the diary that she pasted up all over town in the live session before we left. We will find out shortly…

Various IRL spawn are giving their parents trouble, so Skabb goes on an adventure on her own. She hears a voice in Sylvan talking to itself in the forest. “Eyes open. Got to watch out for bug-scratcher and friends.” Skabb cackles to herself. It’s Belches!

She wants to sneak up and jump out on him. If she terrorises him enough maybe he’ll be her pet. He is up a tree to the side of the path, and has a little pile of butterflies - he is pulling the wings off and eating the bodies. She jumps up next to him - he startles and falls out of the tree. He hovers just above the ground while Skabb scrunches the remaining bugs.

Belches tells her that Flashbang wants to see her. Is it about mischief, she asks? "In part." Skabb suggests that Belches become her pet, and his expression turns terrified. She's already got Grabby Cat, he belongs to Flashbang! She wants two, she wails, but lets him lead her to Flashbang’s camp.

Last time he just had a teepee but now he has a full camp. Belches turns back and asks if we have any food? If so, hide it away from Biscuits, he tells us. We hide our rations in a tree. Skabb sniffs the air - there is Primal magic happening. She hears a thudding noise, and scampering, and giggling. She ventures a bit further and spots Biscuits:

(Sprocket gets a Hero Point for declaring that there’s no such thing as a bear, only two people living in one pair of pyjamas.)

Skabb senses primal magic on this bear, as well as crumbs all down its front. She cuddles him; he doesn’t seem to mind. He seems a bit food drunk; he’s full of biscuits.

The thudding gets louder, then stops. A familiar face pokes around the edge of the yurt:

(Someone’s had a glow-up.)

He smiles at her, then looks at Sprocket. Apparently Sprocket’s mummy (Wrin) made him some biscuits, but unfortunately Biscuits has eaten them. Sprocket rolls good on Society - he thinks Flashbang is lying. “Huh.”

Flashbang explains that the bear came into his camp and would've eaten everything, up to and possibly including Flashbang, if he hadn't calmed it with magic. Now they're bonded, and he's named it Biscuits. (Which, can I say, that's the best name for a bear I have ever heard in my life.)

As Flashbang talks, he spots Jorg’ath - he runs over and holds out his hand. “Brother dragon!” They shake. Flashbang is excited to have a dragon friend. (... Jorg’ath is not a dragon.) Flashbang proudly points out his teeny tiny wings. “Only the very best kobolds have wings!” he boasts.

He tells Skabb in Sylvan that our cat friend (Joto) came running down the path a while ago, and that he wondered where the rest of us were. Skabb says he must have got spooked or something. Cats are skittish. She explains the situation with Jorg'ath (also in Sylvan) and tells him not to tell Jorg’ath what he saw.

Flashbang goes into his yurt and gets a lump of silver, which he hands to Hartvig - along with a scroll. He liberated it from ‘the borings’ in the big gold building. (Hartvig can now swap out a cantrip for Needle Dart, which will do more damage.)

Skabb sidles up behind Flashbang and tries to poke his little wing nubs. Stealth 12, and he spots her. “Aren’t they amazing?” He runs and jumps, and flaps like crazy, and they carry him a little tiny bit further. He is the best dragon she’s ever met, Skabb tells him truthfully.

Flashbang gives us some scrolls of healing - One to Luna, one to Nadia, one to Grabby Cat, one to Jorg’ath and one to Sprocket. (The scrolls are the same as a potion, but will heal everyone in range for the same cost.)

How sneaky are we, Flashbang wants to know? Some more than others, is the answer. "Just don’t be loud," he says. "Follow me." He tells Jorg’ath to sit on Biscuits, as his armour makes a lot of noise.

(“Why does this Johnny-come-lately get to ride on a fuckin' bear??” Skabb asks, outraged; Jorg'ath ignores her and cackles with delight as he climbs onto Biscuits' back. She makes a mental note that she hates him a little bit more now.)

“Advance!!!” Jorg’ath cries. Flashbang climbs up with him, and leads us to a little overpass, where he points. “Stone Ring Pond," he says.

Can Skabb feel the Primal magic? he asks.

“Yep. It’s smelly.”

Stone Ring Pong is very magical, but currently infested with hippies. "Doing silly celebrations," Flashbang says derisively. "They think they’re worshipping nature. Do-gooder druids and rangers. Soap-dodgers. Planning a biiiig festival. Bring fine weather (?) to town. Me and sky-daddy wants you to interfere. They have a book with rituals. You go in and get it, and it’ll change their ritual. Is in their biggest tent."

“Okay,” says Skabb, and we plan. Jorg’ath offers to cause a distraction by rampaging through the camp on a bear. Sprocket can play inanimate doll, that’s a thing he can do. We could pass Augustus off as a piece of art that we made, like a Burning Man thing.

Augustus will pretend to be art while Grabby Cat does a recce, including taking a squizz at what the folk are doing. Deception for Augustus of natural 1 for 4 total. “… things went badly wrong,” says Sprocket before Hero Pointing that for a 15 this time. Augustus will stand with one big old mitt in the air like whatshisface from Shakespeare with the skull, holding Sprocket like the skull. “If you have to ask questions, you don’t get it,” Sprocket tells us as Augustus lifts him up.

Flashbang is rolling on the floor with laughter at this display. A figure comes out of the big tent - that’s the head druid, he says. "Nasty little gnome. Worliwynn."

She comes out of the tent and spots the art installation. Smiling, she comes over and starts placing flowers around Augustus, humming to herself and singing. Grabby Cat makes her move - Stealth 16.

(Luna arrives, having finally wrestled BWJ into bed. She asks Sprocket what we’re doing; breaking into a camp of hippies, he tells her. “Ooooh!”)

Grabby Cat enters the tent without being seen. It is empty of people, and there is a sort of shrine - on it sits the book. It’s too big and heavy for her to carry it, however, so Skabb relays this information to the rest of us as she can see through Grabby Cat’s eyes. Nobody seems to be watching it.

Are these hippies magic-user types, she wonders? Could be priests, clerics. Some have bows. Grabby sniffs the book to see if there’s protective magic on it. Nature 18. She senses residual magic, but nothing she recognises as protective or warding.

She scouts out the camp on her way out. The pond in the middle is about 60ft across but shallow, and people are scooping water out of it, probably for potions or tinctures or something (but not soap). The ones with the bows are leaning against the stones and watching what’s happening with the head druid and Augustus; she’s still singing to him. The gnome spots Sprocket, and very gently lifts him up with Mage Hand. She starts weaving flowers around his neck.

Skabb, with great sympathy: “Poor Sprocketses.”

Sprocket puts up with the ‘unasked-for touching’ with incredible grace.

Luna is up; Grabby Cat will watch for danger. Luna makes an attempt to get in to the tent: Stealth 23. Like a ghost she slips in and sees the book on the altar. Religion 18; she recognises this as an altar to the god Gosra (sp?). He is the God of wind and waves, the neutral god of nature. That tracks. She picks up the book and sneaks out with it. “Hooray!”

Sprocket is dipped in the pond while the druid says magical nonsense at him, but despite all this he maintains his composure. Well we got the book, now how do we get our poppet back?

(Skabb’s littl’un is not well at all, so we call it there for this week.)

#dnd #pathfinder #abomination vaults #abomination vaults spoilers

[abominationvault]

Session 22: Sat 27 Jan 2024

Good news the first: Our DM is well on his way to a bill of clean health, yay! Goods news the second: Roll20 is close to giving us easier Pathfinder character sheets, yay!!

Long discussion about Warhammer while Skabb and Joto sort audio issues. I tune back in at the mention of Henry Cavill. (Hartvig: “… Absolutely shameless.”)

Last time, there was an eye on a wall and Hartvig and Joto beat the shit out of each other, and then Skabb sang a song about mud and dispelled the haunting that caused it. Yay!

We look around and notice that Joto seems to have disappeared. When did we last see him? What we didn’t know about Joto, his player tells us, is that he is a coward. In addition, he was being pursued by someone. It turns out he only joined us to get away from said someone; apparently he stole something from them. As we are looking around for him, we spot this fellow:

Hartvig isn’t sure if this person is male or female, and suggests taking a look at his… area. The lizard invites him to try; Hartvig politely declines. “Excuse me,” he asks, “Can we help you at all?”

The lizard approaches us. He is looking for ‘the heroic pirate cat’. He says Joto stole something from him.

He never told us he was friends with Godzilla, we say. He will stay with us until we find Joto, and he can retrieve his property, he says. What is it that Joto has stolen? Lizard man doesn’t think it’s our business. Well, if he wants to hang around, he will have to spill the beans, Hartvig says. He will spill Hartvig’s beans. “That was a lot less threatening and a lot more sexual than you thought it was,” Hartvig tells him.

Sprocket runs over to stand under the lizard and “inspects the cloaca” (his words).

Nadia wants to do some sort of insight check; she rolls a 1 to the lizard’s 14. “He’s fine guys, let’s let him come with us!”

What can he bring to the group, we ask? “A breath weapon. ... Later.”

“When, later today?”

Skabb wants to make sure he doesn’t eat slugs. There’s only room for one slug-eater in this party. He has two weeks of rations, he assures her. Sprocket wants to know if we pull his tail hard enough, will it come off?

Wait, what’s his name?

Jorg’ath.

Well, he can come with us, but not to find Joto. We quite like him, we say. “Yeah, he has that effect on people.” We make it clear that we won’t help Jorg'ath find or kill Joto.

Jorg’ath makes his way through us up the corridor - we (except Nadia who trusts him immediately and thinks he’s great) resist. He has picked Skabb up and put her on his shoulder; she farts. Luna’s tail puffs up as he passes and she does a cat growl.

Moving on! We should heal, Skabb thinks. The DM reminds us that we haven’t checked out the room the mist monster was in. Hartvig: “I search. Immediately.”

We do Perception checks: Sprocket, who has a ‘pretty terrible’ Perception, rolls a 26, higher than any of the rest of us. He spots a door on the western wall. He walks up and knocks on it. Jorg’ath lifts him up so he can reach the doorhandle. Skabb: “Aww. He’s trying to be friendly. Yuck.”

Behind the door is a provision room for guards, it seems to have contained weapons at one point. There are bottles; Skabb takes a look to see if she can see what is or was in them. She makes a Nature check - two lesser healing potions, a barkskin potion and three that I didn’t catch. Lesser bra-bra’s Brew? It’s a kind of beer that gives advantage on some checks. Lesser Skeptic’s Solution - the drinker can spot lies and deceit.

Augie comes in and points out the library which is east of us, and points north as well. He has no idea what lies that way. We give Hartvig one of the potions as he’s at about half hit points. We give Sprocket the Barkskin potion as he has the fewest maximum hit points. Skabb wanted it, but she’s trying a new thing - she’s going to be the bigger person. Sprocket thanks her and gives her a little shin hug. She warns him that the potion will make him vulnerable to fire - suddenly terrified, as he's already vulnerable to fire, he gives it back.

(Hartvig takes his potion, 2d8 plus 5. He rolls a 6. “Oh God,” he says under his breath. “Are you alright?” Skabb asks. “Yeah, doing maths gives me physical pain.” Skabb, nodding sagely: “Did you run out of fingers?” “… Yeah.”)

Jorg’ath looks around for Joto and rolls a 12. (Luna takes umbrage with this lizard. Perhaps she was enjoying the rivalry with Joto more than she let on.)

So we have ghouls or cultists that we could go and fight…? No, the ghouls ARE the cultists. But there are minion ghouls, yes? Let’s go and wipe out the ones at the library, we can sneak back to town before we tackle the double-hard bastards. Hartvig warns Skabb to prepare herself to avert her gaze, as there will be books in the library.

North to the library then? Skabb warns Jorg’ath not to bring the ghouls to us, if he decides not to sneak. Marching order: The lizard goes first and Nadia at the back, with the others somewhere in between.

To the north is another corridor, with a symbol over the door at the opposite end. Augustus takes a look at it. Perception 14. It is a plaque with an image of prison bars drawn on it? Jorg’ath kicks the door open and a bored-sounding voice calls “intruders, you’re under arrest, surrender your gear and step into the prison.”

He makes no attempt to apprehend us, however. Jorg’ath tries to apprehend him. He laughs and calls him amusing. Nadia might know something about this fella, being of the hornéd persuasion, and Hartvig might as well. We elbow our way to the front and get recall knowledge rolls made for us.

(Jorg’ath has a Wayfinder that seems to be giving out light. Is that Joto’s? Yes it is! Has he already killed Joto??? Or do they both have matching ones, did they get them at Claire’s back when they were friends???)

Nadia recognises Korlok as a Barbazu, from Hell, often bound into pacts by sorcerers and other magic users as servants. Their beards can attack, they are sort of prehensile. Hartvig knows they carry a disease that causes a fever that can burn you alive, and they are resistant to physical damage. “Stay back, he’s riddled!” he shouts, earning a Hero Point.

Nadia does a Make an Impression roll (Secret DM roll). She chats with him a while and does a Society check - she rolls juuuuuust enough to impress him.

He is bound here by a sorceress called Balcorra. (!!! Velcro!) She has died and he is stuck here and can’t find his contract. Might be we could help him…? He can't leave because the last order Velcro gave him was to wait here for her, and she never came back. He offers us help in exchange for finding his contract, which he says in in the library. If he can destroy it he can escape this place.

We have a discussion. Nadia knows devils are lawful. They are tricksy with how they word things, but they do stick to the agreements they make. His contract is in the library, but he warns us about the ghouls in there. The ones with hoods are definitely more deadly. After a quick discussion with the party, Nadia spits on her hand and holds it out, and Korlok does the same.

Skabb spots a skeleton in a bed of what looks like fungus in the cell behind Korlok. She snatches some of the fungus and eats it; it is delicious. Korlok says the skeleton was Velcro’s chef and made the mistake of over-spicing her food. Skabb: “Well she was a blaaaaaand bitch.” She grabs more of the fungus and hands it around.

(Sprocket points to the devil as we leave and tells Jorg’ath, “That is how you open up to strangers.”)

Augie points us to the east, where he says the library is. Delicious delicious ghouls in there! We decide to send the lizard in first to be a distraction while the rest of us sneak in behind him. We meet some ghouls coming down the corridor towards us - Initiative!

It seems to be delivering a soliloquy - oh wait, no, he’s just licking the brains out of that skull. (Luna: “If he’s the lesser of the ghouls, I’m a bit frighted.”)

Luna and Nadia go first. Nadia screws a silencer on her gun but the shot misses. She reloads. Luna scrambles past Hartvig and shoots - 18 hits, as does 24, plus Sneak Attack is 19 damage. She re-hides for her last action. 24 Stealth, and she is confident that she is out of sight. She is surprised the ghoul is still on its feet, given how rough it apparently already looks.

Hartvig misses Luna as he passes her, since she’s vanished from sight. “Produce Flame! At the nearest ghoul.” 15 misses, and that’s all his stuff.

Skabber will (Wait, Jorg’ath and Augie aren’t in the turn order. The DM adds them in.) Skabber will - no, because it’s Jorg’ath's turn. He unleashes a Godzilla-esque roar and Rages, and smashes the ghoul in the face with a great sword. 28 is a crit, howdydoodis! He eviscerates him. doing THIRTY damage.

(Hartvig: “If you were trying to ingratiate yourself, you should have led with that.”)

Jorg’ath will, having Raged and Smashed, do a Raging Intimidating Glare on the other ghoul. Intimidation 20, the ghoul is Frightened 1. He stands and blocks the corridor, protecting his new party, quote, “with my heft.”

Can Skabb cast spells past him? As long as he’s not in the splash radius, and as long as the spell isn’t a line or a cone. She casts Elemental Betrayal, and then Slashing Gust on the two visible ghouls:

She rolls a 14, Hero Points it, and rolls worse. Oh well.

We can hear the scampering of nasty clawed feet, it seems there are more on the way.

11 misses Jorg’ath, but he is flanked. “Let me stop you there, I would like to Deny you Advantage," he announces.

He has to make a Fortitude save, though - he crit fails, with 11, but uses his Hero Point - 14. Somewhat better. He is Paralysed. The ghoul bites him for 5, the second misses. Jorg’ath, sarcastically: “Ow, the pain.”

He has a bunch more bites aimed at him, some hit, some miss, but none do much damage. (He is on the other side of the door to us, Skabb points out. We might just… shut it, and walk away...?)

Sprocket is next. He does Electric Arc, but the ghouls save, taking half damage. Augustus throws up a Shield.

Augie elbows his way forward, and he looks really keen to eat the felled ghoul, but instead he has at the remaining ones - mouth first. 16 hits for 13 piercing, and he bites a great chunk out of the ghoul to Jorg’ath’s left.

Nadia shouts “Duck!” and takes aim from the back, critting even with the bonus to its AC because of all her friends in the way, and blows another chunk off it. Luna finishes it off with her bow. Howdydoodis! “Classy like. Stylish.” She re-hides.

Hartvig can’t do much for Jorg’ath’s paralysis. He can just glimpse the two ghouls either side, but they both get bonuses to AC. He tries Produce Flame on the one to the north, and then Guidance on Skabber.

It is now Something Else’s turn, we are ominously told. Short pause, then, “… Okay. Jorg’ath, you can repeat your Fortitude save.” Sus.

Jorg’ath swings with his Great Axe of Acid, and dissolves the ghoul. He attacks another one and crits, and one-shots the next one. Howdydoodis - he swings his axe and cuts everything in front of him in half. He gets a Hero Point, because that was badass.

Skabb can just see ghouls, which gives them plus 2 to their AC. She has another go at Elemental Betrayal and Slashing Gust, with a 22 this time to attack, hitting both. 7 damage apiece!

One of the ghouls moves and attacks Jorg’ath, but misses thanks to the Intimidation. 22 still hits, and Jorg’ath makes a Con save - 28. Critical success, so he’s temporarily immune to the paralysis!

The next one crits its bite against him. “You’ve hurt me. Ow!” It bites him again, 22 also hits. He requests some healing from the grey man somewhere behind him. Skabb reminds Hartvig that Healing magic will damage the ghouls - but the DM reminds us that this will also hurt Augie.

Augustus does a Fist Slam and hits, doing Thunder damage rather than bludgeoning. He then casts Shield on himself again. Augie eats the dead ghoul under Jorg’ath’s feet, and heals himself a bit. Then he Swift Leaps (“He’s pretty spry for a dead guy,” Hartvig and Luna observe, and we all sing Offspring for a bit).

Nadia springs over Jorg’ath, succeeding on her Athletics to get past the ghoul, and spots more to the south. She shoots her Glue Bullet and crits, Immobilising one!

Luna gets another howdydoodis. The bits of ghoul raining down around the delighted Augie reminds the DM of the end bit of the Crystal Maze where the contestants are snatching silver and gold paper out of the air as it falls around them.

Luna takes aim at another. “Bazinga. Shit. I’m going to Hero Point that, don’t want to come out here and embarrass myself.” She hits this time, spraying more blood and gore everywhere, and does a little cat dance.

Hartvig moves up and does a 2-action Heal, 2d8+8 giving Jorg’ath 12+8 HP back. “Ah! You are delicious grey man.” He gets a Hero Point for acting tactically and healing the tank.

It’s the Unseen Thing’s turn. All of us but Skabb see this:

He is showing far too much thigh, Luna disapproves. Is this one of the nasty cultist wankers? Yes, we are told. Well shit.

Tendrils of darkness emerge from his fingers, forcing Fortitude saves from Luna and Jorg’ath. They take half the Negative damage, 3 apiece.

Something else then does a 2-Action Harm??!?!? (Nadia: “You’ve hit the wrong button, DM, that’s supposed to say ‘Heal’.) 14 damage to Jorg’ath. “Ow.”

Jorg’ath is next and he’s just going to start slinging javelins. 18 misses the Canker Cultist. Does he add anything for Rage? To attack? No. Sighing: “Oh dear. Welp. More javelins then I guess.” 23 does hit, doing 2 damage. (Additional rage damage is just for melee stuff.) 20 also hits, and Jorg’ath will now await his response.

Skabber asks about Magic Missile. If she used the wand last time, does that mean she can’t use it again? She can use it, but risks breaking it. A day hasn’t passed yet, maybe half a day, a bit less even. Skabb, disappointed: “… okay.” She hops on top of the pile of dead ghouls and does Slashing Gust at the regular ghouls behind the Cultist. They take 7 slashing each, and she snips the ends off both their ears. She is hoping that will encourage Augie to go and have another snack.

The Glued Ghoul fails its save and remains stuck. Some of the other ghouls move, but don’t attack yet.

Augustus moves and clobbers the cultist, hitting it for 7 damage and then grapples it, hindering its ability to sling shit from its fingers. Athletics check as an attack against the cultist’s AC. 19, crit, and the cultist is grappled! “Next turn, Augustus is going to cuddle him like, really hard. The squeeze that keeps on going.”

Augie will - start eating the cultist? No, but he will eat the one that was glued to the floor. He is blood drunk. Nadia wants to high five him. He has a bit of a paunch now, he looks like Gollum. Can we keep him? (The DM doesn’t recommend taking him back to Otari, especially after what happened in the graveyard. Will it help if we put a hat on him?)

Nadia runs right into the thick of it and does a Reloading Strike on a ghoul with the bayonet on Alkonost, hitting it for 3 slashing and earning herself a Hero Point for getting amongst it. “I’m gonna die, but thanks!”

Luna moves up to shoot, debating whether to hide first, and does. She shoots, 25 hits. The cultist yelps. She shoots again and misses, but gets a Hero Point for being awesome.

Hartvig will heal the lizard one more time, but after that he’s out. 2d8+8, and he rolls very badly. He Hero Points it, doing a bit better. Jorg’ath is healed for 14. Then he moves, I can’t see where because Nadia is facing the wrong way.

The cultist is grappled, but he can still cast. The DM, muttering to himself: “… Yeah. Plus nine.”

-- Actual footage of the DM plotting our demise

The cultist emanates something for 30 feet in all directions, all of us take 9 damage and it heals the ghouls and Augie. It is the Harm spell again, and we do get saves. Nadia crit-fails, Hero Points, and still fails.

The Cultist does Phantom Pain at Nadia, but she succeeds her Will save and only takes the initial damage of 4.

Jorg’ath moves down to the cultist, and takes some swings with his Great Big Sword of Have Some Acid you Bastard, rolling a 29 Crit, and then rolls Crit Damage as well. He’s taken it from full hp to 2hp, and gets a Hero Point. “I guess I’ll… do that again?”

Sprocket: “Just tickle him!”

Hartvig: “That’ll do it at this point.”

He swings again and cuts him in half, leaving Augustus holding the top bit. Augie turns around and licks his lips. Augustus proffers the wet end.

Skabb will cast Jump to give herself 5 feet of extra movement, and comes up to the newly-arrived other cultist calling “Coo-ee!” She gets a Hero Point. She then uses her Grill of Aberration Bane with a 24 to hit, and cheers when it hits.

“When she was jumping she was singing the Gummy Bears theme, just so you know.”

One bites at Nadia and misses, so it tries again. Nadia: “You can’t just keep rolling until you get a number you like.” It tries again twice more, and still misses. Sulking, it moves to flank her instead. Another bites her for 15 damage. The good news is that she’s an elf so she immune to the paralysis, but she ain’t immune to the disease. Fortitude save of 16, and she is not sick. Phew.

Augustus gives Augie the top half of the cultist, and Sprocket wanders out of the corridor into the room. “Yaaaay, chums! - I mean, hey,” he finishes in his Danny Glover voice. Augustus does a fist bonk on the noggin - meets it beats it, so it takes 5 Thunder damage.

Augie rushes ahead and takes two bites out of a ghoul - a 30 for 28 damage (DM: “Woah! That’s dead!”) and then, inspired by Skabb, does a jump.

Nadia backs up and shoots the ghoul that was next to her for 4 damage, takes a potion, and that’s it.

Luna shoots the other cultist for 27 and another 3 Sneak Attack damage on top of the six. She shoots again, 25 is a crit! 21 crit damage, howdydoodis and a Hero Point! She shoots its head in half with her arrow, top half comes off and leaves its tongue lolling around being generally gross and disgusting.

Luna is off to bed so she scoots off and Hartvig has only one ghoul left. He doesn’t want to use a Focus spell, so he will Produce a Flame at it. It misses.

Jorg’ath will give him a merciful death, and claws it to death. (Skabb: “That’s not merciful. That’s like getting bludgeoned and slashed at the same time.”) He slashes it with his Great Sword again instead and crits, critting the damage roll as well. Howdy doodis!

Sprocket: “… Arguably, you drew that out.”

We have defeated the ghouls! Jorg’ath lifts the ghoul in the air on the end of his sword, it slides down to the hilt and is immediately torn off and eaten by Augie.

Hartvig: “… You’re a hungry boy, aren’t you.” It's hard to tell if he's impressed or nauseated.

Augie points to the door to the south and puts a finger to his lips; there are more cultists behind it.

The room we are in is just outside the main library. Stone shelves in here, books and scrolls, signs, faint blue glow under the sign that points to the south. Skabb wants us to look for scrolls or other spells.

I miss the next bit of description because I can’t type fast enough, and my computer keeps wrongly correcting me. Augie stands in a tendril of hideous light and gets some healing. Jorg’ath crit rolls his Medicine check as well, healing himself for 22hp. He has another go for Nadia but crit fails. She takes 7 more damage and is immune to being healed for an hour. (Nadia, watching him crit succeed his own Medicine check and then crit fail hers: "... I see how it is.")

Sprocket wanders over to Nadia and hands over a minor elixir of life; she accepts it gratefully. Skabb scoffs her mushrooms as she is looking for books - she is told to roll a d20. She finds a divine magic scroll, but she’s not sure what’s on it. Jorg’ath offers to read it. He makes a Religion check - 4. He has no idea. Skabb calls Grabby Cat over to eat it so that she can learn it - but Grabby refuses. Hartvig might know what it says, but he’s been looking for legal documents for Korlok - he just spotted a secret door. (He’s confident the contract isn’t in here.) It’s a scroll of message, he tells Skabb.

None of us can learn the spell, which is disappointing because it could be useful. The other casters can cast it from the scroll but not learn it, and Skabb can’t do either.

Let’s look in the secret door… Not the one to the south, which is the library, but the one to the west. Hartvig steps up, and finds some kind of occult circle. Sprocket can tell us that this is another inert Teleportation circle, but its silver is still intact so it could be reactivated. No legal documents in here either.

(Skabb takes one of the capes of the cultists, and disguises herself as one.)

Skabb can read the signs that are hanging up in here, which are written in Undercommon. They say things like “personal quarters”, “safety,” “Belcorra’s office”, “North wing” etc. The rest of us see that the books lining the shelves are ones that the cult have gathered together. Remember the gay librarian back in town? We think some of these would be of interest to him. We should load up before we go back to town.

We’re out of spell slots and hit points, so we will start off next week in town…

(Hartvig put this on the group chat, I felt it was worth including)

#dnd #pathfinder #abomination vaults #abomination vaults spoilers

[abominationvault]

Session 20: Sat 20 Jan 2024

We are back with the main campaign after a mostly successful Christmas Special! Roll20 now has a tool for us to measure our own spell cones and areas of effect; we spend a good amount of time mucking about with it. Hartvig invents the spell “Manifest Butt Stuff”; I miss the context but to be fair I probably didn’t need it.

We got prizes from the Christmas Special! Joto has a wayfinder containing an Aeon Stone that glows when he wants it to; Skabb’s grill of +1 with a Rune of Bane in it transfers over from Christmas Land. She can do more damage to, among other things, aberrations; she immediately wants to know if Hartvig counts as an aberration. Nadia has a single Glue Bullet and the recipe to make more.

Luna (well, Mialee really) won the contest so she gets a wayfinder that holds two Aeon Stones; she can cast Heal as a level 1 spell, and as a one-time use, it will save her from dying. Can she transfer it to someone else who is dying? No. (Skabb and Joto mute themselves to see who can eat a hobnob faster; when they come back all we hear is Joto: “I lost.”)

We have two sets of stairs that we could descend; Joto has found one, and Skabb has left Grabby Cat guarding the other. She sends Grabby Cat down her stairs to see what she can see. Does Grabby Cat have darkvision…? Skabb, sarcastically: “She’s a raccoon.” GC doesn’t have her own darkvision, but Skabb can bestow it upon her. She’s already given her manual dexterity and flight, and she can give her three things so she chooses darkvision for the third. (Hartvig has a tumblr account, hi Hartvig!)

GC comes to a closed door with her new darkvision, and has a listen. Perception 12. It’s quiet, but she can just make out a kind of mumbling sound. She tries the door - it is not locked. She checks it for traps, Perception 15. Her splatty little hands can’t sense anything trap-like. She opens the door quietly - Stealth 22! Quiet as a ghost, she opens the door. She sees the back of a creature’s head. It is standing in a large room, and it looks like the morlocks we fought not long ago. It seems to be in a bad way. It’s on its own, and it’s muttering. Grabby Cat wants to know if she understands the muttering. What languages do Skabb and Grabby Cat speak? Common - a bunch, too fast for me to catch, but Undercommon pricks the DM’s ears up. Grabby Cat makes another Perception check - 10, and she Hero Points that. 26, that’s better. The creature is complaining - he is hungry, complaining about Graulgust and ghouls. Grabby Cat sends this to Skabb telepathically and she repeats it to us. Staying out of arm’s reach, Grabby gets its attention and asks if it’s imprisoned. DM: “Can Grabby talk?” It turns out no. Speech is another thing Skabb would have to bestow, and she’s done three already.

Grabby Cat can see in front of her the room is 35 feet across, and there are corners she can’t see around. She thinks it might be cross-shaped. She decides to float down by the creature’s ears and click her fingers. Up close it smells different from the other morlocks. It smiles at her. She gets the impression that it’s not hostile, and isn’t likely to attack. Grabby sends this to Skabb and we go on down while she scouts the room.

There are closed doors to the north and south. The DM wants a marching order; Joto leads and Nadia and Luna bring up the rear, the others are all somewhere in the middle.

There are couches and planter boxes and a dry fountain, the water spout coming up through a stone lighthouse upon which Grabby is perched when we arrive. Joto immediately reclines on one of the couches. Hartvig: “Is he muttering about the Precious at all?”

The creature speaks Undercommon to us; Hartvig only speaks Shadowtongue, but it doesn’t seem to be close enough to Undercommon that they could pidgin their way through it. In broken Common, the creature says: “Visitors.”

Skabb asks if he has any slugs. No; it is dry down here, the plants in the planter are all dead. Skabb asks what he’s doing down here all alone. "Used to be a morlock; driven up here from deeper down. Morlocks won’t let me go up, ghouls won’t let me go here. Stuck."

"What are you now?"

"Augrael," he replies.

What did he do to offend morlocks, Skabb asks in Undercommon?

Rotten Raulgust chased him off, Augrael says. "Ghouls caught some of us. We went upstairs. I got hot and feverish and Graulgust drove me off." He describes the ghouls as delicious; did he eat some? Is that what made him ill? Sprocket gives him a shin-hug. What can we get him?

He wants delicious ghoul flesh, and Graulgust's head on a plate. Does he want to join the party, Skabb asks? He’s not much for parties, he says. "Neither is one of ours," says Skabb, nodding at Hartvig. "You can hang out with old dusty bollocks." Hartvig smiles and nods, not really listening.

Skabb makes a Diplomacy check. (I miss what for.) A 6, Augrael replies that he knows his way around the library. If he wants ghoul flesh he might have to play along, otherwise he’s not going to get far, Skabb points out. Joto does an Intimidating Glare to back up Skabb’s encouragement. It rolls a 17 Will save to his 13 Intimidation; Joto tries again, rolling a 24. Augrael meets his roll. Joto: “This fucking guy.”

Skabb tells Augrael that we’ve killed Graulgust. If he can provide the plate, we can probably find where his head landed. Augrael becomes friendly now, upon hearing that we’ve vanquished his foe. Skabb repeats her diplomacy check and may add 8 to it - 18, for 26. What does she want to know?

What’s out there, what they want, and what will hurt them, Skabb demands. Augrael switches to not-great Common. He points to the north door and says beyond it is a corridor and another room with a dangerous mist monster. This floor was the library, and all the staff are now ghouls. Used to work for ghost lady; they think they still do. Cult of the Canker, that’s what they call themselves. (Lovely.) How does he kill them before he eats them, we ask?

There are two types - normal and canker cultists. Cultists much tougher. Circular room east of here is where they hang out. Loads of them - riddled. (What does the cult do?) "They’re stupids!" Augie says. "They think they’re bringing back ghost queen by collecting flesh, but they eat it all."

Another dangerous room, with bookcases in the middle, full of normal ghouls.

Luna suggests that we somehow pretend to be the ghost queen. They are pretty stupid. (Joto, presumably glaring daggers at Skabb: “I used to have a cape, that would have worked pretty well.”)

Augrael avoids the mist monster. Huge unblinking eye, tentacles. (It sounds pretty corporeal for a mist monster.) It’s water based, I think? Skabb offers him to come with us. Diplomacy 17. “Hmm? Hmmmmm?” She has a plus 8 so he agrees to come. He can help himself to the delicious ghoul flesh.

Hartvig makes a Religion check - 19. “Yeahhhh.” He thinks Augrael himself might be a ghoul. Or whatever morlocks turn into when they get ghoul sickness and die. Joto wants to do an insight check and see if Augrael intends to lead us to his buddies, who might then eat us. He makes a Society che- or he can use Deception instead. He does. 24, Augrael is telling the truth. Joto nods at us all to reassure us.

Is holding his hand, for example, going to make Skabb poorlysick? Nature check 27. (Sprocket remembers the shin-hug and starts worrying.) No, simple contact won’t transfer the sickness, they are reassured.

Skabb and Augrael lead the charge, and we head through the door to the north toward the mist monster. Augrael insists there’s no need to sneak, as it sees all. Sinister.

Mist creature is straight ahead, but there’s a door to the left - Joto wants to know what it is. “Little room, strange wall,” Augrael tells us. Skabb asks for clarification in Undercommon. Just strange, he doesn’t like the look of it.

We decide to come back for the weird wall later. (What’s in the room to the right, a floor he doesn’t like? A poorly-constructed Ikea showroom?)

As soon as Skabb opens the door at the end, a thick mist pours out. Those at the front can’t see anything.

We roll initiative…

Skabb can’t see. She tries a refresh, but nothing doing. She does a restart of her computer, as she’s quite low down in the order. The Mist stalker goes first. It has Skabb and Joto within range, so it tries to hit Joto. “Ow.”

It hits both of them with its tentacle; Joto tells it to put it away. 34 does hurt him, for 9 damage and - 24????? Critical damage???

Joto: “I am dead. Wait - I might not be dead.”

Skabb is down, the DM works out for her as she’s offline. Joto looks at us and yells “Run, you fools!” in his best Gandalf voice. The monster solidifies its mist, making it difficult terrain, and forcing a reflex save from Joto. He rolls a 21, so he is not immobilised fortunately.

It is now concealed, so we all have to roll to ROLL to hit it. (Flat DC5 check.)

Sprocket is up, and he wishes to cast this spell:

(Hartvig, who wants to use his new Flense spell: “What’s up with giving us all these enemies without skin all of a sudden?”) Sprocket’s spell works, so now it takes a penalty for 1 minute to attack anyone but him. He casts Shield as well.

Augrael takes his turn, and he will (after some deliberation) come into the mist and bite it. 31 hits, thank God. But he has to roll a d20 first - yes, he makes the flat check. 14 piercing damage, and the monster isn’t immune to any of it. Augrael claws at it as well.

Nadia strides forward and shoots - Hero Points it - and crits! (Then makes the DC5 check to hit, which is also a crit.) “Duck,” she yells from her place at the back of the line. She reloads for her third action.

Joto grabs Skabb and drags her back into the corridor. But, it turns out he didn’t roll high enough and actually IS immobilised. He can roll to save, or attack, or bosh a potion - so he does the last one, rolling just a 4. “I shall await my death, because that’s the end of my turn.”

Hartvig decides we need a big old flame to dissipate the mist. He will do a 2-Actioner, on… Cat or goblin? Hmm. Skabb points out (while unconscious) that it’ll just knock her right back out again, but it’s her turn next so she can do some damage first. Hartvig Heals her for 2d8+8, 16 total. He casts Guidance on Joto, which will hopefully help him out of his current predicament. “If you live that long,” Hartvig adds.

Skabb is up, and she rolls her d20. Is it an aberration, she wants to know. She can Recall Knowledge as an action…? She does Elemental Betrayal instead, and chooses Fire. Checking the cone template, she uses her other two actions to cast Burning Hands, neatly missing Joto and Augie. (Hartvig plays with the templates.) It crits the Reflex save.

Luna is AFK; short pause and then we resume. She doesn’t think she has much that’s useful. She makes an attack, rolls her d20 (a 10, good enough) and 20 hits and it is flanked so she gets sneak attack as well! 13 damage total, nice. She rolls her d20 again for her second attack (another 10) but the attack is a 12. She makes an Arcana check (18, DM forgot to hide the roll) and she knows that it is an elemental. It is immune to Bleed, Paralysis, Poison and Sleep, and has no specific weaknesses. Well, shit.

It sweeps its tentacle at Skabb, Joto and Augie; 23 hits all three. Skabb is down to 5 hp, but not out. It tries to grab Augie but misses! (Sprocket: “Don’t forget it’s got a minus one on its… majiggers. Did that help anyone? ... Nuts.”)

It moves and hits Hartvig and Sprocket - 17, augmented to 16 for Hartvig. It hits Sprocket and misses Hartvig. Sprocket makes a Reflex save; 13, and he is grabbed. “It will regret that,” Sprocket remarks calmly.

It’s Sprocket’s turn, and he is wrapped in a tentacle and being waved above Hartvig’s head. “Wheeeeeeeee!” he shouts, and earns himself a Hero Point. He does an Acid Splash (cue Gideon impression). 15 misses. Augustus can move through Hartvig, and can place himself on the other side of the Mist Monster, and with that he and Sprocket are done.

Augie can’t do much as he has no ranged attacks.

Nadia shoots for 23 and 3 piercing. Her second attack misses, so she drops Bluebird and reloads Alkonost.

Joto makes a save to extricate himself, but even with Guidance doesn’t roll high enough. He tries again, fails, and accepts his fate.

Hartvig will rear up to his full height and hit the monster with his stick. 20 hits for 3 damage, and now Cry of Destruction does a d12 instead of a d8 “because I already smote it”.

Sadly, he only rolls a 2 on the D12, but the DM gives him a Pity Hero Point. He spits on the monster with his last action.

Skabbo whips out her Wand of Manifold Missiles, and uses the 2 action version. “Are you sure?” the DM asks, but she sticks to her guns so she can bosh a potion with her last action. 5 total damage, and her potion heals her for 3. “Fuckin hell. Yum yum yum. That’s me.”

Luna takes out her rapier and takes aim at the tentacle that is clutching Sprocket. She rolls her d20 first - a 1, nooo! Her second d20 is a 17, and the attack is 22 for 8 piercing and howdy doodis!

“He dissolves into a stinky pile of fleshy mist.”

Augrael looks really impressed. Hartvig can do… If he… Spell slots… Can he use a level 2 spell slot to cast a level 1 spell? After some confusion, it turns out he can, the DM rules. He does a 3 action Heal on everyone. We all get 6hp back!

“You cast that as an emanation, yes?” the DM asks, and we remember Augie. Shit, he’s undead! Just in time, Augie manages to jump out of the way. Phew! Hartvig waves at him. “Sorry, I’ll give you a heads up next time.” Augie smiles. Skabb shouts “Heads up,” and does another Heal, giving everyone 8 more hp.

Sprocket wants to give Joto a potion, but he refuses it. We would like to barricade the doors and heal up. “Back to the room,” Augie says, and is ignored. Those who aren't hurt either stand guard with Augie or do healing with medicine checks. Can we wait here longer and re-roll any poor checks?

Augrael says the ghouls patrol. They don't usually come here, but if they notice the mist monster is gone they might. If we are going to be longer than ten minutes, we really should go back to the room. Okay, okay, okay. Scratch the checks, we'll do potions. Sprocket and Nadia distribute healing potions, refusing to take no for an answer, and Skabb and Joto are almost back to full health.

Weird wall, weird wall! Augie refuses to go in. Sprocket stands next to the door and looks embarrassed, as he can’t reach the handle. Augustus leans over him and opens it.

An ancient rotting sofa sits on the opposite wall. And that’s apparently it for description. (Skabb hopes it’s a healing room that makes us superhuman. Or supergoblin.)

Sprocket investigates the wall. 26 Perception. There are doors to the north and south that were secret, but little Sprocket has noticed them! They are disguised as panels. Other than that, he notices nothing weird about them. He points them out to Hartvig. They suddenly have an overwhelming sense of being watched…

“Something in those trees,” says Sprocket, Danny Glover Danny Glover. Can they both make Will saves? Fuck.

“Oooookay.” a 12 and a 13; they both Hero Point that. Sprocket rolls an 18, Hartvig another 13. Sprocket is Frightened 2, and Hartvig is Frightened 3 AND confused (he treats no-one as an ally, not even Augustus.)

Sprocket hides under the sofa. Because he is confused, Hartvig must use 3 actions to strike or use offensive cantrips. He can attack either Joto or Sprocket, but he must use all 3 actions. Sprocket is in heavy cover, and shares a hit point pool with beefy Augustus, so Hartvig swings his stick at Sprocket. All three miss, partly from poor rolls and partly the sofa which gives Sprocket an extra 4 to his AC.

Augustus wants to go in and subdue Hartvig; Joto shuts the door behind him. Augustus makes a grapple attack on Hartvig - Athletics versus Hartvig’s Reflex save. Augustus 6 to Hartvig’s 14, and Augustus must make a Will save.

Skabb leans in to see what she can see - 23 Perception. She sees a glowing red eye on the western wall, glaring evilly between Sprocket, Augustus and Hartvig. “That’s some magic shit going on in there,” she announces. Does it look attackable? No, it’s a wall. In his Frightened state, Sprocket banishes Augustus. More Will saves; Hartvig 11, Sprocket 18.

“If only the one who could Dispel Magic wasn’t in there,” Skabb laments. Well, Sprocket isn’t confused, could he cast Dispel Magic? How does Frightened work in this game? The DM would clarify, but he’s rolling mental damage for Hartvig and Sprocket.

Sprocket flees the room, and Hartvig does the same but unfortunately Hartvig can’t pass through our space as he doesn’t consider us allies. (Sprocket can because he’s tiny.) He must now use his other two actions to attack Joto. He misses, and is able to reduce his Fear level by one, as Joto grapples him - but Hartvig is all elbows and can’t be grabbed. He attacks Skabb and manages to roll 0 both times. “Good thing you’re useless, innit?” Skabb says as she watches him swing wildly.

Sprocket regains control of himself first, as Hartvig’s Frightened level is now 1. He must still attack either Joto or Skabb, and as Joto just hit him with his war hammer, Hartvig directs his attacks at him. He misses all of them, and Joto hits him again.

Skabb wants to go in and go through the secret doors. (Hartvig loses his last Frightened level, and the Confusion as well.) Sprocket: “That was a weird wall.” Hartvig: “I’m not a fan. I’ve got a nosebleed now and I’ve been sick soil a bit.”

Can one of us Dispel Magic? Skabb goes in, and makes a Will save. She’s alone, so she can’t hurt anyone else. 21; she is Frightened 2. She Hero Points it: 26! She sees the red eye appear, and it stares at her but she ain’t bothered. “Haha! I wanna poke it. Is it a physical eye? I poke it right in its eye!” It is not, sadly. She Recalls Knowledge. She thinks that this is a Haunt.

Aha, we got rid of one of those before! She has two options to deal with it. She could do a Religion check to ward herself from it, or Deception to make herself uninteresting to the Eye. 20 Deception isn’t high enough. She tries a Goblin Song about really boring shit, like the different sorts of mud she knows about and the varying consistencies. She makes a Performance check - crit 26! “It’s the most boring song you’ve ever heard.” The eye fades off the wall and is gone!

Skabb flings open the door and cries, “Friends!” She wins a Hero Point, well earned. “I promise not to sing any more verses.”

Are the doors trapped, she wants to know? We bring the rogue in to have a look. (Hartvig takes some potions to deal with the war hammer marks on his forehead.) The DM rolls Perception checks for Luna. Neither door is trapped, but the northern one is locked. Luna picks it "like her favourite nostril”. 13 won’t cut it. Luna throws her arms in the air and declares the task impossible, as Skabb pokes a little claw in the keyhole and crits her Thievery check.

Skabb prances into the room to see what she can find. There are four alcoves, with silvery circles of runes. There is also a peep hole into the room beyond. Luna goes in to see if there are shinies.

Sprocket makes an Arcana check on the alcoves; 16. There are grooves in the floor that he believes once held silver that has since been stripped away. We’ve seen this before - it’s a Teleportation circle, or it was. It doesn’t work now. Hartvig, under his breath: “Fuckin vandals.” Sprocket does another check, a crit 26 on the next alcove. This one still has the silver in it, and could work if any of us knew teleportation magic, specifically the awaken portal spell, but he doesn’t know it. Any of us could perform it as a ritual if we had it, however.

There is another door back in the corridor. Nadia rolls a nat 1 on her Perception check and hears nothing, but there are cracks glowing with a faint greenish light like the one we saw above. The baby fly... Demon... thing. Nadia opens the door. A sofa against the wall and a strange green light, but no demon fly. The light forms words:

‘Belcorra fell to the Rose Guard, but we never knew of these vaults below.’

Nadia, saving Skabb from having to do Reading, says the words aloud for the others to hear. The light shoots off North.

The Rose Guard vanquished Velcro five (?) hundred years ago; Otari was the rogue of that party. The story is that the Rose Guard from Absalom heard of her foul sorceries, and came here to vanquish her. They won but lost Otari in the process, and left this place to form the city which they named after him. But the Rose Guard never found these vaults, it seems. So Velcro might not have been the big bad after all, Skabb theorises…

We leave it there for this week.

#dnd #pathfinder #abomination vaults #abomination vaults spoilers

[abominationvault]

““OPEN ARCHIVES OF NETHYS BITCH WE’RE LEVELING UP””

— Me to the party after we beat the boss.

[abominationvault]

Session 19: Sat 25 Nov 2023

Level 3! Skabb has a new ability that lets her climb walls and ceilings, and a new spell that lets her vomit vermin on people. Combined, that should make for some interesting combat. She gets so excited about it that she closes her character sheet, and then it refuses to reopen. Then Hartvig thinks he’s the only one signed in, when in fact he’s the only one NOT signed in. Oh, he’s in the Christmas Special game. “Ohhhhhhhh… Well that’s great.”

We get some last minute levelling done (and a good amount of buggering about), and off we go. Fortunately we don’t need a recap because we kicked everybody’s asses and that was about it.

There is a room of slaves (or prisoners?) to the north of us; Hartvig Heals himself and goes to have a chat with them through the door. The idea is that we leave them here for now and drag our sorry carcasses back to town for some healing and a rest.

“Hey! Who’s in there?” he calls through the door. He hears humanoids whispering to each other.

“… Who are you? Are you with those creatures?”

“… No.”

He explains that the creatures are still here, technically, but they’re very much dead. The prisoners say that the creatures killed their friend, and used their corpse as part of the big bone statue of the ghost queen. Ah yes, we saw that. Hartvig is sorry for their loss. He wants to let them out, he says. How many are you? "Three. We were four."

What were they doing here?

More whispering. “… Osprey Club business.”

Hartvig makes a Society check to see if he knows what that means; a four. (Sprocket rolls a bit better. They are the Thieves’ Guild, they work out of one of the pubs in town.)

If Hartvig lets them out, they are sure he will be rewarded. He will try; can’t have some innocent birdwatchers being held prisoner.

With some assistance from Augustus, he gets the door open. The room holds these three:

Skabb: “They look like they’re in some sort of goth band.”

They are not in good shape. Will we take them back to town? We’ll get a reward for rescuing them. They are warned not to steal from us; Skabb has sharp teeth. Sure, we’ll take them. We were on our way back anyway; we’ve run out of Kendall mint cake.

Skabb offers them a slug which they fall upon, and immediately the rest of us offer actual rations. They want to retrieve their belongings before we go. Sprocket and Augustus find them dangling down a well on a rope. Joto pulls it up.

Inside the bags is a waterproof firearms carrying case with what feels like a firearm inside, and a gunner’s bandolier. Nadia sidles up. Do those belong to them? They shrug and shake their heads. Well, if they don’t want them, Nadia knows someone who does, she says as she’s putting on the bandolier.

Inside the carry case is a pistol engraved with a picture of what looks like a harpy, and the name “Alkonost”. Nadia takes it, very pleased. Joto grabs some of the junk jet parts for Nadia to look over later.

We skip back to town and the townsfolk are still pleased to see us; the healers heal us back to full. Joto wants to get drunk and womanise. Nadia spends the evening playing with her new bandolier:

Luna goes with the rescued Osprey Club members back to the Crook’s Nook to get our reward. Joto goes with her to get drunk. We all end up going, in the end. Here we meet the leader of the Ospreys, Yinyasmera:

She approaches us to thank us for rescuing her people. She’s very welcome, Hartvig says and bows. She gives us 50gp! We are always welcome here. Drinks are always cheap, but tonight, for us, they are free. 60 would be easier to divide, Skabb says under her breath, and we are handed another 10gp!!

We do a bit of shopping for potions; Joto sells his crossbow and Nadia buys a couple of daggers. We are reminded that Skabb demanded a house. The mayor said he’d look into it. She waddles round to see him; he’s still working on it, he says. As soon as we can give him some sort of assurance that the event at the graveyard will not be repeated, he will find us one. Until then he is answerable to the people of Otari, and he cannot just hand us a house. He gives her a lesser elixir of life (3gp); she snatches it and says “I’ll be back.” She pockets the elixir and doesn’t tell the rest of us about it.

We pop round to see Boss Skrawng. Skabb is nervous. The last time we saw him he proposed to her. She sharpens her teeth in preparation. He is astonished that we are still alive. Mushroom eye people dead?

Yup!

Nasty magic priest mushroom eye dead? That too. He orders his mitflits to leave the room. When they've gone, he drops to his knees and grabs Joto’s leg. “Forgive boss! I have no gems!”

Joto: “… Motherfucker.” He does an Intimidating Glare.

Skrawng says he will cancel his plans to attack Otari. He will be good.

“Fine. Scuttle off with your little mitflits then. And you’re not marrying our goblin, either.” Skabb sticks her tongue out and wiggles her bum for emphasis.

Skrawng mentions the water dragon; he says it 'came out all bleedy'. Was that us?

Yeah.

She’s gone deeper into the fogfen, but he will tell us when she comes out. All very nice, but what is he going to give us, Skabb asks? Any slugs? He’s got some mud cakes. Skabb gets excited until Hartvig reminds her that that’s poo.

Skabb asks if Skrawng’s spider is poisonous? Can she milk it? Its name is Bite-Bite, it turns out. It’s not poisonous, she is told. Disappointed, she leaves.

Well if we’re all happy with that deal, we will leave them to it.

There are more doors on this level. Luna finds one, and Joto and Nadia ready attacks. Luna hears a faint buzzing through the door.

(There is a new feature on Roll20 which lets the DM split the party and put half on one map and half on another; we are all horrified and demand that he ignore it.)

Skabb wants to fight the buzzers; Luna checks the door. We all go sneaky-sneaky, and Luna has a peek. Behind is a short corridor and another door.

Luna: “… Oh, God.”

Joto considers vaulting over Luna, but as he’s a bit hung over, decides against it. Luna spots no traps in the corridor and has a listen at the new door. There is intermittent buzzing. Joto puts his hand on Luna’s shoulder like he’s a SWAT team; she shrugs him off, annoyed. She sneaky-sneaky has a look. There is a silver cane amid a group of mops and buckets...

Skabb wants to do a magic check. Sprocket has Magic Sense and can cast Detect Magic as a cantrip; we call him up to the front.

Luna: “Can you come and check this please? There’s a shiny and I want it.”

Sprocket casts the spell; there is no magic in the room. Luna makes a Thievery check to retrieve the cane: 13. A fail! We all gasp.

Joto wants to steal it instead. (The battle of the cats continues.) The DM wants to allow her to retry with a Hero Point; she does. Better - 25! (A crit fail would have knocked everything else over and made a huge noise.) She examines it - it is a sword-cane! Skabb thinks she should get a top hat. So fancy! Joto hates this. He doesn’t even have a cape any more. He’s not fancy at all.

Skabb wants to split the party and open two doors at once. “Anarchy!”

Skabb opens a door and finds this:

Yuck. We are all disgusted except Skabb who is, predictably, overjoyed. She shuts the door and tells the rest of us what she’s found. “Bzzz bzzz bzzz bzzz bzzz!” she calls, and the Initiative menu appears on our screens.

The thing goes first and attacks Skabb with its mandibles:

She doesn’t take the Evil damage because she is not of Good alignment; she’s Chaotic Neutral. She makes a Fortitude save - a 25. Just as well. It attacks her again for 12 more damage and she has to repeat the save; natural 20 for a 26! She is temporarily immune to whatever it is trying to do to her, yay!

Then the bastard thing goes invisible.

Joto wants to try to Perceive him. Can he hear it?

Wait - Nadia spots something. It has attacked twice, and the Invisibility thing was two actions...? The DM rewards her with a Hero Point, and retracts the Invisibility. (Joto wants to give Nadia his Hero Point.) It does a third attack against Skabb instead, and misses. Yay!

Joto shoots it with his bow but misses, and Recalls Knowledge about it instead. He thinks it might be some kind of devil, but he’s not entirely sure.

Nadia comes forward with Alkonost and shoots it; 29 hits! “… I like this new gun.”

Skabb necks a potion, which brings her back up to a third of her hit point max.

(The DM remembers that the thing is actually immune to some of the damage we’ve done; he’ll let our attacks stand for now. We’ve done mostly piercing so far.)

Skabb does Hydraulic Push and gets the howdy doodis! She splats it into the opposite wall, and some of its smashed body splashes back and lands in her mouth. If she wasn’t immune, the DM tells her, she would have to repeat her save again. She does a happy dance and licks her chops.

Joto has a go at healing her, but fails the roll. Sprocket takes a look at the body. He knows it’s a kind of lesser devil, and it was probably bound here against its will. It was probably forced to be some sort of janitor, since we found it in a cleaning cupboard. It has painted some stuff on the wall to remind it of home. We feel briefly sad for it, and then Skabb resumes desecrating its corpse.

Joto opens the other door. Inside are ‘humanoid objects’ like statues covered in dust standing in each of the corners. He puts Sprocket up on top of one so that it looks like he has a huge body, and earns himself a Hero Point.

Sprocket finds something made of clockwork up there; it is broken. Nadia has a go at repairing it, but rolls badly. She thinks they might have been some sort of cleaning automatons. She and Joto have a look to see if anything is salvageable, but they both roll too low.

Luna spots a shiny, and investigates. On closer inspection, it’s not as shiny as she thought it was (low Perception roll). Sprocket has a look with a +2 Circumstance bonus, was he’s got a good view from up there. He sees eight little gemstones among the clockwork, and he thinks he could maybe pry them out. They are worth 5gp each! He shows them to us all, as he’s got little understanding of the value of things like this. Skabb snatches one, and he offers the rest around. We thank him; he gives us a courteous little bow. (Skabb starts feeling weird about snatching the gem, though she doesn’t understand why.)

(Luna is feeling unwell, and bows out for the evening.)

Joto goes back and finds another door; we ready attacks and spells as he boots it heroically open and finds a bath and a commode. There are ribbons of eerie green light. “That’s not for me.” He steps aside and lets Sprocket in. The light is magical, he can see. He turns to us. “There’s some magic in here.” (Danny Glover voice.)

Skabb can poke her head in and recall knowledge, or maybe an Arcana check? She can do an Occultism check, but she doesn’t want to get too close. As she enters the room, the ribbons of light form letters.

“I was Otari. Save me from below.” Skabb reads the letters, against her better judgement, and tells the rest of us what they said.

The letters reform into ribbons and slither out the door and to the west. Otari was an adventurer, we remember. He was his party’s rogue, and he was killed when they came here to fight Velcro.

We follow the light - and find the bones of a long-dead body. It’s Otari! Joto kicks open the next door, and we are told to stay where we are.

Joto sees the light disappear under another door, and the Intitiative menu appears. Also, the bones on the table reform into something huge! The DM can’t find the handout, but it’s the skeleton of a minotaur, and it takes up *four squares*! So, not Otari, then.

We all get a free move action as the bones reform.

Luna is first up, so Sprocket takes over for her. He asks about the cane sword; does it do anything special to undead? Sadly, no. She stabs it with her rapier instead.

Skabb takes her turn to heal herself, but she can’t hurt it as well because she’s moved. She heals 15 hit points!

Hartvig does his new thing:

It’s a gross spell, but the thing is a skeleton, and doesn’t have any flesh. He looks embarrassed as a free action. The DM takes pity and lets him retcon. He casts Ray of Enfeeblement instead. It fails!

Skabb: “In your face, you big bony bastard!”

Hartvig has an action left. He could run away, or he could mock it…? Little Sprocket is next, so Hartvig casts Guidance on Joto.

Sprocket has Augustus give it a good battering, but 14 is just a miss. Enfeebled doesn’t affect AC, sadly. In which case, Augustus will slam it again - 23 ought to do it. The minotaur takes all 8 of the associated Thunder damage.

Joto can finally use Titan Wrestler!

So he does. He rolls 22 Athletics, sweeping it under the legs with his tail, and the skeleton rolls 18. “Ha! Fuck this guy, he’s on the floor!”

Joto makes his day worse by slamming him with his great axe. Because he is prone and flat-footed, Joto’s success becomes a Critical and he does 24 damage! He gets a Hero Point for his amazing attack. He raises the axe and swings it again - a 4. (It’s a shame Luna, AKA now the Second Best Cat, isn’t here to see this.)

It stands back up - do any of us have attacks of opportunity? No. Rats. Then it does this:

— against Skabb and Augustus. It’s Enfeebled, so it does less damage to Skabb and misses Augustus entirely.

Then this happens:

Nadia’s turn, and she whips out Bluebird for an attack. She gets a crit, and does 15 damage - and gets the howdy doodis! The bullet hits it in the chest, and it shatters back into its component bones. She gets a Hero Point as well.

The light went down some steps and further into the dungeon… We make to follow it.

Skabb wants to come back to a not-bleedy Skabb after the Christmas special, so the DM lets her heal up.

Next week, we begin our Christmas Special!

#dnd #pathfinder #abomination vaults #abomination vaults spoilers

[abominationvault]

Session 18: Sat 18 Nov 2023

Hartvig is away and the rest are all IRL except me, so notes may be sketchy. Right, what were we doing? Oh, we were killing morlocks - quietly. I’m being Hartvig, so if you die, I’m sorry mate.

Joto does a drunken recap - we went to a place and did some things, and there - wait - there were some little dudes, and then we left. A bad guy who worships the blood queen, maybe, and then we decided to kill everyone.

… Close enough.

Our DM has been making AI images of some of us, here is Skabb:

We heal up, regain spell slots, and Nadia cobbles some silencers together. She also gives her Healer’s Tools to Sprocket, on a more permanent basis. He’s better with them anyway.

The DM rolls stealth for us all, and announces that we all THINK we’re being stealthy. Joto dives for the next door and opens it. Beyond is a corridor with three doors on either side; Joto opens them to discover that they are empty cells. He spots something standing just in the opening on the other end of the corridor…

There is another squabble about who is the best cat which Luna wins, and launches our round of surprise attacks. She immediately rolls a natural 1, but Hero Points it, rolls again and gets a 2 for 10 total. Joto, naturally, finds this hilarious.

Nadia goes first and leaps into the room shooting wildly, misses, and reloads. Luna makes up for her uncharacteristically poor start with a nat 20, and takes one morlock from “full health” to “incredibly ropey” in one shot.

The morlocks attack Nadia, and she goes down. (So much for ‘fortune favours the brave’.) The rest ready attacks. Well, shit.

Joto springs off Luna’s shoulder and into the room, and does some stuff I can’t hear but I just know it was awesome. The morlock fails its save.

Graulgust does something awful:

Joto fails his save and takes 7 damage, and 1 Persistent damage. Hartvig casts Light on Joto's rapier. This affects only one of the morlocks so far, but he can’t get further into the room to cast it on something better.

Sprocket has Augustus make his way up the corridor. He gives off an eerie blue glow and a morlock gets an Electric Arc in the face, then it jumps to another. They both make the save and take half damage.

Skabb wants to know if Hydraulic Push only affects one creature? She might be able to shove one and trip him over Nadia’s unconscious body. (Nadia: “I’m useful after all, yay!”) It works! “Missiles, bitch.” She brandishes her new wand. “Pew pew pew pew pew pew!”

Nadia rolls a nat 1 on her Death Save, and is now Dying 2. She will Hero Point it on her next turn. Joto: “Don’t worry, I’ll save you before then.”

Luna disappears and does some shooting; 26 will do it.

A morlock jumps around the corner to attack Joto, but is immediately blinded by the Light on his rapier. It misses! Another attacks Luna and hits for 6 piercing damage with its dagger.

Joto tumbles through a morlock and opens a door on the other side of Luna, so that the morlock in the middle is flanked.

Graulgust flings some rubble at Hartvig for 3 damage. Hartvig retaliates against another morlock with Torturous Trauma and kills it, then ducks into one of the cells for cover.

Augustus does a two-fisted slam and kills one. Skabb takes aim with something (I didn’t hear what) (oh, her slingshot), and kills another! She then throws another Electric Arc; the first morlock makes the save, takes half of the two damage she rolled and dies. (Laughter all around.) The second fails and takes all two of the damage.

Nadia uses her Hero Points to stabilise - Unconscious, but no longer wounded.

Luna shoots and rolls a 1. She gets an 18 on her second attack - but it misses, as does the 14 for her third attack.

The morlocks attack Augustus, but he can add 1 to his AC so the attack misses. Sprocket: “Suck it!”

Another stabs Joto, so he stabs it right back. He crits and gets a howdy doodis! “With great gusto.” He’s not done - “More stabbings!” 13 misses, but he has and action left. He wants to drag Nadia to safety, but doesn’t have enough actions left.

Graulgust shouts something in Undercommon - Skabb understands it. “Get in here!” He’s shouting to the rest for help; they start rolling initiative. Graulgust casts Ray of Enfeeblement on Augustus, who rolls a 36 and still fails.

Hartvig casts Torturous Trauma on the one remaining morlock that he knows about, and then Guidance on Joto. “Bromance!”

Sprocket has renamed Graulgust as Ballbag, so in the grand tradition of bestowing new and better epithets on our enemies, he shall be known as such henceforth. Augustus Fist Slams a morlock but misses.

Skabb steps out into the hallway and shouts out what she heard, so the rest of us are aware that there are more on the way. She is told she must tell us in ten words or less. “He... shouted... those three fuckers... in here!” She does something else that involves rolling just a d4, but I don’t hear what. She rolls a 2, if it helps. She casts Scatter Scree on Ballbag. “… ONE shitty little damage?”

Ballbag crit fails his save and takes two damage. Ha!

The DM tells Nadia to roll a CON check.

Nadia, suspicious: “… Why?”

DM, snotty: “Don’t question me.”

She only rolls an 8, but if it had been a bit higher she would have woken up. Aw.

Luna attacks something with her rapier and gets a howdy doodis! (Some other stuff happens but I miss it because my husband is drilling directly underneath my D&D lair.)

Joto makes some Acrobatics checks, and then says “Stabbies!” He misses, and then drags Nadia to safety.

One of the morlock engineers uses its projectile launcher; Nadia will be sad that she missed this. It hits Sprocket. Then it hits him again for 7 more damage.

Graulgus- I mean Ballbag uses this:

And then runs away.

Hartvig is assured that everyone is within 30 feet and that no morlocks are in range, and does a 3-actioner.

Augustus grapples Ballbag like a toddler. He gets a Hero Point for his ballsiness.

The DM shows us an image of the morlock engineers:

Nadia, immediately: “Ohhhhh, I want one…”

Skabb does this:

Some fail, some succeed, but they all take some damage.

Nadia is awake - she springs back into the room, shoots, misses, and presses against the wall to add 4 (not 2!) to her AC.

Luna hits with a 19 and gets her sneak attack damage as well. “Dead?!” No, sadly. She shoots some more but misses.

Joto does some attacks with his Light’ed rapier. (All the engineers are blinded as well, now that he is up near them.)

Graulgus- Ballbag, wriggles free of Augustus.

Hartvig brings Joto back up (he went down at some point) for 15 hp, and Guides him as well. Joto: “This is the best dust-boy ever.”

Sprocket will cast Evolution Surge on Augustus, which gives him extra movement. Augustus will then try to leap over the engineers to try and grab Ballbag again - he rolls a 10 Acrobatics, but because he has +10 to his movement now he can barge his way through them instead. He rolls Athletics against Ballbag, a 1, which he Hero Points for an 18. That’ll do it! He swings him back into the room. No, he’ll suplex him.

Skabb wants to do magic so she rolls a d4? Not sure what’s hap- oh wait, it’s for the Wand. She then does a Chilling Spray, then an Electric Arc.

Nadia, awake thanks to Hartvig's (admittedly poor) Heal spell, does her Cover Fire attack - the morlock engineer chooses not to duck and she hits him - then presses back against the wall to keep both her hit points safe.

Joto tumbles toward the engineers, picks one that looks injured and hits him. “He’s gonna get it.”

DM: “What if he doesn’t want it?”

“Here it comes.” He crits on his attack AND damage rolls! He is also a Confident Finisher, so he does that as well.

A morlock moves up and shoots Skabb in the face; Nadia is outraged.

DM: “Is that more than ten over your AC, Skabb?”

“… Hold please! Your call is important to me…”

It crits its damage roll and she goes down.

Ballbag tries to get free of Augustus again, and succeeds. He then runs away.

Hartvig moves up and does Ancient Dust on two of the engineers. He does 1 Persistent damage on top of the 5 negative damage on each of them!

Sprocket will cast Boost Eidolon, and Augustus will give Ballbag “a good thump”. +2 damage is 9 total; Ballbag is in a bad way.

Skabb can make a Death Save or spend all her Hero Points; she rolls a 9 and is Dying 1. She swears she didn’t roll anything, so the DM gives her the benefit of the doubt and lets her spend her Hero Points instead.

Nadia chucks one of her bombs; it misses, but does splash damage. She reloads her gun (making up her mind to get a better one as soon as possible) and presses back against the wall.

Luna shoots a bit and hits, and Joto crits both his attack and damage rolls for a rapier attack against Ballbag! “Dead?!” Nope. “How is he not dead??!”

One shoots Hartvig - and Joto figures out he should have done more damage on Ballbag after all, and kills him! Yay! Another engineer hits Hartvig, so he only has 2hp now.

Hartvig sings Earth Song and puts his curse up one level, and runs away. (Sorry man. I was in a corner.)

Sprocket gives Skabb a healing potion. Augustus scoops up the corpse of Ballbag and launches it into the room with the engineers. He makes a Performance check to see if he can splatter their boss loudly enough to make the engineers turn around. Sprocket: “Just so you know, Augustus is for some reason trained in Performance.” Sadly he doesn’t roll very well and they don't even turn around.

It takes Skabb an action to stand up, so she won’t. Instead she casts Elemental Betrayal from the ground.

Nadia does her Cover Fire attack - this time the engineer ducks out of the way. He takes a -2 penalty to his next ranged attack. Luna moves up for some stabbage.

The engineers shoot Sprocket, and take him out. One aims at Skabb and misses. One shoots at Nadia and misses.

Hartvig does Torturous Trauma on another one and kills it, even with only doing minimum damage.

Sprocket rolls a d20 and stabilises.

Skabb uses her wand to heal Sprocket. Luna moves around to flank one of the morlocks with Skabb and gets the howdy doodis with her rapier. “I chop off his head!”

Joto uses his Hero Points to stabilise. Hartvig tries Torturous Trauma again but its luck has run out. He casts Guidance on Skabb. Sprocket does Acid Splash - luckily the splash damage misses Skabb, as she’s having a little lie-down.

Skabb tries Clinging Ice but misses, even with Guidance from Hartvig. She tries again and fails - but third time is the charm. She gets the Howdy Doodis on the last engineer!

Level Three, Level Three, Level Three!

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