#gracus

[viridianreverie]

My age? Young one, I no longer remember when I was born. I remember the sunsets and sunrises I have seen. I remember the young life that I have watched become old and wither. All I can say is...I have lived long enough to appreciate the gifts of life.

-Gracus, Ancient Protector

[rptv1]

Gracus the Centurion

by Boris Vallejo

Top photo shows steps used to create final picture (preliminary sketch, then live models, including the artist himself (bottom photo)

[part-time-adventurer]

At what point does a campaign die?

Real life sometimes gets in the way, a session or two get missed. We’ve seen car trouble, holidays and other-halves’ shift patterns get in the way before, but we’ve always got back together. 

We’ve seen players drop out for one reason or another; first was the original PC party fighter, two years ago now, and then the cleric over the summer, but we’ve carried on. New players have joined over time; we even had to turn away players because we had a full house.

It has been seven weeks since our last game. That’s not long enough to call it dead, but it is by far the longest we have gone. I am worried...

It was October 2012 when Arith’s adventure began. I was a different person back then, a stoic ranger quite unlike Mentathiel, but I have been there by his side since that day. Two of us against the darkness. A fighter joined the next week, Jensen, and we set out.

Over time, we gained a cleric in the form of Gracus, watched Berric die and be reborn, rescued and recruited the warrior Ulric, encountered Mentathiel the rogue, and finally lost Berric when the opportunity came to heal. In recent weeks, we met the monk Jenni, but have not had the chance to get to know her. We also lost Gracus to events beyond our control.

It has been over three years since the adventure started, but so many threads remain unresolved. The Whispering Way have not been stopped, Mentathiel and her sister Kendra have not been reunited, Mentathiel and the demon Jarahmeel have not yet resolved their relationship issues.

The campaign stands at the opening of the final chapter, but it seems to have stalled. I wonder if I could have accepted the story ending before the epilogue had fully resolved those loose secondary plots, but the final chapter? We are close to seeing the final battle, saving or condemning the world, and it’s all gone quiet...

It’s sad to see any roleplaying campaign die, but after three years, I have a lot invested in this.

[part-time-adventurer]

Not that kind of rogue...

Mentathiel is not a typical rogue. She has most of the normal skills that a rogue requires, stealth and sneak attacking and trap-diffusing, but she’s always been more on the subtle side. I have relied on diplomacy and bluff more than most, slipping poisons into drinks more often than applying them to blades and favouring non-lethal options where possible.

As you can imagine, this leaves me a little underwhelming in combat. I can get a few good hits in with a dagger and I do tend to hit at least once a round in combat, but Ulric, our party fighter, deals better damage more consistently. 

On the other hand, Ulric fights fair and Mentathiel does not...

Last Night’s session perhaps epitomises this. We were coming to the end of a long fight scene - I think we were nearing 12 hours over three sessions, down to the final few spells and potions, when the BBEG died and that was only due to my unique talents - and the BBEG, a vampire witch started chanting. Arith, our blind wizard, recognised a powerful summoning spell and I had previously informed him of an intricate circle marked out in blood on the floor of the chamber she was in. When the summoning ended and she started speaking abyssal, a language both he and Mentathiel speak, we knew it was bad. When he recognised the name of the demon, we realised it was far worse.

Luckily, I saved the party. 

At the time, I didn’t do anything except laugh, but that was only because I had already saved us two weeks ago before the battle started. This is a good thing as it happens, since I was currently unable to fight due to failing a save against charm person.

You see, Mentathiel likes to scout and rig the battlefield. She has a ring of invisibility and had circumvented the sentry laid to prevent us from interfering. When she saw a magic circle, intricately-runed in blood and currently inactive, she took the time to break  it. While some people might have destroyed it, washing it away or through some other grand gesture, Mentathiel just defaced one or two tiny runes. It was deliberately subtle, but she checked with the wizard through a psychic link to make sure that she did it right.

Demons in Pathfinder, like their D&D counterparts, need to be bound with very specific runes and circles. It would be suicide to use a defaced circle and no caster worth their salt would ever try using a circle which was obviously broken. But then again, who would even spare a second glance at a circle that no foe has even approached?

We listened as the demon pointed out the mistake, as he snapped the neck of the witch’s final ally. We watched as he stepped out of the circle and advanced on her menacingly. The fight should have ended right there and then, except for Arith...

Mentathiel has one other major difference from most rogues; she doesn’t covet physical possessions, since she was raised as a spy who was supplied with what she needed by her employers or the church of Calistria. In fact, she doesn’t even have a single point in Appraise. Sadly, the rest of the party more than make up for this and they suddenly realised that letting the demon drag her to the abyss would lose us some loot.

Arith’s diplomacy was enough to convince him to leave her to us and so began an hour or so of tense combat as a party with almost no spells or items left fought a witch who had barely cast any of her spells and was casting spells from a high-level staff too. Worse, the demon’s indiscriminate parting shot left Ulric and Mentathiel temporarily insane and unable to join the fight. One wizard down to his last four spells (two of those being Dimension Door and Featherfall) and one cleric faced off against the BBEG...

Stripped of allies, I am happy to say that she did finally die. I ended up shaking off the visions of madness and vaulting ten feet into the air to share a flying broomstick with the cleric, adding my own damage to his just as the fight came to a close.

Being a vampire, we watched her ghostly form slowly return to its sarcophagus to regenerate, but she would be helpless temporarily and so Ulric lifted the lid to drive a stake home.

He was too late...

A little while back, after finding her sarcophagus during my scouting, I had set up a trap with Gracus’ help. It was a long-shot, but I had this theory that I could work out just where to place the stake so that her returning form would coalesce around it and make her stake herself. The DM now asked me to roll percentile dice to see if it worked.

99... Either very good or very bad.

Ulric opened the lid to see the vampire neatly staked already, another of Mentathiel’s cunning plans come to perfect fruition. Further proof that subtlety and foresight will often trump brute force...

[part-time-adventurer]

Keep Him Occupied

The whole adventure seemed to have been building up to this point. Two factions of vampires were vying for control of the city and we had chosen the least bad (most willing to maintain the centuries-old truce) faction to support.

After some amazing investigative and stealth work, I (as Mentathiel) had brought my party to the crypt belonging to the leader of the rebels. The party had taken some negative levels (our 12th-level party now contained a 3rd-level cleric (Gracus) and a 5th-level fighter (Ulric)) and Arith (the wizard) was dominated by a vampire, but we had to press on because we had a couple of hours to stop a coup.

Arith could not shake the domination effect. He had been given so many chances to save and kept failing, even though he only needed to roll a 5 or something. Finally, with the help of a Protection from Evil spell, he temporarily shook off the effects. We had very little time (a third-level cleric's spells tend not to have a very long duration) and it was only luck that Arith had prepared a fairly sturdy magic circle against evil; we tried not to think about the fact that it was created so he could call some nasty-sounding demons for his new master.

So the wizard sat in the circle while Gracus prayed for some Restoration (he had not prepared all of his spells and the DM lets us fill unused slots later if we are willing to stop and prepare them) to bring him back to full power. So, for about half an hour, we sat there in the middle of a vampire’s lair with a short-duration Hide From Undead the only thing between us and death from all the vampires wandering around.

And then, after another protection from evil and confirmation that Arith was himself for a while longer, we did something unwise; we let the wizard come up with a plan.

The plan made a certain sense; he would call (Planar Binding) those scary demons he had prepared the circle for. A pair of big, scary demons (Arith was vague on what he was calling, for the sake of the slightly-uptight cleric) would have to fill in for our 5th-level fighter as we tried to take down the vampire.

So, it would take 10 minutes to call each one. That’s fine; the magical protection would last about 3-4 minute beyond that time...

Two minutes from the end of the summoning, the vampires started leaving and we were going to lose them. All but the leader (our target) had left, so this was both our best chance to kill him and our last chance to save our current patron.

Arith would not relinquish control of his spell. He told us to keep the vampire occupied. Why not? 1-2 minutes is only 10-20 rounds after all... Ulric, being a puny 5th-level fighter said he was sitting this one out. 

So, no fighter or wizard then...

As we opened the secret door to his inner sanctum, he knew something was up. He could not see us (his Will saves were awful apparently) and nothing he could do would change that, but he knew something was there. As he stepped forward, he drank a potion which displaced his apparent location. Now we had a 20% miss chance, which was a pain in the backside, but we’d live. And then the DM mentioned that you cannot sneak-attack someone who is using displacement.

No fighter, no wizard, no sneak attacks, 20% miss-chance...

Striking from invisibility, I tried to disarm his to help give us a chance. I made the 20% to hit him, rolled CMB and failed. Great... We’re now visible and he’s still armed and I still cannot sneak-attack him.

We knew this could go badly. We had both rolled badly for initiative and neither of us expected to last 10 rounds, let alone 20. We had one more attack in the surprise round, so the cleric put everything he had into it. His blessed mace allowed him to channel his divine power into a smite attack, so he did that. It was Undead-Bane and all sorts of cruel, so he was looking at 11d6 damage if it hit. 

It hit.

Now 11d6 is not as great as it sounds. You are looking at 11-66 with a median value of about 39 for a good chunk of damage which will maybe slow him down a little, but is not going to kill even Arith, a wizard in one hit. The disadvantage is that he needed to collect dice from every player to make up that number. I myself carry 9d6 (my highest possible attack is a sneak-attack vampiric touch for 8d6), but he preferred full-sized dice to the little Games Workshop ones I use for sneak-attacks.

While he collected them and tried to work out how to roll that many dice, he said the DM might as well roll a Will save against the Disruption effect of the mace. It rarely worked and the DC was only 14, but you never know...

Now here’s the funny thing... Even a CR 22 vampire (apparently this direct attack was meant to be suicidal even with a full party) can roll badly on a Will save. In fact, I did mention that he was bad at Will saves.

The divine magic of Sarenrae shattered his mortal form in a single blow, reducing him to dust and ash. The villain was brought low.

In the other room, Arith continued his chanting. With seconds to go, Ulric saw a demonic form taking shape in the circle and ran to stop Arith. He tried, but he was too late.

The swirling shapes coalesced into something terrifying, but the dice-gods will have their balance. The creature succeeded on its ridiculously-high save to resist the calling and dissipated before it was fully formed.

Arith was now himself again. The vampire who had dominated his mind was dead...

[part-time-adventurer]

Watching a CE vampire and a LG cleric trying to flirt led a certain paranoid part of my brain to start screaming that he was completely out of his depth. I was waiting for the failed Will save and the moonlit walk that ends in a subterranean crypt.

All I said was that he needed to be friendly, that we needed the vampires on our side; I never told him to flirt...

[part-time-adventurer]

Mentathiel and interpersonal relationships

I suppose the only person Mentathiel did not get on with was Berric. They just had such diametrically-opposed views despite sharing the same nominal alignment and half a skill-set. Berric was quiet, thoughtful and yet implacable when he set his mind to killing where Mentathiel was outgoing and willing to kill only when things went wrong. Mentathiel just couldn't get comfortable with his single-mindedness and lack of moral flexibility, a trait we will see again later.  Unlike the ranger, Ulric has cracked jokes. Ulric has probably even smiled under that (creepy) mask. Ulric knows how to complement her skills and they work as an effective pair in combat which quickly leaves gently-twitching corpses and a lot of blood. She's never going to have an in-depth conversation with him, never going to debate the finer points of poetry, but he's got her back and she's got his. As far as Mentathiel is concerned, Gracus is a problem. He's not a bad person, not a danger to her, not even someone she dislikes. They've pulled each other's backsides out of the fire (perhaps he's done it more, but who's counting?) and fought back to back, but their moral codes don't ever seem to mesh that well. It's not just about Jarahmeel, it's about how comfortable he is with killing too and about necessary evils and the general sense that any plan she concocts with Arith includes the same caveat; don't tell the cleric... Finally, Arith... Oh, the tomes she could write about that boy... And there's part of the problem. She sees him as a boy, not a man. He's trying too hard to be some kind of arch-wizard in her mind and that leaves him trying to be too firm and dour. Yeah, he's seen some awful things, but so have they all. He's also morally compromised and not in the way she's comfortable with. It's a shame, because she does kind of like him; he's the only one in the party near to her age (though not being human, she's kind of older and younger than him at the same time) and that probably makes a difference. There's nothing romantic there, but I think she kind of wishes she knew how to fix him. She found her equilibrium, so there's some hope that he will find his somehow, but there's also the chance that she can't save him and will end up having to stop him instead.

[part-time-adventurer]

DM: The pool radiates powerful necromancy, but without Arith†, you can't tell what spell it is.

Ulric: I'll look at the pool then.

DM: It is murky, reddish-brown and has bits of meat and bone floating in it, but you can see a glint of metal at the bottom.

Ulric: Can I use my sword to poke around?

DM: Okay, you spot a silver dagger at the bottom of the pool.

Ulric: I take the dagger.

DM: What? You just reach in and grab it?

Ulric: Yeah...

DM: You feel a burning sensation where the water slips through the gaps in your gauntlet. Within seconds, the burning extends up your arm and across your body. You fall back, but it's too late; your flesh is on fire, but the flames are inside your armour where you cannot reach them to put them out.

Ulric: ...

DM: The other party members smell roasting pork and you turn to see steam and smoke billowing out of the gaps in Ulric's armour.

Gracus: I run over, ready to heal him; what do I see?

DM: You pry off a few plates and all you see is black, charred flesh.

Gracus: Using my Eyes of Deathwatch‡ to check him out, do I think he can be saved?

DM: You activate the magic and you realise that even though he shouldn't be alive, he's still conscious. He has one hit-point...

Mentathiel: (OOC) *looking over at Ulric's sheet* He just took 98 points of damage in one go? Glad that wasn't me or I'd be dead twice over...

DM: Ulric seems to be trying to say something, but his face and throat and lungs are too badly damaged. In the end, he brings up his hand and you can see something metal glinting in his paralysed hand.

Ulric: (OOC) I got the dagger? Then it was all worth it!

Menta: You need to think about your priorities...

__________

† Arith, the party wizard, caught a slight cold (which even Cure Disease couldn't shift) while his player was absent.

‡ We don't get to see our hit-points, just a vague "you think another hit like that would kill you" from time to time, so Eyes of Deathwatch are the only time we get a numerical value for health