Minotaur Warlord/Artificer

I tried tinkering with Character Builder a bit, but in the end I think that a minotaur serving as a front-line soldier during the Last War (I would totally play this guy in an Eberron campaign) made more sense than an artificer. I’m not saying it couldnt work, but I felt that it was cooler to have a minotaur charging into the fray instead of hanging back pegging creatures with a repeating crossbow.
The ability scores and racial features work with this a lot better, and I can always lump on artificer stuff through Multiclass feats or even using Hybrid rules. In the end this character works out well and is very functional, even when using artificer spells at later levels.

Tuska, level 1
Minotaur, Warlord
Commanding Presence: Tactical Presence

FINAL ABILITY SCORES
Str 18, Con 13, Dex 10, Int 16, Wis 8, Cha 13.

STARTING ABILITY SCORES
Str 16, Con 11, Dex 10, Int 16, Wis 8, Cha 13.

AC: 17 Fort: 15 Reflex: 14 Will: 12
HP: 25 Surges: 8 Surge Value: 6

TRAINED SKILLS
Intimidate +6, Heal +4, Athletics +8, Endurance +7, Arcana +8

UNTRAINED SKILLS
Acrobatics -1, Bluff +1, Diplomacy +1, Dungeoneering -1, History +3, Insight -1, Nature +1, Perception +1, Religion +3, Stealth -1, Streetwise +1, Thievery -1

FEATS
Level 1: Student of Artifice

POWERS
Warlord at-will 1: Inevitable Wave (swapped out for Magic Weapon as a houserule)
Warlord at-will 1: Opening Shove
Warlord encounter 1: Warlord’s Favor
Warlord daily 1: Lead the Attack

ITEMS
Khopesh, Light Shield, Hide Armor, Adventurer’s Kit

Homebrew: Keeper of the Light

A basic elite monster that protects/talks to/wields an intelligent sunblade, complete with teleporting minions that popped in every round to harass ranged characters (ie, Greymalkin). This was the last encounter that the group ran into during the second session of The Hydra’s Grave, and gave Grynn a chance to use some extended Arcana checks to try and interact with the intelligence bound to the sword. After some bad rolls and psychic damage, Grynn tucked it away to examine later.

June Editorial Calendar

June’s calendar is up. Mondays and Fridays are Eberron Player’s Guide excerpts, but I could give a fuck less about City of the Dead. However, couple those with Divine Power and Eberron Campaign Guide excerpts, and its a good month even for the non-subscribers.

I’m eager as usual to see what gets thrown into the Ampersand column, but there are a few other highlights to look foward to as well:

• Ecology of the Rust Monster
• Design & Development
• Ruling Skill Challenges
  
• Playing Revenants
• Dungeoncraft
  
• Class Acts: Bard
• Playtest: MM3

Preview(s): Pathfinder RPG

There is a massive, 60+ page thread on RPGnet that talks about the previews Paizo has revealed about the “new look” of Pathfinder‘s equivalent to the fighter. Well, and the sorcerer. If you want to sum it up, fighter’s still suck, spellcasters are still broken, and Paizo is still failing to correctly steal the good parts of Dungeons & Dragons to claim as their own.

According to Jason Bulmahn, the fighter isnt built as an optimized character, but to showcase…something. No one is really sure what, and they sure as hell arent impressed. Its a big-ass stat block of numbers that mean almost nothing to those who are not really, really into PRPGB. One poster compared Valeros to an ice devil, which while one CR point lower, can still kick the fighter’s ass without breaking a sweat…literally.

Compared to Seoni, the preview sorcerer, she can beat the shit out of Valeros even though she is four levels lower. With her magic, she can be untouchable and annihilate him without taking any damage at all. Even if Valeros could somehow reach her, dispel magic fixes all that fiddly balance bullshit that Paizo isnt concerned about.

Valeros sucks ass. He is easy to hit, deals dick damage, cant make a Will save to save his life, and can only compensate for his tiny AC and damage by further crippling his already meager attack bonus. Does Pathfinder add anything interesting to the fighter? In a word, no. There are more feats all around, but since they dont necessarily grow with your level, they end up becoming a rigid feat tree that you need by necessity to still fail to be on par.
Paizo apparently removed a high-level feature that gave you Damage Resistance in heavy armor, which while cute was almost entirely worthless since its better to not get hit at all, than to shave off a measly five points of damage. It wont do a lick of good if that attack also carries on level/ability drain or poison. Whoop. De. DO.

Fighters are boring and repetitive, which is made worse since they do things that other melee-oriented classes can do, just without extra options like raging or useless 4th-level spells. Hell, they do a LOT of things non-melee oriented class can do, and with spells they can do it more reliably and better. Pile all the feats on that you want, but if the end result is allowing your fighter to make a bunch of mundane attacks that probably wont hit, then whats the point? You just wasted half of your career path to be mechanically inferior to the monk. For an encore, they should add in another feat tree that gradually turns you into a bard, which might ironically be more interesting than a fighter.

Pathfinder succeeds at adding many new–if inelegant and unecessarily convoluted–mechanics to an already inelegant and convoluted system. It fails to fix the parts of 3rd Edition that needed it most (ie, interesting options), and instead just scratches the surface of what Wizards of the Coast did for Dungeons & Dragons and pretending that it was their idea all along: increase in hit points, more feats, easier to sneak attack, at-will spells, the list goes on. They claim its backwards compatible with your 3rd Edition swag, but only if you add more features to the races and classes that they dont/cant/wont add in the game later. Sound familiar?

Yep. This is exactly what Wizards of the Coast did with 4th Edition, except they didnt try to pass it off as the same game with a new name. Pathfinder is not D&D. Its kinda-sorta close to 3E, but you cant make a thri-kreen psychic warrior without houseruling the 3E version of both to put them on par with how races and classes are built now. They might add them or something similar in later, which is exactly what Wizards of the Coast has been doing with 4E. The fucked up thing is that I dont hear people going to the Paizo boards and having a bitch-fest over, “those money-grubbing bastards.”

Common theory holds that Erik Mona favores spellcasters, and if the preview iconics are an indication it certainly has merit given that the new sorcerer has a shitload of new stuff and some spells got a power kicker. Its bullshit to think that they couldnt make major changes to the system, since they wanted to cater to the played out copper mine that is the “old school” audience, considering that 3rd Edition released Book of Nine Swords. While still not sufficient to put melee combatants on par with spellcasters, it made a huge leap in progress to making them interesting and useful at levels above five. They could have easily made a similar system with a similar goal, and I have no idea why they didnt.

Spite, perhaps?

Another poster thinks that they are ignoring the best parts of 4E, “out of spite,” and I’m inclined to agree since they blatantly stole the easiest things that anyone could houserule in, but ignored the really good mechanics that would require some actual design experience. Thats really what Pathfinder feels like: a very heavily houseruled version of 3E D&D. The problem is that if I wanted to play 3E, houserules and all, I dont need to pay another company to think up houserules for me. I did that myself over a year ago and I’m more than happy to be done with it.

Delve Night: Silent7Seven vs. Goblins

This is my second stab at doing a delve run using playtest or otherwise new material. Andrew at Silent7Seven suggested I use a lot of their stuff this time around, and I was happy to jump at the opportunity since while I thought it looked interesting, wasnt sure how it would hold up to use. Since I’m cramming for finals, this isnt necessarily a more evocative delve, but it is longer.

Meet The Party

• Garrison (human rune soldier)
• Garrol (shifter bard)
• Howl (warforged druid)
• Xan’tchack (illithid sorcerer)
• Thrystan (dwarf totemist)

Every character here relies on some fashion on content given to me by Silent7Seven. The rune soldier is a heroic playtest class that you can snag for free from Silent7Seven, Garrol is equipped with the Moonleader feat which lets him boost an ally’s defenses when using a healing power once per encounter, Howl is using a wolf favored form feat, Xan uses the aberrant spell source, and finally Thrystan is a barebones class sent to me by Andrew.

Whew.

This was problematic because I was, again, on my own in this endeavor and had to rely on several notepad documents, scratch paper, and pdf files on a continual basis. It took quite awhile to get through this delve run, and one thing that helped was that I wrote a primitive transcript so that I didnt boggle events, hopefully making it more organized this time around.

Encounter 1 & 2: Goblins! (500-1000 XP)
This encounter started as a single 500 XP wave with the potential to add in another 500 XP of monsters if the players made too much noise. I determined this by rolling a d20, with a 10 or higher signifying that the other group noticed something was going on and decided to investigate for…whatever reason.

Here’s the opening shot of the forest before combat breaks out. I think at this point I was still trying to figure out where the party would enter, eventually deciding on the upper-left side. It was far enough away from the camp that it made it easier to justify how the hell the other goblins wouldnt immediately notice or hear combat breaking out.

So, the party universally rolls poorly on their Perception and Stealth checks, meaning that the goblins get a free surprise round. They spend their time basically diving for cover so that they are better protected the following round. This proves to be very good given that they also do really well on their Initiative rolls…

From a very safe distance, the goblins still manage to get in a few licks in before the party can retaliate, nailing Howl for 10 damage.

The only viable tactic I could come up with was to have everyone that had to enter melee to run (+2 Speed but grant combat advantage), but in the end Garrison still had to burn an Action Point in order to do anything useful. This was about the time I had to pause and quickly review how runes worked: Garrison used rune strike in order to deal damage and apply a rune of inferno, which also dealt ongoing 2 fire damage to the goblin (save ends).
Garrol botched prophesied strike, while Thrystan used generic totemist attack and designated it as his prey, giving Howl the prey bonus. The round was handily wrapped up by Xan’s use of mists of disarray, which rolled out 12 damage to one of the archers and pused it away from cover.

The goblins in area 2 failed to notice anything amiss, so kept sleeping, eating, arguing, or whatever the fuck it is goblins do when they arent being harvested for XP. None of the goblins managed to hit anything, but the one taking ongoing fire damage made its save. To make matters subjectively worse, they also noticed the blackblade skulking about a tree. As a temporary DM, I had hoped to keep it hidden a bit longer so that it could spring out and backstab a party member that would ideally be hoofing it for one of the sharpshooters.

On the other hand, the party did pretty shittily as well. Howl and Garrison both missed, allowing the goblin to scamper away, though in the end Thrystan managed to take it down. Garrol continued his missing streak with jinx shot (or is that jinxed shot?). The MVP thus far was Xan, who used induce mutation to good effect despite rolling minimum damage.

The warrior and blackblade both together in order to try and take out Garrison, but neither is able to land a blow, but he still takes an arrow while distracted. One of the sharpshooters panics and tries to flee, its shot going wild and missing Xan.

Garrison reapplies rune of inferno with a well-placed rune strike. Howl uses darting strike to tap one of them and get his ass out of dodge for the time being. I completely forgot about warforged resolve, probably because I kept forgetting that Howl was a warforged. Oh well.
Thrystan continues to use generic totemist at-will, which is basically him tearing the poor goblin apart with his claw-like hands, and giving the bonus to Howl on the off chance that it will actually work. In an unexpected twist of fate, Garrol successfully uses jinx shot. Finally, Xan continues to be awesome and deals 13 damage with induce mutation.

The goblins finally notice whats going on and decide to get up (eventually) and assist. One sharpshooter nails Howl, while the blackblade manages to give Thrystan a spinal tap thanks to his flanking bonus.

Howl leaps into the fray, missing spectacularly. Garrison decides to use rune strike to draw mark of the mindhand so that the blackblade will be forced to focus his attention on someone with heavier armor. Garrol uses majestic word, which is nice since you really cant fuck it up. This not only helps out Thrystan a great deal but moves him into a flanking position against the warrior, and at the start of his turn tears the goblin in half while also using second wind. Xan actually manages to miss.

At the start of Turn Goblin, the ones in area 2 begin closing the distance, using ranged attacks to make themselves known. A sharpshooter manages to drop Howl, and Garrison is bloodied by the blackblade and other sharpshooter. Garrison responds by killing the blackblade (finally!) with revitalizing strike, which heals him as well. Thrystan, suffering from a string of Garrol’s luck, misses. Garrol brings Howl back with majestic word while simultaneously taking out one of the minions, and Xan manages to take out one of the sharpshooters.

Thrystan takes a critical bolt to the face and Garrol finally knows pain. Howl manages to scramble to his feet and take out the other minion, Garrison slaps a rune of inferno on one of the warriors, Garrol responds with a very nice slash from war song strike, and Xan bloodies one of the warriors with a nice 20 damage shot.

Thrystan takes another crit, the minion misses, and the sharpshooter decides to try and leg it to the dungeon entrance. Howl’s favored form feat comes into play, and he is able to trip the warrior thanks to Combat Advantage. Thrystan cant hit shit, while Garrison pursues one of the fleeing goblins and cuts his head off. Xan immediately brings the sharpshooter into bloodied condition with a single critical mutation.

The last round went quick: everyone gang-banged the warrior, and Garrol finished off the sharpshooter just before he got into the dungeon with jinx shot. This encounter took quite awhile since I was rolling pretty badly for the players. I ended up burning through most encounter powers and Action Points, knowing that I was going to award them another after the battle was over since it was technically two combined.

The rune soldier gave me the most headache due to all the runes and effects that each rune has. It wasnt made any easier seeing as I was controlling five party members, each with new stuff.
I found that Howl was pretty easy to utilize, since his feat provided a nifty, thematic passive benefit. On a similar note, Garrol was easy to use since Moonleader only works once per encounter and does something very, very simple.
Xan was fun, though I found myself relying on induce mutation for almost everything since it was better than chaos bolt (which basically did the same damage but without the benefit). I was bummed that I never got a chance to use mind blast.
Thrystan would have probably felt different had I remembered to use his growl power that imposes a penalty and grants a bonus. All in all he felt a bit leaderly, which I think is totally awesome given the themes behind the gray wolf pack thingy.

In the end this was a fun exercise, and each character contributed well despite their shitty rolls. The only weak character might have been Garrison, since he has to use a rune to mark enemies, and that requires an attack roll to successfully pull of (all other defenders can do so for free or automatically with a minor action). If there was a way to more consistently mark enemies, it would help make him a lot more sticky.

Thats it for the first two encounters, I’ll post the last one later.

Dragon: Hybrid Characters, Take 2

Updated mechanics for hybrid characters is out, marking the end of May’s issue of Dragon. It is complimented by a Design & Development article, giving you some insight into the designer’s thought processes and methods.

The two big things that I noticed are that hit points and healing surges are now given in fractions, so you no longer round down and miss out, and the Hybrid Talent feat lets you pick from a list of options that are detailed in each hybrid class. Some of them work as explained in the class, while others are a bit different. You can also use it to become proficient with all armor and shields that the class might provide.

Note: Oh, you can also use paragon multiclassing to steal more shit from one of your hybrid classes, like how you can use paragon multiclassing to boost your multiclass-class.

At some point today I’ll build a hybrid character and compare it to a single-classed version to see how the math holds out (probably a druid-shaman). I like the theory of having a character that is a bit more evenly spread out, but I dont want to gimp myself for the sake of the concept. Only a handful of classes ever benefited from multiclassing in 3rd Edition, and those were the classes that werent getting anything useful anyway.

Multiclassing as it exists now lets me supplement myself and enforce the concept with the price of a single feat, and its cost I’m willing to pay since I know that despite everything else the rest of the character works fine (and I basically got Skill Training with something extra).

Excerpt: Self-Forged

This week we get a preview paragon path pertaining to artificers. The good news is that this means that between now and date, that if anyone is actually playing a non-houseruled single-classed artificer that there is finally an “official” paragon path to snag at 11th-level.

Self-forged are 4th Edition’s renegade mastermakers, and are artificers that augment in order to crib all the warforged’s racial features. You start out by replacing your arm with a battlefist (mine looks like Hellboy’s arm), and then gradually work your way up the chart: you get a +2 against ongoing damage at 11th-level, and can both attach warforged components and take 10 on death saves at 16th-level.

The battlefist is a mace category weapon that deals 1d8 damage and gets a +3 proficiency bonus. You can use Enchant Item, Disenchant Item, and Transfer Enchantment on it, but cannot destroy it with any ritual (only remove whatever bonuses you gave it). Thats pretty much what I would expect, but I’m glad Wizards added in the non-destruction clause since it’ll make things clearer for people that actually needed that degree of clarity.

As for powers, battlefist smash deals 3[W] and pushes the target equal to your Con modifier and also causes it to grant combat advantage. Not bad for an opener.
Self-repair is a standard-daily that heals you for your bloodied value. Very nice.
Finally, flailing gauntlet is your typical Hellboy-Nazi bad guy attack, where you launch your fist at an opponent. It says that its connected by a chain of force, but I think that a normal run-of-the-mill chain will do just fine, thank you. Its only got a range of 2, but targets Fort, deals 4[W] damage, and knocks the target prone. Oh, and for the rest of the encounter it gains reach 2 as an effect.

All in all I like it. Unlike the renegade mastermaker in 3rd Edition, the battlefist here is useful and the rest of the powers help compliment the entire theme. It gives me an idea for a minotaur artificer-tactical warlord when someone else runs an Eberron campaign…

Jaroo, Gnome Barbarian

Jaroo belongs to the Ghost-Stalker clan, which relies on their limited invisibility to hunt and kill. Since gnomes get a Charisma bonus, I decided to go with the thaneblood class feature with the intention to later multiclass into shaman, bard, or perhaps sorcerer (to bank on the magical aptitude that the race possesses). To this end I cranked up Charisma quite a bit higher than I expected, which synergizes extremely well with thaneblood.

In the beginning, I just had an image of a gnome with wild hair and a cracked, bone-white mask, packing a humongous sword. Initially my only concern was to just give him a Strength of 16 and call it good, figuring that everything else is gravy. However, in the end I thought more and more about it and the concept started to solidify into something more than just a random race and class combination.

This is a character that I would absolutely love to play. Its a gnome that plays like a gnome would, but not like gnomes I expect to see (and certainly not a gag character). At this stage he’s up and running, but perhaps not as optimized as he could be. I dont expect to use complicated tactics, and in fact would possibly attempt to provoke an opportunity attack just to gain invisibility for an encounter or daily attack (assuming he hasnt gotten smacked already).

Jaroo, level 1
Gnome, Barbarian
Feral Might: Thaneborn Triumph

FINAL ABILITY SCORES
Str 16, Con 15, Dex 13, Int 12, Wis 8, Cha 15.

STARTING ABILITY SCORES
Str 16, Con 16, Dex 13, Int 10, Wis 8, Cha 11.

AC: 15 Fort: 15 Reflex: 12 Will: 11
HP: 31 Surges: 11 Surge Value: 7

TRAINED SKILLS
Intimidate +6, Endurance +7, Athletics +7

UNTRAINED SKILLS
Acrobatics, Arcana +3, Bluff +1, Diplomacy +1, Dungeoneering -1, Heal -1, History +1, Insight -1, Nature -1, Perception -1, Religion +1, Stealth +2, Streetwise +1, Thievery

FEATS
Level 1: Weapon Proficiency (Bastard sword)

POWERS
Barbarian at-will 1: Devastating Strike
Barbarian at-will 1: Howling Strike
Barbarian encounter 1: Vault the Fallen
Barbarian daily 1: Swift Panther Rage

ITEMS
Bastard sword, Hide Armor, Adventurer’s Kit

Songs of Erui: Session 3

Party Roster

• Kegan (dwarf paladin 2)
• Greymalkin (razorclaw shifter ranger 2)
• Maev (elf druid 2)
• Grynn (gnoll artificer 2)

As a quick recap, the campaign opened with the party tracking down a gang of goblins that had been harassing the village of Dorsen. I prefer to start my games with dice rolling, and gave them ample time in order to figure out why they were already teamed up and heading into the Bone Forest. Greymalkin (razorclaw shifter ranger) and Grynn (gnoll artificer) were able to track the goblins to an unknown ruin that they later determined to be a very, very old eladrin crypt.
Inside, they killed a shitload of goblins there were looting the place, and then decided that two-wrongs make a right and that they might as well loot it in their stead (perhaps to eliminate further temptation). The crypt is arranged with a central chamber and three linked, hidden crypts specific to three different eladrin houses. Amongst the minor items and silver that they found were an assortment of metallic icons that Grynn was able to use with his Arcana skill to open up portals within the central chamber, leading deeper into the dungeon.

The second session started with Kegan (dwarf paladin) arriving, having witnessed a figure stalking him in the forest. He claims to have received a vision from Miach (the Erui variant of Moradin) to seek out a strange symbol (triskelion), which lead him to the crypt without any sort of assistance. He didnt know what was in the woods, except that it started to get extremely cold, so he ran inside and found them.
Using the wolf-like icon, they encountered a bunch of frostblade skeletons and undead wizards before running into a searing suit of gold armor packing an intelligent sunblade. In a nutshell, they managed to strip the place of anything valuable, learn that some of the swordmages can sustain ice walls, and that teleporting minions are a bitch.
Oh, and Greymalkin had to put down Adrian’s invoker (I cant remember his name, and he kept changing/adding more to it) since he thought it would be fun to attack party members that are unconcious and dangerous close to being actually dead. I can haz party dynamics?

Last session, the players managed to clear out one-third of the dungeon in its entirety. One of the frostblade swordmages managed to escape, but they encountered it as they tried to make it back to the crossroads, so its all good. He put up quite a fight, though Greymalkin did try to utilize diplomacy before arrows. In his defense, he couldnt understand what the fuck it was saying since as far as Maev (elf druid) and Grynn can figure, they are speaking an ancient root dialect of sylvan.
After putting it down, they decided to use the silver owl icon and check it out. There they discovered a mural depicting dwarves and eladrin allying themselves against fire archons, much to Kegan’s consternation. They looted some dwarf sarcophagi under Kegan’s tenuous rationales of, “they don’t need it,” before alerting an entire hive of kruthik to their presence. This was made worse since some of the walls were illusionary, which caused many of them to get swarmed by ravenous young and hatchlings. Just when they thought they had things under control, mommy showed up and basically ruined their day.

The last room they went into contained a massive ice shard, bound within a rune circle. Now, this changed a lot from my initial design. One thing that Josh (Greymalkin) has realized is that entering a room and tampering with shit causes the dead to get up and try to stop trespassers from trying to steal their shit. Most of the chambers and halls have either a mural, relief, or some depiction of eladrin history or a bunch of graves and vaults built into them. Once shit hits the fan, bones start pouring out, skeletons start crawling out, or undead just start teleporting into the chamber. Sometimes this triggers other chambers to “wake up” as well, which happened in the wolf-crypt where soldiers and spiritual hounds started charging from different hallways.

This time, Josh decided to have everyone kind of spread out before cracking a vault. He gave the rune circle a wide berth before giving one a shot, and was ready when a bunch of skeletons covered in frost and rime started spilling out. What he wasnt ready for was that most of them were going for the shard, using it as a powerful focus for a “cold-based Death Star beam attack”. I decided initially to have it grant a +1 bonus to damage with cold attacks and resist 5 fire, but then decided that they could all channel their magic into it and use it to generate a more powerful beam based on the number of frostcasters touching it.

As Greymalkin and Maev started picking them off, more frostblade skeletons showed up, as well as an ettercap husk packing four longswords and wearing eladrin armor. This was certainly not what anyone was suspecting. Kegan was able to hold off all three frostblades while Greymalkin and Grynn had to hold off the ettercap husk. Once they took out all the frostcasters, Grynn took control of the ice shard and started using it to blast apart the frostblades and spiderhusk swarm that erupted out of the ettercap when it was destroyed.

And thats where the session ended.

Kalashtar and Telepathy

Khyber’s Harvest is one of many things you can get on Free RPG Day, which is a Dungeon & Dragons adventure written by Keith Baker, and it includes a kalashtar invoker as one of several pregen characters. While the poster wouldnt go into many specifics, he did reveal that one of the racial abilities is telepathy 5 as a language, they get +2 to Wisdom and “something else” (probably Intelligence or Charisma), and have a racial power that buffs their allies’ Will defense.
This sparked some complaining debate about the overall power of telepathy and how it might invalidate languages and the Linguist feat. Keith Baker himself showed up and made many clarifications, alleviating the bitching concerns about its abuse.

Oh, and he also dropped some vague information on dragonmarks.