After a three-week hiatus we finally managed to get in a short session. Having liberated some treasure from some gith mummies, they proceeded through the canyon until they reached the entrance to the gith’s cave. A bunch of gith were gathered outside, doing gith things and playing gith games. Some were stationed on top of rocky spires (using a terrain feature out of Creature Catalog).
Category Archives: the heirs of ruin
The Heirs of Ruin, Play Report 8
The characters arrived at South Ledopolos and met with the Stoneblood clan to inform them about the fate of Baranus. They buried his bones and held a wake, telling stories and drinking drinks the likes of which could even get a dwarf drunk. Branor asked about any legends concerning the purported city to the west, and got some stock-legend tropes about it once being a great dwarf city that was destroyed during a great war. If nothing else, it reinforced the fact that something was out there. Maximus met with a former war buddy of his, who–after hearing about him being tried with treason, the murdered family, and having to flee Balic–offered him a job cleaning gith out of a cave that he strongly suspected contained silver.
The Heirs of Ruin, Play Report 7
After burying the dead, the caravan continued on its way to South Ledopolos. Rather than “Indiana Jones” the trip, I asked them what their characters would be doing for the day. Beth (aka Maximus) decided to strike up some conversation with the caravan leader, a man named Canth. I played Canth as a similar personality to Maximus; serious and disciplined from living a life of danger running trade goods between cities. She learned some rumors about the Giant’s Rib Mountains, as well as the giants from the Silt Sea.
The Heirs of Ruin: Meet Hakaar
The Heirs of Ruin Play Report 6
With all the guards and jhakaars slain, the characters were now free to scope out Hakaar’s house. It was night so they could clearly see that there were no lights on, and they could not hear anything from outside, so they concluded that either Hakaar was either a heavy sleeper or that no one was home. A win in either case. The front door was locked briefly before Jiga got her picks on it. Inside they found some alright furnishings, but a fine layer of dust coated almost everything, indicated that the place saw little use, if any. I handled the investigation like a skill challenge, allowing them to use their skills to locate the prisoner (or at the least his prison); it was a pretty easy feat to narrow down the areas of the house that actually saw activity, and locate a hidden passage soon after.
They followed a short passage underground, which terminated at a stone door with a ring of red runes. Branor deduced that red, glowing runes are often a bad thing, while Sardis’s experience with magic more accurately concluded that it was some form of fire based trap. A very low Arcana check confirmed her assessment to the tune of 20 points of fire damage and being knocked on her ass. As if being bloodied was not bad enough, it also alerted Hakaar to their presence.
They sucked it up and opened the door, finding Hakaar standing before a blazing brazier and an unconscious man chained up in the corner; the very picture of villainy. They exchanged some words and threats, but Hakaar’s patience quickly wore out and he summoned a pair of magma beasts in the shape of Large scorpions that flanked the door. This did not stop many of the party from trying to get in, provoking an assload of opportunity attacks, but with the silver lining that Branor got to give his defender’s aura a strenuous workout early on.
Hakaar proved to be a pretty potent pyromancer, tossing around scorching bursts, a burning hands, and even having a few abilities–Elite kickers that felt niftier than another double attack–that let him turn up the heat when characters took fire damage when it was not his turn (which was most of the time, since almost every attack that the enemies had dealt fire damage). In fact, despite having a full suite of party members he actually managed to kill Maximus. Well…I hand-waived it at first, but after Beth’s persistence I finally relented that yes, Maximus did die (by only a few points), but would be raised by the Veiled Alliance anyway so it was all kind of a moot point.
I guess it worked out for the best in the long run, because after Maximus came back to life he retained faint memories of wandering a cold city composed entirely of black glass, which is foreshadowing if I’ve ever used it. Which I did.
So with the prisoner and loot in hand–including a fire elemental that Sardis bound to herself, gaining a gift of fire–the party made it back to Wavir’s enclave, and with nothing better to do was packaged up in crates and shipped out of Balic’s city limits. Once safely out of sight, they were let out of the crates with the understanding that Girias had instructed the caravan to at least escort them to South Ledopolos, which was nice because that will be their launching point to a rumored lost city that they’d heard so much about. We wrapped up the night with a nice attack comprised of sunwarped hyenas and a couple flocks of kestrekels, whereupon I learned that the dwarf knight is really fucking hard to chew through, and the psion is really good at obliterating swarms.
The Heirs of Ruin Play Report 5
After looting the necromancer’s lair they returned to Barunus’s ghost, gathered up his bones, and made their way to the surface. Almost immediately there were spotted by a patrol, which could have easily overwhelmed them had a pair of newfound friends not shown up; a dwarf named Braynor Stoneblood that knew Maximus from awhile back on one of his tours, and a bizarre crystalline entity that could manipulate objects whose named escapes me. After defeating the guards and stealing their uniforms, they decided that the best way to safely get out of Balic would be to get in touch with House Wavir due to Jiga’s connections.
Unfortunately, they had to cross the Market Precinct to get there.
I ran the same skill challenge as before, asking the group to tell me how their characters would try to get there, and got some different–but still impressive–results; Maximus wanted to try the backstreets, Jiga and Braynor tried to mingle with the crowd, and Sardis, well…he got spotted pretty damned quickly by guards on the lookout for “anyone with a mysterious halo”. He legged it, I prompted him for an Endurance check, and he managed to get some distance between them. They split up, trying to surround him, and so he made an Athletics to get on the roof. Maximus tripped one of them, but a botched Athletics roll caused both the guard and him to fall. The guard recognized him pretty quickly, but was silenced by a dagger in the throat (though Maximus lost a healing surge during the scuffle). With Sardis on the roof, Braynor and Jiga rallied the mob against the guards by tricking them into thinking that they’d killed their baby while chasing Sardis. As Sardis moved from rooftop to rooftop, Braynor managed to take the handful left out with a well thrown rock while they were scaling a wall after him.
Again, things flowed really well and seemed much more cinematic. The players didn’t just spam whatever skill had the best bonus, and they seemed to enjoy it a lot more than usual.
At the Wavir estate, they made a deal to help retrieve a prisoner from a minor noble in exchange for safe passage out of the city. Supplied with fresh clothes and an actually balanced party, they staked out the estate for a good while–during which Sardis detected a steady pulse of evocation magic underground–before just storming the walls, which was still pretty effective. It was a fairly lengthy melee briefly made worse when someone got knocked onto the ground and a pair of jhakaars showed up, but ultimately no one got hurt that a few healing surges couldn’t fix. We had to wrap things up there, but next session will be actually getting into the house and figuring out what is going on.
The Heirs of Ruin: Going to Ground Skill Challenge
I started running The Heirs of Ruin for two different groups, one of which already managed to get out of the sewers, after which they had to try and lay low for awhile. I had intended to use the skill challenge Going to Ground out of Dark Sun Campaign Setting as a guideline, but ended up just saying fuck all and asked the group how they were going to avoid the attention of the guards and citizens that might sell them out for the reward on their heads.
The Heirs of Ruin Play Report 4
![](https://awfulgoodgames.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/a8959-68.jpg?w=212&h=320)
The Heirs of Ruin Play Report 3
This was a pretty short session as Randy and Beth arrived a bit later than usual due to work, and we had to introduce a new player. Most of the session was devoted to the initial party discovering that they were being followed by an assassin-lead squad of soldiers, “dealing” with them, and learning that the assassin did not really want to be in the business anymore.
So, hey, free striker.
Once the dialogue wrapped up they continued skulking about the sewers looking for a way out, soon stumbling upon a large pile of bones that animated and tried to kill them. The fight was not terribly difficult on paper; some skeleton minions, dwarf skeletons, and an eladrin skeleton that still knew how to use wind magic. All in all the fight had a XP budget of 600 I think. However, one of the eladrin skeleton’s powers–blinding wind–did a hefty amount of damage along with a blind kicker, but only recharged on a six. The problem? I rolled that six, in front of my players, three times in a row.
The pile of bones was intended to be a major terrain feature, being difficult terrain and causing creatures to fall over if they got subjected to forced movement and failed an Acrobatics check, but because the skeleton kept blinding everyone never really had a chance to use its other spells that could knock them about. So…oh well. After smashing all the skeletons, the ghost of a dwarf manifested over the bones, but it was getting late so we decided to leave it at a cliffhanger.
Anywho, here are some pics of the game table, since I kept saying that I would take some and forgetting:
The Heirs of Ruin: Method Mapping
I really dislike drawing maps, so often I try to play out the events of the adventure in my head to get a feel for what might happen (as opposed to what I would like to happen), usually resigning myself to the task of mapping a day or two before game night.
The campaign started out with the players going through a few arena battles before having an ideal chance of escape when a silk wyrm starts wreaking havoc on the place. The intent is that after escaping that they go through a door leading to the mess hall, beat up the guards in there, head into the kitchen, and then use a waste disposal pit to get to the sewers.
When I was writing up the adventure, I figured that not all the guards would get eaten by the silk wyrm, instead fleeing and locking the door behind them, giving the characters extra incentive into taking the other door. The problem is that that whole thing is contingent on the characters not interfering with the guards, and not being slaughtered by a level 3 solo.
When I ran it, the wyrm eventually ran away on its own and the guards followed it, making sure to lock up the prison from the outside. The players armed themselves with loot from the dead guards, and then proceeded as planned when I had a squad of guards show up in the mess hall looking for escapees.
Ultimately it felt like that there was too much that could go wrong, and in the interest of helping things run more smoothly the next time I run (or put it online) I decided to make some hefty cuts to the previous map, making it a bit more straightforward in its purpose. I put the waste disposal in the same room, figuring that it made sense because those cells are not going to clean themselves and it gives the guards a place to go. I also put the whole structure underground, making a lift necessary to access the place. Makes sense, as slaves–as well as dangerous monsters–will now have a very hard time getting out this way.