Friendship is Dragons
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Page 542 - Ace Layman
Author Notes:
Unfortunately, that leaves me with a great deal of work to catch up on, not the least of which is Fallout is Dragons. I hoped to have Session 33 caught up by this morning, but I was more tired than I realized. So now it's "when it gets done." That said, I have no excuses for not having Session 34 (this Sunday's session) out by its normal time now.
Hey! It also looks like I get to kickstart storytime! So tell about a time you or another think you worked something out... and the subsequent wonderful (or terrible) results.
Hmm...story...story...I don't really have too many on this sort of thing...but to go back to the rat incident (the one where we decided burning down the shack was a better option than actually facing the swarm of rats inside), we originally went there to meet the old witch that lived in there. No witch, but the place was radiating magic and I wanted to find out what was hidden in there. So while everyone was still checking the outside, my sorcerer, Mathias, went in with our fighter and went straight to one of the back rooms.
The room I got into was a mess: Scratch marks everywhere, bookcases turned over, blast marks, and there was a skeleton laying on the floor near an alchemist's lab. Since I was the only one in there, I put on my detective hat and, after a lot of skill checks, deduced that the skeleton was the witch in question and that there was an explosion that had half transformed her (on closer inspection, the skeleton was deformed quite badly on the left side) before killing her...or him, whatever. Anyway, the point was that the left overs of the explosion was probably what we were detecting and that there wasn't anything of value left in the place. Not that that has ever stopped me from trying to find stuff before, of course. Feeling quite proud of my display of intellect, I went back to the ever important task of plundering whatever of value was left in the room.
Well, while I was right about what had happened, I didn't realize that there was another victim of that explosion and that it was still very much alive...and ticked. The door behind me closed and I couldn't get it open. I yelled for someone to get me out, but was promptly ignored because...anyway, I kept at it with the door until I heard the arcane squeaks of a rat under the floor boards. A magically enchanted rat. That decided to summon a swarm of rats right on top of me.
To make a long story short, the fighter ripped the door off its hinges after 4 turns of me screaming at the top of my lungs for help, we failed to do anything to it, the ninja joined, continued to fail to do anything to it, brawler's failed entrance occurred, then we decided to burn everything to the ground. So yeah, I need to see if I can get a refund on that detective hat of mine...
Since I don't see a story time comment I guess I might as well ask if anyone else ran into one of these moment?
For instance, one time the team discovered a forged painting was being sold to an antiques dealer. Only the night before, the real, original painting had been stolen, so it was kind of suspicious. we investigated the museum and found that it had been entered by two different points of entry, one of which was consistent with a famous art thief super villain. My other team mates were looking at it, assuming he had a team that he got in to deal with the electronic security, while the villain himself did the theft. but this didn't explain why a forgery happened to be discovered, discarded, only a short distance away from the museum.
I thought about this for a little bit, after antagonizing/being antagonized by the museum's docent, and figured that there were actually two robberies of the same thing committed on the same night. The famous thief had managed to break in and steal the painting... expect that the painting had already been stolen and replaced by a forgery earlier in the night by a team of normal thieves. Then the famous thief, when he discovered he had only a forgery, discarded it for it to be found and sold to the antiques dealer.
The rest of the party was about to track down and take on this villain when I proposed my theory. I got the team electronics guy to look into more of the digital security angle, and he managed to find the van that the group of thieves used. When we tracked that back to their hideout, there was the original and a bunch of copies of the painting!
So, long story short, we found an obvious suspect, but through a really good deduction on my part, we managed to steer away from the dangerous fight to the actual bad guys. Although he was still technically a famous art thief, but priorities.
Meanwhile, this barely-known little side villain was building a magic item in order to dominate some devils and terrorize the countryside. Nothing big though, mostly imps and low-level stuff.
Somehow the PCs mistook the minor villain for the main heavy of the entire campaign and they were going full force after this guy. I decided to play along and make the little guy the main BBEG of the campaign and improve the imp summoning up the to some higher pit fields and devils. That turned out to be an awesome campaign.
Everyone has broken that rule before. It's kind of hilarious when it happens. Especially when I was GM, hehehe.
Our group was escorting a caravan heading towards the dead man's mire to fix some road there in an attempt to figure out where the cultists (because it has to be cultists in these games) were hiding out in said mire. After an Orc/Ogre attack and a few peaceful nights, we arrived at our destination when we were assaulted by the most evil of npcs ever created: A Half-Orc Accountant! I almost cast burning hands at the abomination before I was informed that said Half-Orc ran the depot we were at. Little did we know...
Anyway, the caravans stopped and started unloading their stuff when we noticed that the seventh caravan was unloading some white bags. Now, they joined us late and I had previously thought I'd seen a small blue drake enter into it in the previous session, so I had already labeling them as the cultists we were after. Naturally, I immediately flagged this as suspicious.
I revealed this to our wizard and he went in to ask them about the bags. They were marble stones, which is odd for obvious reasons. Of course, then they all of the sudden became special when we wanted to look at them because they apparently disintegrate in direct sunlight. Oh, and they got permission to trade for them in Underdark from the King and they had the papers to prove it.
It was at this point that I got tired of my BS alarm going off in my head and just cast zone of truth just when our wizard asked him if the papers were actually signed by the king himself. Our poor little victim was all ready to say yes before blatantly telling us that no, they weren't because they didn't come from the king.
At this point, the Half-Orc came by to ask us why we were harassing his workers and, after a bit of dialog where I had to reveal that I had a zone of truth up to confirm that our wizard was indeed telling him the truth about what was happening, I realized why I didn't like him. See, back when our sorcerer had practically sacrificed me to a roper, he took with him some scabbards belonging to the cultists to sell off. So, since the fighter and my cleric were the only two characters that were actually at that event, we were the only ones to noticed that the Half-Orc was wearing the exact same scabbard that the cultists always wore on them. At that point, we were convinced that the depot we had stopped at was the cultist hideout and that the Half-Orc was the leader.
But I insisted on having more proof, so we surrounded the building (our Dragonborn fighter went inside with the Half-Orc so he wouldn't do anything shady) and had him basically pull out all of the supplies from the building so we could double check it all and find our proof. About a fourth of the way through, our wizard was fed up with the blatant "lying" our Half-Orc was up to and basically lit him on fire. Our barbarian then put him out of his misery as his screams basically alerted the cultists to stop what they were doing and run down their secret passageway to their base....And showed it to our Dragonborn fighter because they thought he was with them...I'm honestly trying to figure out how these guys are a threat when they keep making stupid mistakes like this on a consistent basis.
So yeah, the evil accountant that I wanted to light on fire turned out to be the BBEG for this chapter and we did end up lighting him on fire. Sad that we ended up skipping the actual combat related to him, but it was his fault for not wearing armor...and for wearing clothes that lit him up kinda like a match tossed into a barrel of black powder. Either way, we got the job done.
Because I know in 3.X and Pathfinder you would have to worry about someone spying on you back in Canterlot and then casting Sending or something to get to the local Guild members who could do the harassing locally. Or teleporting after you to do it themselves.
But that could just be me being paranoid.