{SCEbJ} Shackled City 27th, 28th & 29th Session Reports

Justisaur's Eberron Shackled City Session 27-28-29, The Smoking Eye -
Soul Pillars

Garrot - Male Human Rogue 13
Seven - Male Human Fighter 5 / Cleric 2 / Kensai 6 chain fighter
Zhray - Male Human/Smoking Eye Wizard 6 / Rainbow Servant 6
Lorash - Male Human Druid 13
Ysindra - Female Elf Favored Soul 13

I've been too busy to crank these out after the games recently, but
things just slowed down so here's the updates. We just finished
session 29. I'll try to go over the important stuff:

27 -

The group gets a bunch of summoned monsters thrown at them from the
lich in the room above, they deal with them easily, but when they get
to the room, they find the lich (who they have trouble even finding) a
much harder opponent, eventually Lorash takes some negative levels
fetching it out of the black fire, and squishes him with bear hugs. I
forgot the lich's paralyzing slam attack, or it might have been a lot
worse for them.

They continue up to the eye itself. They listen to the mummy explain
the last test is a test of sacrifice, Zhray summons an unseen servant
and sends it into the plasma. I give him the smoking eye template
(questionable if it should have worked, but what the heck, why not),
and the mummy congratulates his new master. They decide to kill the
mummy and loot his stuff.

They decide to go look for the the Dragon's lair who accosted them
earlier. I got a bit confused where the lair was and had an encounter
with their nemesis - more hezrou - where things went horribly wrong,
so realizing they would have found the lair before the encounters, I
backtrack before that and give them the dragon's pitiful hoard, and
they plane shift back to Sassarine and spend some time researching
what just happened, and they find that the only info on Occipitus
would be in Cauldron.

28 -

They return to cauldron talk to lord valentru's assistant in trying to
get into the library, while in disguise, but let it out that Lorash &
company are back in town. So the assassination attempt ensues, Seven
is caught by surprise and was unconscious most of the fight, things
looked bad for a bit, but they turned the tide after Ysindra found a
spot where she could cast spells and heal everyone outside of the
silence the assasins had brought. They ended up killing the
barbarian, the sorcerer got away, and they captured the cleric. They
got out of her that she was hired by Ike at the temple of the dragon
down below. They went back to Sassarine and turned her in as an
assassin. She got away from the authorities.

They went to the temple in cauldron to 'arrest' Ike. First floor was
quick, when they got to Ike it was pretty hairy. Seven entered, the
ice devil cut the rest off with a wall of ice, so Seven killed it.
The dread wraith drained seven something fierce, and seven kept
missing on the 50% miss. The party eventually broke through the ice,
and were able to take care of everyone else in short order.

They search the place, refuse to touch the cage, and leave.

29 -

Garrot looks through the papers they found in the temple and finds the
letter that leads them to Karran. They don't have any idea where it
is, so they leave it for now, and do a raid on the library in the club
(sun something? Back from when they got the quest to find the dwarf, I
had the wizard remember he saw a book on occipitus there). They
easily get the book, but find nothing terribly useful in it.

They were unable to get a good enough knowledge or gather check to
find anything about Karran, and flounder for a bit, so I throw the
half-minotaur half-dragon at them, who's yelling in front of the
temple he wants Lorash. They pretend not to be lorash's group, and
try to find out what he really wants, only finding out that the half
dragon is there to avenge his father. They take him out taking some
damage, then use speak with dead to find out he's the son of the
dragon from the kuo-toa lair, and promptly dismiss him.

(The party is calling the assassins and this encounter "People
bringing us loot" at this point).

Floundering trying to figure out where Karran is, I eventually have
Jenya offer to cast Find the Path. Lorash realizes he can cast that,
so wind-walks everyone and casts it to find the place. They get there
and don't touch the pillars with the spell weavers in them.

Gripe #1 - These are large creatures, but they only take up a 5'
diameter pillar, and the module says there is enough room to get by
them, but they look awfully close on the map.

They get to the first room with an Ice Devil, and take him out easily,
and clear the room of the ice lattices. They explore a bit, take out
the iron golem no problem.

Gripe #2 - no mention of the Iron golem in the room's boxed text. I
know this is considered 'normal' but it's annoying as hell.

They get down to level 2 and encounter a room...

Gripe #2 - Major gripe! Apendix Bad! Again! This time there's no
stats on the creature that's supposed to be in the room in the
appendix! I looked in the magazine after the game instead of the
book, and found that the stats were there, but too late.

So I substituted another Ice Devil. Looking at it's stats I realize
it has a fear aura, which I hadn't used with the last couple of them...
It teleports between Seven who is leading the party and everyone else
(they left room in the formation because they didn't want to get
affected by small area spells, like the hezrou's blasphemy which had
been causing them so much trouble on occipitus). Seven, Ysindra and
Garrot all fall to it's aura. The ice devil of course ice walls
between it and the rest of the party. Seven has nowhere to go, so
gets to try to change to wind walk form. The others affected get to
run away, and take the time to change to wind walk form. The ice
devil isn't able to do much melee so starts with his cone of cold, not
terribly effective as the party has 10 point cold resistance up since
the place was cold, but better than no damage. The corridors being
5' wide at this point make it difficult for the runners to get by, and
the ones who are still able to get past to affect the fight - since
both Lorash & Seven are large at this point

It takes Zhray a couple rounds to get the wall down, after Lorash
gives up and returns to human form. The area fills with steam since
he took it out with a scorching ray and burning hands. Wall of ice is
rather vague in the description, just says it fills a large area, and
no indication how long it lasts.

The Ice devil gets off another cone, Zhray dispels the fear affecting
Seven (still not sure that should work, but I guess you can target a
single affect on a target if you know what it is). Seven makes his
next save against fear and Seven and Lorash back it into the room
where they can get at it better. Cone of cold kills Zhray injures the
others. The Ice Devil bugs out for a breather.

13 rounds later, Zhray's corpse burns up in a smoldering fire, and he
wakes up in the eye of Occipitus, with no gear and realizes he's
really screwed now.

End of Session.

- Justisaur

On Sep 28, 10:33 am, Jasin Zujovic <jzujo... RemoveThis @inet.hr> wrote:
> Justisaur wrote:
> > Justisaur's Eberron Shackled City Session
>
> Hey, I don't know if you've been reading that far ahead, but I have a
> question about the Shackled City finale.
>
> Is Adimarchus supposed to get two actions each round (one for each of
> his personas) or just one (and switch between personas like a wizard
> would switch between shapechange shapes)?
>

"Changing between forms is a free action" so more like shape change,
but a little odd, because each form has it's own HP, ability scores,
etc. I could see how you might think they should each get an action,
sort of as if two creatures were teleporting back and forth to the
same space as free actions, but I don't get that impression.

> We did a couple of no context high-level battles this summer and I used
> Adimarchus and ran it as if it was shapechange. He ended up being kind
> of wimpy.
>
> I'm now thinking that was a mistake, and I should've ran him more or
> less as two distinct monsters. It's kind of weird that they wouldn't say
> this explicitly, considering how rare this is in D&D.
>
> What do you think?

Was that from the Book or the Mag? I was just looking at the Mag,
I'll have to look at the book and see if they changed anything in the
Book.

- Justisaur