The End is Night

May 29, 2014

The battle continues...

As the round begins, the announcer interrupts the battle to state that the challenge has not been fully met. The challenge was made to the Judges, and not all of the judges are present. Standing next to him is Praetorius, minus his armor.

So the battle continues, this time with Praetorius.

After getting his buffs, Praetorius and Galen head to the center of the arena to begin the fight. 

The opposition summons a short spear of force to attack Verus and Ricken, but Ricken dispels it. 

Ricken then casts maze on the spiny dude, sending him away, until he can succeed on an intelligence check.

The opposition then drops a prismatic wall right in front of K, Ricken, Verus, and Curator. 

Then follows round after round of an exchange of blows. Included in this is Praetorius running up and disarming both an elvish woman with a brilliant sword and Eccardian who was wielding a brilliant rapier.

K notices at one point that something is invisible to their left. K, Ricken and Verus are all three alone on that corner of the arena, so Verus casts true seeing. He sees three fire giants and a red dragon. He panics and runs to K, and with difficulty, teleports the two of them to the other side of the arena.

The dragon then rips the staff of the magi out of Ricken's hands as he says, "I'll have that back!"

After a little bit more fighting, the two dwarves back up with their hands up, clearly giving up, saying, "we aren't going to risk our alliance with them." Eccardian then shouts curses at the dwarves and turns to Praetorius and surrenders the field. He tells us, rather angrily, "you have clearly won the field."

K asks what's going on and Verus casts true seeing on her. She sees the dragon and the three fire giants and gets nervous. K and Verus also see a wall of force that Praetorius ran into that goes all the way across the room.

About that time, a gold dragon arrives next to Ricken and says, "You have recovered your property, great one. This needs to go no further." The great red dragon responds, "if he publicly apologizes." The staff falls to the floor at the feet of the dragon and Ricken dimension doors forward grabs the staff and holds it up, "My apologies for taking your staff, but I thank you for it's use." He steps forward and takes it and whispers, "There will still be a reckoning." 

Unfortunately, the dimension door variation Ricken used, sprayed fire at the gold dragon, which didn't react well at the time. Once the red dragon left, Ricken apologized to it and made it all ok. 

6 points of fame

Then there's a massive explosion at the other end of town; at the mayor's house. Verus gathered all the judges and teleports them from the middle of the arena to the approach up to the mayor's house.

We appear, and in front of us is the Pit Fiend that was imprisoned in the basement of the house.

The mayor is in front and maniacly monologues about how without us around the city will truly be his.

With him is Crosial, his major domo, Julistarc, and Salisfer. Then there is the Pit Fiend (Leebdaga) and two hand-maidens (The Left Hand of Leebdaga and The Right Hand of Leebdaga). The pit fiend tells us he will accept our surrender. Praetorius recalls that the hand-maidens are immune to fire/poison resist acid/cold and they have DR/Good. The pit fiend is DR/Silver/Good immune fire/poison/cold resistant acid. 

Once again, as in response to an epic battle, the battle displays in the sky above the city again, allowing all citizens to bear witness to the defeat of their mayor and his devilish compatriots.

The End Game Battle

The two hand-maidens teleport behind Verus and K and grapple them both, successfully imprisoning them. While imprisoned, Praetorius opens up everything and unleashes hell on the maiden grappling Verus. He manages to deal well over half of the maiden's available hit points in one round of attacks.

Verus manages to escape the grapple, properly concentrate and banished the Left Hand of Leebdaga, holding K. She is then freed.

Ledaga then casts a blade barrier on top of Galen, where he is cut up a bit and pushed towards the rest of the battle.

Ricken summons 9 lantern archons who all target the mayor.

Curator finishes off the Right Hand of Leebdaga and flies up over the blade barrier.

Ricken casts a wall of fire on top of the mayor, hitting him and the other two morals.

Galen runs up and attacks Crosial, who turns invisible. Praetorius follows suit, gets on the other side of where Galen attacked and manages to behead Crosial.

Leebdaga drops a couple fireballs on Galen and Praetorius and teleports next to them to attack.

Since Leebdaga came much closer, Verus is now within range to banish him. With an effort, he manages to succeed in the banishment, but Leebdaga is under the effect of a ritual that anchors him here. However, he took splinch damage from the banishment because of it.

The mayor then steps out of the fire and drops hellfire on Praetorius and Galen, who both succeed on their saves, still taking quite a lot of damage from the fire.

Ricken makes Curator huge and casts maze on Leebdaga. He is still anchored to this plane though and instead takes splinch damage.

Praetorius cartwheels from Leebdaga to the mayor, hits him with his chain whip, then cartwheels back to the Leebdaga and just devastates him with a multi-crit attack.

In response to Praetorius's performance, Salisfer runs away, shouting in frustration and fear.

Leebdaga took enough damage from Praetorius's attack, that he takes one last death attack, then dies!

Verus takes one step, teleports to in front of the mayor. He uses his spellcraft knowledge to cast a prismatic spray, all rays focused into a single beam, at the mayor. The mayor is burned and melted before his remains are turned to stone.

Then, Praetorius rips the head off of Leebdaga and Verus casts overland flight on all of us as we rise above the city making ourselves as impressive as possible with Ricken's lantern archons hovering around us. We then hover and slowly spin to allow all citizens the chance to see us.

In the middle of the display, Verus casts greater teleport and teleport us all back to Judged, where we slowly descend. Praetorius put the head on the sign and Verus casts Flesh to Stone to preserve the head where it is.

A little while later, the nobles all present themselves to us at Judged. They ask what our plans are. Ricken announces that we will be taking over the mayor's position. They press us for details on what our changes will be. We decide that all slave trade will be stopped for now, with plans to deal with slavery. We also make Eric the head of all Dotari in the city. We also decide to make Walcourt the seat of our power in the city. 

Word is brought to us that General Vorn, a representative of Cheliax' Royal Family, House Thruun, is on his way with a fleet of ships and will be here in 2 days.

We manage to get enough of Walcourt cleaned up by the time Vorn arrives.

It turns out the nobles have protected the mayor's house from looters until such time that we can go claim our spoils. We salvage over 2.5 million gp worth in his treasury. He also own over 5000 hectares of property that we now own. Verus spends a lot of time working on inventorying the mayor's house. He finds quite a lot of cure scrolls that he then distributes to the public to help overall health.

The public consider us living gods and are always massing around us such that we can barely move in public. Ricken and Curator move around as much as they can to help patrol and heal the downtrodden.

Galen spends time with the temple to arrange for the church of Asmodeus to remain as the contract providers, but arrange for Iomedai to be the largest representation based on their charity contributions.

Praetorius calls for the dwarves and Ricken and Praetorius negotiate with them very agreeably.

Vorn finally shows up with only one ship. He is met by Curator on the dock. Behind him the path is lined with shield archons that are dismissed behind them and new ones summoned in front.

Vorn is taken to the throne room to present him to the court, with all the nobles. Then into a side room for refreshments and discussions.

Vorn straight up asks us if we intend to swear fealty to the queen. We all respond in the negative. After a diplomacy check, he accepts, on behalf of the queen, recognizes our claim of Westcrown and its sovereignty. He asks that we undertake diplomatic talks. 

And the rest is diplomatic details.

Our characters, if we calculated it out, would be 20th level with 3 mythic tiers. 

GM Notes

• I learned a lot in this process.  I learned that an ending that wraps up the major points is a GOOD THING.  I think that all of us appreciated the fact that a story was completed.  I don't think I have done it before.  
• I think I learned the players want focus from me and to keep them on track.  Knowing that they CAN go off over there, which has nothing to do with the adventure, doesn't mean they will but they like options.  
• I'm not impressed with the AP I ran.  The ideas were great and I will keep mining them for those but not the execution.  It does make me want to re-read a few other APs I read with this perspective in mind and see what I think now.  
• I'm torn on the final fights.  Again, I don't see if it was close or not or how worried the players are, and therefore the characters.  I think one character got low in hit points but otherwise I don't think any were worried about the final fight.  In hindsight, I had a tough fighter type, the pit fiend, casting his spells because I thought they were more powerful than they were.  And the NPCs faced the same problems as the PCs, which was spell casters need time to prep!  That can make a big difference.  
• Mythic levels are fun but tough to challenge!  
• I think I got the "rushed" tone of the module but the players were disappointed they didn't get to use some creation feats.  It's not a bad observation and earlier, they could have used them a lot.  A tough line to straddle!  
• I do think there were some great ideas with the politics and several were thinking about what their characters were doing next, which is fun!   

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