Joel’s Scattered Thoughts

The party returned to the site of their second adventure - Ebonring Keep. They rescued Liam from shadow-modified trolls. Liam blames the Ebonring for the corruption of the keep. This actually went quite well. I wanted to portray Liam as a little unbalanced - he’s convinced that the Ebonring is the root of all evil (so to speak). The PCs are skeptical that the Ebonring is really to blame for the current problems, so I must have done a good job playing him as a touch paranoid. (”A paranoid is a man who knows a little of what’s going on.” — William Burroughs)

After they’ve waltzed through encounters that should have been deadly, they nearly got killed by an encounter that should have been super easy. The encounter was just supposed to set a little atmosphere. The magic user was scouting invisibly and was detected by dread wraiths. Two of them jumped her and drained her constitution down to 0. The only thing that saved her was was a rune of cheating death left over from the last time they were at Ebonring Keep. The warmain ran out, grabbed her and ran. He was chased down so the PCs had to fight the wraiths and beat them after a tough fight.

Once again CR was not a good indicator of actual difficulty. I need to put more work into figuring out how tough a particular encounter will be and rely less on straight CR. In this case, having the magic user wiped out in the first round was what made the encounter such a killer. It sure would be nice if the archer happened to find a better bow and maybe some magic ammunition…

In the tradition of the Skippy list, RPGnet Forums - 250 things Mr. Welch can no longer do in a RPG.

My one gripe with reading electronic texts is that bookmarking your place in a story is a royal pain. Here’s where I’m at in various books/texts/whatever.

Sagiro’s Storyhour - http://www.enworld.org/showthread.php?t=598&page=39&pp=40
How we got here - pg 91
Real Life
PartiallyClips

This is going to be a short review of “Roadkill on the Information Highway: The Future of Work in Canada” by J. William Pfeiffer. I obtained this book from my local library, hoping to get a picture of what work in Canada will look like. Unfortunately, the book is nearly unreadable.

It seems to have been designed by someone who thinks that the reader’s maximum attention span is 60 seconds. There are any number of interesting ideas, but the longest articles seem to be about two pages in length and these are often cluttered with sidebars, comics, graphics, colored backgrounds, and other distractions.

The only way I can see using this book is as a quick reference - a way to get a point of view on a given Canadian economic issue. Reading it cover to cover strikes me as just too awkward - like trying to eat a full meal from hors d’oeuvres trays.

We continued on the “Throne of Iuz” in our higher level game.

The PCs rested up and then headed back to the serpent mound where the remaining chorrim were packing up. The spryte cast slow on the chorrim. The warmain kicked in the door to the solidest building around, revealing some shadow trolls at work. The chorrim moved to intercept the PCs - though it was pretty hopeless. The shadow trolls inside the building tossed up an elderitch wall to defend themselves. The shadow trolls conjured up three electric hydras. The warmain went through the hydras like cordwood. The trolls tries some other spells that were pretty ineffective, then dimension doored out when the warmain started to force his way in. Three made it, one didn’t.

The PCs then started down the tunnel in the serpent mound’s mouth. There was faen magic and memorials to ancient faen heroes in the tunnel. The PCs came to a large open area where they heard someone saying that they need to get it finished quickly. They spotted a giant toad and attacked. The warmain charged in and killed the human working on the throne. Two stone columns came to life and attacked. The toad slurped him up with its tongue and proceeded to chew on him. A boar charged out of the shadows and took the unfettered to negative hitpoints twice - the only thing that saved her was a defensive roll. After the warmain beat on the toad for a while with his fists and the magic user flung many sorcerous blasts, the toad tried to hop into the water, only to be zapped by a blast from the magic user’s rod of electricity and lightning. The columns only lasted another couple rounds before being turned into rubble.

A fun time was had by all. The final fight was deadly but, thanks to some good luck and clever planning, nobody was killed. Now I just need to figure out how to keep that kind of challenge going.