October 15, 2005 Session Summary
The adventurers climbed down a long set of spiral stairs below House Vlaadam into the Chamber of Antiquities (Dungeon 124). They did some careful exploring, but the unfettered’s first attempt to disable a symbol trap was a natural one which triggered the trap and awoke the Seven-Headed Juggernaut. The party was doing poorly - the unfettered had strength, constitution, and dexterity damage, the warmain was taking lots of damage in relation to what he was dishing out, and the greenbond was trapped in a forcecage. The greenbond tossed up a wall of ice which delayed the Juggernaut enough for them to escape up the stairs.
They passed a peaceful night at the top of the stairs, swapped out some spells and equipment, and went back down to try again. The greenbond used heightened walls of stone to slow and damage the Juggernaut - throwing up a new one whenever it broke through. So the unfettered hid, the greenbond tossed up walls of stone, and the warmain took a stab at the Juggernaut whenever it broke through a section of wall. In the end I handwaved the rest of the battle. The Juggernaut didn’t stand much of a chance against those tactics and the tactics were pretty much set. We ended the session with the Juggernaut destroyed and the Chamber of Antiquities ready to be explored.
The big problem with this session was that the unfettered didn’t have much to do. Basically she could only hit and do one point of damage if she rolled above 15 and max damage with her bow. Ah well, I’m going to need to watch those super tough constructs from now on.
I would say that Juggernaut is under-rated at a CR17. It was “programmed” not to give chase beyond a certain point and the magical walls confused it. I ruled that the slowing effects of cold spells meant that it could only use half its breath attacks each round that it was slowed. If it wasn’t for these limitations it would have destroyed my well-equipped 17th level party without breaking a sweat.