Wandering Adventure Party

I would have boosted this directly from the author's Fediverse account, but it's not behind a CW, and I try to put the "big" U.S. politics stuff behind those. Mainly for my friends who aren't in the U.S. and don't want to see it, but also for those who are in the U.S., and who are exhausted or don't come here for that stuff.

This is a really good essay. I usually get a lot out the things @JuliusGoat writes. I have Very Fine People (a book I recommend).

I wish I could share this with people I am "friends" with on other platforms, but I feel like they would not be able to absorb it. I feel like they are too angry and would read things that are not there. And then they might try to have me fired.

I have said it before, but I'll say it again: bringing a gun anywhere and shooting someone (or a group of someones) whom you disagree with is wrong. Concerts, movies, lectures, schools, workplaces...we should be able to go anywhere and not fear that a person with a gun will open fire because of who they think we are or what they think we believe. I want to live in a society where that never happens.

Right now, it does happen. And we need to be honest about that.

#uspol

Acceptable Losses

Whose deaths get to be deemed unacceptable in supremacist America, and whose are deemed necessary? And who does the deeming?

The Reframe (www.the-reframe.com)

We played our Pathfinder 2 game today and I had a good time. We had to stop right in the middle of a big encounter, though, so I'm antsy to get back into that.

We had finally defeated the nasty invasive fungus stuff in the city, and after resting up and upgrading some equipment, we were asked by the queen to go find someone who was off investigating the source of this nastiness - she had lost contact with him.

We geared up and headed out, and almost immediately (because we teleported, so we got to the "danger" area FAST), we ran into some tough Big Bads. They were hard to hit and they did a bunch of damage.

The main enemies look kind of like mossy elk, or something. They are big and they are not messing around.

I tried one of my good spells on them and it did very little. Oh no.

Next week I may have to go right up to them and have a conversation punctuated by swings from my war hammer. Maybe that will work.

I did do one good thing - they had some kind of ability that poisoned the air or something. I had taken the spell that cleanses the air (and it lasts for a full minute), so I was able to cast that and clean out whatever infection or curse they were trying to inflict on us.

Anyway, it was fun even though we couldn't finish the fight. Hopefully next week our luck will turn and we'll be able to knock these guys down.

#Pathfinder2e #ttrpg

I love it when new folks discover Mastodon and the greater Fediverse. If you're new, hello and welcome! It's different here (in a good way).

@kichae OMG I forgot I didn't update this week!

I will get on that!

We played our Pathfinder 2 game on Saturday and it was a mixed bag.

We started out in the middle of a combat. It was the two large mossy elk mosters and some other Yes, we saved the NPCs (at least, most of them) and defeated the mossy elk things and the smaller guys who were with them.

It was a hard fight, but we got hasted and that helped a ton. We did get in closer with them and that worked better.

Then we explored some more because we are on a mission to find a missing guy, and we saw some tents that looked like they might be from his group.

They may have been at one time, but now they were inhabited by evil vines. We had to hammer on those for a while before they were finally subdued.

Then we moved on to what looked like a corrupted temple. There was a raised circular platform in front of it, and an altar at the top of the platform.

It had been desecrated and there was blood.

A couple of us could tell we were being watched and made our spot checks. It was a giant opossum that was infected with the evil fungus (we think).

We started fighting whatever it was, and we discovered a couple of Omox (sp?) that had been hiding beside the platform.

Since they are demons, my warpriest was very effective in hand-to-hand. Her warhammer does holy damage and it's also cold iron, so WHAM!

Even with that, it was a rough fight. Our Orc had taken a couple of hard hits from the giant fungus-infested opossum thing, so he backed out of the fight, intending to heal and maybe take some pot shots from further away.

He backed into a trap. He was in the doorway of a ruined building, and we did not know it but there were some nasty, mobile, carnivorous plants in there.

They spotted him, and then he spotted them. He threw a fireball and moved about 30 feet away, thinking they were like the other plants we'd been fighting (relatively slow-moving).

Nope. These guys were as fast as we were. They immediately surrounded him and there was no way to save him. They all hit him and then they ate him.

They. Ate. Him.

I was really upset about it, because I was going to leave the main combat and go heal him (he was too far away to do it from where I was). But he said not to do that - he was confident he would be okay and he said I was needed more with the Big Bad (the opossum thingy).

And then he died. Like, dead-dead. They critted him so he was Dying 2 and then the rest of them hit and it was just over.

It's possible they would have killed him even if I had healed him the round before. But I still regretted listening to him rather than following my instincts.

After that happened, my warpriest marched over to those pitcher plant things and incinerated them. They were vulnerable to fire and she was really angry, and the dice cooperated.

It was not completely satisfying, but I felt somewhat better.

My cleric could probably bring the Orc back, but he's going to make a new character instead. So now we have to figure out how much of his gear goes to the party and how much is "lost" due to him bringing in a new character with new stuff.

So we won, but at a cost. Next week we'll meet our new party companion, which is always weird and usually kind of funny. I'm curious to see what he'll come up with.

#Pathfinder2e #ttrpg

@kichae It was a series of escalating surprises and I felt like my eyebrows almost lifted right off my face because they kept getting higher and higher as things got worse and worse for him. First the "Oh, there are enemies in this building." Then "Oh, they are FAST!" And then "Oh no. I am surrounded and too far from the group, with 18 HP...."

We avenged him. My character was the most upset, but everyone was sorry to see the Orc succumb to the pitcher plants of doom. Maybe we will do some kind of memorial for Rootus the Orc.

OMG WASH.

We played our Pathfinder 2 game yesterday and it was great. One of our group was having a birthday, so we brought a charcuterie tray and a fruit tray. So good. We didn't bring cake or muffins because he's diabetic.

Our "new" party member was a great fit even if the meet-cute with the new character was the expected mix of awkward and hilarious. I mean, we all know they are joining the party, but dude. You just showed up while we were recovering from an intense fight where one of our group members was killed. We're not feeling particularly open and welcoming right now. You can't just peek into the yurt like we're not on the edge of attacking anything that breathes (or doesn't breathe, for that matter).

Anyway, we now have a human fighter and my character finally decided she was okay after we had a fight and the new person held her own.

After resting in our yurt, we went back to the desecrated altar and temple (the site of our last big fight). We went into the building where those danged pitcher plants had been and we found a buried chest with some really useful stuff.

We wanted to undo the desecration of the altar even though none of us follow that deity. But none of us had a strong enough spell prepared, and we didn't feel like it would be right to spend 3 days on a ritual when the clock is ticking.

The chest had two scrolls of Dispel and we were able to dispel the desecration successfully which was awesome.

Then we went into the temple itself and found some fungal puffball things on the walls. There were 3 of them and one of them was glowing. Upon examination, we determined that the two that were dimmed had been connected to enemies we had already defeated. That meant the brightly glowing one represented another enemy that was still unknown.

But not for long! When we went further in and found kind of a nasty pulsing fungal mass, we were greeted by a harpy who at first seemed menacing but reasonable. They suggested that rather than us wrecking their home, they would produce the person we had been searching for. Awesome! Love it when we can overcome an encounter through diplomacy rather than combat!

Except that's not what this was. Oh, the harpy was able to present the missing investigator, but he wasn't really "himself" any longer. He was a zombie who was infected with fungus. Dang it.

And then a few more "used to be elves or maybe half-elves but are now thralls" came in, and the fight was on.

I managed to get a Heightened Divine Immolation cast while they were grouped up (and before anyone from my group got in there). It hit them all. They all failed the save, so they took persistent fire damage (and some of them never managed to shake it, which was great).

The new Fighter went right in and kind of accidentally killed the guy we were there to retrieve (who was now a zombie). It was a little like Fezzik saying "I didn't mean to jog him so hard...."

Oh well, I don't think that McGuffin guy was going to make a comeback.

We figured out when we defeated the thralls, they would explode spores on us, but apparently we have fought enough of this sort of thing that we all made our saves. We had also all put some Greater Antifungal Salve before going in, which had been a great suggestion from the wizard. That helped with saves.

The Wizard made the new fighter larger, so she was able to reach the harpy when they decided to fly. The Champion and my character kept after the Thralls.

It was a tough fight because the Harpy was reasonably successful in casting against us. But we eventually prevailed - the fighter got some nice attacks of opportunity which helped out a bunch (I don't think that's what they are called in Pathfinder, but if you play ttrpgs you know what I mean).

Once all the foes were vanquished, we healed up (again) and started hunting around - the guy we were supposed to find should have had a book that would help us out.

Before we could find it, we realized something was happening with the big mass of pulsing fungus. We ran over to check it out and thanks to a really high knowledge check, we figured out that it was going to generate a demon.

By the time we figured that out, it was too late. It had started hatching and we watched in horror as a gargantuan demon slowly emerged. It kind of looked like a spider/mantis/wolf? I can't really describe it. But it was big and scary looking.

DUN DUN DUNNNNNNN!

And that's where we ended!!! So that fight has to wait until next week. We're supposed to prepare the next level for our characters, so probably we'll have the fight, then officially level up, and we'll move into the next part of the story.

I'm enjoying Pathbuilder a lot more since I sprang for the paid version. I still mainly work from my printed character sheet during the game, but Pathbuilder is so handy for keeping track of spells. If you like Pathfinder 2 and you haven't tried Pathbuilder, go check it out.

#Pathfinder2e #ttrpg #Gaming

We played our Pathfinder 2 game yesterday and it was fun. Much of the session was spent deciding what loot to keep and what to sell, and then determining how much money we all ended up with.

But we did have a couple of big encounters.

When we began, we were in the room with the gargantuan demon that had just emerged from the fungus dome. It was so big and icky looking.

I planned to stand back and hit it with spells that did holy damage. I thought that might soften it up before I had to close with it.

HOWEVER, the human fighter (the new party member) ran over and yelled to my character to flank with her. I did NOT want to do that, but I also felt like I couldn't leave her there by herself, so I went in.

I got a couple of reasonable hits with my cold iron/holy warhammer, but then the monster suddenly disappeared and then reappeared across the room.

Well, I got my wish. I wasn't in melee with it any longer.

So I hit it with a couple of spells that did extra damage due to the holy part, and that turned out to be really effective. I was rolling pretty well and the extra holy damage from its vulnerability was high (like 15 extra points each time, or something).

None of us got knocked down, and we ended up defeating it more easily than I had anticipated.

We found the book we were looking for and wow it's going to be helpful.

Then we decided to go find whatever monster was linked to the final glowing puffball. I had thought it would have been the harpy, but we defeated that last time and the puffball was still glowing.

We went through a boat house and as the fighter (who was in the lead) went out onto the dock, a large winged monster jumped out of the water.

It was another one of those mossy elk things that we fought before, but this one had wings!

I did not have water breathing prepared and neither did the wizard. So we knew we were going to have a tough time with something that was so comfortable in the water. The water was nasty, anyway (turns out it can give you brainworms, but we didn't know that until we fixed the problem).

Like just about every other Big Bad we have fought, this one tried to infect us. And unlike the other times, two of us failed and got infected (thought we didn't know it yet). It was my character and the Wizard who succumbed, which was not great when the symptoms kicked in later.

Anyway, no one drowned, and even though we took some pretty hefty damage, we did defeat the Mossy Elk from the Black Lagoon.

While we were resting and healing up, we noticed that the nasty water was clearing up so quickly we could almost see it happening. Like how you can watch a clock and see the hand creeping slowly along. After an hour, it was noticeably better.

So that was cool.

But then the next day the Wizard and my War Priest were feeling pretty yucky. And we were sprouting little fungal filaments. Ewwww.

I've been taking Cleanse Afflication since we figured out how easy it is to get infected. But I didn't have one in a high enough slot for this - I would have had to roll a 20 and I didn't. And I only had one prepared....

BUT! I have a feat that allows me to convert a Healing Font spell (which are always at my highest level) to Cleanse Affliction! I had to burn three of them to get us both cured, but it worked.

I'm really glad I took that feat.

Then we teleported back to civilization where we traded in our loot, picked up some bonus items from the queen (because guess what, we have another job to do), and bought some new stuff.

The terrain from here on out is going to be really inhospitable, so we are going to have to take a bunch of food (and I will probably take some spells for food and water). The yurt will come in handy, which means there is a good chance it will get destroyed (knowing our luck).

We're going to do some practice runs before we leave (like practice setting up a base camp with the group the queen is sending with us) to make sure we are truly as ready as we can be before we head out.

We learned some more information about the Ultimate Bad Guy and it sounds like he has a High Priestess who is going to give us a hard time.

Bring it.

#Pathfinder2e #ttrpg

We played our Pathfinder 2 game on Saturday and it was nice to get back to it after a week off.

We are getting into The Bad and Dangerosu Place now, and the terrain is getting more and more hostile. We have a group of elves with us but only one of them has a name so I hope everyone makes it but you know how that can go...

We have a series of assignments to work through, and the first one was setting up a base camp. We picked a spot and started to get set up, but almost immediately we were challenged by two translucent nasties who looked like undead plant fae (I can't remember what they were called, but they were icky).

They (of course) had a way to poison us, and the fighter and I got poisoned. The fighter ALSO failed her save so bad that she was not just dazzled, but she was confused. Her first random attack was against a bad guy (yay!) but all the rest of them were against me (oh no!). We all survived, but it was challenging for a bit.

We finally knocked the fighter out and of course that happened right before my turn. So I had to choose between healing her (and maybe having her attack us some more) or doing something else. I decided to tie her up and then the Champion did a Lay On Hands to heal her, and once we were sure she was okay again we undid the ropes, healed everyone else up, and went on our way.

I treated the poison, but I think the fighter was nearly at the end of it anyway. It wasn't the kind of thing that killed you or changed you permanently, apparently. Just scrambled your cognition temporarily.

The wizard figured out something neat during that fight - he cast Quandry on one of the bad guys (it used to be the Maze spell) and when it wore off, they were just....gone. A pile of leaves was all that came back.

Apparently when they went into the maze, their connection with our plane was severed and cutting that off destroyed them. So he's going to prepare that spell every day now.

Then we fought 4 fungus-infected "somethings." I'm not sure I ever did learn what they were, but they were large and they were strong. They weren't the elk-things though. These guys were bipedal. Mushrooms growing out of them all over the place.

They were in a nice clump and we weren't close yet, so I hit them with a Divine Wrath. Three of the four critically failed and the other was a simple failure, so that was a nice amount of damage. And that spell does "persistent" damage so on their turn they kept taking more fire damage until they managed to extinguish it.

They started to figure out that we were dangerous so they cast a wall of thorns, but it was already too late. They were toast.

By this time, it was nearly time to stop for the night, so we made sure to write down everything we looted and then we had to roll some checks to see how well we were doing with our assignments. We did not roll very well, so now we'll get Something Bad coming at us when we start next week's session. No idea what it will be.

#Pathfinder2e #ttrpg

@edhaswell It was! Our group has a good time together. I think this group has been meeting for around 7 years now. I can't remember exactly.

We played Pathfinder 2 on Saturday and it was fun, but I had trouble keeping track of the details because we had a front moving through and sometimes that makes me really tired.

Here's what I recall - we had to do a bunch of skill checks. This is something about Pathfinder 2 that none of us really enjoy - there is usually at least one section of an adventure path where you have to earn points by making weird skill checks.

You can't really role-play them (or at least, that is not how our DM runs them), so it's just "roll this very specific knowledge skill which has an achievable DC" but we can't. Because none of us are trained in that skill, usually because we've never heard of it before, and will never use it again.

OR it's "roll a skill that you actually have, but you had better be legendary because the number you need is ridiculously high."

Sometimes the player's guide will tell you what the One Weird Skill you will need is (it's usually some kind of Lore), but in this case we ran into one that no one remembered ever being mentioned. Why would we ever have taken it?

But even on the skills we had, it just wasn't our night.

I'm very good at religion. I rolled a one on the relevant check (a one is a terrible roll, and means I failed). That's the kind of night we were all having, really. The fighter is very good at survival, and rolled a two. And there was something where the Champion rolled a 19 and just barely succeeded. I mean, the difficulty for making these checks is not calibrated properly At All.

But we got through the encounters that we generated, we infiltrated the tower reasonably smoothly, and we rescued the guy we were supposed to retrieve. Someone even managed to get in the line "Aren't you a little short for a storm trooper?" when we were doing the rescue. So that was funny.

#Pathfinder2e #ttrpg