We played our Pathfinder 2 game yesterday and had a tough and satisfying fight.
First, we had to revisit what happened the last time we played, because everyone forgot over Thanksgiving what we had been doing. The Husband had run a D & D one-shot for our family at Thanksgiving and it was a blast (we saved Kris Kringle from a hostile takeover), and I had to reset the rules for Pathfinder in my head.
Anyway, we remembered that we had defeated a Bad Guy named Grunch (and I think I forgot to write that up, so sorry about that). We searched the room and found a key with an image of what looked like a bird cage on it.
We explored some more and found a room with (dun dun DUNNNN) a big cage in it. And we met a ghost! She didn't attack us because we recognized her and were able to speak to her in a way that got her on our side. She was the ancient elven warrior who tried to reclaim and purify this temple back in the day (it did not work out for her).
She told us to continue on our mission and then come back later for her, so after some discussion we decided not to argue with the great and powerful ghost. She's still there, and we moved on.
We had to fight some guys who were doing some kind of ritual. They finished the ritual before we attacked, and we figured out that they had been awakening a nasty statue thing. It looked kind of like a centipede until it broke out of the shell of the statue, and then it was pretty awful. Three tails that looked like giant earthworms, but they were tipped with stingers like a scorpion. It also had claws or pincers or something, and wings.
It sounds bad, and there were some moments that were not great (like how easy it was for us to get sickened). But that fight was ultimately not very tough for us. Most things went our way and no one got seriously hurt. One bad guy fled due to getting too scared by the fighter (her intimidate skill is cranked way up).
As we explored further, we found where that one guy had run to. Well, we found him, and he was an Ex-Bad Guy. We could not tell what had helped him shuffle off this mortal coil, so we advanced as carefully as we could.
It turned out that we were in a crypt full of something called Torments (or maybe Tormentors?). And they were TOUGH. Holy heck.
They had a scream attack that you had to save against, PLUS they had some kind of aura that you had to save against. I cannot remember which effects were tied to which thing, but what I CAN tell you is that the Champion and my Cleric were taking persistent mental damage for that whole fight. We just couldn't shake it. And I was also enfeebled and fatigued.
My spells were weaker, my attacks were weaker, my damage was weaker....it was rough.
BUT! When you have 8 undead all clustered up like they were, it's very handy to have someone like my character in the party. I cast a mass Heal and in this game that will heal allies and hurt undead at the same time. And I was rolling GREAT for the amount of points it was healing/hurting. I don't think I rolled lower than 52 points on all 3 of the castings I did.
That chipped away at them and with the damage the rest of the group was doing, we were able to get them down to the point where they started falling over like dominoes.
That makes it sound easier than it was, so I should back up. My character was down to 99 HP at one point, which is really low for her. And these things were doing a lot of damage when they hit. And I was getting hit because my AC was lower due to debuffs from failing saves.
The Wizard and the Fighter were also getting affected. The only character who was not significantly threatened was our Champion, and that was partially due to a buff I had cast. That one extra point of AC made the difference more than once for our Champion.
We backed up to a hallway and my character and the Champion blocked the Torment-thingies from advancing any farther. The Wizard and the Fighter tried to stay more than 30 feet away from the undead so they could avoid the effects of the scream attacks and auras. And we figured out that cold damage was awesome because it stopped these things from regenerating. So we tried to get one cold attack in each round, and that made things a lot better. The Fighter had a magic bow that would do cold damage, and our Wizard had a few good spells for cold. I kept healing myself (and the Champion on the rare occasion she got hit), and hurting the undead guys, and eventually we knocked them down and took them out with something cold so they would stay down.
There were 8 of them. That's a lot! It made the fight really challenging because each one of those guys had the ability to scream and emanate the aura. At one point I thought I might get knocked down, and the Wizard thought so too - he pulled out his emergency healing scroll and was screwing up his courage to run up and fix me, but I had a lucky round where I didn't get hit and my next heal spell put me in a much better position.
It was pretty harrowing - with only one person in our party who could truly stand up to these things, it felt like a dangerous fight. Thank goodness for our Champion, because she was reducing the amount of damage by a lot. Without that, we probably would have had to run away (and I'm not sure that would have worked).
But eventually we did triumph and that was the end of our session. It ran long because the fight was so tough.
It was great to see everyone again. And we ordered Indian food from a newish place when we had our dinner break. Our previous Indian restaurant closed a few months ago, and we were all missing it. A couple of our players had tried the new place and said it was good, so we doordashed it. OMG it was fantastic. I don't get to have Indian food a lot, so this was a treat. It had just the right amount of spice - we were all passing the box of tissues around and doing that throat-clearing thing that isn't really a cough but is a little more than a normal "ahem" for the rest of the night.
#Pathfinder2e #ttrpg
