Flight of the Phoenix: Final Session

( Click for glorious finale! )

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Yay!

You probably recognized a lot of the monsters here. The image for devourers gives them away, and shadow hunters were taken from the SCP Foundation. Also, when I statted up the shadow hunters, I forgot to give them an armor rating, so what should have been a miniboss battle turned into a bug stomping. Rather than changing it in the middle of the battle, we fluffed it up as that particular shadow hunter being old and decrepit.

I wrote up the battle against the Noble in a lot more detail because it was really the climax of the game and, in some ways, of the campaign. You can find the statistics schoolpsychnerd used as a basis if you follow the link to Four Sun Lynx above, though after the game she told us that the rationale she was using was that this was one of Four Sun Lynx's brood, which is why he had similar habits but was a lot weaker. schoolpsychnerd also had really bad luck with his dice rolls, other than dodging. He only landed two attacks, only one of them serious, and failed every single roll to break past us when he was in Rötschreck. My original goal was just to get him to run away in panic and then for the crew to go to Aurora and leave, but when Mara's player started mixing up an alchemical molotov and the Noble kept failing to escape, I realized that we might be able to kill him.

nWoD's numbers bias also helped us a lot. The (lack of) action economy means that the side with more people wins unless one combatant is overwhelmingly powerful, and since schoolpsychnerd had to adjust his stats on the fly and since we were running out of time in the session, she didn't make full use of his powers or add in the szlachta that he probably would have had guarding him. And it would have gone differently if he hadn't failed 11-die Dexterity + Athletics rolls to get past us. Since he had Celerity active, there's no way we would have caught him.

It was schoolpsychnerd's first time running a real dungeon crawl, and I thought it went pretty well. The Noble she was basing it on explicitly stocked the ruins with weird traps and monsters, so the usual, "Why the hell are all these things in here?" questions had an answer. And we had a map of the top but no map of the lower story, which was nice.

If you want to read schoolpsychnerd's comments on running the game, you can find them here! And you should!

This really stoked my interest in running or playing in another game in the Summer Empire, which is really odd because I wrote the whole setting and I didn't realize just how much I liked it. I guess seeing it brought to life like that was much more compelling than writing it. Now I have a bunch of campaign ideas running through my head, which is a bit of a problem with all the other campaign ideas I have running through my head. So many games, so little time.

I'm pretty sure Autumn Oak, Mara, and Petrichor will show up as NPCs in a game I run, though, or at least as rumors. And maybe Bartleby too, depending on what kind of game it is...

All in all, I'm very pleased!