Re: OT: Null has gone looney and wants to GM.
 

Planning it, haven't written mine up. I will of course need to roll HP, select skills, choose new Wizard spells and regularly prepared spells per day - but it doesn't hurt much if I don't coordinate those. Crafting Feats? It's better not to duplicate them.

I may never pick up Natural Spell - Craft Wondrous at 6th, Craft Magic Arms and Armor at 9th, then Craft Construct at 10th, in time to make a nice ....

Hmm. There's not a single golem you can make that doesn't require a 7th level spell. A Clay Golem requires Ressurection. A Flesh Golem requires Limited Wish. An Iron Golem requires Limited Wish. A Stone Golem requires Symbol of Stunning. A Shield Guardian requires Limited Wish (and Discern Location, 8th). Okay, there's the Homunculus, but it's kinda pointless and rather dangerous to use. Well, there goes that plan. Still taking Craft Wondrous at 6th, though.

Edit: Maybe Quicken Spell at 9th (when it becomes useful - 5th level spell slots), Craft Magic Arms and Armor at 10th, and Craft Construct at 12th (for making actual golems at 13th, when 7th level spells become available). Natural Spell will just have to wait. I suppose I have very little reason to pick up Polymorph (Alter Self, on the other hand...).

Re: OT: Null has gone looney and wants to GM.
 

So, everyone up for the session in about 12 hours, 42 minutes?

Re: OT: Null has gone looney and wants to GM.
 

Should be.

Re: OT: Null has gone looney and wants to GM.
 

Server online this 6/16/2007.

Re: OT: Null has gone looney and wants to GM.
 

Server closed.

A bunch of unusually bright skeletons and zombies defeated (I lost count - there were a large number of them). Made peace with the rest at the point of a claw on their leader. Four encounters, essentially. No rest yet. 600 gp found in a house. I'm fairly sure we would have won a stright-up fight at the end; but I wanted the information; got most of it, too. I was also basically out of spells - had my Extended Rope Trick, one more Shield spell, Speak With Animals, Faeire Fire, and a bunch of cantrips. That, and having the leader order everyone stand down is usually going to work out better than hoping you got them all. Especially if they have a natural desire to feed on intelligent living things. This might eventually come back to bite us, but it'll do well for the moment.

Hmm... should be a reasonable amount of XP, even though they were probably in the range of 1/2 to 2 on the CR (except for the priestess - I don't have any benchmark to judge her CR, as she didn't get to act, but it was probably higher). Thankfully, rolled well where it mattered. How much XP, anyway?

Very good session, by the way.

As to the reason for the three things I'm checking; two incidents don't make a pattern - pretty much ever. At least, not as far as locating the next is concerned. Three points will be easier to work with, but it's like a mass murderer - on the one hand, you want it to stop, so you don't want it to happen again; on the other, you want to find the next victim so you can have more in the way of clues to track down the perpetrator.

I'm checking three things:
1) Straight-line location. Large natural phenomina tend to follow this type of pattern over the short run (a hundred miles or so) - storms, for example. If there's a likely spot that follows the straight-line (or close to it), that's my next choice of destination (although I will consult with Amaki first)
2) Circular distribution. People usually have a base of operations of some kind, and do stuff in a radius from there. Going with the mass-murderer example, above, murders will usually not think about it too much, and go a random distance in a random direction from their home to commit their murder. The more they do so, though, the more you can find the center of it, and get a good idea where it's coming from. The same thing happens with certain types of natural events - huge gobs of lava belched from the mouth of a volcano land in essentially random points in a radius; but when there's a lot of them, you can get a pretty good idea where the volcano is located from where the huge gobs of lava landed. Failing a settlement that is a close fit to a straight line, the next thing to check is inside a circular distribution, using either known incident as a center point. I'm hoping it won't come to this type of progressively narrowing down the location, especially as it is possible to fake out by someone who knows about it, but I'm going to continue to track it.
3) Nearest town distribution: this is for the traveling villian who isn't yet aware someone's on his tail, who is "simply" looking for the next suitable set of experimental subjects. Failing any settlements that fall into 1 or 2, this is the next best bet.

Of course, if I find a settlement on the map that fits two or more of those, that's my next stop (well, after a rest - exhausted, you know).

Re: OT: Null has gone looney and wants to GM.
 

For simplicities sake, I think I'm going to put all of the encounters at an average CR of 5. I kind of homebrewed those creatures up on the fly to fit my idea of the adventure(basically intelligent, non-shambling zombies), and the CR of 1 didn't really seem to work quite right.

Tip: Always give NPC spellcasters improved initiative, or some way of escaping a grapple. It would have been a lot harder had it had the chance to use a DC 16 ghoul touch....

Re: OT: Null has gone looney and wants to GM.
 

Yeah, probably would have won the fight... the zombies looked like more common ones, and the leader was busy being Grappled. Information is more valuable though.

I like your plan for finding the next spot.

Can we level tonight or should we wait for a significant amount of down time?

Re: OT: Null has gone looney and wants to GM.
 

Null: Grease is a 1st level Sor/Wiz spell; you might want to look it up. Then have it prepared Stilled. And use Eschew Materials.

Re: OT: Null has gone looney and wants to GM.
 

There was the SLIGHT problem with only being able to use standard action spells. Otherwise Alever would have been blasted with a stilled eschew materials Cause Fear. That would have solved her grapple problems quite well.

Re: OT: Null has gone looney and wants to GM.
 

Ah, so she was a Sorcerer (in part, at least).

Yeah, Wizards, when the prepare for it (Agean hasn't - and can't, from the Wizard perspective, not without Still Spell, which will be a while; hmm... could get a Wand of Grease, those aren't a problem, save for drawing them in the first place) do better in grapples than do Sorcerers, for exactly that reason.

Grappling is THE anti-caster tactic, at least before Dimension Door (Sor/Wiz 4; requires a 7th level character, minimum). I'm kinda surprised you haven't used it on me, yet; Small size, stregth as a dump stat; I'm staring down a negative grapple modifier. Escape Artist, untrained, of +3. Whop de do.

Which reminds me - I need to look up a Medium Animal with a good Grapple check.... what's got the best Strength score.... Black Bear at 19? Crocadile ties; hmm... which is better... oh, a Deinonychus looks interesting, same strength, too... right number of HP, reasonable dex, good speed, and more natural armor! We have a winner (until 8th level, for Large wild shape). After Wildshape, that's a grapple modifier of +8. Not too bad.

I didn't leave you twitching too badly, did I? I could tone it down if you'd prefer. Then again, I am keeping things as core as possible, except for the Gestalt aspect....

Edit:
Let's see... 4 CR 5's for 2 ECL 5 characters is ... 3,000 xp each. Nifty. That's next level. Level now or later?