Sudden Insight

I wonder if they decided to include Eladrin as a race in 4E because they were afraid that if they included aasimar as a core race every munchkin would be making "ass" jokes.

-The Gneech

You Knew the Job Was Dangerous When You Took It

Came this close to my first TPK tonight in Red Hand of Doom. The party went up against a fairly pedestrian encounter against some ettins and goblins, that was easy. Then they fought against an immature purple worm (a home-baked encounter I put in to replace some rather ho-hum wandering monsters in that particular part of the module), and finally a fiendish behir that nearly tore them to shreds.

Against both the purple worm and the behir, jamesbarrett's bard/barbarian/ranger guy (just call him "Mr. Multiclass") got swallowed hole. Against the immature purple worm, that wasn't such a problem, but against the half-fiend behir, it was huge. The behir opened the battle with its breath weapon, hitting everyone hard, then swallowed two party members (jamesbarrett plus an NPC ally) whole in the first round, doing vicious amounts of damage to them automatically each round, then pounding on sirfox's cleric with a "smite good" and once he was down getting ready to do the same to lythandra's sorcerer.

The NPC died; jamesbarrett was taken to -9 hp, and sirfox was taken to something like -4 or -5 IIRC. If it wasn't for hantamouse forsaking his attacks to get a cure moderate wounds into the cleric in time, the bard/barbarian/ranger guy would have been lost and probably the sorcerer would have quickly gone next.

It's not like they weren't hurting the behir — they were — just not as much as she was hurting them, which is of course the key to winning. ;) So … quite the session! I must say, the party did very well to survive that.

For those who are interested, have ( an immature purple worm! )

I did screw up the "swallow whole" mechanics a bit by having the swallow whole take place on the same round as the grapple, but as it is unlikely the characters would have escaped, it didn't make that much of a difference. I also made a mistake in the players' favor by forgetting to apply the behir's acid damage to the swallowed foes while they were being constricted by its gullet, so I imagine the players will forgive me. ;)

In other news...

sirfox, lythandra, and I all went to see The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor today, and we all enjoyed it tremendously. Terrific fantasy/adventure flick. The yetis were awesome, and it had Brendan Fraser, Jet Li, and Michelle Yeoh. What more could one ask? ;D I highly recommend it to pulp fans. :)

-The Gneech