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Kaganfindel wrote:

I think it'd be even more interesting if your character attributed a personality to the skull that it doesn't possess. In other words, it's just a snapping, thoughtless automaton that seeks to burn and bite anything that comes near it, but the sorceror pretends to converse with it, asking its opinion and interpreting its thoughtless lunging and snapping at people as commentary or insight to be translated.


"I think you've offended Robert. Yes, yes, you have. What's that, Robert? He says he has to consume you now. I can't imagine what you might have said to upset him thus."

"I don't think I trust you. Robert, what do you make of him? What? Grease him now? You really are a sadistic bastard, Robert. I'm glad you're dead."

"Yes, Your Majesty; he's with me. Robert! I'm not translating that! I beg your apologies, Your Majesty - I really can't take him anywhere."

"Robert says we can't go that way. Things will end badly for us if we do, he says."

KInd of like this...? (skip to about 4:00 for the impatient)

"We can't possibly do that! Who would clean up the mess?"

sockmonkey66 wrote:

Is it just me or does everyone use the default name of Bob when they don't know what to name something weird? I've done that myself before noticing that it's kind of become a meme.

In this case, it was a reference to Dresden Files which had a ghost character named Bob who lived in a skull covered in runes. But who knows, maybe they defaulted to bob when naming him.

As for stories, not much new has occured. I have full control of the skull now, though I haven't taken the feat yet as we haven't leveled to a point where I get one. It is currently stuck on my staff and it giggles a lot at inappropriate times, and sometimes snaps at people or sets things on fire. Its been a lot of fun so far, as when a tanner was getting uppity I reminded him that as a Genasi with fire resistance, I was the least flammable thing in the room and held the flaming skull out over one of the chemical basins he used in his craft. He caved in rather quickly.

We did fight off an appearance by some strange undead, then a tomb spider, then some sort of spider man, so obviously something is going on there. Only playing every other week, advancement is a bit slow.

sockmonkey66 wrote:

That was probably less clever than it seemed at the time since fire resistance is not concussive force or falling debris resistance.:D

He didn't have gasoline in the basin. I don't know what chemicals were actually used in tanning during the medieval ages but I can't imagine it was all that explosive. We were in a wooden building though, and I'm sure SOMETHING would have burned. I wasn't going to stick around until the entire building collapsed on me.

Besides, I could have simply used Sorcerous Sirrocco (sp?) to fly myself out the door as a readied action to minimize blast damage or avoid it altogether if the boom is delayed.

Well either way, I was certainly the most likely candidate for survival had the hut gone up in a mushroom cloud. In 4.0 'blast pressure' isn't modeled... fire damage is. If we're going to pull real physics into a magical world you cannot tell me a spell which creates intense heat in a large area has no pressure wave to it.

Okay, so... because people seemed interested and it's been a while since my last update, there have been some new developments. This is a long one, so I'll break it into two posts. You have been warned.

On our way back from visiting the site of a large earth mote hanging over a small town, which is now filled with raving lunatics as all the decent people left, a star fell to earth. And when I say star I, of course, mean a meteor. Being strapping adventurers with hardly any survival instinct and even less common sense, we ran off through the woods to investigate. We eventually reached an area of scorched trees, with a furrowed trail of earth leading to a crater. We left the drake (I have a draft drake hitched to a wagon) in the safety of the forest and went out to investigate.

We found a large reddish-black rock, about the size of a car, with an amazingly small crater, only slightly bigger than the rock, and several shadowy beings surrounding it. These shadowy beings turned out to be some sort of far realm phantasm (fell taints, though I don't know that ingame) attracted to the energy being emanated by the rock. After killing the taints, as well as an odd little storm crystal (a being of elemental chaos excreted by the abyss and possessing a heart of pure malevolence) we noticed a trail of matted grass with burn and scorch marks along the surrounding vegetation. Once again, with little regard for safety, we set off to follow the trail.

Time passed, some tracking skill challenges ensued, and we came upon a small clearing where the ranger stopped, puzzled by what he saw. Present was the trail we had followed, but converging with the tracks of a bear... a rather large bear. There were signs of a scuffle, and then the bear tracks continued along the original path of whatever we were chasing but now the bear's tracks had random scorch marks and burns on the vegetation. Naturally, as a hero does in such a situation, we followed.

By and by we came upon a known feature of local geography in this world, which is a giant stone spire in the forest. What we had not known, however, was that the thing was built by ants. Large ants. HUGE ants. Ants that were 6ft tall, and some of them could fly, and all of them hated us. I will spare you the details of our ascent, but suffice it to say that it was packed with harrowing escapes, fights on narrow ledges, buzzing insects, and very angry soldier ants. When we did reach the top, we found two strange things...

More in part 2.