After 14 four-hour sessions of Council of Thieves, we've reached the end of the adventure path! The players have gone from being rebels to being... well, let's not get ahead of ourselves, should we?
When we left our brave gang, they'd just finished dealing with most of the undead aiding the Council of Thieves. There was just one left, though they didn't know it at the time. However, he would find them...
The Celestial Toymaker
Reports came in of a mad dwarf toymaker who had used his automatons to close off some streets; the automatons would attack passers by and walk off with perfectly ordinary wheelbarrows to build a barricade.
Interestingly, the group didn't deal with this problem with fighting: they managed to convince Rolan the Mad Toymaker that he definitely had the solution, and they'd take the automatons to help fight the upsurge of crime.
Oh, boy.
The Return of the Vampire with One Shoe
Since we last saw the snobbish and unlikeable actor, Thesing, he'd had something of a life-change. By which I mean he'd been found by Ilnerik and turned into a vampire. And, being Thesing, he blamed one group of people for his changed situation: my players. So, when they were heading down a street in the evening after dealing with the Toymaker, he ambushed them. Him and his three vampire spawn.
At least, Thesing *tried* to ambush them, but the party has a high enough Perception that they noticed him beforehand. He attacked, but the high AC of the party defeated him (another creature whose attack bonus is somewhat under what is needed). So, he fled - badly wounded - as his spawn were destroyed. He returned to his lair to lick his wounds.
The automatons got their first (and only) use in combat in this encounter, and one proved exceptionally effective: scoring a critical hit with its first attack! Unfortunately, it happened to be against another automaton. They got placed in storage after that.
Thesing had made his escape! Unfortunately for Thesing, the group still had the shoes they stole from him during
The Sixfold Trial. Using them as the focus of a Scrying spell, they tracked him to his lair during the height of the day, and staked him. Such was the life and death of Thesing Umbero Ulvauno - a loser all the way.
I rather enjoyed that - especially the unexpected resurgence of the 'shoe' joke from the earlier adventure. Yeah, Thesing wasn't much of a threat, but there were greater threats ahead, weren't there?
Janiven in Trouble
Just to stir things up, Janiven then got kidnapped by the Council of Thieves. More divination magic was called for - and following that, the group grabbed a barge and used that to travel down the canal to where Janiven was held, dubbing the barge "Home One".
There was an invisible imp on guard outside the warehouse where Janiven was held, but the group (once again) has high enough Perception checks to spot him in advance. At which point he was attacked by Dave, Tim and Greg. Dave did about 7 damage. Tim did about 20 damage with a lightning bolt. Greg? He crit twice (even with concealment miss chances) and did over 200 points of damage to the poor imp. Which had 19 hit points before it was attacked.
With such damage output, any combat against the tiefling holding Janiven would be an anticlimax, so the tiefling just surrendered. Wise choice. (Her stats are almost ok, except for having an attack bonus 5 points too low).
The Devil's in the Details
It was time for some harder fights, so the group now went up against two groups of devils causing problems in the city: some Hellcat Cavalry, and a group of Erinyes.
The Hellcats were scary: the group managed to sneak up on them, and Michael sneak attacked one to kill it, but after that the Hellcats each attacked one of the PCs. Greg and Tim were grabbed by their attacks, which is not a good position for the archer and sorcerer to end up in.
Tim then demonstrated his new spell: Chain Lightning. Amazingly, he managed to ace the Concentration check to cast while grappled, and did an amazing amount of damage to the hellcat. Not quite enough to kill it, so he attacked it again the next round. His stoneskin spell was keeping the hellcat from significantly damaging him, and the resulting explosion certainly lit up the neighbourhood (and destroyed the remaining hellcats).
The Erinyes fight - against four of the devils - was made quite interesting by the True Seeing of those tormentors. Trying to sneak up invisibly? Yeah, doesn't work so well, Tim and Dave!
Unfortunately, the Erinyes are CR 8. You want a challenging encounter in Pathfinder? Having a disparity of four between the individual CR and the party's APL is not the way to go. They just don't have the hit points to withstand Tim's Chain Lightning and Greg's bow attacks.
The Sister Betrayed
It was now time to deal with Chammady and inform her that her soul was forfeit if her brother got what he wanted. How could the party track her down? Oh, by magic, of course!
(I was getting utterly sick of the 'you need to find them by magic' line by now. It doesn't get repeated all that much, but, although it does show that the adventure is written with Pathfinder's magic system in mind, I don't like there not being a non-magic way of finding this material out).
So the group reached where she was hiding, then fast-talked their way past her lover (very nicely done by Greg), and Greg went down alone - except for Michael, hiding in the shadows - to confront Chammady. Greg is playing a low-Charisma character, but role-plays a lot better than that. Thankfully, his Charisma will be better for his next character (a Paladin). In any case, he said *exactly* the right things to Chammady, and gave her the copy of the contract that doomed her soul to Hell. And rolled a 20 on his Diplomacy check. Sometimes things just come together.
Chammady insisted that she should be able to convince Ecarrdian to abandon her plan, and Greg was amenable to that. So, Chammady gave up the location of Ecarrdian, and the group then travelled to the final confrontation.
The Final Confrontation
Ecarrdian was attended by a high-level devil cleric of Mammon, an Earth Genie, and several Council Captains. Well, we've seen how dangerous the Council Captains were (not at all), and the Genie never got a chance to act before Greg skewered it with several arrows. (CR 7, hp 85 - yep, no chance).
Chammady did get to confront her brother, and Ecarrdian made his choice: to repudiate her and condemn her to hell. So, the final fight was on. His cleric companion, Melavengian, used Hold Person to successfully negate Dave, but Lee used Freedom of Movement in reply. Then Lee cast Align Weapon to make Greg's bow "good"... and Melavengian was cut down.
This was one of the few combats of the last couple of adventures where I thought the characters would be pressed, and they were - for two rounds. After Lee and Greg got together, however, and Dave attacked with his holy weapon, Ecarrdian could not stand long. He used Improved Feint to badly wound Michael, but was about to move into defensive/Combat Expertise mode when he was cut down.
The combat might have lasted three rounds. That's long for this campaign!
And Finally, General Vorune
The threat had been dealt with, and - of course - General Vorune of the Cheliax Empire arrived the next day to pick up the pieces. The group was summoned before him, and Greg (once again) gave an excellent summary of what they'd actually done to control the situation.
Then we got to the climax of the entire adventure path: What would General Vorune decide? What was the fate of Westcrown?
It came down to a die-roll. With modifiers based on how the characters had done through the entire adventure path and the final adventure in particular. The group rolled the d20 - getting a 19 - and I looked up the result in the book...
Martial Law: The citizens of Westcrown do not see the PCs as heroes, but neither do they blame them. They certainly don’t look to the PCs as leaders, and see no true option among their own. General Vourne institutes martial law and leaves a significant number of his troops stationed in Westcrown to rule. Over the years, Westcrown recovers from the events in Council of Thieves but continues to atrophy and diminish. In time, this once-proud city will become little more than a glorified fortification used by the House of Thrune as a port for their navy. Westcrown’s legacy of art and culture will be gone forever.
Yeah. To hell with that.
I took the best option - the heroes become the new rulers of Westcrown, and the House of Thrune basically takes a hands-off approach to the city. The group hadn't done *everything* correctly, but I dislike Paizo's method of "point accumulation" throughout the adventures intensely. Especially as the were some point accumulation options that relied on the DM adding more stuff than what was in the adventure.
EDIT: As it turns out, I probably miscalculated the total. This wasn't very surprising, as the adventure is really, really poor at presenting the awards in a manner that makes them easy to find, and keeping track of a running total of points over the weeks and months of the campaign is tricky, especially when they are so erratically awarded.
The Final End
So, that was the end of our play through the Council of Thieves adventure path. It didn't impress my players that much, and it impressed me even less. If I can, I'll get some reactions from my players after they've had time to think about the series.
Next week, we start on the best-received adventure path of them all:
Kingmaker. Wish us luck - we'll need it!