I Smell a Rat: Rune-Lined Hallway

[sjmdw45]

Originally Posted by mburr0003

Sword-armor golem, my bad. The two tend to get confused, especially when I don't revisit the material and just go off memory. I just remember that everyone who fought (twice as a PC and once as a GM running it) that it was "siege-beast" levels of rough due to the very high armor DR (everyone I've played with has either hated siege-beasts because of the high armor and decent damage they do, or ignored them because the Mind Mage just wiped them out).

Oho! Yeah, golem-armor swordsmen are very tough to kill, much harder than Siege Beasts. Due to the clause about "when the flesh golem is slain, the armor reanimates on its own as an 'armor golem' and must be destroyed a second time" and the obvious Cyberdyne T-800 reference, I give the reanimated form No Eyes and Homogeneous as well, so you have to beat that DR 17 instead of bypassing it with eyeshots or armor chinks.

Fortunately they're also quite slow (Move 2) and easily evaded. If you left the lock intact you may be able to even just lock it back up again in it's cell.

Count me as one of the haters, but I love to give players problems that I hate, so I'm a lover and a hater both.

[Christopher R. Rice]

Originally Posted by Kromm

In the original Gen Con sessions, the groups who went through the dungeon came up with novel proposals for how to deal with this area, and I went with their ideas. It does say, "Disarm: No, unless the GM permits Cleansing (Exploits, p. 24)." One group tried exactly that. I forget whether they used Theology with Seeking Guidance (Exploits, p. 90) to get a hint from me.

Both groups had expert thaumatologists who warned of the danger when the door was opened. They learned about selling their soul, but nobody wanted to do that.

Three of the pre-gens have Shape Earth, too. Nobody tried it, but it would've been an option if they were willing to spend lots of time casting and recovering (~14 cubic yards, so 84 energy because it's explicitly worked stone . . .), and mostly likely meeting wandering monsters.

Originally Posted by DouglasCole

I remember it was my holy warrior who used Exorcism (I think with Contingency Casting) to cleanse the runes, and we got away with it pretty scot-free due to favorable wandering monster rolls: it took a long time, but no one showed up to punish us for our dilly-dallying.

It was. I think we started with the idea that we could chip our way through and then Doug was like "If only we had a wheelbarrow. That'd be something." Then we had the shared cleric PC and Doug's character destroy it and it wasn't a crit, but it was a SUPER low roll. Worked great.

[Dalin]

When I ran this for some beginning players, the runed hallway was Ælin Rock-Talker's moment to shine. We determined that behind the stone of the hall was mostly earth, so he carved an expensive hole in the wall and then mined a relatively cheap tunnel parallel to the runes. Then one more expensive hole at the end. It wiped out most of his FP, but the rest of the party thought it was well-worth it.