Tower of the Elephant, playing today.

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Soooooo....

I ran my group through Tower of the Elephant last night, didn't finish it though.

Everything went according to plan; I love my players, as they aren't prone to being plot-bombers.


Lamach (Shemite Nomad3/Thief1)
Damir (Zamorian Thief4)
Ulf (Aesir Barbarian4)

They meet up with Buryal and agree to steal the poison from the caravan. Damir the Zamorian Thief sneaks onto the caravan and witnesses the Lesser Son of Set about to attack Vanku. For a moment , he ponders whether to allow the snake to kill this guy holding the chest, then opts to help him as not to have him scream out and alert the guards. Both thieves finish off the serpent and agree to work together. They sneak back to where the other characters are hiding and decide to screw Buryal out of his share of the poison.
Next, they head to the tower and proceed into the gardens. Damir is attacked by the vines and takes a total of 14 hp of damage and gets poisoned. They finish off the vine and cross into the inner garden. Vanku dispatches 1 lion with the poison, but misses vs a second. The party finishes off the second lion in short order and proceed in the darkness to the tower.
After over a dozen attempts with the grapple, they finally get it hooked onto the ledge; luckily, they didn't alert the guards. They climb up the tower and get onto the roof, where they notice a dessicated body; Vanku recognizes it as his long lost father; a tear rolls from his eye as he swears to succeed where his father had failed.
They enter the roof building (6:1) and Damir quickly scans the room and proceeds across to the opposite door. while crossing the room, he and Vanku take some gems from the open chests.
As Damir begins checking the door for traps, the guardian spider drops on him. He takes damage and is poisoned by its bite. He decides to tumble away from the beast, but fails his tumble check; an AoO later, Damir is down to 4 hp as his friends battle the spider.
After they finish it off, Ulf the Aesir Barbarian applies short-term care to Damir's wounds, but secondary poison damage causes him to drop to 0 hp.


That is where we left off; the party plans to rest for 3 hours to allow Damir to regain his ability loss. Figured that after 3 hours of rest on a couch (bed rest), he will be back up to 12 hp (out of 30 hp) and full STR and CON.
 
Sounds interesting. I'll spring this on my players in the near future, with obvious tweaking since we're playing after the 'official events' as detailed in the Conan story.
 
Here is one thing that came up while I was doing a little work on the follow up to this adventure:

My players are the proud owners of 5 doses of Green Lotus Powder at 1,500 sp per dose!

Only thing is, the doses in the adventure are supposed to auto-kill, whereas the ones listed in the core book only cause an initial 1d6 of CON damage (not even enough to kill a lion).

I would also like to mention that there is no listing for the powder in the adventure.

Am I missing something?
 
urdinaran said:
I would also like to mention that there is no listing for the powder in the adventure.

Am I missing something?

I believe you are right. I remember looking it up in a book though I cannot remember the damage. I just remember everytime Vanku tried to use it (3 times) the lions made their save. Sadly, in my game, Venku was killed by the lions. :cry:

I'll add also to my post above that the scholar and Venku took out the guards in the outer garden while the barbarian/ soldier fought one of the vine creatures at the inner wall. (they were seperated at this time)

After dispatching the guards the pair followed the inner wall and came across a hacked up vine. The hopped the inner wall here beliving it to be te trail of their companion and found their barbarian/ soldier buddy about to be attacked by a couple lions. There is also the bodies of two lions dead in the grass that the barbarian fought solo and took a pretty good beating against. Luckily the three of then took out the two lions but then daddy lion showed up it was curtains for Venku.

I had forgotten that I had Venku put on the outer garden guards equipment. The lions are suppossed to ignore the watchmen. :shock: But since it was the male alpha lion that killed Venku I reasoned the lion thought Venku did not smell right despite his appearence. :wink:

The bypassed the off duty guards on the west side of the tower since they found the stairs to the first level once they exited the lion pens. Those guys had no clue intruders were in the tower and I gues died when the tower fell upon itself. :)

The biggest combat came from fighting the guards and royal guards in the throne room on the first level. It was helluva fight that the barbarian/ soldier and the scholar/ soldier barely won.

The scholar/ soldier even took out a guard with his stygian bow who nearly got away to get the off duty guards. After this battle they both put on the armor and equipment of the Royal guards. These two characters have really embraced the idea of traveling light and picking up things as you go along.

Also I decided to not do the caravan encounter as one of the players was only in town for a couple days and I had used a priest of Set and a son of Set in a previous adventure. Can't over do it. Stygians are suspicious enough as it is.

They thought about ripping off the laundry wagon for the Royal Guard uniforms but as mentioned above when they first went to scout the tower I sorta railroaded them over the wall. :twisted:

More specific info on the the two PC's:
5 Barbarian/ 2 Soldier
From the a southern tribe of the Black Kingdoms

3 Scholar/ 4 Soldier of Stygia.
Started a scholar but found running one hard to keep alive.

Looking forward to hearing more about your adventure!
 
Once rested, my players pretty much followed the adventure just like the story. Guess that's one of the advantages of going for the roof.

The Green Lotus Powder kinda bugs me though.

Buryal (ToE pg. 5) describes it as: "a quantity of the most lethal poison known in all Hyboria".

On pg. 335 of the pocket edition Green Lotus Blossom is described as such: "kills when inhaled"; 1d6 CON damage initially;

kinda weak if you ask me.
 
Since they went by way of roof did go pretty quickly? Was their any furhter action besides the spider, the yag, and Yara? That was one of my fears.

Sounds like the adventure went great.

The rope of dead womens hair always got a smile around the table because it is fun to say. :lol: I was much talked about but never accessable. I figured if they could come up with another way of getting to the top then more power to them.

Tht is pretty weak poison by the way. Perhaps The Prince of Thieves discription of it performance is exagerated...then again it did kill 4 lions in the book. :? Thats totally weak. I guess since every time it was used in my game the save was made so I didn't think about the dmg. I would beef it up.

So, who can come up with a feasible way of getting to the top of the tower without Rope of Dead Womens Hair? A hemp rope would be nigh-impossible given the height. i like to hear what people can come up with.
 
Yeah, it went pretty quickly. When they got to Yag's chamber they were so close to killing him before his speech. He spoke first, so that prevented a big plot bomb; then they followed his instructions to the letter, fled the tower, etc.
The next session will focus on the aftermath of the Tower falling.

The poison IS pretty weak. They have 5 doses of the stuff, and if you ask me it would be better to sell the stuff. There are better poisons out there; sure, none that are inhaled but who wants to wait 10 minutes for the secondary damage to kick in?

I'm wondering if the blossoms in "Rogues in the House" would be as dissappointing?
 
"Rogues in the House" you say? I didn't see "God in the Bowl" listed on the Conan page, (it had been taken off that some time ago) so I'm wondering if they just decided to scrap the whole foray of 'You do what Conan did' adventures altogether. You know, they're ONLY releasing several bug armies products each week, so they may have had to cut back on other product lines to allow manpower to produce more stuff for the starship troopers lne. :roll: :lol:
 
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