Fake War Stories

Pathfinder campaign, running for a few months, and we’re on the final session plowing our way through the final few rooms until we get to the boss (the Carrion King.) I’ve got a Barbarian who was planned out to be a lot more interesting than he ended up being in practice. Our rogue is a multiclassed Barbarian as well with an INT score that doesn’t really break the bank, but he’d always done a good job of finding traps for us.

So we’re descending this long, Guggenheim-style staircase-room with no railings and a deep chasm in the center when we’re all hit with complicated, DM-created trap that opens with a blinding spell.

Everyone saves except for the gnome sorcerer, but no one has evasion, so while most of us are blind for three rounds, the sorcerer is blind for nine minutes.

The blinded party (along with the fifteen meat-shields we had just rescued) is then hit with the second part of the trap: a wire which yanks us all together like in a Looney Tunes short.

Being in the center of the uncomfortable heap (and with the sorcerer wedged up against my buttcheeks) I roll a great strength check to break our bonds from the inside, unwittingly sending several meat shields over the edge of the staircase and onto the waiting up-turned spears of the pair of gnolls waiting below.

As the blind sorcerer starts clambering up my barbarian’s back for safety, the rest of us regain our sight and realize the third part of the trap: a magical-fire type of “fuse” flaring up in a spiral along the wall, and a sort of gunpowder showering down on everything from above. We have only a couple of rounds before the explosion hits, and the remaining NPCs we rescued are ignoring all fire safety and crowding the door we came through so that no one can get out.

The rogue jumps for it with his ring of featherfall, and my friend playing the sorcerer mentions that he, too, has a ring of featherfall, but no way of understanding what’s going on in his blinded and confused state.

In my first feeling of creative problem solving I’ve felt with my character in ages, I hatch a plan.

I run as far up the staircase as I can and ready an action to jump into the chasm while holding the sorcerer as soon as the fuse reaches its end, thus doing the action-movie thing and saving us from the explosion. The DM, who is a huge fan of this kind of playing, heartily approves. We wait…

And as soon as the fuse ends, I make my acrobatics roll.

1

The barbarian, holding onto the sorcerer, gets tangled in the aforementioned wire and slams them both into the side of the staircase as it explodes, the force of which blasts them across the room into another wall of fire on the other side, knocking the sorcerer into negative HP. At this point we reconvene a discussion of whether a gnome wearing a featherfall ring could sustain the barbarian carrying him, and the DM decides to make it a CON roll on the sorcerer’s part. The sorcerer’s player is a DM himself and knows to never take CON as a dump stat, so this should be ewasy enough.

1

The unconscious sorcerer dislocates his shoulder and the barbarian tumbles, barely catching himself on a flaming staircase, as the gnome drifts lazilly down, bleeding out and hanging from a sickeningly dislocated arm wearing the crucial ring. Once he lands, the rogue (who had dispactched the two gnolls at the bottom in this time) does a little bit of roleplaying and shouts that he attempts to heal the sorcerer, despite having no ranks in heal.

1

“The rogue attempts to kick the shoulder back into place. 3 damage.”

Thankfully the party cleric had made her own way down there by that point and saved the sorcerer at the last possible moment, but at this point we all turn to the DM, “What was the DC on that trap?”

“It was only 23! I didn’t want to make it to cruel, but he rolled a 21.”

“Oh shit,” says the rogue. “I forgot my +2 to trapfinding.”