The Triumph of Virtue
FrdNwsm
Member Posts: 1,069
In a clearing a few days travel outside Sara"s Tush, MC and his stalwart allies were taking a break from slaying fire giants and saving the lives of honorable merchants. Hard work, but rewarding.
Recently, he had been having troubling dreams, wherein he had taken up adventuring with a group of total swine and rejoiced in vile and reprehensible actions, such as slaying innocents like the very merchant they had just saved. MC shuddered. Surely such nightmarish visions were sendings from the fragmented ghost of his dead father! Begone, bothersome spirit!
Thank Helm he could perform good deeds without fear of muttered complaints from his companions! In the midst of such musings, Neera got a message from ... a bird? Well, that made a bit of sense, since she was a tad bit bird-brained herself. Apparently, the villainous Red Wizards of Thay known as the Black Staves were still hunting her; talk about obsessive behavior. Neera came up with an uncharacteristically clever plan, involving decoying them into a trap (although MC suspected it was actually the bird who came up with it).
And so it was done; Neera cast NRD (a spell which MC had until now specifically forbidden her to even memorize), and then the party ... went to sleep? OK, that part of the plan could have used a bit of work. Sure enough, as the group slept, 5 of the Black Staves, led by someone named Vy the Annoyed, teleported in, accompanied by a bunch of fighter types. Vy somehow neutralized Neera's casting ability, but that was of little consequence, as she was well equipped with scrolls and items, including the staff of the magi, spell strike wands and more scrolls than you could count.
The resultant fight was vicious and short. MC and Co. triumphed fairly handily, with MC and Keldorn taking out the escort fighters while everybody else concentrated on countering the mages. Imoen told them "say hello to my little pal" and summoned a planetar, while Neera made liberal use of her spellstrike wand and staff of the magi. Just as it looked as though righteous vengeance would descend upon Vy the Irritable, she teleported away. Typical.
What wasn't typical was MC and group being teleported along with her. Oops.
Recently, he had been having troubling dreams, wherein he had taken up adventuring with a group of total swine and rejoiced in vile and reprehensible actions, such as slaying innocents like the very merchant they had just saved. MC shuddered. Surely such nightmarish visions were sendings from the fragmented ghost of his dead father! Begone, bothersome spirit!
Thank Helm he could perform good deeds without fear of muttered complaints from his companions! In the midst of such musings, Neera got a message from ... a bird? Well, that made a bit of sense, since she was a tad bit bird-brained herself. Apparently, the villainous Red Wizards of Thay known as the Black Staves were still hunting her; talk about obsessive behavior. Neera came up with an uncharacteristically clever plan, involving decoying them into a trap (although MC suspected it was actually the bird who came up with it).
And so it was done; Neera cast NRD (a spell which MC had until now specifically forbidden her to even memorize), and then the party ... went to sleep? OK, that part of the plan could have used a bit of work. Sure enough, as the group slept, 5 of the Black Staves, led by someone named Vy the Annoyed, teleported in, accompanied by a bunch of fighter types. Vy somehow neutralized Neera's casting ability, but that was of little consequence, as she was well equipped with scrolls and items, including the staff of the magi, spell strike wands and more scrolls than you could count.
The resultant fight was vicious and short. MC and Co. triumphed fairly handily, with MC and Keldorn taking out the escort fighters while everybody else concentrated on countering the mages. Imoen told them "say hello to my little pal" and summoned a planetar, while Neera made liberal use of her spellstrike wand and staff of the magi. Just as it looked as though righteous vengeance would descend upon Vy the Irritable, she teleported away. Typical.
What wasn't typical was MC and group being teleported along with her. Oops.
2
Comments
Neera also recognized the cause of the entire fiasco, it having happened to herself often enough in the past; a wild surge. Yes, Vy the Ticked Off, wild mage hunter, was herself a wild mage. Talk about ironic twists of fate. Realizing her cover was blown, she teleported once more, leaving the valiant party to fend as best they could.
The entire melee was apparently being staged inside a gladiatorial arena; possibly similar to the infamous Black Pits, of which MC had heard rumors in the past. This was a bit more of a hassle than the last fight, since the good guys had been dumped into the very midst of the combatants, much to the delight of Denethor, the announcer. Drastic measures were clearly called for.
Our heroes pulled out all the stops; rage, true sight, a deva, a time stop, an insect plague and a withering were the first orders of the day. After that, things degenerated into the usual confusion that typically marked such fights. With somewhere between 18-20 Aunties, a couple of humans, and his own companions present, MC found himself (as was the usual case with him) somewhat bemused; his basic course of action was just to whirlwind anything that popped up in front of him, which left combating the enemy spell casters to the professionals.
Well, spell strike wands kept the enemy mages vulnerable while Jaheira and Anomen peppered them, and MC and Keldorn slowly cleared the field of opposing fighters. Eventually the dust settled, and the party emerged victorious, none the worse for wear. Whew!
Afterwards, the announcer directed them to speak with someone named "Sassy" Tom. OK, what the heck was with these Red Wizards and their wimpy names? How about "Vy the Devastator", or "Mangler Tom"? "Sassy" was like some 6 year old girl's nickname. Not exactly fear invoking. Anyway, Sassy Tom apparently wanted something from them; hardly a surprise.
By the way, that fight with those 12guys in the clearing is quite a hard one when playing with only 2-3character
He's a putz. And has a girl's nickname. A six year old girl's nickname at that.
And what's your point about the fight in the clearing? I daresay it IS harder with fewer combatants on your side; it would be even harder with one character. Not an astounding leap of logic there.
But the fight in the clearing is against 4mages you cannot ignore for long because you will, at some point, fail a saving throw and that means death in solo, but there are also 8fighters dealing damage at the same time and you cannot ignore them either, which is why this fight is so hard.
Basically every fight against large group of enemies are painful if you are not soloing a mage, a druid or a cleric
It would have been harder for my "B" team.
A simple plan of action evolved. Sneak in, whack the guards before they could alert anyone, then get Vy. This worked to some extent, but as usual, no plan survives contact with the enemy. Someone managed to sound the alarm, and a running fight developed. More mages and fighter types joined the fray in waves, while Vy herself proved adept at hit and run tactics, ducking in and out of rooms to strike and then fading away.
This led to the group making an uncharacteristically amateurish tactical error. Eager to get the task over with, and irritated by Vy's gadfly attacks, MC, Keldorn and Neera (who had the three Paws of the Cheetah, and were thus faster) pursued the elusive wild mage while Jaheira, Anomen and Imoen remained in what appeared to be a safe room in order to heal up damage. Adventurer's rule #1: Never split up the party!
Yet another squad of baddies came in and managed to kill Jaheira before being put down. Anomen always carries a resurrection spell, so she was back and spoiling for revenge in short order, but had to spend some time rebuffing. Oh well, live and learn ... or die and learn, in this case.
Meanwhile, the pursuit group, having tracked Vy over half the building, finally managed to pin her down and finish her off. Whew. With the fierce fracas finally finished, the stalwart group stuffed themselves with loot until they could hardly move, then rang the bell to alert Sassy, who teleported everyone back to his base. He then tried to get sassy with us, proclaiming with what he thought was a sinister diabolical sneer that he could not (surprise!) simply let us live to tell about the affair.
Oh please! Like nobody saw THAT one coming! Imoen summed it up for him ... "You moron! We've been betrayed by professionals. Compared to Jon Irenicus, you're a rank amateur!" We had saved a time stop, a spellstrike wand and some witherings just for him, and gave him a planetar of his very own to play with. Whimpering like the cur he was, he caved in and transported everyone away. What a putz!
The good guys made out like bandits. Almost destitute at the start of the venture, they scored a good 80 large from selling off the loot. Nice!
Note: My good party is way stronger than the evil one, except for MC who is identical. They have like 4 wands of spellstrike, the best armor, weapons etc, and having two arcane casters as opposed to Edwin plus the Sarevok/Hexxat combo also helps. Think two sequential time stops instead of one.These side quests are pretty equivalent as far as the spots they occupy in the time frame of the game. If the groups had been reversed and the Bad Boyz doing Neera's Quest while the good guys fought the dragons, the difficulty levels would have been reversed. I.E. I'd have found the dragons easier and killing Vicross harder.
OK it appears the game isn't programmed for him to die at that point. It kept saying he was almost dead, we gave him over 1000 HP damage after that message appeared, but he never died. I sent Keldorn with true sight all around the room to see if this was some sort of doppleganger and the real Szass Tam was lurking somewhere else, but no such thing. The game was treating him like he was an extra planar being and this wasn't his home plane ... sort of like the Planetar of Justice in Dorn's quest. Very strange.
Probably just as well, since completing the quest got us 80,000 in gold, but still puzzling.
So, if we fight him at a later point, after killing Vircoss, is it really him, or just another simulacrm type thing?
I am surprised you were able to just keep wailing on him forever, though. He's supposed to get mad and force-teleport you home when he runs out of hit points.
And yes, we kept whacking him endlessly and all he did was try to walk through a wall (since we were totally surrounding him, he had no where to go). Mind you, by then he had used up all his cheating tricks like double length time stop, webs, binds and what have you, so he probably had nothing left in the tank.
It used to be the case that items of MinHP1 could be defeated by killing the "unkillable" with stat drain instead of damage, but the EEs are supposed to have fixed that exploit in the well-known cases (such as Arkanis Gath). Probably they've also fixed it in the case of Szass Tam ... but I wonder, has anyone tested this by attacking him with stat drain?
It's just a matter of curiosity, though: you wouldn't actually want to kill Szass Tam, because then there'd be no-one to teleport you home, so you'd have broken your game.