"Pathfinder: Annihilation of a Barbarian Tribe (1)" Topic

For Ref: TMP link

My PC does an intel dump to the others PCs and important NPC's on what I found out about the Shoanti and my bullet points about strengths, possible weaknesses and suggested tactics. Someone at the table brings up that while we do not have the resources for poison, magical sickness, plague and disease could work just as quick on them and we DO have access to that via the infernal clerics we have plus a small handful of Urgathoa worshipping spellcasters (including one new PC Oracle of Urgathoa that just joined the PC party!!)

The erinyes did a day and nights worth of aerial recon, verified there are giants, penned up slaves/food, they do have very few casters (assuming druidic or totem-priests), and still do not have a watch or patrols.

A plan was struck to capture local goblins, extract information, then eventually infect them and seed them via the erinyes into the Shaonti valley so they may be captured and eaten, spreading a "blinding sickness" that is airborne, it saps CON, and has a chance of inducing blindness. Turns out the Asmodean cleric has the ability to summon and bind a succubus – another asset we had no previous knowledge of.

The engineers and laborers are congruently keeping at making the road while we concentrate on the more military aspects of this… The camp was approached by a pair of lizardfolk bearing gifts, and we set up a meet between their "mistress" black dragon leader and our camp after verifying with them that we have a common enemy in the next valley. Over the night, we set an artist to work and commissioned a golden sculpture that would be appropriate as a "shiny gift" in return for the dragon, it was done in time.

Their mistress is a young black dragon, only 8ft in length right now. Her mother and siblings were the dragons the Shoanti killed years ago. Turns out the lizardfolk here are the largest "power" or authority in the valley, the goblins were few and we had already killed or captured all them, and they verified about three score hobgoblins total in the valley and that is it regarding "thinking" beings.

We struck a pact to defeat the common enemy with the assistance of the lizardfolk, in exchange for the rights for the road and within her lifetime, peace with any travelers on that road. We acknowledged their right to self defense if attacked, but that they would be supported as the local authority here so long as they maintained peaceful dealings with us and travelers.

They also acknowledged they had domesticated the spiders and use the venom, volunteering containers of it if we desired. Our party does have six ballistae teams, so this could be yet another good thing to assist against the giants, which are actually the only REAL threat now we ado have a concrete plan about.

We set the erinyes loose to concretely locate the giants lair(s) and, "have fun," for two days with any lone Shoanti she encounters so long as she does not risk capture – which she appreciated and set off to do her thing. One of the main tactics erinyes employ is to swoop down and entangle creatures with their animated hair, then lift them up to great heights and drop them, savoring their victims terror and helplessness. She is concentrating on the casters – druids that go off into the woods to pray alone for their spells.

My PC is going out with a party to find these hobgoblins and press them into assistance in our endeavors whether they like it or not. If they want to join the fight, fine, but we will not give them anything important to do. If they are useless for any other purpose, they can be paid laborers (hobgoblins are lawful after all, so they will respect their more powerful betters), and if they cause any problems, we can always infect the troublemakers and set them loose in the Shoanti valley as a lesson to the others.

So a plan developed: In two days we would infect and seed the goblins, then march to the saddle between the two valleys, prepare for a few more days on our side of the slope to give the "blinding sickness" a chance to spread around. The lizardfolk and their spiders will scout and hide in the hills to the north to await the start of the attack, their job is to free their own folk and the duergar and arm as many as they can manage to assist in the fight; this will be the diversion – while the Shoanti are struggling to round their slaves back up, we bring the formations to bear at the saddle with the ballistae to fire down upon them. The succubus swooping about reigning havoc, the erineys in flight, peppering the frost giants (we found out the type) with flaming arrows (which they can create.) while the ballistae concentrates on the giants with spider-venomed and flaming bolts. It is known and accepted that the sickness will probably infect the slaves as well as the Shoanti, and may spread a bit to ourselves, but we have many more and much more powerful casters on our side to counter that after the battle is won.

The real-politic consequences of my PC's actions are weighing me though -- I am changing alignments. There is NO POSSIBLE WAY I can reconcile my PC's willingness to do these things with any measure of being, "Good." My concept of my PC and his class was not pious or devout even before facing this chain of events and experiences, so there is no real in-game penalty or consequences for that, but an alignment change HAS to be the reality to be honest with the game play.

Thankful for that last paragraph. Sounds like an interesting game.

I am curious, I've not played Pathfinder and its a long time since I played AD&D but I do recall the incident when our NG Elf Wizard used a spell to gas an entire small clan group of bugbears – right down to the females and pups. They were employed as mercs to collect tolls at an underdark crossroads and weren't really a threat given the size and level of the party. None of us were impressed and later, when the Elf needed help from a Good deity, the DM decided the deity insisted on some serious penance. The Elf's argument was "they were just bugbears" really sank his case in everyone's eyes and we were as sarcastic as only 17 year old geeks can be.

You are quite right this whole plan is wholly incompatible with any kind of good alignment – it's straight to LE in my book. If there was a paladin in the party I'd strip his status just for being there when it was discussed. I have to question the DM, what kind of fantasy is this to have this almost industrial approach to it? To quote Bowie, "this ain't rock and roll, this is genocide."

i think my old CG ranger would get on his horse and ride off to find who the real monsters are and kill them. Then again, I did test positive as Ned Stark in a GOT character quiz…..

Truth be told, the group has great inter-action, and I like the DM's story-telling style of play, but yea, he decided to center his game in Korvosa, which was a colony of Cheliax, a literal, genuine, "we-sold-our-souls," infernal Asmodeus-worshipping nation. Lawful Evil runs deep and wide throughout Cheliax AND Korvosa and the surrounding area.

So when the LE king maneuvers us into, "I am richly rewarding you for doing this for the kingdom, go forth and do not embarrass me"

(insert evil grin here)

Our PC's are over a barrel. We can walk away and be "disappeared" or even enslaved by the king or his minions for daring to deny him publicly and embarrassing him/challenging his authority.

Or we could get help from only "good-aligned" forces. How, exactly? There are no Rangers in or around the Korvosa area. The way the city is organized, all skilled and unskilled labor is done by highest bidder and competition is cut-throat, so the tendency is to be competent AND sabotage others to ensure you are hired… generally, "not be good," when you seek employment (oh, and anyone caught trying to unionize or start a guild in Korvosa are publicly executed, BTW.) "Good" faiths are tolerated, but not encouraged.

The only support and assets with any numbers or resources to accomplish this multiple-month, 160-mile task with a reasonable measure of success are the powers of note in the city itself… Lawful Evil noble houses, Mercenaries, the Hellknight Order of the Nail, the various faiths that have an interest in bringing trade and commerce/civilization to the wild (gee – exactly one of the primary goals of the Asmodean church, go figure.)

Does not help that I am the only "good" PC (well, now, used to be good PC) in the party to boot. All the others are Neutral-something, and one, the new guy, an Oracle of Urgathoa, well, cannot see how he can be anything BUT evil, given that deities spheres, "the goddess of physical excess, disease, and the undead. She is mostly worshiped by dark necromancers and the undead."

We played quite a bit in the City State of the Invincible Overlord and it was only years later when I really looked at my Necromancer Games edition, that i realised just what a nasty place it was. The details were there but our school DM had run it as an archetypal fantasy city with a bit of darkness in the corners and a borderline evil ruler. It seems to me that your DM has you as you say over a barrel, if you try to be anything but a scheming murderous git, you will be offed. And you're not even a drow!

I don't think I ever saw much in the way of overt evil PCs in D&D, the worst was " LN Selfish" who posed as LE but didn't really have the taste for it. We were mostly good-ish.

I sympathise, if you want to play a rogueish character who is ultimately good you seem to be in the wrong campaign. Perhaps you should have a quiet word and try to pitch a Casablanca, Rick Blaine style path for your character? The odd rescue of an innocent or the accidental diversion of the forces of eviltude down a blind alley. A decent DM shouldn't straight jacket the players into joining the legion of the damned. Nor of the Good, or that matter. It may be interesting for him because presuming your character is allowed to follow the Rick model, at some stage at a higher level you will clash with the more overtly evil members of the party……it does sound to me as if the blue fury of the Metropolitan Church of Mitra needs to pay a visit, in numbers and tooled up for a ruck :-)

I did PM the GM, acknowledging that while I enjoy the challenges and moral dilemmas in the game, that we players seem guided by the choices available/presented to only go with, "dark," solutions to have a reasonable level of success, and it troubles me somewhat.

I told him also that in his game, as in real life, there are really no altruistic solutions, and I get that, but if you liken it to black and white/shades of grey… every solution or result we have come to (with the choices presented) has resulted in a dark-grey to black result for all NPC's affected, and there has not been one "mostly white" or even light-grey resolution in almost 50hrs of gameplay, no swing of the pendulum.

BUT – in his defense, it's not *just* him… the other PC's are not "good," and do not care for how the solution ends up for the NPC's, so again, maybe I've just hamstrung myself by choosing a poor start alignment for the setting.

In his GM-style, alignments are not important unless you make them important by choosing to roleplay that way, or pick a class that forces him to make consequences for not following a certain morale/immoral choice code (Druid, Necromancer, Cavalier, Paladin, Anti-Paladin, Clerics of evil/good deities.) So if you are joe-blow the wizard or rogue or fighter or whatever, he really does not care what alignment you are, do what you will in the sandbox.

It's an interesting one isn't? If you are basically looking to get by in a bad world, you're really N at best and if you go with the flow, NE. Now Runequest didn't have alignments just the results of your actions – sign up with th Lunars but don't expect a frienly greeting at Boldhome…..

It strikes me that the is really an alignment less campaign. And given the nature of the country – there are no good character classes which have to act good and thus no imperative to do anything else than go with it and do what has to be done.

It will be interesting to see how the DM replies but he sounds committed to a journey to the dark side.

So… D-Day starts tonight.

Never got a reply from the GM on my PM, but he and I are usually on the site about a hour early before the session starts, so we can communicate then.

I drafted up a bullet-point-guide for myself on how I am going to address my fellow dwarf party of NPCs (a dozen ranger/mountaineers and six clerics of Torag) who have been along for the excursion representing Janderhoff's interests, but they have not played much a part thus far, nor are any members of the planning counsel in-game.

They may bail, they may not, but that is why I drafted a guide for myself, to hit all the wickets of the plan and make the case for them to stay aboard despite the severity of the tactics involved.

Leveraging the suitability of this valley, ruins/stronghold and forges to become the dwarf site for a Janderhoff presence along the route – cannot make that argument if they all leave disgusted with us. ALSO – what dwarf in their right mind would turn down the opportunity to take on a few giants with this kind of support at their backs?