Ratpack – Shattered Star Book 3, Session 12

[Day 25 – Planning the Elf Job and a wrinkle]

[This game uses the Pathfinder 1E roleplaying game.  Game sessions happen once a week.  This session happened November 7, 2022.]

[SPOILERS!  If you are likely to adventure through the Shattered Star Adventure Path from Paizo, this campaign will be spoilers all the way down.]

Player Characters

Marativy – female ratfolk 8th level Ninja

Zitch Grimreaper – male ratfolk 8th level Witch with a donkey rat (capybara) familiar

Roscuro – male ratfolk 8th level Monk

Swamprover – female grippli 7th level Wizard

Hrefna – female changeling 7th level Omdura

Via Roll20

Templeton von Trapp – male ratfolk 8th level Summoner (Synthesist)

NPCs

Gridik Stormstride – male blue kobold 6th level Wizard (Invoker)

Ariphi – female tiefling 7th level Rogue

Autumn

Day 25

Morning

Zitch continued working on Marativy’s magic belt.

Needing some critical information to plan the Elf Job, Hrefna cast Commune right after breakfast.  The Ratpack learned:

• The prophecy Elaneiros wanted related to the shards the Ratpack was tracking down.
• Both Leroux and Winston are in Kaer Maga
• The security on Augustille is constant
• Augustille is not sedated but is magically trackable

The group made some preliminary plans on how to retrieve Augustille.  There were a lot of grey areas in the plan, so the group spent the morning checking those out.

Swamprover did some discrete testing to determine if Dimension Door would pierce the walls of Kaer Maga [not the buildings in Kaer Maga but the city walls themselves].  She learned it does not.  This meant the Ratpack’s plan to Dimension Door away with Augustille to a point outside the city required a different landing space.  Swamprover and Gridik also went looking in Tarheel Promenade for scrolls of Sleep and found none available.

Afternoon

Back at the Grange, Zitch took some time off from crafting Marativy’s magic belt to learn Dimension Door from Swamprover.  This involved their familiars whispering to each other for a while until Zitch’s donkey rat knew the spell.  For both casters their familiars act as their spellbooks.  [Gridik has an actual spellbook, which causes complications when they want to share spells.]

Late in the afternoon, Roscuro asked Gav some leading questions about whether or not the security automatons, like those in Bis, were armed with weapons.  Gav suggested that Roscuro take some time in the evening to go look around Bis, particularly the Ardoc compound.  He also volunteered that if there was trouble in Bis, the other districts would not likely get involved.  Roscuro thanked him for the advice [and paid him some gold to keep quiet].

Evening

After dinner, Roscuro and Marativy went over to Bis to see what the difference was.  They nearly immediately noticed the difference – several of the buildings and their courtyards had migrated up the walls of the city and rested tens of feet up from their daytime position.  The entire Ardoc compound was nearly 100 feet up the city’s exterior wall.  This made the Ratpack’s plan to jump or climb over the compound’s wall at night impossible.  It would have to be a daytime job.

Once back at the Grange, the Ratpack discussed how they would deal with these developments [compound up the wall at night and Dimension Door not penetrating the city walls].  The consensus was to Dimension Door into Cavalcade as an escape.  Due to the limits of the spell, Swamprover would Dimension Door with Augustille and Zitch would Dimension Door Roscuro and Ariphi.  Hrefna, Swamprover, and Templeton would fly out, heading north towards The Warrens as misdirection.  Marativy would walk away, having never entered the compound and remaining hidden [for reasons to be explained].

End of Session

Rat Whispers

[We ended the session with Hrefna casting Commune again, but I’m going to push that to the next write-up.  We also listed a To Do List for the beginning of the next session:

• Templeton, Swamprover, and Zitch scout for a discrete landing zone in Cavalcade
• All return to the Grange by 1:00 PM
• All split into smaller groups to infiltrate Bis
• All assemble on roof of building adjacent to Ardoc compound to do the heist]

[The writeup was short as we spent most of the session talking out a plan to assault the building we needed with fewest being the wiser and with minimal alarms.  It was late as Dungeon23 is eating up some unexpected time.  I needed to draw out part of the dungeon level first and then describe the rooms.  After drawing the first page of the map I realized the Entry room I started was all wrong and I needed to redraw the starting map.  I should catch up this week.  I'm not certain I want to pull ahead as that seems to be counter to the spirit of the challenge.]

Ratpack

Book 1: Shards of Sin Landing Page – Links to all Book 1 sessions

Book 2: Curse of the Lady’s Light Landing Page – Links to all Book 2 sessions

Book 3: The Asylum Stone Landing Page – Links to all Book 3 sessions

Last Session: Session 11

Next Session: Session 13