PF2e 10 - Shores of Duvall 1

A week off for me to prep, and a second week off due to an illness made this one come a bit later than other ones. We’ve got some stuff happening and I still am stumped by the travel question, though I may just not be that interested in having an answer for it, since there’s no like… meaning? To the travel.

Up top, the Magus player swapped characters. The benefit of having them rescue members of their tribe is that it gives them alternative characters, since a couple have stuck around the city. They swapped to their character’s younger brother, who is a Ranger with a Giant Rat animal companion, which is a reflavored Capybara familiar. The Thaumaturge character took a Bard multiclass, and got the Cast a Spell action, which is huge for me, personally. With Cast a Spell being a requirement for Spellhearts, it kept me from giving them weird weapon/armor augments, since they need the Cast a Spell action to trigger.

The party met with a member of the League of Iron, the church that runs the city of Arlon. I had a stupid name for him written down somewhere but lost it. It was something dumb. Trust me. I didn’t even get to say it to them.

The party had two missions that they could have chosen, both by the League of Iron, which really threw them for a loop. One person wanted them to just collect the stuff from a village’s library, and let the metal overtake the terrain, while the other wanted them to stop the spread of the metal and try to repair the village. This is to point at a schism forming within the church, as it’s devoted to a god of Ruin and Rebuilding. One faction believes that this is just part of the Gods’ wills, so it shouldn’t be stopped while another feels that this is an unnatural and artificial ruin being brought, and spits in the face of their order. Do to the party’s anger at the metallurgic menace, they chose to try to fix the issue.

Along the way to the coastal village of Duvall, they encountered a storm that forced them to scrounge for shelter for the night. This was just to see if they’d enter the next section a bit exhausted, but nope, the newly added Ranger helped crush the survival check.

The terrain was sharp and metallic for about a half mile from the village, spreading further than it had before. They came across a farmhouse beset by a few mechanical zombies. They quickly dispatched them, and were allowed in by the hosts.

What I’ve been trying for this mission is Moderate Encounters Only, since I had been putting them in a lot of Tough encounters, which has led to their increase in taking Feats and Gear based on healing. So the first encounter was like, 4 -1 and a level 2 monster. For a party of 3 level 4s, it was a piece of cake.
They met with the people who lived in the house, found that things have been going to shit for a week, and that they would be able to house people in their barn, since it wasn’t as sealed up as everyone else’s houses looked. There were many people who evacuated already but besides them four other groups remained, and they asked the party to rescue them.

One of the groups that they were told about was a group of Ratfolk.

They also found out that the metallic grass appeared to be radiating out from a point just off the shore, where the water had been solidified, and that they heard wet hoofbeats on the metallic water’s surface.

They ended up beelining that house by sheer happenstance (it was the one that was, on average, closest to them and to the water). They plan on completely ignoring the house between the Ratfolk house and the shore because it has, as my notes put it “Shitty Teenage Son” and “Shitty Teenage daughter”, who yelled at them from windows, demanding to be rescued.

The ratfolk house was beset by 4 Giant Flies (level 1), and they managed to dispatch them, with the Ranger learning they have a nifty “2 attacks for one action” ability. The fun with the Flies though is that they carry a disease on a DC16 Fortitude save. The Thaumaturge and the Ratfolk failed their save, but the onset time for this disease is 1 day. So nothing has happened to them yet, but we’ll get there.

With the Flies down, the party needed to find a way into the house. The Thaumaturge ended up breaking down the door, but it took time. They got a pretty middling success so I asked if they wanted to just keep at it, taking time to break the door down, or find an alternative means of entry. Sort of the mixed success setup. They chose to take the time, and when they got in, they met 3 plains/forest Ratfolk who have lived there, and two Desert ratfolk. One was the cleric whose staff they found in the desert during the caravan rescue mission, and the other was a badly injured ratfolk from their tribe.

And that’s where we ended it.

So I need to now advance time a few minutes and figure out how that affects things around the town. I should make a couple maps, but last session I used a drawing tablet to quickly draw battle maps based on where they were. Did it ahead of time and then did one night of, and it worked well, so I may keep doing that for less important fights.

What’s funny is that one of them brought up a Kelpie after hearing about the water running, because it reminded them of a Final Fantasy XIV thing. Let’s hope this Metallic Subsumed Kelpie is Funnier.