Dungeon 9 Turn 45
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The party shuffles around some items in preparation for finishing off the dungeon. It may not look like much is happening, but rest assured, a flurry of trade and exchange is taking place. Coccyx even contributes a single arrow to the process, although it breaks immediately.
Since, let’s be honest, nothing is really going on, Ricki has time to notice that Coccyx seems to be in some amount of discomfort.
Discord noticed that Cocyx was also uncomfortable like this on turn 36. We haven’t been able to figure out why that might be, but it was the 22nd arrow that he fired at us from our best tracking of turns and shots. We’ve been speculating Cocyx might have a fun pun ability to generate arrows like “Bone Marrows” – credit to Sick on that name I believe – but no real conclusion for what’s causing it.
“If a necromancer is present, it usually means that every undead around, no matter how far away, are under their control.” Maybe Cocyx is fighting against this control?
The weird part is the timing. Why turn 36 and turn 45?
Could easily be ‘you can make all the arrows you want, but with a 10% chance of it taking one health’ or something similar
Continuing the zombie kill plan
Kamau: Drink the zombie cure potion by consuming the plague sample and healing potion together. Move left.
Botanya: Enchant the siegesword permanently by sacrificing 5 hp. Move left.
Lara: Move left and pull the lever to open the bottom tomb door.
Ricki: Ask Cocyx about his discomfort. Move left with the rest of the party.
This gets us in position to kill the zombies from the bottom floor tomb on the following turn.
I understand that we want to clear as much as we can but traditionally turn 50 changes tings and forced us into panic mode and this time with infection and that high remorse the risk is very high, so please explain why you are not afraid of turn 50, I mean you have very detailed explanations to everything else and how to solve them, but things will change drastically if we stick around few more turns
We don’t really have a choice at this point. Starting the necromancer fight at this point has a 50% chance of a skeleton being spawned in the first two rounds of the fight. If we can’t kill the big skeleton in a single turn we will end up having to fight the turn 50 zombies at the same time as the necromancer.
We could just sit and do nothing for the next 4 turns to wait for the turn 50 zombies, but if we are going to do that might as well try to clear the zombies in the meantime when we have a safe plan to do so.
Continuing the zombie kill plan NOW WITH ADDED POSSIBLE PLOT AND CHARACTER STUFF
Kamau: Drink the zombie cure potion by consuming the plague sample and healing potion together. Move left.
Botanya: Enchant the siegesword permanently by sacrificing 5 hp. Move left.
RICKI: Tell Lara what you saw and that you think Cocyx is hurting himself by shooting us somehow maybe. Move left and pull the lever to open the bottom tomb door.
Lara: Ask Cocyx about his discomfort cause you secretly empathize with someone possibly hurting themselves with some arcane ability. Toss him your 3 arrows to use on us. Move left with the rest of the party.
This gets us in position to kill the zombies from the bottom floor tomb on the following turn.
In addition to that, there’s a running theory that Cocyx is using his actual bones to replenish his arrows and that’s causing him damage – which would explain why he went down so easy to Lara last time. The arrows are a way to keep him from hurting himself for a bit and maybe a peace offering to smooth over when the necromancer isn’t controlling him anymore.
Your plan has ricki doing two actions, just saying…
Meh, the telling lara thing is just flavor. I’m cool with it.
I think this is worth trying, and would have edited my plan to match this.
Lara, when tossing the arrows, please make sure to not accidentally kill Cocyx again, thank you.
Kill necro asap plan, with curing Kamau
Everyone move one room up, avoid the trapdoor pointed out by ricki.
Ricki: point out the trap to your friends, talk to coccyx about how he seems uncomfortable and might want to consider leaving this place.
Lara: support Ricki by apologizing to coccyx, maybe offer tovgive him some arrows and try to figure out how he died so quickly in the first place.
Kamau: drink the potion with the plague sample to cure infection.
Botanya: permanently enchant the siege sword with the scroll by using 5hp
I did vote for this but I do want to point out that still fighting the necromancer while turn 50 happens and zombies get summoned would be Very Bad given his block ability. This is cutting it fine.
Could we fight “Big boy”, and then go upstairs again to fight the new zombies (up to now all new zombies did go upstairs) and then afterwards go downstairs and fight the necromancer?
The necromancer is intelligent, so I’d be worried about them following us or getting an attack off as we leave. Particularly since we still aren’t sure if unblockable damage will be mitigated by Botanya, which might mean we need Kamau to interpose for any retreat and then retreat on his own.
Kill necro asap plan, no curing Kamau
Everyone move one room up, avoid the trapdoor pointed out by ricki.
Ricki: point out the trap to your friends, talk to coccyx about how he seems uncomfortable and might want to consider leaving this place.
Lara: double move left
Kamau: double move left
Botanya: permanently enchant the siege sword with the scroll by using 5hp
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This brings us into position to fight the necro in 2 turns, since Ricki & bot can catch up (though without having a combat action).
With this we could start necro fight on turn 46 and likely kill him before turn 50. It’s somewhat likely the dungeon won’t end then so we could maybe still do zombies afterwards.
Not curing Kamau is risky, but with this plan there should not be any more zombie encounters (until after necro fight)
Ugh comment belong to the other plan, but I can’t edit anything
The necromancer can’t be targeted through undead and has a chance of summoning skeletons every turn we fight him. This plan would only give us 3 turns to fight the necromancer, meaning if he summons a skeleton on the second turn we will have to deal with turn 50 zombies WHILE fighting him. If people are worried about turn 50 being awful, it’ll be way worse during a boss fight.
I think we’re getting greedy and setting ourselves up for potentially losing a character by not going after the Necromancer ASAP. The waves have been getting progressively worse, and Turn 50 is traditionally when things start to get really bad.
On Turn 40, he summoned a trio of regular zombies and we’ve JUST been introduced to an upgraded zombie that deals two points of infection. The likelihood of the Necromancer summoning something like a duo of beefy zombies, a duo of regular zombies and a beefy zombie, or a quartet+ of regular ones is too high for us to go off and screw around in the tomb to try and clear a secondary objective.
If we really wanted to clear all of the zombies in the dungeon, we should have aimed for that at the beginning and methodically wiped them out as we encountered them instead of leaving them alive so that we could backtrack and waste turns moving back and forth. Right now, killing the Necromancer and trying out any last-minute ideas we have for recruiting Coccyx feels like the safest thing we can do. We’ve got some great loot already; lets not spoil it by getting Kamau or Lara killed and having to abandon the dungeon just so we can try and add to our haul.
So I’m with you and voted and for shaylin’s plan above but here’s the rationale I’m seeing for the other plan. I know there is often a disconnect bayern the discord and the readers not on it so I’m trying to summarize the loooong discussions on thete to bridge this gap.
The concern is that we’re too close to turn 50 to start the necromancer fight. General thought it’s that big guy will take two rounds to beat. (I think we can actually do it in one, but I digress). With the necromancer able to summon skeletons with a 30% chance every round and himself being blocked from being attacked if there’s any undead there – that makes it likely we will still be fighting when turn 50 zombies happen. Which would be very bad.
The other thought is, believe it or not, but greed – but an honest desire to clear the zombies and finish the secondary objective because it’ll make the game world better. Like I’m hopeful (very) that if LSN drops a hint that ricki feels all the zombies are gone – we get to stepping. The opening of the tombs is to see if zombies are inside and assure the full clear. There’s no plan to even fight them if they aren’t zombies -(and spider chest is basically a gimme so a turn spent there at that point is no big). I’m also really hopeful that the owlbear doesn’t count somehow. But there’s a lot of evidence that it does.
Again, I want to be clear, I agree. I’m pretty darn concerned myself that turn 50 is either going to be the guards raiding through the tomb or a big spike in either the number of quantity of zombies summoned yes. With the infection cure being applied they’re confident that they can handle it without too much trouble. The analogy has been made to the chapel adventure, which lasted 69 turns. And the event that happened on turn 50 was just a spike in skeleton summons. They seem to think they can handle that. I’m also concerned that the necro kill doesn’t actually best the dungeon and we have to kill the zombie table or the altar somehow. And that once we do there’s going to be the twist.
But again all of this is speculation. We honestly don’t know. I do know that the crew really honestly wants what’s best for Ricki and the gang and they’re not going into this just for more loot. They’re literally going in to save the world from the zombie plague.
I’m voting for the necro kill plan, and suggest you do the same if you want to asap. But if we don’t go this turn, then yeah I see the point that turn 50 zombies appearing during the necromancer combat is a big problem. I do Agree with the assessment that starting the necromancer fight without a buffer before zombie summons is bad. I just really hope that the twist isn’t that on turn 50, the necromancer doesn’t start summoning every five turns cause otherwise all this planning is moot. But hey, I was very against the cobra attack and that worked out really well. I could be wrong here also. I hope I am.
Ultimately, it’s up to the readers to decide.
I think fears of him summoning one of these buff zombies we just fought are overblown. We were just told that they are incredibly rare, so him being able to summon one, let alone multiple on command seems incredibly unlikely. In the event one was summoned, we’d just have the flytrap attack it in melee and kill it off from range. Maybe that’d require burning a corruption for a venomous barrage, but it’s definitely not an unsolvable problem.
In any case, we basically committed ourselves to getting through the turn 50 zombies when we decided not to go for fighting them on turn 46 last turn. Starting the fight on turn 47 has a very high chance of having us fight the zombie spawn while we are fighting the necromancer, which would doom us.
Remember that the necromancer cannot be targeted while any undead are nearby, and he starts with a large undead Golem guarding him that we may not be able to kill in one turn. If we assume the big skeleton takes two turns to kill, that’s two chances for the necromancer to summon skeletons. If we can’t kill a skeleton and the big skeleton on turn two, or if he just happens to summon a new skeleton on turn two we will end up having to fight the necromancer and the turn 50 zombies simultaneously.
We basically need to have 4-5 turns of combat available for fighting the necromancer to be at all safe, and that’s impossible to do on this round of zombies at this point.
Yeah I think we’re likely committed at this point. Ideally there’s another healing potion in that spider chest to help us feel better but we’ll see what happens. I still don’t like the idea of opening tombs Cause of what might pop out but we’ll get to those rounds soon enough.