Random DM nagging.

[Anastasia]

Okay then. Let's get the teams firmed up.

[Anastasia]

Announcement: Due to Yuth being gone most of this week, we don't have time to properly deal with the Lannark Imperium negotiations before tomorrow. Under the circumstances I am ruling that this is retconned into not happening yet. If the assault on Castle Crumbling goes well, we'll just move that scene to afterwards. If circumstances resulting from it render it null and void, we'll redo the first part of the scene as appropriate.

[Corwin]

Our team = Team PC + Ebony.

The secondary NPC team heading out to draw the defenders back to the Aurora: Adrian in the lead, Hanna, The Jarl, The Master and Simmer.

Precast magic: FF on everyone, RE x5 on everyone, the negative energy-blocking clerical spell of your choosing on everyone.

[Anastasia]

Our team = Team PC + Ebony.

The secondary NPC team heading out to draw the defenders back to the Aurora: Adrian in the lead, Hanna, The Jarl, The Master and Simmer.

Precast magic: FF on everyone, RE x5 on everyone, the negative energy-blocking clerical spell of your choosing on everyone.

So PCs+Ebony get Fortunate Fate, Resist Energyx5 (as needed, barring immunities) and Death Ward or Life's Grace. What about individual spells? If you have those ready already, post them so we'll be aware ahead of time.

[Merc]

Besides the spells mentioned, GMW as usual. I'll share it if anybody wants it before the attack through arcane channeling.

Yuth mentioned last page Attune Form on everyone.

I'd also like to poke someone from the NPCs to see about some spells given where we're heading:
Hide from Undead. Considering how easy this is to cast on a lot of people and its duration, should be worth spreading around. Might help squishier soldiers in Aurora a fair bit if undead do start streaming in. There's got to be some brainless ones or ones that fail their will saves.
Undead Bane Weapon. Won't help against devil minions, but sure helps cut down the undead ones faster.

[Anastasia]

So PCs+Ebony get Fortunate Fate, Resist Energyx5 (as needed, barring immunities), Death Ward or Life's Grace, Greater Magic Weapon, Attune Form.

Hanna or some of the firre/celestials can see to those spells on the soldiers as needed. Speak up if you want them on yourselves too. Hide from Undead is probably only so useful since offensive action or turning shatters that casting of it.

[Merc]

I'd like the second spell (undead bane) on my glaive. As you said, first spell probably won't really help.

If nobody from team PC wants GMW, I'll pass it on to any of the NPC leaders that do want it, and I'll cast it a second time if there's a lot of requests (I could get it on six other people).

[Ebiris]

Afina casts on herself Greater Mage Armour, Endure Elements, Shield, See Invisibility, Greater Heroism, Scalding Touch, and Moment of Prescience.

Also 10 minutes before the attack begins she'll cast both Elemental Swarm SLAs just outside Aurora's gate so that 2d4 large and 1d4 huge both water and fire elementals arrive and ten minutes into the battle a greater elemental for both will arrive as reinforcements.

[Yuthirin]

Muirfinn will also cast Elemental Swarm at the same time as Afina, adding additional reinforcements from Water.

[Corwin]

All our goons (and us) can and should have a Heroes's Feast pre-battle.

[Anastasia]

Duly noted, all of ya. If the five of you are partaking, say so too so you can apply those boosts.

[Corwin]

We are

[Anastasia]

Fantastic. Good luck!

[Anastasia]

Todo list after this

1. Purify Spell + outliers (Bolt of Glory)
2. Crown of Flame and Archon component.

Pay this no mind, just taking notes.

[Anastasia]

Tonight's miscellaneous announcements.

Make sure to read the away topic. Hopefully we can game tomorrow, but if not we'll finish this next weekend.

I'm going to reverse myself on Purify Spell and allow it to work as written on Bolt of Glory. Reasoning is in the spoiler box below.

Spoiler: ShowHide

Purify Spell isn't all that great normally, but it becomes solid when you turn 1d10 to 2d8 and awesome when you turn 1d12 to 3d6. Now there's not may spells that use d12s (For example, in the SC, there are nine that use d12s for damage, and of those only four do more than 2d12), so this is a corner case. Following the example of the rest of the weapon damage chart (add one die and decrease the die size by one step) ends up with 2d10, which has a higher damage potential than 3d6. So Purify Spell and Bolt of Glory don't play nice. I wanted to see how big an upgrade this was so I ran some numbers.

An average Bolt of Glory deals about 90 damage and a maximized one deals 180. This is against evil outsiders and whatever hits the highest damage category. By comparison, a purified Bolt of Glory deals 135 average damage and 270 max. Ouch. Impressive, but you're using a feat for one spell in particular. Compared to, say, an empowered Bolt of Glory, you're looking at 135/270 average/max damage. So that evens out with empower for a discount of one metamagic level. Now you get a lot more utility out of empower spell over purify spell, so I'm going to err on the side of this being okay for now.

As a final note, empowered+purified or other similar shenanigans for bolt of glory get nasty fast, but it's still a situation spell, so eh. I'm sure there's some potent d12 spell out there that purify spell shenanigans could do evil things with. For now I'll just exercise discretion with Ebony. (It would combo well with Afina's firebursts if nothing else)

As far as Crown of Flame goes, I'm going to table the matter until this adventure is over. As far as searching the board and my PMs go, I don't think anyone noticed the archon component in it. This isn't really a matter of the spell being broken as much as a rules fuck up. Cor, do you care about this spell much either way? If you do I'll grandfather it in, since it's been around for months and several appearances without anyone noticing. If not you can retrain it after this adventure (and use it for the duration of it).  While I'm not happy about the component screw up, that boat has long since sailed and it's my own fault for not checking your spells over more closely. Speaking of, I'll be checking them over tonight to see if any other slipped through. Yeah, I'm sorta annoyed at myself since I'm supposed to catch this shit.

I feel like Afina's AC is finally coming back down to earth, though her secondary defenses pick up that slack and then some. Jaela's saves rocket up to compensate; I ran some numbers and they're really eye opening. Jaela's saves from her sheet (disregarding non constant buffing that can raise these higher) are 46/37/45 (fort/ref/will).  Her fort and will have a double digit lead on everyone else (33/33/31 are the highest fort/ref/will from the other three PCs and 34/34/35 are the highest from the NPC topic.) and her ref is saner - until you realize that Jaela's weak save beats everyone else in the game's ref save.

As you may have noticed with to hit rolls when I want something that has a prayer of hitting Afina, one person's saves being grossly out of line with everyone else's can cause problems. If I want a save DC that can threaten Jaela on anything but a natural 1, the DC is going to be difficult to near impossible for anyone else to pass. This is obviously undesirable and will make the campaign more lethal for everyone but Jaela, so could you lay off the save optimization, Cor?

I have Dana's rebuild done, as I had more time during the past week than I anticipated. I've also constructed an epic psychic warrior and the bones of rules for epic powers. First of all, even with full PP progression, Dana's starving for power points. Psionics can eat them up at a frightening rate, especially with how the system focuses on augmenting powers. It's really a different paradigm than spellcasting with a fair few tradeoffs. Speaking of epic powers, one of the tradeoffs of psionics is that there's not much need for high/epic level powers. The basic augmentation setup largely reduces the number of higher level powers that are needed.  There's far less need for epic powers - and I don't intend to do much for them with Dana - but I'm going to establish the option for the sake of consistency and system balance. The concept of epic powers did exist in the ELH, though there weren't any in there and I dunno if any other book ever made any.