Let's Play Hell's Rebels: The Many Steps Monastery, Session 2

Intro

This post is part of my solo Hell’s Rebels campaign, and will probably be mostly GM-focused. Now that I’ve decided to break the “1 scene, 1 post” rule, I thought maybe I could do one where I just post the planning for the stuff I intend to play through next.

In our last post covering this delve, our heroes managed to progress through roughly half of the Monastery dungeon level. This is mostly because they’re using what they learned about the layout of the place and disposition of enemy forces to make a beeline towards where those forces are. They’re also just marking loot caches for later retrieval instead of stopping to count coins, which speeds up the proceedings by a lot.

Their progress, and the fact that the alarm is raised, means we have two encounters left in the delve. There’s a possibility they will merge to become a single one, but we’ll see how that shakes out in actual play.

[GM] Preparation: The Common Room (F6)

The original adventure places five more Asmodean Redactors here along with the Lout, an enslaved half-ogre whose brain has more or less turned into tapioca from many years of torture, brainwashing and mind control magic. The redactors attack at once. The Lout interprets his orders in a very literal manner so he does nothing until the PCs actually try to cross the door to the gardens that he’s been told to guard.

I don’t like this. As I had the opportunity to see during this delve, Asmodean Redactors are kinda boring opponents for our PCs on their own. And for a variety of reasons I’m not going to get into here Pathfinder 1e ogres are icky, half-ogres are super icky, and the Lout is super-duper-icky.

So let’s change things up a bit, shall we?

We’ll leave three of the redactors in place. The other two will be replaced with Asmodean Dark Adepts, which as we already saw make perfect stand-ins for more senior redactors. And instead of the Lout, we’ll have two hastily summoned Tar Devil Guards, because we know that adepts are good at summoning tar devils. Unlike the ones we faced back in Scene 02, these do have access to their tar net attacks.

I can also say that this is an activation of Jade’s Monster of the Week disadvantage that she gets from being The Sixth Raven. The adepts worked together to summon one devil, but got two because one of them is the same guy our heroes fought back in Scene 02. After being defeated and therefore banished back to Hell, he started spreading the news that the “Raven brat” was back in town. So when he got summoned again he pulled in a buddy to show him it was true.

So here is our new encounter: 3 Asmodean Redactors, 2 Dark Adepts, 2 Tar Devil Guards. Both the adepts and the devils are very “grabby” opponents, so we’ll likely use plenty of Fantastic Dungeon Grappling attacks. This will let the plain redactors do some backstabbing too. And there are enough opponents here that the party starts out slightly outnumbered and might have some trouble shutting down the grabbiness before it can start.

No loot conversions yet. There will be an entire session just for that.

[GM] Preparation: Meditation Gardens (F7)

This is easy. It’s just Nox and her pet hell-hound. Nox is pretty menacing by herself and that regeneration can make her a tough nut to crack, but our delvers do have access to some Holy damage and as the original book notes there’s a stream right there that can be used to drown her. She also lacks much in the way of mental defenses, so there’s a chance our PCs will be able to shut her down with “control” abilities.

So let’s add a little emergency measure to her. A “contingency scroll” affixed to her armor with a wax seal that activates when she gets stunned and summons a pair of Lemures to act as a distraction. Not the most spectacular trap in the world, but it’s what they could do on short notice.

Nox will pay attention to what happens in Room F6. She and Mephiry will move from their spot to join the fight there if it seems the PCs are having too easy a time dealing with the guard detail on the other room. Otherwise they’ll stay here and wait for the wounded and weakened party to make their way to her, to better savor their despair when they see who’s waiting at the end (she doesn’t know they know).