Intro

We’re officially done with Adventure 01. Its capstone dungeon is cleared and looted, and Barzilai has lost a large number of his loyal followers, including an important lieutenant. He also definitely knows someone out there is engaging in organized resistance against him.

But for now, our heroes can sit back and spend the hard-earned points they got at the end of the last adventure. Everyone got 14 points, and some of them had been saving up even before. Everyone might be able to afford some big-ticket advancements!

And not just that, between adventures is a very good time for our player (me) to stop and reassess our character builds, and “refactor” them if they aren’t working well or aren’t fun. And it’s also a very good time for our GM (also me) to maybe introduce some house rules that would have been potentially disruptive to implement mid-adventure.

[GM] New House Rule Time!

There’s a few rules I’d really like to try here. I’ve made posts about them all before, so I’m going to link them here.

These is going to change our PC’s character sheets, and I even already planned out how this would happen recently, so what’s left to do here is apply those changes. Any points saved by the changes go into the unspent pile.

[Player] Advancing our heroes

We’ll go over them one by one in alphabetical order, and detailing both the refactorings and the advancement for each of them.

Arcturus Pankrator, Knight of the Deep

Our boy Art ends up with the following new combat skills from the new house rule:

Grappling (A) DX+5 {20} - 20
Knife (A) DX+1 {4} - 16
Unarmed Striking (A) DX+2 {8} - 17

This frees up 4 points for him, meaning he has a total of 18 to spend. That’s not enough for Extra Attack or Unarmed Master, which are the big ticket items I’m after. He just got a pretty cool suit of armor so I’m betting that he won’t need any more DR from Tough Skin or other powers, either.

So I think I’m just going to hold until I do get those 25 points, and then I’m getting Extra Attack 1.

Jade Irinka, The Sixth Raven

Jade’s Saber skill changes its name to Fencing and becomes a little more conceptually broad, but otherwise remains the same, as does her number of unspent points. However, she has 20 of those!

There’s a lot of things I could do with this, but I think I’m going to be straightforward and get her 2 points of ST, bringing it up to 13. That lets her do a lot more damage with her backsword swings, potentially wear heavier armor, and gives her a tiny bit more HP.

Jania Moonshadow, the Phantom Thief

Jania has 17 points, and I think we’re way overdue for that third level of Spell-Thief Expertise for her. That’s 11 points, and it will make most of her spells hit that magic skill level of 15. The one exception is Great Haste, which remains at 14, but we can remedy that by spending 1 extra point.

4 of the remaining 5 points to go buying Observation at 15, and the last one goes to buying the Weapon Channeling perk (first presented in this blog way back in 2016). This lets her use weapons enchanted with Staff, which is good because we want to replace her cane with a proper sword in the next post.

Rosalia Savory, the Mysterious Satirist

Rosalia’s Saber skill changes its name to Fencing, and before I spend her 14 free points I’d like to refactor her a little.

Right now I’m setting her up to be good with guns because that’s what I had done in a previous solo game, but I don’t think I want to do that here after all. In the last delve she could only fire that gun once, and she missed. While there are several solutions to the rate-of-fire problem, I think I’m going to reserve that for Jade, and go in a different direction with Rosalia. I’m going to make her an archer instead.

So if we remove her Off-Hand Weapon Training perk and her Gunslinger (One-Handed Guns) advantage, we free up 16 points. Her Guns (Pistol) skill at 16 becomes Bow at 15. We’re left with 30 free points. 20 of those go towards Heroic Archer, 4 go to bringing Bow back to 16. 3 of the remaining 6 points go to increasing Singing to 18. We’ll keep the other 3 in reserve for now.

Urist Stortebeker, The Last Archivist

The skill changes don’t affect Urist’s skills in any way that needs renaming or rewriting. I’ll spend 4 points to increase his Axe/Mace to 15, and another 4 to increase Shield. The remaining 6 go to buy 2 points of Energy Reserve.

Coming up next!

We have $38K in our party’s treasury, so I think they deserve some equipment upgrades.