What Do I Know?

This will become important from an in character perspective.

We just did research that figured out what caused everything to happen.  A long time ago, mysterious crazy lady talked to “the Patron,” and he wanted her to get ahold of “the Entity.”  Looking through a big old telescope, you could undead bad guys on another planet milling about, with a gate.  For some reason, “the Patron” wanted some of that action here on Golarion.

“The Entity” caused the Abyssal dams to break and set loose the plague of undead.  So we knew, more or less, how all of this happened, and that it wasn’t just a gate that opened accidentally.  There was a transaction, and “the Patron” wanted the calamity to befall the planet.

However, my character is new to the group.  And my character has some of the highest mental stats of the group.  Thus I felt a little responsible for trying to come up with a plan and a direction.  Also, in character, it looked really strange that our child of Asmodeus left right after his father’s forces secured this place for us.

So my character called up on his mother.  Now, my dhampir death knight has claimed to the party that I’m Pharasma’s child  (for anyone not up to speed, the goddess of Death and Fate, not a fan of undead).  My actual mother was Urgathoa  (goddess of the undead).  I asked mom for a tip on what direction to go, and made her a deal that I would gladly turn full vampire and lead her armies if I died to get that information.

She clued me in that “the Patron” might be mister infernal himself, Asmodeus, and that he was orchestrating the people of Golarion to call on him to save them all and establish his own forces as primary to the world, wiping out the demons and claiming a lot of souls to boot.  She also mentioned that opening the gate on the other planet would likely cause the weird things on that planet to cause a ruckus in the Abyss that might thin out the demonic hordes, but if we did that first, Asmodeus was likely to get his way and take over right off the bat.

Now, knowing that the A man was the driving force behind all of this, we suddenly all assumed that his son must have been part of the plan, and decided to track him down and get some answers, or kill him, or both.  

And to get out of my deal with my mother, I asked our child of Sarenrae if her mother could provide me with something that would destroy me if I turned full vampire.  She got a necklace that, to me, was uncomfortably warm, and I put it on.

We went back to our lich ally  (that I hadn’t met yet, and didn’t want any part of, due to my vows of death knightdom).  He was going to open up the gates to Hell for us so that we could track down our wayward former ally, and our parents contributed a host of various celestial beings to keep the armies busy.

So we go to Hell.  We find a Pit Fiend.  I know we skipped some stuff in between.  The whole group was so ready to see if we could unravel the BBEG plot in one fell swoop, that we all gambled that we could pull off some miracle and unravel the plan from the backdoor.

Well, that didn’t happen.  This encounter was “set,” i.e. it would happen the same way if we did it now or waited a bit to try and gather some more information and maybe some more experience and magical firepower.  We were down two party members.  We were already hopelessly outmatched at 8th level by a pit fiend.

What’s even worse?  Well, I got too close to the pit fiend.  Poison is bad.  What’s worse is when you have a magic item that is set to keep you from turning into a vampire, given to you by the goddess of fire and the sun.  Once I dropped to 0 Constitution, my “fail safe” went off, and incinerated all of the party except for our arcane scion godling, who teleported out.

We told him to go forth, tell the gods to have more kids, and try this again in a couple of decades.  However, not only did my plans manage to royally mess up the party, but the GM didn’t even get to add his name to the roll of GM TPKs for this group, because one of us got away.

At this point, almost all of us that were present decided to put some distance between ourselves and Pathfinder.  I was voted GM, and since it is a fantasy RPG night, I gave them their pick of Dungeon Crawl Classics or 13th Age.  For at least one of the players, 13th Age sounded too much like 4th edition, and we had a good time with the one shot funnel two weeks ago, so DCC it is.

Now to make up a new funnel, and maybe a campaign and campaign world.  I’ve got two weeks.