MAJOR spoilers for future The Ass of Ages Adventure Journals incoming
Context: Throughout the Serpent’s Skull Pathfinder Campaign, your party is supposed to be occasionally threatened and taunted by a creature called the Flying Shadow that will eventually be revealed as a winged Chupacabra. It’ll fly overhead, scoping the party out as a threat. Eventually (as written) it will drop a goat’s head at the party as a taunt before then flying away to its cave. The players will eventually find it there and fight it as the final boss of this particular book.
That’s how it’s supposed to go down.
I was unprepared for how personally Steve and Poldaran would take having a goat’s head thrown at them. As in, we aren’t going anywhere until we’ve killed that thing. As in, we’re going to go find an abandoned ship and look for cannons, cannon balls, chains, and gun power. As in we’re going to convince the friendly neighborhood dryad to weave together a big net made of vines. As in we’re going to find a small clearing and dig a pit full of sharpened stakes in the ground and have someone on the nearby cliff to throw the net. As in have two party members hiding in the nearby forest with cannons that’ll shoot cannon balls tethered together by chains to tangle the Flying Shadow.
As the GM, I was nervous, but decided to give them what they wanted. The Flying Shadow was a few levels higher, and its stats were high enough to evade some of the traps. So they shot a flair up into the air to get the Flying Shadow’s attention, and I had the creature swoop over.
LET THE EPIC BATTLE COMMENCE!
Except not really.
The Flying Shadow dodged the net, but Steve, as Paco the sleepy gunslinger, rolled a natural 20 on the cannon shot, and then a 19 to confirm. That doubled the damage, killing my Big Boss in one hit.
But that’s not all. Three sessions later, the guys were planning on how to deal with the local cannibals. So Poldaran asks me, “Hey, do we have any gunpowder left?”
I was reviewing the stats for the two bosses at the time (the cannibals’ barbarian leader and the local witch respectively) and mumbled, “Yeah, a barrel,” I think.
I had already told them that the cannibals had set up base over in an unfinished lighthouse farther south on the island. So Poldaran says, “Okay, so we’re gonna make a bomb with it, and then Belkross will run into their base, into the lighthouse, and blow up.”
For context, Belkross is more like a familiar than an actual person. He can’t really die, and if he is destroyed, he’ll just reform in like a day or two. So, (thanks to insane stealth roles) he ran into the lighthouse without being noticed by any of the cannibal guards. Both the barbarian and witch were there. Like the Flying Shadow, the barbarian had pretty high HP, so I was confident he could tank the blast. I also rolled to see if the witch could dodge. She rolled a 1.
And Poldaran rolled nearly all sixes on the damage.
Blowing up BOTH bosses. AND knocking over the lighthouse.
So…yeah. Don’t give your players bombs. Or cannons.
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