Aruneus Test #1: Zombie Hoard Challenge

Ben over at Troll in the Corner was kind enough to allow me and my group of girls participate in his Aruneus play testing.  A few weeks ago, he posted his first testing challenge on his forum.  I had originally applied to participate with my Game 2 Grrls (as opposed to my Game 1 Grrls, who meet on every other Saturday), but the G2G weren’t able to pull it together in time to participate in the first challenge.  So, last minute, I mentioned the opportunity to slay hoardes of zombies to my G1G group, who leapt at the opportunity to participate!

I was worried that coming up with our team name would be difficult, since we came up with several names that no one liked during our initial discussion (“Velvet Bludgeon” and “Valkyries of Zombie Doom” were among my favourites), but once we moved the conversation to e-mail we settled on a name very quickly.  Among the rejected suggestions were “Corpse Crushing Cuties” and “Lipstick and Machetes.”  Ultimately the team chose “Post Mortem Slayers” or “PMS” for short.

Since character creation is so time consuming and we were up against a significant time constraint, I volunteered to randomly generate their character sheets once they’d selected a race and class.  Did you know there aren’t any random character generators for Pathfinder?  Or, if there are, they are not easily located via Google searches or Twitter enquiries.  If you, dear reader, happen to know of one, please leave the link in the comments!  In the end, we had to do all the character creation by hand, which ate up just over two hours of our 3-1/2 hour game window.  I found the trove tokens 3.75 generator useful, though it still required me to enter all the information, and then generated a pretty sheet for me (that I couldn’t save to PDF and print *pout*)

Once everyone’s characters were created (An Elf Cleric, Human Paladin, Dwarf Fighter, & Human Sorceress), we ran headlong into battle with the hoard as laid out by Ben for the challenge.  The Sorceress, known as “Necessary” wielded a sickle that had the helpful additional power of knocking a foe prone, which came in handy for Coup De Grace attacks.  She was desperate to try out her burning hands, but knew better than to waste one of her only 2 level one spells on the first of 12 waves.  The Dwarf, Cheggers, started out dual wielding axes, but eventually found his maulaxe was wonderfully adept at zombie-skull-crushing if he took the time to intentionally swing at the head.  Of course, it was pretty much neck-in-neck between the Fighter and the Paladin, going by the name “Justified,” when it came to kill count.  The Cleric, Liriel, was marvelously pleased with the effect her channel positive energy ability had during the second wave, and couldn’t wait to fire it off again (though she promised her team mates she wouldn’t use it all up right away.)  The G1G had a fantastic time slaughtering the first two waves, but that’s as far as we got when our Dwarven Fighter’s husband arrived to take her home.

No one wanted to stop, though!  We had just been in the process of discussing how to work it out so we could just go on playing tonight ’til we were done, when he drove up.  So, rather than stop at the beginning of round 3, the whole group unanimously agreed that we have to meet up again on Monday to finish the fight!  Isn’t that wonderful?  My Post Mortem Slayers are so committed to ridding the world of the undead scourge… awwwww.

So, I’ll be back to post more about our Zombie Hoard Challenge after we finish on Monday night!

 

UPDATE: Sorry to disappoint folks (and especially Ben @Trollitc!) There was a sudden death that effected three of my players, and we were unable to get together Monday to complete our challenge. 😦