Marc campaign 2

How I eviscerated my DM's final boss (and 500 extra copies of him) and dealt 2.5 million damage in one round

No, you didn't misread the title. My character, a lizardfolk barbarian named Lizalfos, dealt two and a half million damage in one round with the help of his party.

This is the story of a GM who allows *far* more than he should (including some bonuses that shouldn't have stacked, whoops) and three players who had forgone an unhealthy amount of sleep to buff their characters as much as they possibly could. This is going to take a while, so get comfortable. I'll be going over the whole campaign since it was generally a trip and a half, but if you want to skip straight to my character build that'll be in the last few paragraphs or so. I strongly recommend reading everything though - it was a hell of a ride, start to finish.

Let's start at the beginning - or rather, the end of our last campaign. We had one going in a custom system designed by the GM's friend, which allowed for stupid things like crits on 9's, +10's to any roll, and a character destroying a country's entire navy by running through their ships at mach 2. So the GM decided "Hey, fuck this system" and started a new one running Pathfinder. Except he made the *horrible* mistake of allowing 3rd party content. Pretty much anything on Paizo was allowed, alongside Spheres of Might / Power. If you don't think a lot of what I'm about to tell you counts because of 3rd party shenanigans, that's entirely valid and I don't blame you at all. A lot of this that can be replicated in base pathfinder, but by *far* the worst of it was only possible because of spheres of power.

Now's as good a time as any to introduce the party, as they were when we finished. The party fluctuated quite a bit as time went on (we had 10 people at one point lmao), but these are the only 6 who really made a difference. First three especially so. A few players were using SoP classes, so not all class names may be immediately familiar to anyone who hasn't used it. I'll be referring to players by their character names to avoid their real ones, I'll specify whenever it isn't clear.
* Me. Lizalfos, the lizardfolk barbarian. Nicknamed the blender; an absurd number of natural attacks let him basically spin around to pulverise things. VERY USEFUL for taking out things with a high CR.
* Labolas, the Tiefling Scholar. 8+int skill points per level made him a god-tier skill monkey. Also built nukes, could actually outdamage me given enough prep time.
* Lizzy, the Vishkanya Conscript. Initially played Undyne the Undine, who actually made a few appearances after being dropped.
* Buffy, the Dhampir magus. Only player so far to get something outright banned from our campaign, and it was string. Also figured out a way for a level 1 character to OHKO the tarrasque, as long as he can get in range. I'll go into both of those later
* Runt, the gnome wizard. Permanently tiny, rides his spellbook around like a flying carpet. Was a pretty solid meme tbh
* Barnaby, the human fighter. Joined late, was his first time playing pathfinder so he had a huge UMD for no particular reason. Comes in handy later.
* And number of other nameless characters, by players who weren't there when the campaign ended and didn't do much in general.

I think the first sign that the campaign was going to go off the rails came before the characters themselves - with my dice roll.
Everyone else had fairly average stats. Except Labolas, but we've made a meme of his player rolling well in all cases. But after rolling stat blocks for 15 minutes and getting zero 18's, I asked my GM if I could roll a d20 as a meme. Like a fool, he said yes.

20, 20, 15, 11, 8, 7.

I knew from the start that I was playing a barbarian, and *god* that's a perfect stat block for one. Allocated stats gave me 20/15/20/8/7/11. GM was right next to me when I rolled it, only reason it was allowed at all was because it was a bit below the party average. For what it's worth, I rolled 14/14/14/14/19/20 less than two minutes later, also in front of him. Maybe my dice are rigged. I got some of them from wish.com so I wouldn't doubt it.

Lizardfolk's racial bonuses (and lack of penalties!) gave me a passive 22 in strength and con at level 1. Barbarian rage allowed that to go to 26.

For what it's worth, we actually had a difficult time getting Lizalfos to talk to the rest of the party. From the start it was either Orc or Lizardfolk - Orc would give me a 5 int, Lizardfolk are xenophobic and refuse to learn anything other than draconic. I went for the latter, and as per that trait I didn't learn a single new language for the entire campaign. [And in doing so forced everyone in the party to learn draconic.](https://i.imgur.com/7QdTW3H.png) For the record, while I was memeing with knowing only Draconic, three characters learned everything possible to learn. One of them could even talk to animals and plants.

The campaign, as some of the players knew it, started at level 3. It actually started at level 1, but only half of the players were there for it and their characters were all scrapped later anyway. For what its worth, it began with Undine, Buffy's old character, and one other nameless one. We're all college students and the GM held that during spring break. The only notable thing to happen, besides 30% of the GM's rolls being crits, was the nameless player allowing Undine's grandma to be killed, by closing the door on some zombies while she was outside with them - a truly heinous act that the player was never forgiven for ooc.

The story as it began for myself, Labolas, and one other generic character, began by coming to the village the first three lived at after receiving a quest from a nearby city. They'd suddenly lost contact with the village, and there were rumors of undead roaming the streets. We started looking around the town for clues, and at one point heard a small noise in one of the houses. After ripping down one of its walls, we found (and scared the crap out of) the first group. After calming them down, we found out where the mayor's house was and took a look. A quick search yielded some incriminating papers, and one strange potion. Labolas rolled reasonably high on an appraise check on it, and found out it was an accelerated zombie rot potion. Lizalfos then made an appraise check himself, not trusting anyone but himself to do it.

Nat 1 and a -2 wisdom mod yielded a -1 for a skill check, first time anyone in the party had ever seen someone roll that hilariously low. Hopefully the last.

Lizalfos loudly proclaimed "THIS IS A HEALING POTION." and downed the entire thing.

Three successful fort saves later, Lizalfos became immune to zombie rot.

Little while later, after leaving to rest and coming back, we came across a Wraith, as per the SoP class. One of few non-martials our GM as ever bothered to make. He possessed me, I started and ended my rage to penalize myself, and after a round or two of combat we realized we had no way to deal with incorporeal enemies and ran back to town. None of us were very happy with the GM after that, who was [surprised](https://i.kym-cdn.com/entries/icons/original/000/027/475/Screen_Shot_2018-10-25_at_11.02.15_AM.png) that a level 3 party with (obviously) no magic weapons couldn't deal with a literal ghost.

The session between that and the next is where two of the original three scrapped their characters. One allowed himself to be killed so the party could escape, Buffy's old character was traumatized / seriously injured and retired from adventuring. Undine stuck around.

After seeing his friends hospitalized because he couldn't kill something quickly enough, Lizalfos got angry. Punched a couple holes in a wall, and ran outside to beat something senseless after the staff asked him to not destroy things in an infirmary. So he grabbed a metal beam from a nearby construction site, and smashed it around some. Since there's no athletics equivalent in pathfinder, my DM had me roll a general str check to be able to throw it around.

Nat 20.

After smashing it around some, Lizalfos heard a small "ouch!". Confused, he smacked the same spot and heard another "ow ow ow", followed by a weak trail of blood coming out of thin air and leading away. Lizalfos ran into the hospital to tell the remaining party that "AIR IS BLEEDING FOLLOW ME" and ran back out. After following the trail of blood to a dark alley, who did we find but a Drow Wraith - the same one who'd pissed off the party earlier that day. Now without his fancy Wraith abilities. Most people turned a blind eye to the Drow getting his ass kicked in an alley. But some people [joined in the fun.](https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/412011801484591104/638141376885817345/unknown.png) GM told us later that he planned the wraith to be a recurring enemy for the party, but clearly that didn't go so well. Also, Lizalfos got a +4 belt of strength off his corpse, and now has 30 str at level 3. Yaaay.

The next sign the campaign was about to go beyond anyone's expectations (if it wasn't already obvious) came from the very next quest we got. Party was hanging out in the main town's tavern, all glad about the death of that piece of shit wraith, when we were approached by a hooded figure, who asked us to visit the castle in the capital, another town over. Turns out the figure was the princess, who asked us to deal with her bitchy uncle the prince, in line to take the throne. Having him arrested or sent off elsewhere would be ideal, but anything works so long as the princess ends up being next for the throne. Thus began the last significant roleplay that would happen before the game became ruled by whose numbers were largest (mine lmao).

We had a bit of trouble finding any notable information, most of the continent is fairly racist against humans, which only one of us was. Most are passable at best, especially Labolas whose disguise was like +25. I only get by because I'm dumb enough to pass as his pet. Thanks to him and the one human party member we had at the time, we found that the prince often disappeared, but there was a shady gem-selling stand on the fringes of the markets, run by someone who looked like the prince - or would, if the prince wore [one of these.](https://partyplus-sm5.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/groucho_glasses_-_eyebrows_nose_moustache.jpg)

So, we pay the tent a visit. A bit of roleplaying ensued, involving an appraise check finding his most valuable wares were fake, the appearance of guards and a gem expert, and a flubbed sleight of hand check to pass a bribe. Someone cast zone of truth and the prince wouldn't answer if he ran an honest stand or not. The guards couldn't really do anything since he was the prince, but they offered to turn a blind eye if we had any "plans" and sorta just...left. The prince tried to run, but Labolas was well-versed in trap throwing, netted the dude, and [pointed](http://img2.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb20140225085927/jjba/images/4/47/JotaroPart3Full.jpg) at Lizalfos's new target. Coincidentally, this is also where the jojokes about me being Labolas's stand started.

Now that the uncle was out of the picture, our quest was complete. Nice. As reward, we got to level four. Oh, and a kingdom. Yes, at level four, the party is now the vassal for a small kingdom. Labolas was chosen to be the king, given he's the only one who can pass as human in a kingdom that's racist against non-humans, and the only actual human lost the vote from the rest of the party. Him and everyone else in the party took other positions in the kingdom, with Buffy's old character and a few NPCs filling the rest. Thus began our ~~reign of terror~~ ~~forced spread of freedom~~ rule of a perfectly average kingdom.

Not that it stayed average for long. In the very first kingdom turn we had, an adamantine mine was discovered. Apparently nobody bothered checking that mountain? Bit strange, but hey, all the better for us. Especially lizalfos, who now has some DR on his armor. Side note - I got an agile breastplate out of that, and didn't change it until literally the end of the campaign because I didn't need to. No enchantments or anything either. It was kinda funny when I saw it towards the end of the campaign and thought "hey, wait a minute"

And then, over the next few irl weeks, our kingdom kept getting events for no particular reason besides the GM consistently rolling a 1 on a d4. We became a popular tourist spot (probably because of the mine), some cultists popped up (swiftly dealt with as Lizalfos the enforcer rolled a nat 20 to put it down), and our magic shop getting an oddly high number of magic intelligent items. We got bracers of armor that wanted to smite everything that was CG, which pretty much defined our entire party. An intelligent helmet with comprehend languages that I don't remember anything else about because it wasn't useful. Stupid stuff in general.

Anyway, back to the main campaign. After the mines and the tourism and the cults, the nearby tribe of ogres started encroaching on our land some, so we had to go deal with it. The battle itself was mildly noteworthy because it's the only fight in the game where Lizalfos actually went down, and it showed us that we weren't as good against a bunch of smaller enemies as we were at fighting one big one. However, it did push a bunch of players to start optimizing action economies, especially Labolas. Since he was lucky enough to go first in initiative, this is pretty much how it went down for him:
* Before the turn ends, immediate action to detonate an acid trap in front of the ogres
* Getting hit by a trap lets him make an attack of opportunity, shoots them with an crossbow with a flashbang attached to the bolt
* Turn ends, new round starts
* Slides 10 ft away into cover, stealths, and reloads, all as a move action
* Attaches upgraded alchemist's fire to a dart trap and throws it an an ogre
* Attack of opportunity, flashbang crossbow because he got hit by a trap
* Swift action, throw upgraded acid flask at ogre
* Ogre dies when he was at full HP initially, nearby ogres take burn & acid damage from being in the blast range
* Uses abilities to negate stealth penalties and stay hidden

And here I thought making all my natural attacks at once was dumb. Mind you, we were still at level four when he was doing this. Had I played a *normal* character he would easily have been the most overpowered member of the party. Arguably, he still was.

Anyway, that was that encounter. Was a tough fight, but we finished them all off, including their general. Got some nice stuff out of it, but we pissed them off and they started sending more armies after us. Nothing our own armies couldn't handle, though. Also, unrelated, but we found a second adamantine mine around that point. So, that's cool.

Soon after that, with summer break around the corner irl, the GM decided to have a really noteworthy final event of the year. One involving love, a d10000 table of random magical effects, and Uggg.

Before I get into that though, you all need context on who - no, *what* - Uggg was.

So, every semester, the gaming club and anime clubs on my campus get together to host Redeye - an event that's just a full night of games and anime, 6pm to 6am. Every year we have a MAID one-shot (Always a treat, but a story for another time), and this time around my GM wanted to host another one-shot with the same allowances as the current campaign - except everyone was level 25 and had 10 mythic ranks. With the help of the GM and another player, my roommate (playing Undine in this campaign) built Uggg. Truly an abomination of a character - 70 strength, colossal sized, colossal+ impact butchering axe, greater improved vital strike, and a cyclops helm. The rest of us built fantastic characters, especially Labolas's player. His creation probably would have been more powerful than Uggg given the right situations - he had like 8 different ways of not being hit. But one-on-one combat was Uggg's 'right situations', and that's what we were dealing with in this one-shot, which was essentially a quick trip through Hell (the LE plane). Took out a few greater archdemons, and it ended with that party meeting Asmodeus - who Uggg promptly smashed. The GM made the mistake of giving Asmodeus a stat block. A CR 40-50+ stat block, sure, but whatever it was, he died in one hit after Uggg dealt like a thousand damage in a single attack. And after taking Asmodeus's powers, he used them to destroy the entire LE plane. We realized later that a lot of Uggg's bonuses shouldn't have stacked (notice a trend? I didn't at the time.) but at that point it was too late - the precedent was set. Uggg was a god who thrived on smashing other gods.

Oh, is now a bad time to mention that the GM keeps everything in the same universe? Helps him avoid making whole new settings. That last campaign with the custom system was some 1500 years before our current one. That one-shot is in the same world as the current one.

The LE plane does not exist in our campaign.

But Uggg does.

So, now that you know who Uggg is, let's get back to our story, and the last session of the school year.

One of our players, a human inquisitor, decided he wanted to get married for some reason or another. the GM used it as a convenient plot hook to get that a pseudo-one-shot for us. We were hanging out in the church, when a portal opened in the back, the inquisitor's now-wife fell in, and a bunch of lesser demons popped out. "We gotta get out of there! Sorry guys, this is our home now!" Then they all got blended or otherwise killed. After combat, the inquisitor jumped into the portal to help his wife, and the rest of us followed. After looking around some, a good roll on a quick knowledge planes check told us we were in Abaddon. It certainly didn't look the part though. Most notably, we saw a path of destruction trailing behind a gigantic creature, swinging at everything in his path, including anything that tried to fly up to fight him. After a while the creature approached us. "Hello! Me Uggg! Me like smash!" he said to us, smashing a few demons as he said it. Thankfully he wasn't going after us since we have brains and were't trying to attack him. Well, except Lizalfos, whose train of thought went "big monster -> kill" and was smited pretty much instantly. Worth noting by the way, anyone who was smited by Uggg was actually just teleported back to the church. It actually worked out pretty well for me, I had something I needed to do that night. Someone else, playing a witch for the one-shot, attempted to seduce Uggg, and was immediately smited by his massive holy dong. The rest of the party played it off intelligently and wasn't smited minutes after meeting a god. Since I wasn't there I can't tell you how things went down exactly, but I can say for sure that most notable events from that night involved the [d10000 table](http://www.traykon.com/pdf/The_Net_Libram_of_Random_Magical_Effects.pdf) that the GM had going. Especially:
* The creation of a water elemental as strong as Uggg (idk the roll ##)
* Abaddon freezing over (rolled 9999)
* Abaddon exploding (rolled 10000)
So, that was fun. For clarity, 9999 makes winter start immediately in the current area, and end when it would normally. Except this is Abaddon. It (obviously) never starts and never ends. And 10000 makes the nearest star explode in a massive supernova. It created some fun jokes in our party about hell freezing over and then exploding because of Uggg, another realm destroyed by his hand. OOC we started having actual discussions about what the greater gods were going to do about Uggg - he's destroyed two of the nine alignment planes, and he's probably not going to stop. Maybe he could delete some good planes for balance? He was dealt with later, but that's another story. For now, the party was smited an instant before Abaddon was consumed by the might of an exploding star, and we all woke up in the church. And to close it out the party went back to our home the castle, with the inquisitor happily married and all of us at level 6.

So, that's how summer break began. With the campaign on hiatus until the school year started, and all of us messing around with our own stuff as would be expected of college kids in the summer.

All of us, of course, except the GM, who had a great idea for how to make us all even more broken: Cohorts. See, the leadership feat, which can be taken at level 7, allows a PC to get a cohort two levels below them. There's a bunch of rules and things surrounding it, but the GM made a homebrew change to simplify it for us: Cohorts are consistently two levels below their PCs, and we don't get other subordinates. Also, he gave us all psuedo-one-shots to actually get our cohort. Not necessary, but kinda fun. And it was summer break anyway so not like we had anything better to do. We just pretended we were level 7 for that.

So, let me explain the cohorts. The GM decided only two of us can get cohorts, then basically everyone in of the party did anyway, save one or two of us who didn't need/want one. The idea for them was that we'd give the GM a concept, and he'd make a character that was really good at whatever idea we gave him. After that, we were on our own. Of course, we could ask him for advice, but the final decisions were ours. The three that are important are named/nicknamed Gordos, The Weaboo Dinosaur (& Co.), and Star.

Buffy got Gordos. He came a bit later, but it's easier to talk about him now. By the point he was introduced the party was already blending things in one round. So Buffy had the idea to make "a tank. But, like, a REALLY good one." And so, did the GM make a tank. "Loosely" based off his first character, Gordon, who got him into RPGs to start with. There are a few fun tales about him, but - you guessed it - that's a story for another time. Gordos's single goal here was to get his AC as high as humanly possible, and he did that EXTREMELY well. To the point that the tarrasque itself could only hit him on nat 20s. Damage wasn't Gordos's strong suit, but like I mentioned the party was one-rounding everything anyway when he came in. Gordos just made sure enemies were distracted in case they went first in initiative.

Labolas got The Weaboo Dinosaur (& Co). The fun part about his cohort is it wasn't just one - it was 6. The Dino wasn't even the lead. It was just the dumbest of the bunch, which is why it gets special recognition. The lead was an Incanter sprite, with focus on illusion, conjuration, nature, and fey spheres. The sprite, controlled entirely by Labolas, got:
* A butterfly familiar, to boost its perform dance, which the sprite needed to cast magic for some reason
* The Weeaboo Dinosaur as its animal companion. It was an ankylosaurus who could wear heavy eastern armor, which we polymorphed into a humanoid so it could wear rings and get tower shields and stuff
* A copper dragon mount which acted as the sprite's casting focus and could sunder, vital strike, bull rush, slow enemies, nauseate, poison, and dimension door thanks to a magic item.
* A holy healing ooze conjuration that can heal, give AC buffs, and act as a general support
* A graven guardian construct that the sprite built and specced out
Also Labolas's sprite cohort had like every magic item craft feat in the game since incanter gives you a really dumb amount of feats. So that was cool.

I got Star. My personal favorite of the bunch, but I'm a bit biased. My idea for the GM was someone to "make me stronger." And Star did that amazingly well, while being able to dish out a lot of damage himself. He started off as a Lizalfolk shifter. Lizalfolk being one of the DM's homebrew races, basically Lizardfolk+. And his Shifter was the spheres class, with an archetype that allows him to take talents from both the Alteration and Light spheres. When he started off at level 5, he could make me and himself huge, basically for free. He had as many natural attacks as Lizalfos - and got even more later on since Shifter's kinda silly. As someone with *extremely* limited knowledge of pathfinder in general, I'm inclined to say that a natural attack based Shifter is one of the best classes in SoP, if not pathfinder in general. Spoiler alert: having multiple attacks that all do damage as a colossal+++ creature is really, *really* good. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

Anyway, summer break came and went. We had our one-shots and did some theorycrafting for how we could get our characters to be even more busted, but before we knew it, summer break was over and the school year started back up.

The year started off easily enough. A neighboring kingdom of mermaids was under attack for some vaguely story-related reason, so the party went off to help. The battle itself wasn't anything notable except for the fact that it was an aquatic battle. A round or two in, one of our party members had the hilarious idea to cast hydrophobia on all the generic aquatic baddies who were attacking, and like 90% of them failed their will saves. So they all scrambled for the nearby beaches and were quickly dealt with by the few guys who stayed on dry land. Hooray, everyone's level 7 now. Canonically, *this* is when all our cohort one-shots go down. We've got a month between kingdom turns anyway so there's plenty of time for it in-game.

But, perhaps, not as much time as we'd have liked. After the next kingdom turn, ogre battle. the mithril mine.then go from there



summer break & one-shots
mermaids (level 7) and cohorts (star, gordos, weeaboo dinosaur & co)
mitrhil mine
army mass combat vs ogres - aiden kill stolen
herald of armageddon - nuke discovery :)
marriage & civil war - linguistics babyyyyyy
slavers
goblins and god-blin - fireballed them all and smoked out their tunnels b/c raiding trade routes. hunter kept god-blin as cohort, became gunslinger riding dragonfly
dragon blending.
nuked negative energy + wishblade + aiden's dad
scry on demon lord who was involved with dad
tarrasque & scrying on cthulhu pool party
~*<THEORYCRAFTING>*~
arrows + string shenanigans




Uggg.

epilogue - ascension, ending, afterbardy

idk where to put this so i'm leaving it here
A magic broom showed up later that could fly, ID powerful enemies/magic, and wanted to destroy all arcane magic casters. Near the end of the game it spawned a sentient staff that gave a +2 luck bonus to AC/saves to its wielder and could cast true resurrect on them once/month.