Picking up TOEE after 3 years and then Butchering both Iuz and St. Cuthbert

I bought TOEE when it was first released, played through half of it and quit. The original pen and paper module was one of my favorites, so I wiki-ed "TOEE" the other day and ended up at this Co8 page. I decided to download the 5.0 patch and started playing TOEE for the 1st time in 3 years.

First I want to thank the Co8 crew. Great job, guys! I love having 8 characters in my party and the new level cap at 20.

I was getting owned by Iuz until I read some tips on this page.

I don't have a particularly uber-esque party: the most notables are one 14th-level wizard, one half-orc 10th/4th-level fighter/rogue, and one human 10th/4th-level rogue/fighter. I armed the first fighter with Scather and the second with Fragarach. I had my wizard and cleric cast mass endurance, strength, and dex on everyone. I had my druid cast barkskin on most of the party. I had my wizard give each fighter 2 coatings of stoneskin for a 150 DR each coating.

Nobody in the party had wacked out custom armor or anything. I only managed to save enough gold and XP to craft one +3 keen flaming guisarme for one of my characters and that was it.

**The Fight**

I took Hedrach down to 10 HP or so and he whined to Iuz for assistance. I had my wizard cast summon major water elemental behind Iuz to keep the demigod occupied, and my druid and ranger summon minor animal friends and monsters next to all the bugbears to keep them from rushing us. Everyone else except the two fighters mentioned above were armed with glaives, guisarmes, and ranseurs in the event that any enemies came into range--the minute they did, one of my "polearm support crew" would trip them and the rest would lay into them with abandon while they were down and when they tried to crawl back up (most of the time, they didn't get to crawl back up).

That was the first round.

In round 2, both fighters rushed Iuz and did about 100 cumulative damage each (power attack set to 12 or 13). Iuz was distracted by the water elemental and a Mordenkainen's sword. My rogue/fighter even managed to do a crippling strike with one attack and caused Iuz to lose a couple attribute points (can't remember what, CON perhaps?)! My wizard launched an augmented level-5 fireball into the enemy wizard line and killed a few archers back there. My ranger and druid continued to summon minor assistants to keep the enemies in the middle ranks at bay.

In round 3, my fighters did 100 more damage each, and then Iuz got wise and decided to butcher-slap one of them 6 times. That was a bad move, since my fighter answered each time with a return attack. At this point Iuz was down to like 37 HP.

I saved the game, caused I wanted to time Iuz's death with the arrival of St. Cuthbert so I could kill him, too.

After a couple replays where I killed Iuz too fast, I decided to switch my fighters to "nonlethal damage mode" and basically bitch-slapped the demigod into unconsciouness.

Iuz KO'ed on round 3.

St. Cuthbert showed up a couple rounds later and just screamed "IUZ!" while standing around doing nothing.

I mopped up the rest of Hedrach's crew, looted the corpses, rested, and rebuffed my party with the same enhancements I had before engaging Hedrach, Iuz and, co.

But since St. Cuthbert was just sitting there doing nothing, I decided to use up all of my summoning slots to put creature allies at all 8 compass directions around him. I put one fighter behind him, and one in front, so 1 fighter would always get backstab damage. I had all my "lancemen" circling him in the interstices between the summoned baddies so that he would be covered from every angle and all my people would get a +2 on their strikes. I had my cleric stand a little bit away from the group so he could perform mass heals. Then I pressed "full attack" mode with one of my greatsword-armed fighters. Backstab for breakfast, Cuthie!

St. Cuthbert hit something like 10 times a round, but he was distracted mostly by the summoned baddies. I had to pull out each fighter once because Cuthie managed to get through the DR somehow and do damage directly to their hitpoints. A pit stop at my cleric's location sorted them out, though. I think it took about 5 rounds to kill Cuthie.

I looted Cuthie as well and enjoyed seeing a battleground littered with enemy bodies as well as the corpses of 2 naked demigods. That was fun. I even tried using a raise dead spell to resurrect them so that I could kill them again, but it didn't work.

I'm thinking about doing this battle again, recording it with Camtasia Studio, and then putting it on Youtube.

Hats of again to the Co8 staff for making me take interest in this game again!

Please put some demigods in Keep of the Borderlands so I can kill all of them.

 

If you can capture it and make it in to a avi, mpeg or other video and you post it on youtube...Yah, please, post a link to it here in a new post in this thread for us to all enjoy. That'd be great!