Lacking in Aim
Two vampires down, and the third coffin makes us suspect there's another one nearby. First, we take stock of what we've gathered recently, Ganelon in charge of the pool of loot. 'Did anyone take the heavy repeating crossbow?'
'Yes, I did', comes a disembodied force, the GM pointing out that 'I'm sick of you lot getting all the loot'.
That does us no good, though, but Brennan has an idea. 'How about we sell it to you for half its listed price?', but he doesn't have to gold to hand, so the crossbow goes in to the bag of holding.
'I have the magical stakes from the second vampire', I say, having disarmed them from the monster and hoping to use them against the next.
'Why would a vampire be wielding stakes?' says Afutavere. 'What if he tripped? Wouldn't that be really dangerous?'
'You walk around with a scythe. What would happen if you tripped?' Well, he'd probably miss, as usual. Even so, a vampire could probably carry a less self-harmful weapon, and it seems that this vampire used to be a vampire hunter. A poor one, it would seem, but moving on.
'Who has the pre-Thrune Chelish bunnies?'
'The... what?'
'Pre-Thrune Chelish bunnies.'
'I thought that's what you said. Let me see. Yes, that certainly looks like pre-Thrune Chelish bunnies. I'm not quite sure what else it would be. Where did we get them from?'
Much head scratching follows, as we try to work out where we'd pick up some bunnies, and if we really had them or were under some weird illusion. 'Oh, banner. It's a pre-Thrune Chelish banner.'
'That makes more sense. Brennan has that.' So with the bunnies safely tucked away in our bard's backpack we scoot down the corridor to the third room in this basement, where without any kind of surprise we encounter a third vampire.
We charge in to combat, knowing that our ranger will do all the damage again but hoping to get some small glory out of the combat to salvage our individual dignity. I surge forwards wielding the stakes plucked from the vampiric vampire hunter, and try to plunge one in to the heart of the vampire before us.
It's a hit! But it seems that in order to actually thrust the stake through the vampire's heart I need the monster to be helpless so that I can perform a coup de grace attack. 'But at least I'll be doing full damage, right? Even if it's effectively little more than a dagger, it will actually hurt, right?'
But no. The stakes may be magical, bypassing one of the vampire's magic and silver damage reductions, but they are otherwise plain wooden stakes. 'I think we've found why the vampire hunter became a vampire.'
It's good we have Afutavere around to save the day, with his silvered arrows being imbued with magical energy when fired from his bow. 'Full attack!' he cries. 'No deadly aim!' I think we've also found why our ranger tends to miss a lot.