How a warpriest’s attempt at a valiant sacrifice terns into a rescue mission

This is a story about how a warpriest of protection and war tries to fails to sacrifice himself for his friend who get's captured, and their rescue that follows suit


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We were playing what started out as a one shot but turned into a short campaign. We were playing pathfinder but in a modern setting with firearms. We all got mutant abilities as well, some more powerful than others. I was a warpriest and I got a few important abilities. One was that once per week I could stop time for 2 rounds, but I couldn't modify the world or attack while it was stopped in that way. Another character, a bloodrager, had the ability to fabricate at will at the cost of health points. We also had a sorcerer and an alchemist. All of this will be important later.

A final note about the setting, we were all mutants living in a radioactive wasteland with a megacorp dome off in the distance. They would occasionally send out drones to scout the area and would kill any inhabitants they saw, and they were very hard to take down. Even if you did, it would only draw more, so we always hid from them.

We were on our third session and we were heading into the war-torn wasteland between the broken city and the shiny megacorp dome. We were using the fabricate ability to pull precious metals out of items we found to make an obscene amount of gold and silver. While salvaging we came across a broken but still active mechanical war dog that attacked us.

We almost killed it when it ran back and launched a firework. The alchemist stated he wanted to shoot the firework as it left, as to detonate it close to the ground so it would not alert the dome. The DM said he had to roll a nat 20 to hit it. The good news is that he did it, he immediately sniped it out of the air. The bad news is its explosion burned all of us, so we had to take a moment to recover. The other bad news, much to my consternation the megacorp dome still saw it and sent a drone to investigate.

We did not have many methods of quickly escaping. The Sorcerer used expeditious retreat to get away and into a building quite a distance away, as the area was mostly barren and empty. I used my blessings to give everyone extra movement speed, but it was not enough to escape. Luckily, the alchemist had 2 potions of invisibility prepared, but only for the 3 party members. I told him to go with the blood ranger and escape into the building, and he apologized for not preparing 3 of them.

Now resigned to my fate I get ready to fight what we had heard were nigh unkillable drones by myself. I had a couple aces up my sleeve. You see, earlier in the campaign we found an old gun nuts stash that had AP rounds for pretty much any gun. One of the guns I carried was a double-barreled sawed-off shotgun. I dropped the stone shield spell and crouched behind it, hoping to force it to get closer before it could make out my head signature behind it. I held my police riot shield in front of me as I waited, listening until it got close. Once it got close and stopped and I started hearing the guns start up, I stopped time.

There isn't much i can do while this is happening, but I could do 2 things. One was move into positions, and the other was take an aim action. That was exactly what I did. I moved underneath it and aimed upward and kept aiming till my time stop ended. Afterwards I fired. Natural 20. I knocked the drone out of the air, and it crashed down in front of me. I was ready to do battle with this thing. My party wouldn't let me have an epic one on one combat though.

During its first turn it tore apart my riot shield, though it took less damage thanks to it. Thank god for make whole so I could repair it later. Our sorcerer then dropped a large illusion of heat around the drone, blinding it, and giving us the edge in combat. Sadly, our fabricating bloodrager was not actually there that session as he had a week trip, so he would miss a couple sessions. The GM did ask him what his character would do via text and had him act. He of course, charged out and buried his massive sword in the drone. With it blinded it wasn't much of a threat and I could hear reinforcements coming, so I tried to pull the raging bloodrager off to no avail. The GM is an old GM and forgot that they could end their rage whenever, so he had him rolling will saves to break free, all of which he failed.

I had moved into the building, while doing everything I could to get the barbarian to follow us. The ship arrived and we prepared to defend our friend from cover. He was tazed and knocked unconscious, and they dropped a carrier to capture him. At this point we had all found point we could fire from in the building and I opened fire. There was no way I could break the thick steel cabled that were hauling my friend up, so I tried to take out the combatants so we could run out and try and save him. There really was not anything we could do.

I killed the commander with a single shot from my rifle, using AP rounds. My DM had a rule that if you fired on someone with a precision weapon without them knowing where you were with, he would roll on a chart to see what would happen. I tore out the guys throat and he dropped. The soldier freaked out and the still active drone rippled fire across the building. We were fine, but only because we got lucky. We all fired on the drone and I was able to take it out. The other two characters fired at the other soldiers and one of them summoned some monsters to assist us.

At this point the bloodrager was pulled into the ship and it abandoned the soldiers down below, our friend was captured. The following turn I was able to take out the next highest ranked person, another neck shot, and the two soldiers ran inside, one of them being killed by the other party members. I quickly jumped down and forced the remaining guy to surrender and we captured him, set on rescuing our friend from the huge facility. We were able to retrieve his bad that had the vast amounts of gold in it.

We make our way back to our starting town that had a vastly powerful mage in it to get supplies for this attack. We needed help and invisibility. On our way we recruited some of the groups we came across. The player playing the bloodrager had been having some fun and had started a religion worshiping a god of crafting and had gotten a few followers due to his sheer charisma and we were able to get some of them to come with us, though they didn't turn out to be needed in the end. We even used some stolen stealth suits that another group had acquired to set us up nicely for the attack.

Once we made it to the mage, we used our obscene amount of wealth to buy invisibility potions and I purchased a bunch of elemental golems the mage made, much to the surprise of the same mage. I also bought myself a dancing shield and gems to pay the golems for their service, since they had fire, earth, air, and water golems inside of them.

When making our way across the wastes to enter the compound with our captive guiding us, we had the earth golems carry the fire golems so the heat didn't attract attention and we dressed them up as large shrubs in order to hide their presence. The water golems were fire with traveling due to them not putting off heat and we used the air golems as scouts. We safely made it across the wastes to a preserved section of city outside the dome that the captive described as the garden.

We were able to sneak our way through the garden and into the dome. It wasn't easy especially since the area was flooded with drones during the day to clean the area up and also at night due to the residents "driving" around the place. We were able to stop at a high school science lab to prep more invisibility potions. We then broke into the facility by cutting through a wall with the joint effort of the fire golems and the water golems to keep the heat down.

We made our way through the maintenance tunnels, making sure to avoid any personnel we came across. The prisoner starting "blogging" at that point recording his capture. We did not treat him badly, and we even promised to let him go after we grabbed our friend. Maybe it was Stockholm syndrome, maybe it was because it was funny, but he was rather cooperative.

At this point the bloodrager’s player was back and it turns out some of his captures were quite fond of him, and some even viewed him as a messiah. They warned him he was going to be executed soon and he was even working on his own escape plan. This helped because when we made it after riding up an elevator, which reacted a bit negatively to our massive earth golems, we were easily able to get our friend out of his cell and start our escape, leaving our captive with the scientist as promised. They even looped the cameras to help us escape. We ran down the stairs by the elevator on our way out due to the elevator being investigator for repair due to strange malfunctions.

The alarms started blaring shortly afterwards and we even had to throw walls behind us as we ran down the stairs. We dropped down the end part of the elevator shaft and started running out. On our way out we had to sacrifice one of our earth golems due to it bumping into a drone after we used an illusion to make ourselves invisible. A bubble illusion was the best way to make it past the drones. The resulting battle was epic, as the golem was quite potent when we were not directly controlling it. Us paying it for helping us really did pay off. There was a long chase afterwards, but in the end, we were able to escape.


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