The system is Pathfinder 1, and happened maybe around 2018. It's some years after the event now and my memory's crap, so I'm probably misremembering a lot of it, but I found out yesterday that one of the other players in the party doesn't remember how it went down *at all*. So since I can't rely on anyone else to remember for me, I'm going to do the best I can. I think that the reason why we had to go to the mountain is wrong, but a wrong story that makes sense is better than an incomplete right story.
I was playing as a Hunter; a bardrangerdruid that's written to invest heavily in the Animal Companion. Basically, Tick-tock the Deinonychus (named for the way that his talons would clack on the floor) was the *real* character and Raul the Hunter was there to provide teamwork feats and other various buffs or spells.
Scene 1: The Dam
The party is in a dam, which is is powered by draining the life out of a Pit Fiend that's bound to a magic circle in the dam. Mechanically, the fiend's got a ton of *negative levels* - these massively penalise it in many ways. We need to activate the dam, but doing so will immediately the Pit Fiend - those have 20 hit dice, and it currently has 19 negative levels.
Pit Fiends can perform one Wish per year. We could really, *really* use a Wish for a power bump (Wish isn't Unlimited Wish) so we negotiate the following deal.
- Mutual nonaggression, but the fiend isn't interested in indefinite servitude because that's not an upgrade from its current situation
- We can't take any direct or indirect harmful actions.
- We are to let it out and it is free to go immediately, but we meet back up soonish on top of a mountain someplace to get the first Wish.
- I can't remember what we specifically used the wish on but I think it was attribute bonuses, everyone wants more attribute bonuses.
- It gets the next Wish a year later to fix its level drain
- I'm pretty sure that we're damned upon our eventual deaths, either directly or indirectly for the act of letting a fucking pit fiend loose in the prime material plane
All party members and fiend sign said contract and power the dam in the interim with an animal instead. Now, we're currently low-ish level but we actually really don't want a full power fiend running loose in a year's time. We've got a lot of time to do enough adventuring and get strong enough to kill it before then, but it's still something that we'd like to deal with as soon as possible.
Scene 2: Clever Girl
- All PCs signed the contract
- Tick-tock isn't a PC and therefore didn't sign (not going to get a wish either)
- Tick-tock has Intelligence 3 and therefore counts as a person and is able to independently make his own decisions
- He can't speak, but he does have Cunning Pantomime which lets him communicate just as well very slowly via acting
SO, one evening while we're all in town, Tick-tock takes the initiative and fucks off to a paladin order to try to get some backup on the mountain later. I don't know how that all went down - the interaction was offscreen.
Scene 3: The Mountain
Time passes, and we arrive at the mountain at the allotted time. Disappointingly, no paladins had turned up. We receive the wish and decide that we have to commit to trying to kill it on the spot, because we might not get another chance.
Now, Level Drain ("Negative Levels" to be specific) is a serious debuff.
For each negative level a creature has, it takes a cumulative –1 penalty on all ability checks, attack rolls, combat maneuver checks, Combat Maneuver Defense, saving throws, and skill checks. In addition, the creature reduces its current and total hit points by 5 for each negative level it possesses. The creature is also treated as one level lower for the purpose of level-dependent variables (such as spellcasting) for each negative level possessed. Spellcasters do not lose any prepared spells or slots as a result of negative levels. If a creature’s negative levels equal or exceed its total Hit Dice, it dies.
However, go ahead and look at the Pit Fiend page and apply 19 negative levels to that.
AC doesn't go down. HP drops from 350 to 260. Damage Reduction 15 is still in full effect, immunities and resistances and regeneration are functioning, spellcasting is still up.
Not having access to the statblock, we didn't do the math and seriously overestimated our abilities. We couldn't even scratch it. It just kinda rolls its eyes and teleports away - apparently it had more important business to attend to. Things have gone from bad to extremely fucking bad.
Scene 4: Dread
So we released a powerful and purely evil being into the world, it's completely unbound by contract, we have no significant allies, it knows who we are and the element of surprise is gone. We don't know how long we have before it decides to mop us up or why it hasn't already done so.
I put my foot down. No more half-assed plans. We need to look at what we've got and figure out something that will actually keep us alive. We bring up the entire loot sheet, respective spell lists, abilities. We take at least an hour, maybe two, working through ideas.
It's a devil, those can be summoned with strong enough magic. Magic circles can hold it. They make deals. It's highly level-drained. It's apparently very busy. Any further level drain would kill it, but it's got ridiculous Spell Resistance, so good luck getting that to work.
We have a couple castings of Lesser Planar Ally (summon things), which ignores spell resistance at least, but it's limited to 6 hitdice, and you can't get a specific creature unless you know the name.
No, wait. With all that level drain, it's within the required range.
And we *signed a contract with it, so we know its name too.*
So we can force another fight to start but that's not a winnable fight, or even stop it from just teleporting away again. Back to the drawing board.
We do know of a circle that held it once, but we don't know if that was due to the existence of a previous contract or due to the circle itself.
But that doesn't matter.
Because that circle is, conveniently, hooked up to a machine that can drain levels.
Scene 5: Finale
We fucking leg it over hill and dale back to the Dam as fast as possible; on arrival we are relieved to see that the fiend didn't think of the same plan first.
We only get one shot at this.
One of us stands next to the activation lever. Our divine caster faces the circle and casts for a tense 10 minutes - which is successful. The fiend is barely materialising inside the circle and doesn't even have time to realise what's going on before the activation lever is yanked down and he implodes into dust. Silence.
Did it work? Is it over?
As we understand it, "killed" devils will reform in Hell (like most outsiders). Only one way to know. We pull out another scroll of Lesser Planar Ally and summon it again. This time, a mere 1HD Lemure arrives. No rank, no status, no power, no memory. Confirming that it did indeed have the right name, we dismissed it back to Hell on the spot and ended the session.
The End!
This is probably my favourite game tale. There's no "Nat 20!" moment, just desperation and raw system mastery to take down something that was probably about as dangerous as the campaign's final boss and get a free Wish out of it on the way.
