Dale's Campaign - Session #11

Well I’m going to make a quick entry for this session.

The reason for that is that the battery on my MP3 player died while recording, and thus saved nothing. That means no good facts of what happened and no interesting and/or funny quotes.

When I was doing entries for our WLD campaign, it was a lot easier to remember what happened without the need to record things. I could just open up the book and take a look at the maps and they would trigger the right memories and would then type them up. After the fight with Kasteoficiss I knew I had to record the sessions because the fights were getting to complicated and long to properly put in written form.

Dale doesn’t use maps (hence no maps recently). He pretty much free-hands everything. It works for him, so it works for me. But the lack of a solid map makes it harder for me to remember the little details.

So no maps and no recording means a short and quick entry.

Mike couldn’t make it to this session, so Aaron played Mark the paladin. When Brian left early I sort of took over Culan; which meant that I was running three characters for about an hour. I haven’t done that since I was in 9th grade.

Let’s see, we stopped the last session having cleared out Dagger Ford.

It was only around 1pm and we were pretty low on resources. We decided that we needed to rest, and then go adventuring during the night because we wanted to find Bauer, the ghost of the warrior who died trying to save his betrothed from the hags.

We rested and were about to move out to the river when Kineo was attacked by something he couldn’t see. No evil was detected by Mark, so we moved on while being wary of the area and building the attack came from.

Then it attacked again and critted Kal. It was a greater shadow who drained Kal for a mere 6 point of strength. That could have been much worse since Kal has an 11 strength and a crit from a greater shadow sucks out 2d8 strength.

The shadow then hid in the building. Kal then filled the building with a Daylight spell. But unlike previous editions of D&D, light now does nothing to shadows.

So when it didn’t come out of the building for us to kill it, Kal summoned an earth elemental and had it level the building. The shadow knew it was in deep smurf, so it flew up and away.

So now we’re cruising on the river once again. Kineo gets a nat 20 on a spot check (probably the only thing that would have worked). That prevents the return of the young adult black dragon from getting surprise on us.

This dragon (a parent of Growlgretch apparently) came in from behind and breathed on all of us (we were nicely lined up for it and all).

None of us dropped from the acid breath and we somehow all saved versus the dragon fear.

Our next actions involved us moving to solid ground and hurting the dragon as best as possible before it returned.

The rounds after went about as usual, while the dragon was maneuvering for a return swoop we buffed up or attacked.

Then Dale did the weirdest thing; he forgot that we had moved to land but the dragon intended to crash through our magic canoe and then swim away without us being able to get it. But instead what happened was that it slammed right into the ground onto the boat.

Several of us (not Kal or Jaxil) took plenty of crushing damage, and the dragon hurt itself nicely too (but not as much as you’d think).

Then Culan and Mark handily finish the poor dragon off.

Note to self: Give all dragons the Hover feat so things like that won’t happen.

After that we rested up yet again (a lot of our spells were designed for undead attack or dragon attack) and the next morning Culan memorized a Speak with Dead spell. But it didn’t work. We wanted to find out where its horde was. Now we have to wait a week to try again. Oh well.

So we cut off its head and moved on to find Bauer’s tower.

And we did. Going through the tower involved fighting your standard nasty and scary evil things and so on. And Kineo had to use his diplomacy to full extent to keep Bauer himself from beating the snot out of us.

Thanks to some good die roles and us having the same goals as Bauer did/does, he helped us out with some information.

But the lack of a recording means I can’t remember more than a few things.

First, Bauer cannot go past a certain point. His spirit is either chained to something, or it is being prevented from entering the area the hags live in.

And more interestingly, Bauer was able to smell his betrothed’s perfume, even after she was supposed to have been fed to the big bad grey render.

These little bits of information started filling in some holes we had.

Take these clues (some may or may not have been written down here before):
Gray renders are usually protectors rather than hunters.
No one has ever seen a maiden attacked or devoured by the gray render.
The hags always come for the maiden to take her away to the render, and they come in force (several hags and other things – like giants).

Now, I don’t think these girls are sacrificed.
They are warped and turned into hags.
I had been thinking this for a few weeks, originally as a bit of a joke, but also it was kind of thinking out loud.

The perfume clue pretty much confirmed it to me.

The idea of it probably came from gaming with Dale before.
:)

We have 16 days until the next sacrifice. And for the time being, we’re ignoring the Holtrus stuff unless something new and important comes up.

That leaves us 2 available options.

Option number one: Hunt down the hags and kill them in their home. That’s the standard way for adventurer’s to do it. But we have no clue as to where they are or how many of them there are. And we can’t forget that they would have the home advantage.

Option number two: This option requires a little more thought/planning and a moral outlook through my eyes.

The town originally was forced to accept the sacrifice as their only means of survival; “Lose a maiden and you won’t be destroyed.” Or in a more modern view “The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few.”

And for a while, that is acceptable, but after a deal of time, that one little girl has turned into 20 or more girls. To me, “the needs of the many...” has been perverted from a semi-noble sacrifice to the other townspeople actively working with the hags. They turn their heads so long as it doesn’t happen to them.

I don’t know if that is explicitly evil, but at best it is a neutral aligned thing.

And pardon me if I’ve seen the movie Dragon Slayer too many times, but I would be willing to bet that the leaders of the town are rigging how the maidens are chosen.

I wouldn’t be surprised if some of them are actually working for the hags, willingly or coerced.

So after having thought about that, I want to have Kal and the group return to town to find out more information about what is going on in the town itself.

Both options are difficult and have their own pros and cons.

And we won’t be playing this coming week thanks to the Easter holiday thing-a-ma-bob.

So that gives us two weeks to meditate on our choices.