Sean's Campaign - Session #4

New Weird Al video

This session didn’t go anywhere near to where I had planned.

The group didn’t follow the plot hooks, but I was prepared.

Secrets of the PCs’ backgrounds got out a little sooner than expected, but that was ok. It gives me some more plot options.

The game session itself was pretty good up until the last hour of it.

Pre-game stuff:

Justin is back!
His schedule has calmed down and can get Fridays off again.

Mike is out.
His schedule has done the opposite. He’s been quite busy with work recently so he has to give up his Friday gaming for a while.

Dale was able to join us this week thanks to bad weather ruining his original family plans.

Next week we are playing, but the following week has several people unable to play so we’re skipping that week.

As for my own critique of my own game I need to do one thing; make a list of names to have them ready on the spot.

Example:

Last week the party was seeking someone to make them a Wand of Cure Light Wounds. But by intent and design, no one is freely available to do such a thing openly.

So with a little bit of role-playing, the party was directed to see three men known as Daryl, Larry, & Larry.

Yep, those are the names I came up with on the spot. And yes, I know it’s supposed to be Larry, Daryl, & Daryl, but I had to make at least a tiny change.

But anyway, on to the quick synopsis:

The party spent a few days doing their normal outside of the game stuff plus a few other things.

Thanks to the loss of a horse during their previous expedition, the party needed a replacement. But they were in for a bad surprise; the price of horses was now triple thanks to their lesser numbers. Additionally the remaining horses for sale were in very sad shape. Had Ian not rolled a natural 20 for his handle animal skill check, they’d had gotten a very bad horse. But instead he found one that had been a little sickly, but was getting over it. So instead of a horse with 50% of its hit points, they found a standard one.

They also went to see Daryl, Larry & Larry about some healing wands. They were told to bring them 2 normal pearls (100gp versions) and 750gp and they’ll make them a Wand of Cure Light Wounds. And if they brought back a weird and exotic head they knock 100gp off the price. Daryl also told them that if they found any large pearls he’d pay them a premium price.

When the party asked where they could find pearls, Daryl told them “good luck”. All of the pearl farms were either gone or watery death traps.

So the party decided to do search along the coastline to gather pearls.

But before that Artemis had something to take care of.

Artemis had something he had been tasked to do long before “it” (the apocalypse) occurred. So he went to the Talonar Arms Trading Company to see if he could get shipments of their weapons sent to the elves of Maratheelia. Their response was that they won’t even consider it until the trade roads to the north are safe and clear.

But prior to him entering the Talonar Arms Trading Company, he saw the manager of the place shooing a couple of halflings out of the place.

And wouldn’t you know it; those very same halflings were at the Roaring Bull Inn when Artemis returned. And since “PC” was stamped on the head of one of the halflings, the party asked them to join for a round or two of drinks. And of course both halflings accepted when the party offered to let them tag along.

So Trebor (Justin) and Recin (NPC) joined the group.

A few other things of note happened during this drinking evening.

The first caused Aarasilia to leave. Both Artemis, a half-elf warmage, and Zelast, an elf dusk blade, discussed where they came from and how they came to be here. Artemis had been sent to Endrin by his military commanders to establish contact with the Talonar Arms Trading Company to have weapons shipped to the elves. But the job was expected to be a failure and designed that way. Artemis’s existence as a half-elf was offensive to one particular elf noble name Jothillian. Zelast had also had dealings with Jothillian and his gang of noble thugs. They had attempted to accost Aarasilia but Zelast had to stop them. As a result they both fled to Endrin.

The second was that Recin seemed to stare at Ari. When she asked him about it, he said that she looked familiar, but couldn’t remember where from.

And none-the-less, the party was off to some more adventuring the next morning.

And it didn’t take long for that to happen. A group of 7 highwaymen ordered the party to stop and hand over Ari. When questioned the leader of the highwaymen, a woman ironically, stated that there was a reward for her to be brought in alive for a value of 100,000gp. It didn’t take long for talks to break down and fighting to begin.

A few rounds later and the party took care of the situation and captured one of the potential kidnappers.

He was just a hired mercenary though. He didn’t know anything other than her was being offered 1000gp to aid in the kidnapping of some girl. And since he was starving and couldn’t get a job, he had no choice.

The party believed him and took pity on him (although both halflings were a bit bloodthirsty about it). So later when the party returned to town, they handed him over to Bull for some unofficial rehabilitation and got him a job.

But before all that happened, Ari had to come clean. She told the party that she had stolen an amulet that would hide her identity from a wizard named Vernal. And ironically that amulet had been stolen from her just a day before the apocalypse hit. But something still didn’t add up to Ian so he kept pressing her for more information until she finally confessed. Her name was Arianna, princess and daughter of the king of Siglund. Her father had been overprotective of her so she stole the amulet to get some freedom.

Given that information, they knew they couldn’t turn their captive in to the authorities or he’d let everyone know.

And through something that is pure coincidence, the highwaymen happed to have 4 white pearls on them. So now the party has two brand new Wands of Cure Light Wounds.

Now the party had to decide what to do next. They ignored my plot hook and decided to hunt for more pearls. When this brought them to a large stone bridge, I let them know that they had heard many stories about the dangers that lie across that bridge. But they felt they could handle what was thrown at them.

So they crossed the bridge.

A couple of days later they encountered a group of creatures they had defeated before; feral demons.

I like the feral demons, but after this relatively boring combat, I think I won’t be using them again anytime soon.

But their special ability looks great on paper. A group of feral demons share the same soul that is split among several bodies. So whenever one feral is slain the rest get stronger; they get +1 AC, +1 BAB, +2 to their strength, and so on.

So the first couple of them dropped pretty quickly and easily, and they got progressively tougher. But by the end it was just predictable and the impact of these things getting stronger was not all that interesting.

The one thing that was interesting was that the last couple of the standing feral demons let out their fear howl and caused half the party to flee.

Now since I had overestimated the power of the feral demons, I knew I had to throw something at the party to get the point across to them that they were in a very dangerous area.

So as Artemis returned from fleeing from the fear effect, he was being chased back to the party by four huge ankhegs, hot on his heals.

So we were immediately back to initiative.

The party didn’t realize how deadly these particular ankhegs were until it was too late.

Caspar, the brave knight, charged at the line of ankhegs. But in the process of doing negligible damage he lost his light warhorse (Rupert) and his own life.

Ian, being another frontline fighter (a fighter/rogue) also was taken down in the process of stopping the onslaught.

The fourth huge ankheg caused the horses holding the party’s carriage to bolt. In the process they ruined the carriage and didn’t get very far. That made it easy for the last ankheg to get its meal.

After each ankheg had their meal safely in their mouth, they immediately burrowed into the ground to safely eat and digest their meals.

This utterly ruined everyone’s mood. They had lost their carriage, two horses, and two members.

Also, Recin ran off during the fight and didn’t return.

As a DM being nice thing, I let the party return to town with no chances of encounters.

And since the two dead warriors died not from doing something dumb, but from doing their duty/job I won’t be penalizing the players with their new PCs. They’ll get their new PC with the same amount of XP and money as they had when they died.

Now if you’re thinking I’m just a cruel DM who likes to give the party things and then take them away, you’re quite wrong.

I let the party do what they wanted. And they wanted to cross that bridge even after I had warned them in this session and a previous one how dangerous it would be. I certainly couldn’t throw little puff ball monsters at them so I had to show them how serious this area was.

I think what I threw at them was just perfect to get the point across; creatures that would attack the party and leave after they got what they wanted.

And if the party had about 4 more levels, this combat would have had an entirely different ending.

You might be a bad gamer geek if...

It’s been a long while since I’ve ranted about something.

But honestly there has been very little that ticks me off that I haven’t already ranted about before. Well very little that ticks me off enough to write about anyway.

I thought about doing a rant where I basically admit to be a geek hating geek. But after thinking about it, I realized that most geeks who qualified as the “bad geeks” would just not “get it”. They’re head is usually way too far up their asses to notice.

So just to clarify who qualifies as a bad geek (a.k.a – you might be a bad geek if…):
- You’ve ever written anime fan-fiction that is really just an excuse for you to write about your own disgusting perversions about demons and school girls.
- You’re a drama queen who can’t get the attention you think you deserve, so you hang around the fawning, drooling, women-starved masses of geek man-boys that lavish attention on you.
- You think that everything that everyone else is doing is wrong and you can do better, although you’ve never proven so at all.
- You’ve had a heated argument over which anime character is hotter.
- You throw a tantrum if you roll natural 20s consistently, yet only while someone is not looking, and you get called on it.
- Several people have actually said that they will quit a gaming group if you join it, and give a laundry list of legitimate reasons why.
- You join an established gaming group with the intent of showing them the “proper” way to play their own game.
- People consistently ask what that horrible smell is when you’re around.
- You’re under the impression that the owner of your FLGS should be at your beckoned call, even though you don’t spend any money there.
- You bounce from gaming group to gaming group continuously. And although they each kicked you out, it was a mutual decision…every time.
- You own a game/comic-store and have disdain for your customers.
- You believe that cheating only wrong if you’re caught, but is otherwise just part of the game.
- Or if you get caught cheating you yell and scream until everyone relents just to get the game going again.
- You’ve ever intimidated a fellow player or DM to get your way. And I don’t mean a skill check.
- Someone has pointed out that you misinterpreted a rule that closes a loophole you thought you could exploit, and instead of you accepting it, you do everything you can to ruin the game for them because they ruined it for you.
- You look down on everyone who plays differently than you, even though they are having fun.
- You don’t like the way someone runs a game, so instead of leaving gracefully you have your character commit suicide and make a big scene of it, then wonder why no one invites you to play in their new game.

What is truly sad is that I have met every one of these people. Luckily I didn’t game with most of them because most bad geeks advertise what they are.

Sean's Campaign - Session #3

This session could have gone better, but it was certainly not bad. (I’m just whining because it took too long to get to the role-playing part of the adventure.)

It actually did follow my preferred 3 steps for an adventure (find out about the adventure, go on the adventure, then resolve it all), but the middle part took a little bit longer than I had expected.

The combats still went quick, in couple cases, too quick.

The power of ranged weapons has proven itself in this group. Anyone who has ever whined that a PC who specializes in ranged weapons can’t keep up to a PC who specializes in melee weapons is 100% right - but only if the groups are close together at the start if the encounter. If you have a big separation between them, let’s say 500’ of open terrain, it gives several attacks to one side that the other must endure before getting into melee.

When I made it clear to the group that there would be several outdoor encounters, they prepped up for that quite well. Every single PC has a ranged attack, and they are quite good shots.

Mike’s character Borivic is a ranged-weapon ranger, who may contribute greatly to the party (though only if he shows up consistently…)

The only PC who doesn’t do any kind of ranged attack is Aarasilia. And that is 100% by intent and design.

She is the walking band-aid and buffing machine. And the sad thing is that is she 100% required, because no one is willing to play a PC like her if given many other options.

One thing about D&D is that healing is required if you’re going to play it in the expected way (4 encounters equal to your CR per day). But in order for that to work you need a fairly sizable source of healing.

At higher levels you will need massive amounts of healing in a short amount of time. This makes healing unguents, healing potions, and wands of Cure Light Wounds not so helpful. For those of you who remember, there was an incident where Brian’s WLD character Torin required two Heal spells in two consecutive rounds, and then a Cure Critical Wounds spell on the third round. A wand of CLW would only have stopped Torin from bleeding to death, but then another PC would have taken all that damage, and so on.

In this campaign, I gave the party the option to play nearly whatever class they wanted. And had them all make their PCs separately and prevented them from being all the same class. Not a single person chose to be a cleric.

The reason why is simple; no one wants to spend their Friday evenings rolling d8’s for healing while others get to roll d20’s for attack. Joy found that out in Aaron’s game – she wanted a fighting dwarven cleric but she ended up playing a healing dwarven cleric.

And no one should have to do that.

So I did the best that I could with what I had. And to me the favored soul class is perfect to fit the job; a relatively small list of spells to choose from, no undead turning, and I can easily prevent any kind of combat spells because she is my DMPC.

So the party has a healer, who gets XP and money like everyone else, but arguably contributes more to the party in combat and post-combat than any one other individual PC. And I have an easy to run NPC that does the same stuff over and over, allowing me to pay more attention to challenge the players.

I have long held the belief that a true DMPC is a horrible thing. It drains attention from the DM that should have gone to the game itself. Ask Dale, he’ll back me up, and he probably has the mental scars to prove it. But in this one case, I think it’s acceptable.

After all, at fourth level she only has a handful of spells that regularly get cast: Cure Minor Wounds, Cure Light Wounds, Cure Moderate Wounds, Bless, Sanctuary, and Lesser Restoration.

Would you want to play a PC whose actions on a daily basis consisted of casting those spells?
I thought not.

And now on to the not so quick synopsis:

Dale couldn’t make it for family reasons. Artemis was played by Aaron.
Joy couldn’t make it for other family reasons. Ari was played by Brian.
Mike cancelled Friday morning due to work. He also didn’t leave his character sheet, so we had to “poof” out Borivic.
Allen had to leave early to drive to Indianapolis. When he left he took his character sheet with him, but we were able to wing it with only an hour left to play the game and somehow no combats occurred.

The party had stopped and rested in the ruined tower after the dragon fight, and were able to rest all night undisturbed.

When morning came they set about searching the remnants of the dungeon beneath the tower. They found no new monsters, but did find the dragons’ treasure hoards.

But they had no clues to the whereabouts of Bull’s daughter. So they set about searching the entirety of the swamp, hex by hex.

They had a couple of lovely encounters.

The first was with a will-o-wisp that attacked them at night. It got some good hits in, but it didn’t do anything permanent.

The second was with a creature they later found to be a named a darktentacles. It almost succeeded in eating Caspar and his horse before the party narrowly finished it off.

This encounter did create a new tactic for Caspar and Artemis. Since a knight prevents the free 5’ steps to the squares adjacent to him, that prevents his opponents from moving without receiving an attack of opportunity from him. So Artemis just drops a Flaming Sphere spell (more for larger opponents) on top of the poor fellow, and does 2d6 of fire damage per round. Over a several rounds, multiple Flaming Sphere damage can add up to some pretty heavy damage, even if the saving throws are made.

After the darktentacles was mopped up, the party found some nice treasure on the thing. Something they found a lot of on this expedition. It was a potion here, a scroll there, several nice gems, and even a tower shield +1. By the end of the night, the party had found about 17,500gp in treasure.

Now if you’re thinking that kind of treasure is too much, remember it gets split seven ways. So everyone will end up getting about 2000gp in gear and treasure.

After two weeks of searching the barren swamplands, they had found very little. So they decided to leave the swamp and look for clues in the surrounding hills.

They found no clues.

They did find a wyvern that left Ian with 1 point of constitution and 5 maximum hit points. But that was the only hit that wyvern got in. I had the encounter start at 500’. For the next couple of rounds spells and arrows brought the wyvern to less than half. The wyvern finally flew behind some cover and did a hit and run attack (in the hopes of getting a meal later, after the poison did its job). But that didn’t quite work so well for the wyvern.

Had I not rolled snake eyes for the primary poison damage, Ian would have died from it when the secondary damage hit.

The party found the wyvern’s lair atop the high hill it started from. After they had looted they got another big scare.

A bulette, a.k.a. a land shark, burst from the ground. It had originally wanted to feast on sleeping wyvern, but will settle for some tasty adventurers.

This combat was scary for the party. They had easily shot a wyvern out of the sky half an hour ago, but this think was bigger, tougher, and didn’t give the party a chance to soften it up with ranged damage.

The bulette was handing out damage left and right. Even Caspar’s high armor class of 24 wasn’t stopping the damage that it usually does.

By the time Aarasilia had gotten to Caspar for healing, it was only to stabilize him.

In fact her healing brought him up to 1 hit point. So rather than stand up from his prone position and face an attack of opportunity, or play dead, he chose to attack from prone.

That was not the best idea, but he is a knight. Playing dead isn’t very honorable, and giving your opponent a free shot isn’t very smart either.

But he did broadcast to the bulette that he was still a danger. So the bulette squished him to under -10 hit points.

That left Brian’s duskblade Zelast. And he didn’t last long either. The bulette squished him too.

But he did buy time for the rest of the party to do plenty of damage to the bulette.

A couple of flaming spheres here, a magic missile there, and a few gisarme attacks from the very fragile Ian finally brought the thing down.

But now the party had two dead PCs on their hands. After I repeated to them that raising dead PCs was going to be easy, but expensive, they decided to head back to the hobgoblin Karak’s territory and ask him for help.

The party wasn’t that far from there, so it was an easy trek.

There was that peryton that attacked them, but once again a single volley of arrows hurt the thing so bad that it couldn’t survive a single round of melee. It succeeded in doing a whole 6 points of damage to the party.

They met up with the hobgoblins again, and talked with Karak. He told them that he could instruct his priests to have them raised, but it would cost them 10,000gp. And although gear and gems would get them 100% value, gold itself would only bring them 50% value.

The party had to cash in nearly every item they had obtained since they got together. So they said goodbye to most of their gems, the tower shield +1, the necklace of fireballs, and many other items. But it got their two frontline warriors back.

They were also introduced to an ugly woman named Kleta. She had been here the entire time. And no this was not a DM hand waive. She had been here the entire time, and had the party asked the right questions (and paid the right amount of money) Karak probably would have helped them. But that didn’t happen, so oh well.

Long story short; the party told her about Bull sending them to check on her and her daughter. Kleta seemed a little shocked by this, and mentioned that maybe Bull was not so worthless after all.

After passing out the last of her homemade (and disgusting) wine, she informed the party that they would be taking her and her daughter to Endrin when they left in the morning, then handed them what little money Karak had not gotten from her. Though not happy about that, the party decided to go with it.

So the next morning the party set out with two new members in their group. A forty-something troll of a woman, and twelve year old girl whose favorite activity was arguing with her mother. And they were not quiet.

And in spite of that, there were only two encounters on the return trip.

The party never found out what the first one was. All they heard was the quieting of the forest for a while, and then it was back to normal.

Later, as they neared the edge of forest, they found a clearing of a couple hundred kobold bodies piled up. When Ian scouted into the clearing, they heard the voice of “The Great Jisstorith”. He told them that this was his (?) domain and that they were to leave now. The party never saw him, and tried to instigate a fight, but Jisstorith didn’t take the bate.

They moved on.

Finally the party made it to Endrin. And none too soon because Kleta and Glenda were yelling at each other again. The guards that met the party felt sorry for them.

The party immediately went to the Roaring Bull Inn to dump the girls off, almost literally.

It was a happy reunion. And the party was happy to be rid of them.

It was now day 70 since “it” happened. The populace of Endrin has adapted. Very little heavy food, like meat, is available is heavily rationed. Nearby farmlands are heavily guarded now.

The only thing that hasn’t returned to some semblance of normalcy is fishing. Only 5 boats remain, and they have some heavy damage to them. There are still plenty of monsters lurking under the water, making it very hard to fish.

And because the party has been the only ones to bring in any new monsters, they now have access to the library. In game that means they can somewhat metagame when it comes to Monster Manual I monsters.

We stopped there (more or less) and will resume this Friday.

Sean's Campaign - Session #2

(The podcasts are now on the right. And you'll clearly hear the crickets in the background. Too bad it wasn't perpetually night during the game.)

Okay, this session went extremely well.

The mistakes from the previous session that I wanted to fix were fixed.

Mistake number one – This time I was not trying to do too much. I even had Brian run Aarasilia after giving him some basic guidelines on what she would do.

Mistake number two – There was no encounter where the PCs were not the stars. But then again, they were mostly on outdoor travel for this session.

Mistake number three – I was prepped and ready for every encounter, combat or otherwise, that the group had. The note cards paid off big time. It took a lot of time to write them down, but they saved a lot of time during the game itself. Given the number of encounters we had, I would have to say at least an hour of time was saved.

The combats went quick and relatively smooth (for us).
This I credit to the note cards, the players getting to know their own and other PCs better, the formation of teamwork in the group, and not much in the way of classes that require a lot of looking up information.

The only bad thing about the party is that there are 7 PCs (yes, I am counting Aarasilia as a DMPC). That means that getting XP is going to be severely slowed down.

The quick and obvious solution is more monsters and higher CR monsters. I will be doing that, but I can’t do that full bore just yet. Give the group a few more weeks, and access to more powerful abilities spells, and I’ll be able to “take off the kid gloves” again.

The other option is to take away Aarasilia. But that can’t happen. Six PCs and the closest thing the group has to a healer is a level 4 ranger. In other words, the group can dish it but can’t take it so well. So I’ve done two things to help the party.

First is that I’ve added “healing unguents” to the game. They basically can’t be used during combat, aren’t magical, and he 2d4 points of physical damage. Many can be bought in town. It basically gives the party access to healing while I’ve restricted them from buying magic.

And second is the addition of Aarasilia to the group as a full-fledged PC. She is a favored soul that only does healing and buffing, but will never aid in combat. The cost is that she started at level 1 and takes a full share of XP, and at some point I might even have her take a full share of treasure.

Here’s a quick synopsis of the game (for those of you who can’t listen to the podcast):

First we fast-forwarded Mike’s PC into the group. I gave him the option to role-play him joining up with the group or just having me tell them what happened. He chose the latter.

We last stopped with the group getting ready to leave town to find Bull’s daughter and ex-wife.

Thanks to the efforts of many, the nearby areas were encounter free, but rain heavy. But the forest was not encounter-free.

A group of kobolds, led by a caster caught the party by surprise with a spiked pit trap, poison darts, a web spell, and a couple of krenshars. After a few rounds the party was able to regroup and forced the remaining kobolds to flee.

Next was a hungry green dragon. He thanked the party for the kobold meal they left for him, and the party offered him the chance to follow them around and eat their scraps. He thought about it, but really would rather have had one the party’s horses. They couldn’t come to an agreement, so the party killed the dragon.

Next they found a tree swarming with a bunch of bat-winged tarantulas. The “tarantubats” were dead before they even did anything.

Once the party cleared the forest they were greeted into the domain of Karak, leader of the hobgoblin armies. In order to pass through, the party had to hand over an item of magic to the hobgoblin they met. So the party handed over a wand of magic missiles that they had retrieved from the green dragon (it wasn’t worth much anyway, 10 charges, caster level 1).

In return they were given a token that allowed them to travel safely through Karak’s territories.

But shortly after they made it out of there, a griffon attacked the rear of the party. It was looking for a meal, and horses are the preferred food of griffons. So now Ari no longer has a horse. So out there somewhere is a well fed griffon, with a lot of arrows sticking out of it.

I had originally planned on the party searching through the swamp, hex by hex, until they found the ruined tower. But they managed to make a straight trek right to the spot they needed to go.

First thing they found that wasn’t marsh lands was a recently ruined tower. All that was left of it was a about 75% of its outer wall and no ceiling.

They did manage to find a cupboard that had been jammed shut. And when Ian opened it up, he was greeted by a couple of red, feathery antennae that brushed across his chain shirt. A second later and his shirt had fallen off of him in a pile of rust.

A couple of seconds later and the thing lay dead with several arrows sticking out of it.

Ian searched through the rest of the oversized cupboard, and found a couple of nice gems that would more than replace the loss of the armor. He also found a trap door nearby that led down into a dark area.

Ian apparently had not learned to avoid searching through things.

He led the group while searching the various passages. Then he was paralyzed by a carrion crawler. The party took it down with out much effort.

Next they found a rapidly abandoned study. Inside was not much more than a table, an abandoned diary, a picture showing a young Bull McAllister, a woman, and a young girl, and some other minor things. The diary had been written in a simple code that Ian was able to decipher. And it basically told about life from the woman’s point of view. The more recent entries of the diary were about her and her daughter getting ready to leave because the swamp had gone crazy.

Next the party found another occupied room. And once again, Ian was paralyzed the slimy tentacles (his favorite kind of tentacle) of a grell. With minor difficulty, the party took them out. Once again, Caspar’s high AC played a big part in the combat.

While they were healing up, a voice coming from a corridor they had not been too talked to them. It told them that woman had and he didn’t know where she went. But this place was his now and he wanted them to leave. And unlike the grells they had just fought, he had backup.

When Artemis shined his bullseye lantern down the corridor, combat began.

They were fighting a small black dragon. And they drove the thing off pretty easily; even without Ian’s help (he was still paralyzed from the grell attack).

Realizing that the small black dragon might be getting some help, the party evacuated back up to the surface.

Eventually two dragons found them; the first one they had hurt and a new larger one (though still only medium size – because black dragons are little).

The larger dragon taunted them and found the party’s horses. The party offered to let them have the horses in exchange for their freedom. The dragon responded that he’d let the party go if they dropped all of their gear and left the area in the buff.

The party laughed at them. But Ian, now free of the paralysis, had snuck to get a view of the smaller dragon. He grabbed a 5d6 globe from his Necklace of Fireballs, dropped the necklace to the floor (for someone else to pick up), and tossed the globe at the smaller of the dragons.

Then initiative began.

The party started off strong. Either Ian or Caspar critted on the little dragon with a bowshot, sending it from 3 to -15.

But after the first round the party lost their momentum, having several of their group not being able to roll double digits in their attack rolls.

When it ended, nearly everyone was in the negatives or in single digit hit points.

It took the party nearly ten rounds to drop the dragon.

Next week, back down to loot the hoard.

Sean's Campaign - Session #1

Part 1 of 3
Part 2 of 3
Part 3 of 3
Remember to do a 'right click' and "Save as"

Well this session proved that I had forgotten to learn from some of my previous mistakes.

Mistake number one – I try to do too much sometimes. In previous games I would go overboard with the number of things that I had to do in the foreground and background. The result was a mess. For this session this was limited to the first encounter. I had too many different monsters and too many PCs of players’ who weren’t there, and I was trying to control them all.

I was able to recover and get back on my feet, but as you’ll hear if you listen to the podcast, the first encounter did not go as smoothly and perfectly as I had hoped.

I did not give the players the D&D crack I was hoping for – yet.

Mistake number two – I had an encounter where the PCs were not the stars. The fight with the ankhegs going over and under the city walls was meant to give the group a chance to aid the city guard in an effective manner. It didn’t turn out so well.

Although I take the blame for this, it is something that had to be done. In order to properly challenge a newly formed group, you need a good baseline understanding of the group’s abilities and the group needs to know how to work together. So the result this time was the city guard helping the party more than the other way around. So it did show the party that the city guards are not incompetent level 1 warriors.

Mistake number three – I was not as prepared as I had thought I was. I think I covered it well enough, but constantly having to refer to the monster manuals kind of killed some of the flow. For some of the creatures I just started winging it, but only for the ones I had a good memory of.

But it was bad that I did it because I know I’ve complained in the past about others doing it.

So I’m going with the solution I’ve seen work before, write it on the note cards. Before I’ve done the note cards as just an initiative tracking aid with hit points recorded on them. Now I’ll be putting the encounter stats on them. This is unfortunately a lot of time to invest, so I’ll be looking for an alternative.

There were several good things to the game as well.

The players did not know one another’s PCs at the start, and they still don’t on a role-playing level. I will have to push them to role-play what their characters are like, but so far I like what I’m seeing.

I think I did a good job of getting the apocalyptic feel of the first night across to everyone. Now the players might be looking at their character backgrounds in a new light.

And I think I did well at making the players think “What the hell is going on?”

Here’s a quick synopsis of the game:

A large group of people were having a good time at the Roaring Bull Inn when suddenly all Baator broke loose. Dinnerware and chairs started attacking people. Then a fire mephit popped out of the fire place and a steam mephit popped out of tub of cleaning water behind the bar.

Most of the crowd fled in a panic outside of the door, while one particular woman seemed to know exactly what was going to happen next.

While the PCs were doing what they could to take out the mephits and animated tableware, the crowd was confronted with a group of skeletons. So the crowd fled back into the inn, while several of them were being cut down by the skeletons.

Shortly afterwards several zombies joined in on the fun.

Eventually the party and Bull were able to put down everything, but just barely. Bull and Brian’s PC dropped to the negatives.

When they went outside to check on anything else, they saw evidence that this was happening throughout the rest of the city.

They moved to help the nearby wall and gate that was being attacked by waves of insectoid creatures (ankhegs).

Eventually the cavalry came in the shape of the royal guards. They had taken care of the attacks going on inside the castle of Endrin and now were coming to purge the rest of the city.

By 3am the fighting was almost done, but then the storms came. They storms put out most of the fires spreading through the city, but it also brought at least one tornado with it.

When morning broke (not that anyone had slept) the city was in bad shape. Over 95% of the fleet of ships had sunk, several buildings were burned out shells, and a sizeable chunk of the wall had been destroyed.

Then came the refugees from the neighboring farmlands and villages. Stories came in from all over about the same things happening to everyone else. The only real difference was that the city had a powerful and competent guard while most villages had just one or two protectors.

And then the aftereffects hit. The loss of many people from the attacks, the influx of the refugees, and the greed of man caused riots to break out for food and other necessities. This ended when the city guard was called back and martial law was put in effect.

The guard had been going out and aiding the refugees coming into the city, but too many guards were getting picked off, and the guards left for home defense weren’t enough in number to deal with a riotous populace. So the guards were called back and weren’t sent out again.

But the king issued a proclamation that for every refugee that a group of independent people brought back, they would be paid 10gp and they would be paid 50gp for the head of every “fantastical creature”.

(This world has your standard orcs, goblins, gnolls, and simple undead but creatures like dragons, beholders, and krakens are unheard of except as millennia old myths.)

At the urging of Bull McAllister, the party decided that they might be able to make good money going out and collecting refugees and heads.

They made two such forays. The first foray found them several refugees and a few heads. But the second only gave them disappointment as all refugees already had someone escorting them back to the castle; one group of refugees was even being led by gnolls who were also seeking a truce with Endrin.

But their second foray was cut short by a nasty flying lizard that permanently drained the constitution of a couple of party members.

When they got back, they got patched up and Bull asked a favor of them. His ex-wife and daughter are out there somewhere and he was extremely worried about them. He was willing to pay the party nearly all of his remaining funds, and a small magical trinket (Necklace of Fireballs) to bring them back to him (mostly his daughter though).

The party refused his money, but took the necklace and then set off the next morning.

And that’s where we stopped.