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.