Order of the Mithril Dolphin #7: The Quest for Temps

Well I would have had this one up last week, but I goofed and deleted my draft by accident.
So then I said “Smurf it!” and waited until this week.

Session #7 was one of our standard sessions. Dale had to cancel due to illness for session #8, so we had kind of an ad-hoc setup where Scott got his feet wet for DM’ing with a couple of fights and a storyline setup, then I ran a little something afterwards.

We now have a secondary title for the group: The Order of the Mithril Dolphin – the Hunt for Temps.
This comes from Renald’s bard powers that gives us 4 temporary hit points, or “4 temps”, each time we bloody or drop an opponent.

Random notes/thoughts from session #7:
Lent is here, meaning the stench of cheap, greasy fish will be invading my olfactory senses at game time.
Artillery type opponents are usually the least effective monsters to put against PC’s any more. With the little we’ve played, those are usually the first to drop.
Dale created faux newspaper clippings for us from the “Hillside Gazette”, as reading and foreshadowing. Check out his blog to read them.
If a fight is almost over, use attacks that will end the combat sooner. Sometimes this is a simple at-will attack.
Ian took a beating this session. Luckily he’s a defender and has no shortage of healing available to him.
I am so sick of kobolds and fire beetles.

For session #7, everyone made it (levels 2-3).
Ergot (Justin), dwarf druid, controller
Kal (Brian), human swordmage, defender
Sephira (Scott), dragonborn cleric, leader/striker
Shamash (Aaron), dragonborn fighter/cleric, defender
Renald (Mike), human bard, leader
Wildeyes (Me), halfling ranger/rogue, striker

We last stopped after cleaning out some undead for some goblinoids (note for future use – we found a shiny black stone that belonged to the Cult of the Ebony Obelisk).

We then debated going after the dragon, Itzzelschnitz, or double-crossing the goblins for fun and then going after Itchy.

We chose not to kill the goblins, and rather struck a deal with them. For 200gp, they gave us directions to Itchy’s lair, cold weather clothing, and a hobgoblin soldier as a guide and combatant.

I would roll the dice for the soldier and Dale would role-play him. We wanted to name him something like “Standsinfront”, “Target”, “Combatadvantage”, or “Soaksupdamage”, but Dale overruled us and named him “Bonk”.

To replace some of Bonk’s lost powers (from not having any hobgoblin allies nearby), Dale allowed gave him a free attack re-roll every encounter (like the elf special ability), except that Dale would be the one doing the re-roll. So only on guaranteed misses would I do that.

We traveled to and found the cave of Itchy’s lair, but nothing was inside of it except a large disc on the floor with engraved silver runes.

Shamash promptly stepped into the center of the disc, said “Itzzelschnitz”, and then disappeared.

We all quickly followed him and were then in the first fight of the night.

We popped into an identical room, but this time surrounded by…kobolds and fire beetles.

The fight was easy and we had it cleared out in no time (figuratively, it still took an hour of real time) and we moved deeper into the caves, where it became colder and icier.

We had another very similar fight that ended similarly.

Then we found ourselves entering a large bowl-shaped cavern with an open ceiling, 3 15’ tall pedestals jutting out of the ground with kobold wyrmpriests on them, ice coating the floor, and a ledge with a young white dragon on it… waiting for us.

The ice hurt us with half movement, but the kobolds on the pedestals weren’t much more than a nuisance since our druid, Ergot, could pull them down with an at-will power.

Itchy flew at us, but remained 30’ above us, intending to rain hell on us from above.

But Renald used one of his powers to pull the dragon down to our level.

We swarmed him and beat the daylights out of him for the next couple of rounds; including dazing him.

We started off rolling really well and had Itchy nearly bloodied by the end of the second round, but then things went south.

My example: I used my best attack, a daily that allows two swings with my dual short swords +1, dealing 2d6+4 if I hit with one of them. Then I add 1d6 for Hunter’s Quarry and 2d6 for sneak attack. My attack bonus, with flanking, was +11 for each attack vs. the dragon’s AC of 18, so I had a good chance of hitting once, which I did.

For my 5d6+4 damage, I did a whopping 14 damage as the 5 d6 rolls were 1, 1, 2, 2, & 4.

To add insult to injury I followed that up with an action point attack that missed entirely.

After the daze wore off he was able to fly away from our melee attacks, which, in spite of not doing as well as we’d have preferred, still put him well into the bloodied state.

We followed up by hitting Itchy with our ranged attacks. He followed with his fear effect, and finally ran off once we got him down to 12 hit points.

And now we’re going to have a recurring villain.

So we eliminated the wyrmpriests that we hadn’t yet killed and then looted his hoard and ran before he could return with friends.

And that was the end of that session.

For session #8, (levels 2-3, 3-4 by the end of it):
Ergot (Justin), dwarf druid, controller
Sephira (Scott), dragonborn cleric, leader/striker
Shamash (Aaron), dragonborn fighter/cleric, defender
Wildeyes (Me), halfling ranger/rogue, striker

Scott started off as the DM for the night and Aaron ran Sephira.

We more or less ignored finding a way to leave Itchy’s lair and so on and started off heading back towards town and resting for the night on the way.

Undead rose up around us during the night and dire wolves joined them. They attacked us with surprise and hurt us pretty bad early on. Wildeyes was reduced to 7 hit points from 40 in the first round, before he was healed.

Scott had a very nice plot set up, but was totally too much to be used on a one-shot. I’m not sure Dale would run with the plot as is, but it’s possible. Which I think is what Scott was going for; giving something that Dale could work off of.

It turns out he had borrowed the basic idea from an anime movie and I’m not kidding when I say I don’t think I could repeat it well enough to not confuse anyone…possibly including me.

But anyway, we had another fight with more wolves, minions, and a hobgoblin warcaster. It was setup to happen in Hillside while in the midst of several buildings and we were surrounded.

I liked this fight because I had Wildeyes, who won initiative for once, go straight for the warcaster and took him out single-handedly (though I did have to use every single one of my powers and an action point, all by the end of round 2).

Note: wolves are still pretty nasty if used right.

After that fight I took over and threw a couple of simple fights at them that had been set up as a prelude to an orc invasion as foreshadowed by Dale’s Hillside Gazette entries.

The first fight was just a scouting party (orc raider, rage drake, 4 drudges) and wasn’t a problem for the group.

The second and final fight consisted of a cornered family of elves that was being killed off until the party heard their screams and came running to help. An orc berserker was casually killing each male elf that got in his way while 4 drudges goaded him on.

The fight started and the berserker and 3 drudges ran at the party, while one stayed back to kill off the elves. Then a hungry Deathrattle Viper joined in from the cliff above while triggering a minor rockslide.

The snake did more damage than the orcs.

Then we stopped for the night.