Yes, I got those confused. It is a shame, because I was looking forward to getting spells, but Bardic Inspiration will do. This allows me to hand out 1 or 2 B-I and still used C-W during combat, which is often better than a player rolling a B-A die. I think B-A is best used to help characters that have a one-time use massive damage weapon or attack. Our party has a paladin that carries a Javelin of Lightning. You definitely want him to roll a hit when he uses it.
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Cum catapultae proscriptae erunt tum soli proscript catapultas habebunt
We had session 9 last night. A very RP heavy session. But before I discuss it, let me fill you in on what I decided to do with my level 5 advancement.
I dropped Comprehend Languages because the DM never gave me a situation to use it. I decided to get Dissonant Whispers because it does much more damage than Vicious Mockery and I was often in a situation where V-M was my best option in combat at levels 3 & 4. I picked up Dispel Magic as a level 3 spell because I figure we will eventually come up against spell casting opponents, and I better be able to deal with that for the party. So now my spell list includes:
Cantrips - Vicious Mockery, Prestidigitation & Mending 1st Level - Bane, Charm Person, Cure Wounds & Dissonant Whispers 2nd level - Heat Metal, Invisibility & Silence 3rd level - Dispel Magic <and> Cutting Words which acts like a spell
So we left our heroes in the ritual chamber having talked to the fire elemental's avatar and sacrificing things of value to the "god."
We exited the library carrying substantially less weapons than we brought in but with a huge pile of coins (the party has over 70,000gp in coin value among us; some on our person and the rest back at the base). We have another 10,000gp value in stuff - mostly gems - without counting magic items, weapons and armor.
We load up my mule and head off for a village rumored to be a half-day's travel to the east from here. Our guide from Dragon's Eye Fortress, has disappeared after leaving us a note thanking us for our help and leaving each of us a special book marked with runes on the cover. Each party member received their own book with unique runes marking the cover. Mine is marked with a rune for "Trade" which is appropriate for my efforts to establish an Import - Export Company on the side to obtain information.
We rest the night and set off in the morning. Arriving near lunch time, at Antorling Village, we are greeted warmly and arrange for meals and accommodations for the evening. We talk to the town's leaders to get their spin on the situation east of the mountains and learn we have been taken advantage of by our friend from Dragon's Eye Fortress. The "god" we sacrificed to was probably on the "other side."
Close to dinner the town is attacked by 20 or so "Broo" and three or four of their warriors (think Klingons) rush out with us right behind them to defend the town from the raid. While taking the Broo down we learn they are a particularly nasty foe able to reproduce with insect-like quickness, so they need to be dealt with by someone soon at their lair / nest. However, that doesn't seem to be the kind of action the warriors wish to undertake but they would be happy for us to take up that quest.
We are divided as a party on how to proceed now that we learn we sacrificed items and are deep inside hazardous environs. The dwarven paladin and smith desires to head straight back to Wilowdale, our 'home base", right away. I desire to have the animals and my carts taken back to Willowdale before the 100gp I left with my hireling runs out. Nobody is really desiring to press on, but the war cleric announces that he (played by a she) has a spell called Sending that can be used to send a message to my hireling. As a Bard I know about Sending very well. It is the answer to our needs.
I say we send a message to Joseph, my hireling, to take the animals and carts back to Willowdale, using the remaining gold to hire some helpers. We send the message and he agrees. We use the spell again to Send a message to Rose, my patron back at our base, to ask her if we should return or press on. She replies we should press on. So now most of the party is with me that we should press on but the dwarven smith is grumbling.
So we decide to stay a second day and then head off on the third day after purchasing weapons and rations to suit our needs.
The combat with the Broo was very satisfying for me as the bard. I rolled poorly for initiative and I was second to last to act, even after the Broo. The human paladin ran outside about 20 feet and stopped short when he saw their numbers, drew his weapon and Fire Bolted the nearest enemy. Our dwarven paladin ran out next to him and threw his javelin of lightning into the crowd killing two and wounding three and drew a war hammer. Our dwarven war cleric ran out next to the dwarven paladin and cast some AOE spell that caused 10+ points of damage to anyone that entered 15' of him. He then cast spiritual weapon as a bonus action and missed another enemy. Our elven rogue ran straight into a crowd and used two attacks to wound two enemies, I believe with a mithril rapier and a short sword. He was facing two at this point. Our elven ranger ran out behind the dwarven paladin and shot two enemies with her longbow. A fighter on our team ran off to the left to cover that flank. He had a special shield.
The Broo rushed in and engaged most of our players. Our rogue was hit at least twice for low damage but got a "blooded" marker and a "sickness" marker. Our war cleric was hit and got a "blooded" marker. The Broo ran in from behind us too but were not close enough to engage. Many swarmed our left flank and were blocked by our friend. They engaged another fighter and killed him outright before he was able to act.
I ran out into the area of our paladins and cleric and cast Bane on three key Broo to dampen the ferocity of their numbers. I drew my short sword and dagger and waited for them to come. Then our human teenage sorcerer (which I am beginning to believe is actually a Dragonborn) cast some sort of Thunderclap spell which severely wounded a group of nine Broo bunched up in front of the fighter with the special shield and threw them back several feet.
In the second round I cast Bane on three more Broo and gave a bardic inspiration (d8) to our dwarven paladin when he ran back to cut off the Broo running in from behind us. In round three I used Cutting Words as a reaction for the first time with the party and blocked a hit on our War Cleric. This received widespread approval from the party who had never played D&D with a Bard in their party before. Then I ran over to help the Rogue who was generally not getting it done against three opponents. This was to lend my aid directly and to give him advantage when he attacked because once again he had run off into danger by himself. Unfortunately I missed with my short sword. This was a risky move because I need to maintain my concentration. In the fourth round the Rogue connected because he had advantage and we expected to stabilize that problem. I used Cutting Words again to deflect a hit to our dwarven paladin. In the fifth round I ran away from the Rogue and went to help out on the left flank. On the sixth round I used Dissonant Whispers to kill the final Broo.
So after that combat there were many compliments on the helpfulness of the Bard so I believe they are starting to get the idea of asking, "Hey, what could the bard do in this situation?" when we discuss encounters. I pointed out that Cutting Words is powered by Bardic Inspiration and I reset all those every short rest. So the party has been alerted that taking a short rest can restore some of our power rather than limiting ourselves to one encounter a day, which has been the norm up to this point.
The DM made my original wooden flute reappear so it seems our sacrificed gear may trickle back in to us over the next few sessions.
It looks like we'll press on to the East for the next session. We are told it should be two days to reach the next friendly town known indicated on the map I purchased. I spent our "down day" chatting up folks in town to obtain more lore for my songs and things and making friends selling pouches of spices and buying a mundane rapier.
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Cum catapultae proscriptae erunt tum soli proscript catapultas habebunt
We opened up this session waking up in the town's tavern/inn and discussing what we would do with our free day because the Dwarven Paladin essentially refused to do anything before smithing himself a new hammer. He also smithed up a magical rapier for our Rogue. Our other Dwarf smithed something too, or helped. I just talked to some folks to get more lore & background on the region and came up pretty light. The information I received I generally already had or was of little use. The other players came up pretty light too. So after another night's rest after a smashing performance at the tavern (rolled a nat 20) we had a good breakfast and set off, now with one of my mules carrying baggage and two "steeds" for the paladins since they could cast Find Steed now.
First we went off and knocked out a Broo lair. We killed over 20 of them, including three extra large ones. We stayed outside their lair and camped the night. We returned to Antorling, stayed at the Inn and left the next morning after a good night's rest. We still had to pay for our food, rooms and ales after thumping the Broo.
We traveled a day and made camp. That night we heard strange noises and had a dwarf, nearly naked, fall from a great height and land very near our camp to die. The next morning our ranger found Owlbear tracks. We presumed the owlbear dropped the poor fellow to his death, or he wiggled free at an inopportune time. We went on and found the river, followed it downstream a bit and crossed shortly before nightfall and then camped. The second night our cleric rolled a nat 20 on his watch and saw beady eyes watching us from beyond the light. Noone of the rest of us saw it even though the info was passed on.
The third morning we packed up and went a short way before smelling wood smoke. We believed the smell was the smell of civilization (the town of Six Brothers where we were headed) but it was in fact a burning farmhouse with the tortured burning corpses of the family hung from their heels outside. Tracks of large bipeds went off to the east, but our destination was along the river that continued north. We were warned by the DM that if we left, the tracks may be gone when we return. We placed stakes in the ground to indicate where we found the tracks and the direction of their heading, and then proceeded to the village.
At the village we were greeted as outcasts, not trusted and generally poorly treated. We were asked to head into town and we were followed by (their best?) strong warriors to the tavern/inn. We were then ordered to leave our weapons with our animals outside before going inside to meet their leader. There was much consternation but the other members of the party gave up their weapons. After asking if I could persuade them to let me keep my weapons I roll a 13+10=23 and I am told I was unsuccessful, so I left my rapier, three daggers, short sword and crossbow with my mule, but I still have a passel of weapons in my Bag of Holding that contains a generous portion of the party's treasure.
Inside we are told the guards were going to check out our "story" at the farm but in the meantime they wanted to know more about us. We went through that, which was mostly an attempt by the DM to trick us into saying something that would cause them to be offended. The party has nicknamed me the "College Bard" as opposed to the "Other Bard" because the rogue attempts to pass himself off as a bard but says ill-advised things. So as the College Bard, I managed the interrogation well enough. Then he shared a few things with us about the town, telling us they were traders and although they didn't like their neighbors, they were quite happy to trade with them. He said he was the (elected) leader of the town but a pacifists and although there were warriors in the village, they would not be going out to avenge the death of the farmers. They had no interest in pushing back the wilderness frontier to make the region safer. I found this to be worse than odd.
We made arrangements to stay the evening and the scouting party returned with word that everything was as we described at the farmhouse. Our treatment was upgraded to distrusted strangers at that point. We had a good meal, ale and I made a nice performance before going to bed. The elf ranger decided to get up after her trance and was standing watch downstairs in the tavern when the building was raided by Trolls, a mixture of large and small trolls. The alarm was given and after three or four rounds we were at the head of the stairs rolling initiative for who would get to go down first. Meanwhile our ranger elected to use her bow and shot a handfull of the small ones killing them.
The party rushed downstairs into a dark room larger than 60' in any direction with various enemies about. The Dwarven paladin, who sleeps in his armor, ran straight at the first enemy he could see swinging his warhammer. Others followed and I was second to last to act, after the trolls. As a half-elf I could see 60' but at the bottom of the stairs I couldn't see an enemy so I moved in the direction of sounds and found our dwarf paladin standing next to a dead troll. I cast Bane on three of them. Our other paladin was 10' away from me so I thought I was in a reasonable spot. The ranger was fighting beside herself off to my left where our sorcerer (actually a budding dragonborn) went off to help. Off to my right, also beyond my sight, was the war cleric and rogue fighting.
The bigger trolls swarmed us and we fought them off. One of them charged me in the round after I descended the stairs and delivered a 19pt damage to me with his greatclub. I said "Ouch!" I stepped back and he missed his opportunity attack and then I cast Bane on three more of them. At this point we had several rounds of trading damage with some Healing and Cutting Words thrown in. They started to flee when it appeared they were going to all be killed and we pursued them outside and finished off several more.
We learned it was a general raid on the village, folks had been killed in their sleep, other mischief including knocking over two watchtowers and all that. We have been told we will not have the benefit of our long rest in the morning. We have decided to deliberately have a short rest. The party is discussing via text message if we will proceed to the next town in the morning or linger here for any reason. Without any new information I feel we should just press on. Knowing these "lovely people" don't get along with their neighbors, we're concerned about the reception we will get in the next town.
Session 11 was a downer for me because of friction between players. I learned however, that only myself and one other player, and not the DM, appear to know the rules for a short rest. My DM is also playing his first game of 5E and his last game before that was back in 3.5E. We have had to discuss a few rules, but I was surprised to hear the short rest was not understood. I of course brought it up because of the bard's Song of Rest ability.
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Cum catapultae proscriptae erunt tum soli proscript catapultas habebunt
After a busy summer, we held session 12 on Labor Day.
We spent a bunch of session time checking out the town and trying to obtain Mithril, which was supposed to only be owned by the government. We bought 2 ingots after considering stealing it or breaking a guy out of jail to get it. One of our party members just said, I'll just buy it and pay the higher price. So we did that, we got some magic items identified and then we went on a journey to a far away town, which was expected to be about a week away. We chose to take a "shortcut" through a swampy area and we had the expected result ... we were kinda ambushed in the swamp. But since we hadn't held a session in two months we were begging for a fight.
So we enter the swamp and 'find' four creatures, which because of the icon used I dubbed the 'critters' Swamp Babes. They signal us, a party of seven, to come join them (a party of four) by their campfire. They are described as humanoids to us from a distance and we don't know any more as we approach. Once we get real close they jump up and swarm the closest PC and eight other 'critters' (seven Yuan-ti and one big boss of a snake like a Naga) come from everywhere and swarm the party that thought they were maintaining a safe distance. So the fight started all at once and the party of seven PCs was swarmed by twelve swamp critters in the swamp.
My Bard was at the top of the order after the opening round where we were caught by surprise. Four Yuan-ti ran in from our left where Cadenza and our Ranger, Amarille, were positioned. So I opened with a Bane spell at 2nd level to give these four a debuff so we would be better able to absorb the many attacks coming from these four. Three other Yuan-ti swarmed our human paladin from the right. Our rogue was attacked from our rear (north) by the 'boss' snake; I think he was a Naga. The other four attacked our dwarven paladin and our human wizard at the campfire.
After the first round a couple of us have taken a big hit (about 1/3rd of our HP) and nobody was killed. I cast a second Bane spell at 2nd level to give the boss and the three on the east side a debuff for the same reasons and try to prevent us getting overwhelmed. The DM has allowed me to cast Bane this way to add to the number of creatures I can 'hold down' without breaking my concentration. At this point, the critters focus on me to cause me to break my concentration, but they are unsuccessful until almost the end of round 2. By the end of round 2 we have killed 2 of the critters. Also in round 2 I cast Cutting Words on the boss which caused him to miss our rogue with one of his two attacks. He missed on his other attack anyway.
At the start of round 3 I cast Dissonant Whispers on a critter near me and after failing the save they were killed by opportunity attacks. Again in round 3 I cast Cutting Words on the boss but he was not prevented from delivering 21 damage on our rogue. We dropped another three critters in this round.
At the start of round 4 I cast Dissonant Whispers but rolled terribly and then the critter made their save so I only gave them 2 pts of damage! Again I cast Cutting Words to save our Rogue from 9 pts of damage from the boss, so he only took 12 points of damage in round 4. At the end of round 4 we had dropped two more critters and the rest started to run away.
At the start of round 5 I ran after one of the critters and delivered a crit from my rapier only doing 11 damage. Our war cleric cast firebolt and finished him off. In round 6 I ran over and cast Dissonant Whispers for the third time and they made their save and only took 7 damage. But our dwarven paladin finished him off before he could get away with a javelin.
This was a very tough combat encounter for our party. There were twelve of them with some spell casting abilities (they cast suggestion to get our tanks to throw away weapons or shields and they had some other acid spray spell or something). They had multi-attacks of two or three things each, while we had only five PCs that could deliver multi-attacks, so all combined they had about 25-29 'attacks' per round compared to our twelve. Their HP were on par with ours. Our War Cleric probably carried the day with Spiritual Guardian, Spiritual Weapon and the occasional Firebolt or swing of a hammer. Even when the critters made their save, they took 10 pts of damage from Spiritual Guardian if they were in range. Because of how they rushed in on us, they 'locked themselves down' by accident contributing to our war cleric's ability to deal mass damage.
So I made a big contribution to the party using Bane, Dissonant Whispers and Cutting Words and we are getting ready to have a short rest, so my Song of Rest will be another boost, before we spread around some paladin healing points.
So far, this party has had the most trouble with a band of ranged damage dealing goblins. Melee combat has somehow worked out very well for us. In this case, better than I expected at the outset.
Well, we finally held session 13 for this party. COVID has been an obstacle to our fun. Go away COVID.
We picked up after the swamp babe fight and the DM told us the evening before that we leveled up to level 6. Yea!! Magical Secrets!
So I picked ... Counterspell, and ... thunder step <not>. The DM doesn't have XGTE so I need to look for my second M-S spell still. But, for thematic reasons I picked up Sending.
I did convince the party to take a short rest and they were pleased to learn about Song of Rest. The DM asked the party leader w we were going to do, and everyone said, Cadenza, what are we going to do. So I told the DM we were going to travel until sundown to be away from the site of the battle, with our ranger in charge of guiding us along the best path to conceal our tracks. We arrived at the campsite and had an uneventful evening.
On the second day we stumbled into some more of the same Yuan-Ti around lunch the next day near a "foul pond". The first thing that happened was an arrow bounced off our tank dwarf, <ping!>. So we looked around and a yuan-ti fighter was about 90 feet off. We started to close the distance but we could only move at half speed. So there was a lot of arrow exchanges before we made much progress. But after we landed a few good hits, the yuan-ti ran and jumped into the pond. We had killed one so we gathered around his body to make sure he was going to stay dead.
About the time we got there, a black dragon came up out of the pond and landed 30-ish feet away from us. We fought the black dragon. I was effected by his fear and had to flee initially, but made my save on round two. Two others were frightened, but they tried to fight in place. I could only reroll my save after getting 60 feet away from the beast. At this point I wanted to stay away from the cluster (dragon breath) and find a 'safe place' to throw some magic, so I made my way to a better spot but had to use my crossbow because of range. I discovered another yuan-ti and started trading arrows with him. He hit me with a poisoned arrow on his first shot and did 11 points (combined) of damage to me in the first exchange. Eventually we beat the dragon and the yuan-ti I was fighting. I don't know what happened to the other one. Then the party decided we were going to spend two-and-a-half hours harvesting scales, blood, tusks, teeth and eyes from the black dragon. It was a lot of stuff. Then we headed off to hide for the evening again.
We traveled for, I believe it was two more uneventful days before coming across a town that had been burned and the inhabitants killed by "blunt force trauma." We burned some bodies and we had a look around and stumbled into two tough fighters. One was near death so we used some magic to heal him up. The other fellow was a very grim guy with a large two handed sword and the build to handle it. They were some sort of avenging duo and they ran into the monsters, some trolls, here at this town while the aftermath was going on. They had slain many trolls and the rest ran off to the south. Apparently the survivors of the massacre ran off to the north. We promised to go with these two fellows to fight the trolls when the one fellow is healthy enough. So we are going to kill some trolls next.
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Cum catapultae proscriptae erunt tum soli proscript catapultas habebunt
Wow, I forgot that I had not updated this story in a while. We have played about four or five sessions since this January update.
In the town I mentioned in January, we stayed and fought off a night time raid by the enemies. Then we went back to the Black Dragon's encounter with the objective of finding his lair and cashing in. With the help of our cleric casting thaumaturgy, we found an entrance to an underwater cave. Inside the cave we found and defeated the Black Dragon's mate. Then we grabbed the treasure.
Emerging from the Black Dragon's lair we went back to the now deserted town. We "realized" it would be better to head south to a place on our map marked as the Sun Dome Temple. At the temple we found new allies. We were able to spend our money from the Black Dragon's Lair and in addition to many other magical items we each purchased a book to improve an ability score by 2, naturally Cadenza chose to improve his Charisma to 20. At this point the party was all level 7, so looking ahead to level 8, I concluded that I should look at getting a feat, probably Resilient (Con). I believe I picked up Polymorph as my level 4 spell.
After a week of chilling at Sun Dome Temple, we headed off to the south to investigate two towns on our map that didn't have names. On the way to the first town we encountered a gorge. We walked along the gorge and found a rope suspension bridge. The other side was guarded by two bugbears. Not wanting to kill anyone unnecessarily, I went forward as the high-charisma negotiator and tried to talk our way across the bridge. Of course this didn't work, but I had to give it a try. They had a handfull of brother bugbears up on a rise shooting their longbows at us and we responded while the two bugbears at the bridge tried to resist our melee fighters. We mowed them down.
At the beginning of our next session we found one that could be revived and did so. We restrained him and tried to question him to learn where other bugbear groups might be so we could minimize our risk. He only babbled that he wanted to go home and we would never see him again. The party decided to let him go. I wanted to make him give us more information. But he ran away and we never heard from the bugbears again.
We went on to the next town. There wasn't much happening in that town but our Rogue, who always wanted to establish himself as an assassin, picked up a contract to murder two 'peasant' dwarves in the next town to the south, called Hills Guard. It was situated between two mountain ranges so it was a settlement in the "pass". We arrived in Hills Guard and the story really began to take off.
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You don't recover spell slots. You recover your Bardic inspiration usages.
Yes, I got those confused. It is a shame, because I was looking forward to getting spells, but Bardic Inspiration will do. This allows me to hand out 1 or 2 B-I and still used C-W during combat, which is often better than a player rolling a B-A die. I think B-A is best used to help characters that have a one-time use massive damage weapon or attack. Our party has a paladin that carries a Javelin of Lightning. You definitely want him to roll a hit when he uses it.
Cum catapultae proscriptae erunt tum soli proscript catapultas habebunt
Very true.
We had session 9 last night. A very RP heavy session. But before I discuss it, let me fill you in on what I decided to do with my level 5 advancement.
I dropped Comprehend Languages because the DM never gave me a situation to use it. I decided to get Dissonant Whispers because it does much more damage than Vicious Mockery and I was often in a situation where V-M was my best option in combat at levels 3 & 4. I picked up Dispel Magic as a level 3 spell because I figure we will eventually come up against spell casting opponents, and I better be able to deal with that for the party. So now my spell list includes:
Cantrips - Vicious Mockery, Prestidigitation & Mending 1st Level - Bane, Charm Person, Cure Wounds & Dissonant Whispers 2nd level - Heat Metal, Invisibility & Silence 3rd level - Dispel Magic <and> Cutting Words which acts like a spell
So we left our heroes in the ritual chamber having talked to the fire elemental's avatar and sacrificing things of value to the "god."
We exited the library carrying substantially less weapons than we brought in but with a huge pile of coins (the party has over 70,000gp in coin value among us; some on our person and the rest back at the base). We have another 10,000gp value in stuff - mostly gems - without counting magic items, weapons and armor.
We load up my mule and head off for a village rumored to be a half-day's travel to the east from here. Our guide from Dragon's Eye Fortress, has disappeared after leaving us a note thanking us for our help and leaving each of us a special book marked with runes on the cover. Each party member received their own book with unique runes marking the cover. Mine is marked with a rune for "Trade" which is appropriate for my efforts to establish an Import - Export Company on the side to obtain information.
We rest the night and set off in the morning. Arriving near lunch time, at Antorling Village, we are greeted warmly and arrange for meals and accommodations for the evening. We talk to the town's leaders to get their spin on the situation east of the mountains and learn we have been taken advantage of by our friend from Dragon's Eye Fortress. The "god" we sacrificed to was probably on the "other side."
Close to dinner the town is attacked by 20 or so "Broo" and three or four of their warriors (think Klingons) rush out with us right behind them to defend the town from the raid. While taking the Broo down we learn they are a particularly nasty foe able to reproduce with insect-like quickness, so they need to be dealt with by someone soon at their lair / nest. However, that doesn't seem to be the kind of action the warriors wish to undertake but they would be happy for us to take up that quest.
We are divided as a party on how to proceed now that we learn we sacrificed items and are deep inside hazardous environs. The dwarven paladin and smith desires to head straight back to Wilowdale, our 'home base", right away. I desire to have the animals and my carts taken back to Willowdale before the 100gp I left with my hireling runs out. Nobody is really desiring to press on, but the war cleric announces that he (played by a she) has a spell called Sending that can be used to send a message to my hireling. As a Bard I know about Sending very well. It is the answer to our needs.
I say we send a message to Joseph, my hireling, to take the animals and carts back to Willowdale, using the remaining gold to hire some helpers. We send the message and he agrees. We use the spell again to Send a message to Rose, my patron back at our base, to ask her if we should return or press on. She replies we should press on. So now most of the party is with me that we should press on but the dwarven smith is grumbling.
So we decide to stay a second day and then head off on the third day after purchasing weapons and rations to suit our needs.
The combat with the Broo was very satisfying for me as the bard. I rolled poorly for initiative and I was second to last to act, even after the Broo. The human paladin ran outside about 20 feet and stopped short when he saw their numbers, drew his weapon and Fire Bolted the nearest enemy. Our dwarven paladin ran out next to him and threw his javelin of lightning into the crowd killing two and wounding three and drew a war hammer. Our dwarven war cleric ran out next to the dwarven paladin and cast some AOE spell that caused 10+ points of damage to anyone that entered 15' of him. He then cast spiritual weapon as a bonus action and missed another enemy. Our elven rogue ran straight into a crowd and used two attacks to wound two enemies, I believe with a mithril rapier and a short sword. He was facing two at this point. Our elven ranger ran out behind the dwarven paladin and shot two enemies with her longbow. A fighter on our team ran off to the left to cover that flank. He had a special shield.
The Broo rushed in and engaged most of our players. Our rogue was hit at least twice for low damage but got a "blooded" marker and a "sickness" marker. Our war cleric was hit and got a "blooded" marker. The Broo ran in from behind us too but were not close enough to engage. Many swarmed our left flank and were blocked by our friend. They engaged another fighter and killed him outright before he was able to act.
I ran out into the area of our paladins and cleric and cast Bane on three key Broo to dampen the ferocity of their numbers. I drew my short sword and dagger and waited for them to come. Then our human teenage sorcerer (which I am beginning to believe is actually a Dragonborn) cast some sort of Thunderclap spell which severely wounded a group of nine Broo bunched up in front of the fighter with the special shield and threw them back several feet.
In the second round I cast Bane on three more Broo and gave a bardic inspiration (d8) to our dwarven paladin when he ran back to cut off the Broo running in from behind us. In round three I used Cutting Words as a reaction for the first time with the party and blocked a hit on our War Cleric. This received widespread approval from the party who had never played D&D with a Bard in their party before. Then I ran over to help the Rogue who was generally not getting it done against three opponents. This was to lend my aid directly and to give him advantage when he attacked because once again he had run off into danger by himself. Unfortunately I missed with my short sword. This was a risky move because I need to maintain my concentration. In the fourth round the Rogue connected because he had advantage and we expected to stabilize that problem. I used Cutting Words again to deflect a hit to our dwarven paladin. In the fifth round I ran away from the Rogue and went to help out on the left flank. On the sixth round I used Dissonant Whispers to kill the final Broo.
So after that combat there were many compliments on the helpfulness of the Bard so I believe they are starting to get the idea of asking, "Hey, what could the bard do in this situation?" when we discuss encounters. I pointed out that Cutting Words is powered by Bardic Inspiration and I reset all those every short rest. So the party has been alerted that taking a short rest can restore some of our power rather than limiting ourselves to one encounter a day, which has been the norm up to this point.
The DM made my original wooden flute reappear so it seems our sacrificed gear may trickle back in to us over the next few sessions.
It looks like we'll press on to the East for the next session. We are told it should be two days to reach the next friendly town known indicated on the map I purchased. I spent our "down day" chatting up folks in town to obtain more lore for my songs and things and making friends selling pouches of spices and buying a mundane rapier.
Cum catapultae proscriptae erunt tum soli proscript catapultas habebunt
Session 10:
We opened up this session waking up in the town's tavern/inn and discussing what we would do with our free day because the Dwarven Paladin essentially refused to do anything before smithing himself a new hammer. He also smithed up a magical rapier for our Rogue. Our other Dwarf smithed something too, or helped. I just talked to some folks to get more lore & background on the region and came up pretty light. The information I received I generally already had or was of little use. The other players came up pretty light too. So after another night's rest after a smashing performance at the tavern (rolled a nat 20) we had a good breakfast and set off, now with one of my mules carrying baggage and two "steeds" for the paladins since they could cast Find Steed now.
First we went off and knocked out a Broo lair. We killed over 20 of them, including three extra large ones. We stayed outside their lair and camped the night. We returned to Antorling, stayed at the Inn and left the next morning after a good night's rest. We still had to pay for our food, rooms and ales after thumping the Broo.
We traveled a day and made camp. That night we heard strange noises and had a dwarf, nearly naked, fall from a great height and land very near our camp to die. The next morning our ranger found Owlbear tracks. We presumed the owlbear dropped the poor fellow to his death, or he wiggled free at an inopportune time. We went on and found the river, followed it downstream a bit and crossed shortly before nightfall and then camped. The second night our cleric rolled a nat 20 on his watch and saw beady eyes watching us from beyond the light. Noone of the rest of us saw it even though the info was passed on.
The third morning we packed up and went a short way before smelling wood smoke. We believed the smell was the smell of civilization (the town of Six Brothers where we were headed) but it was in fact a burning farmhouse with the tortured burning corpses of the family hung from their heels outside. Tracks of large bipeds went off to the east, but our destination was along the river that continued north. We were warned by the DM that if we left, the tracks may be gone when we return. We placed stakes in the ground to indicate where we found the tracks and the direction of their heading, and then proceeded to the village.
At the village we were greeted as outcasts, not trusted and generally poorly treated. We were asked to head into town and we were followed by (their best?) strong warriors to the tavern/inn. We were then ordered to leave our weapons with our animals outside before going inside to meet their leader. There was much consternation but the other members of the party gave up their weapons. After asking if I could persuade them to let me keep my weapons I roll a 13+10=23 and I am told I was unsuccessful, so I left my rapier, three daggers, short sword and crossbow with my mule, but I still have a passel of weapons in my Bag of Holding that contains a generous portion of the party's treasure.
Inside we are told the guards were going to check out our "story" at the farm but in the meantime they wanted to know more about us. We went through that, which was mostly an attempt by the DM to trick us into saying something that would cause them to be offended. The party has nicknamed me the "College Bard" as opposed to the "Other Bard" because the rogue attempts to pass himself off as a bard but says ill-advised things. So as the College Bard, I managed the interrogation well enough. Then he shared a few things with us about the town, telling us they were traders and although they didn't like their neighbors, they were quite happy to trade with them. He said he was the (elected) leader of the town but a pacifists and although there were warriors in the village, they would not be going out to avenge the death of the farmers. They had no interest in pushing back the wilderness frontier to make the region safer. I found this to be worse than odd.
We made arrangements to stay the evening and the scouting party returned with word that everything was as we described at the farmhouse. Our treatment was upgraded to distrusted strangers at that point. We had a good meal, ale and I made a nice performance before going to bed. The elf ranger decided to get up after her trance and was standing watch downstairs in the tavern when the building was raided by Trolls, a mixture of large and small trolls. The alarm was given and after three or four rounds we were at the head of the stairs rolling initiative for who would get to go down first. Meanwhile our ranger elected to use her bow and shot a handfull of the small ones killing them.
The party rushed downstairs into a dark room larger than 60' in any direction with various enemies about. The Dwarven paladin, who sleeps in his armor, ran straight at the first enemy he could see swinging his warhammer. Others followed and I was second to last to act, after the trolls. As a half-elf I could see 60' but at the bottom of the stairs I couldn't see an enemy so I moved in the direction of sounds and found our dwarf paladin standing next to a dead troll. I cast Bane on three of them. Our other paladin was 10' away from me so I thought I was in a reasonable spot. The ranger was fighting beside herself off to my left where our sorcerer (actually a budding dragonborn) went off to help. Off to my right, also beyond my sight, was the war cleric and rogue fighting.
The bigger trolls swarmed us and we fought them off. One of them charged me in the round after I descended the stairs and delivered a 19pt damage to me with his greatclub. I said "Ouch!" I stepped back and he missed his opportunity attack and then I cast Bane on three more of them. At this point we had several rounds of trading damage with some Healing and Cutting Words thrown in. They started to flee when it appeared they were going to all be killed and we pursued them outside and finished off several more.
We learned it was a general raid on the village, folks had been killed in their sleep, other mischief including knocking over two watchtowers and all that. We have been told we will not have the benefit of our long rest in the morning. We have decided to deliberately have a short rest. The party is discussing via text message if we will proceed to the next town in the morning or linger here for any reason. Without any new information I feel we should just press on. Knowing these "lovely people" don't get along with their neighbors, we're concerned about the reception we will get in the next town.
Cum catapultae proscriptae erunt tum soli proscript catapultas habebunt
Session 11 was a downer for me because of friction between players. I learned however, that only myself and one other player, and not the DM, appear to know the rules for a short rest. My DM is also playing his first game of 5E and his last game before that was back in 3.5E. We have had to discuss a few rules, but I was surprised to hear the short rest was not understood. I of course brought it up because of the bard's Song of Rest ability.
Cum catapultae proscriptae erunt tum soli proscript catapultas habebunt
After a busy summer, we held session 12 on Labor Day.
We spent a bunch of session time checking out the town and trying to obtain Mithril, which was supposed to only be owned by the government. We bought 2 ingots after considering stealing it or breaking a guy out of jail to get it. One of our party members just said, I'll just buy it and pay the higher price. So we did that, we got some magic items identified and then we went on a journey to a far away town, which was expected to be about a week away. We chose to take a "shortcut" through a swampy area and we had the expected result ... we were kinda ambushed in the swamp. But since we hadn't held a session in two months we were begging for a fight.
So we enter the swamp and 'find' four creatures, which because of the icon used I dubbed the 'critters' Swamp Babes. They signal us, a party of seven, to come join them (a party of four) by their campfire. They are described as humanoids to us from a distance and we don't know any more as we approach. Once we get real close they jump up and swarm the closest PC and eight other 'critters' (seven Yuan-ti and one big boss of a snake like a Naga) come from everywhere and swarm the party that thought they were maintaining a safe distance. So the fight started all at once and the party of seven PCs was swarmed by twelve swamp critters in the swamp.
My Bard was at the top of the order after the opening round where we were caught by surprise. Four Yuan-ti ran in from our left where Cadenza and our Ranger, Amarille, were positioned. So I opened with a Bane spell at 2nd level to give these four a debuff so we would be better able to absorb the many attacks coming from these four. Three other Yuan-ti swarmed our human paladin from the right. Our rogue was attacked from our rear (north) by the 'boss' snake; I think he was a Naga. The other four attacked our dwarven paladin and our human wizard at the campfire.
After the first round a couple of us have taken a big hit (about 1/3rd of our HP) and nobody was killed. I cast a second Bane spell at 2nd level to give the boss and the three on the east side a debuff for the same reasons and try to prevent us getting overwhelmed. The DM has allowed me to cast Bane this way to add to the number of creatures I can 'hold down' without breaking my concentration. At this point, the critters focus on me to cause me to break my concentration, but they are unsuccessful until almost the end of round 2. By the end of round 2 we have killed 2 of the critters. Also in round 2 I cast Cutting Words on the boss which caused him to miss our rogue with one of his two attacks. He missed on his other attack anyway.
At the start of round 3 I cast Dissonant Whispers on a critter near me and after failing the save they were killed by opportunity attacks. Again in round 3 I cast Cutting Words on the boss but he was not prevented from delivering 21 damage on our rogue. We dropped another three critters in this round.
At the start of round 4 I cast Dissonant Whispers but rolled terribly and then the critter made their save so I only gave them 2 pts of damage! Again I cast Cutting Words to save our Rogue from 9 pts of damage from the boss, so he only took 12 points of damage in round 4. At the end of round 4 we had dropped two more critters and the rest started to run away.
At the start of round 5 I ran after one of the critters and delivered a crit from my rapier only doing 11 damage. Our war cleric cast firebolt and finished him off. In round 6 I ran over and cast Dissonant Whispers for the third time and they made their save and only took 7 damage. But our dwarven paladin finished him off before he could get away with a javelin.
This was a very tough combat encounter for our party. There were twelve of them with some spell casting abilities (they cast suggestion to get our tanks to throw away weapons or shields and they had some other acid spray spell or something). They had multi-attacks of two or three things each, while we had only five PCs that could deliver multi-attacks, so all combined they had about 25-29 'attacks' per round compared to our twelve. Their HP were on par with ours. Our War Cleric probably carried the day with Spiritual Guardian, Spiritual Weapon and the occasional Firebolt or swing of a hammer. Even when the critters made their save, they took 10 pts of damage from Spiritual Guardian if they were in range. Because of how they rushed in on us, they 'locked themselves down' by accident contributing to our war cleric's ability to deal mass damage.
So I made a big contribution to the party using Bane, Dissonant Whispers and Cutting Words and we are getting ready to have a short rest, so my Song of Rest will be another boost, before we spread around some paladin healing points.
So far, this party has had the most trouble with a band of ranged damage dealing goblins. Melee combat has somehow worked out very well for us. In this case, better than I expected at the outset.
Cum catapultae proscriptae erunt tum soli proscript catapultas habebunt
Well, we finally held session 13 for this party. COVID has been an obstacle to our fun. Go away COVID.
We picked up after the swamp babe fight and the DM told us the evening before that we leveled up to level 6. Yea!! Magical Secrets!
So I picked ... Counterspell, and ... thunder step <not>. The DM doesn't have XGTE so I need to look for my second M-S spell still. But, for thematic reasons I picked up Sending.
I did convince the party to take a short rest and they were pleased to learn about Song of Rest. The DM asked the party leader w we were going to do, and everyone said, Cadenza, what are we going to do. So I told the DM we were going to travel until sundown to be away from the site of the battle, with our ranger in charge of guiding us along the best path to conceal our tracks. We arrived at the campsite and had an uneventful evening.
On the second day we stumbled into some more of the same Yuan-Ti around lunch the next day near a "foul pond". The first thing that happened was an arrow bounced off our tank dwarf, <ping!>. So we looked around and a yuan-ti fighter was about 90 feet off. We started to close the distance but we could only move at half speed. So there was a lot of arrow exchanges before we made much progress. But after we landed a few good hits, the yuan-ti ran and jumped into the pond. We had killed one so we gathered around his body to make sure he was going to stay dead.
About the time we got there, a black dragon came up out of the pond and landed 30-ish feet away from us. We fought the black dragon. I was effected by his fear and had to flee initially, but made my save on round two. Two others were frightened, but they tried to fight in place. I could only reroll my save after getting 60 feet away from the beast. At this point I wanted to stay away from the cluster (dragon breath) and find a 'safe place' to throw some magic, so I made my way to a better spot but had to use my crossbow because of range. I discovered another yuan-ti and started trading arrows with him. He hit me with a poisoned arrow on his first shot and did 11 points (combined) of damage to me in the first exchange. Eventually we beat the dragon and the yuan-ti I was fighting. I don't know what happened to the other one. Then the party decided we were going to spend two-and-a-half hours harvesting scales, blood, tusks, teeth and eyes from the black dragon. It was a lot of stuff. Then we headed off to hide for the evening again.
We traveled for, I believe it was two more uneventful days before coming across a town that had been burned and the inhabitants killed by "blunt force trauma." We burned some bodies and we had a look around and stumbled into two tough fighters. One was near death so we used some magic to heal him up. The other fellow was a very grim guy with a large two handed sword and the build to handle it. They were some sort of avenging duo and they ran into the monsters, some trolls, here at this town while the aftermath was going on. They had slain many trolls and the rest ran off to the south. Apparently the survivors of the massacre ran off to the north. We promised to go with these two fellows to fight the trolls when the one fellow is healthy enough. So we are going to kill some trolls next.
Cum catapultae proscriptae erunt tum soli proscript catapultas habebunt
Wow, I forgot that I had not updated this story in a while. We have played about four or five sessions since this January update.
In the town I mentioned in January, we stayed and fought off a night time raid by the enemies. Then we went back to the Black Dragon's encounter with the objective of finding his lair and cashing in. With the help of our cleric casting thaumaturgy, we found an entrance to an underwater cave. Inside the cave we found and defeated the Black Dragon's mate. Then we grabbed the treasure.
Emerging from the Black Dragon's lair we went back to the now deserted town. We "realized" it would be better to head south to a place on our map marked as the Sun Dome Temple. At the temple we found new allies. We were able to spend our money from the Black Dragon's Lair and in addition to many other magical items we each purchased a book to improve an ability score by 2, naturally Cadenza chose to improve his Charisma to 20. At this point the party was all level 7, so looking ahead to level 8, I concluded that I should look at getting a feat, probably Resilient (Con). I believe I picked up Polymorph as my level 4 spell.
After a week of chilling at Sun Dome Temple, we headed off to the south to investigate two towns on our map that didn't have names. On the way to the first town we encountered a gorge. We walked along the gorge and found a rope suspension bridge. The other side was guarded by two bugbears. Not wanting to kill anyone unnecessarily, I went forward as the high-charisma negotiator and tried to talk our way across the bridge. Of course this didn't work, but I had to give it a try. They had a handfull of brother bugbears up on a rise shooting their longbows at us and we responded while the two bugbears at the bridge tried to resist our melee fighters. We mowed them down.
At the beginning of our next session we found one that could be revived and did so. We restrained him and tried to question him to learn where other bugbear groups might be so we could minimize our risk. He only babbled that he wanted to go home and we would never see him again. The party decided to let him go. I wanted to make him give us more information. But he ran away and we never heard from the bugbears again.
We went on to the next town. There wasn't much happening in that town but our Rogue, who always wanted to establish himself as an assassin, picked up a contract to murder two 'peasant' dwarves in the next town to the south, called Hills Guard. It was situated between two mountain ranges so it was a settlement in the "pass". We arrived in Hills Guard and the story really began to take off.
Cum catapultae proscriptae erunt tum soli proscript catapultas habebunt