I love to hear about other people's campaigns, the crazy things players do, or crazier things that DMs throw at them. ...So share with me what happened at your most recent session! What was your favorite moment? Where did the game leave off? Did you find any cool magic items? Did someone (gulp) die?!
Ooh! This is the thread for me. I thought about making a thread just for my last session because some stuff happened that I'd really like to deconstruct so that I can use the successful elements of the encounter more frequently and learn to be a better DM. I had an encounter planned that could have been fairly insignificant, but it ended up being one of the most memorable encounters in our campaign so far. I'll drop the description into a spoiler for brevity. It involves a character named Beelock who was central to the encounter. He is a Minotaur Blood Hunter of the Order of the Lycan.
A quick setup: The party had mixed it up with a group of hobgoblin cultists and they were fighting their way up the chain to get to the base and the big guys. Several sessions back, the hobgoblins sent a group of assassins after the party to catch them unprepared in the woods as the party made camp for the night.
Four hobgoblins attacked from different sides while the leader lay in wait to jump out at a wounded player. That never happened. The party absolutely wrecked the unprepared assassins who had no idea who they were messing with. Beelock hulked out into hybrid form and ripped two of them apart by himself while their swords and arrows did very little to his resistant hide. The leader never jumped out at anyone. The party just assumed the leader just ran away scared. Turns out, he was taking notes.
Flash forward to last weekend’s session. The party are all level five now and they had located the hobgoblin base. Two hobgoblin sentries were standing outside the doors to the base and the trees were cleared out 30’ from the entrance. The party got the drop on them and the rogue took out the first sentry. Beelock’s turn. He dashed in and puts his horns right into the last sentry’s chest using his Goring Rush. He connected, and the already-wounded hobgoblin sentry goes down on the first hit. The party got ready to search the corpses
This is when the assassins mad their comeback attack. I had dropped a few hints earlier in the session about him feeling like he was being followed, but he couldn’t pin down exactly who it was. This time, they didn’t send the second-stringers. The assassins were led by none other than the same leader who was hiding in the woods the first time around. He led with four dart attacks because he’s a Hobgoblin Iron Shadow. Then a bugbear brute came charging out of the woods up to Beelock and hit him with a critical hit. 2d8 for the morning star hit plus another 2d6 because of surprise attack. Now double all of that because of the natural 20. Beelock took huge damage in a single hit as the party noticed the other three bugbears emerging from the woods.
On Beelock’s next turn, he spent his action to do his hybrid transformation. His hit points had taken a big hit and he wanted that sweet sweet damage resistance. It was a trap. The assassins were not after the party. They were after him specifically and they wanted to bait him into transforming. As soon as he went hybrid, all the bugbears pulled out silver weapons and went to work on him. He was unconscious before the round was over.
Suddenly the party had a huge problem because not only is Beelock 30’+ from the rest of the group, he’s unconscious with a big bugbear standing over him who has not yet acted on the current round and three more bugbear ambushers who the party now realizes are all looking to finish him off. The cleric and the bard both went into life support mode on Beelock while the sorcerer and the rogue tried to deal with the guys on the periphery before they could close on Beelock and finish him off.
In the end, everyone in the party survived and the second assassin team was defeated. Beelock went unconscious twice and missed one death save before it was all over. The party, who was getting ready to take out two hobgoblin sentries and bust into the base suddenly had to take a short rest to hide the bodies and administer some first aid to themselves. And now they know they need to destroy this entire hobgoblin cult before they hire a third team of assassins to make a run at them.
In hindsight, there were a number of elements, both planned and serendipitous that made the encounter special:
Foreshadowing. I dropped hints earlier in the session that Beelock (who rolled high on perception) noticed he was being tailed. But I didn't want to give too much away so i kept it vague and the party was unable to turn the tables and trap the stalker.
Callback. The second team of assassins learned from their horrible failure four sessions back and responded accordingly the second time around.
Surprise. The party thought it was dealing with a very simple and straightforward attack of two weaker enemies that it had already gotten the drop on. Then SURPRISE!
Focus. When battle started, the party assumed the assassins were making another run at them, which they were. The party was not expecting the assassins to focus on a single player. Because of this and because he went down so quickly, the party had to split their priorities between fighting off the attackers and keeping Beelock alive.
Tactics. The assassins baited him into transforming and then switched to silver weapons, letting him know he got tricked.
Tension. Beelock went unconscious pretty quickly with a big bugbear standing over him. He was going to die. The party revived him only to have him knocked out again before they could rescue him. It was pretty tense and that made for a lot of fun.
After this encounter, which really sort of started off the session, the rest of the day was a fairly straightforward entry into the base and cleaning it out of enemies. In fact, the one battle with two more powerful adversaries ended up being kind of a washout and had it not been for the great initial encounter, it would have been an unremarkable session. But the party left off inside the occupied dwarven base. There are still rooms to explore and the party knows there's an old cave somewhere in the dormant volcano to find. They know there is a big bad (and I can talk more about that after the encounter happens) and they know what he's looking for. It will take at least one more session to resolve this story arc. Honestly, I think it will take two more sessions.
Ooh! This is the thread for me. I thought about making a thread just for my last session because some stuff happened that I'd really like to deconstruct so that I can use the successful elements of the encounter more frequently and learn to be a better DM. I had an encounter planned that could have been fairly insignificant, but it ended up being one of the most memorable encounters in our campaign so far. I'll drop the description into a spoiler for brevity. It involves a character named Beelock who was central to the encounter. He is a Minotaur Blood Hunter of the Order of the Lycan.
A quick setup: The party had mixed it up with a group of hobgoblin cultists and they were fighting their way up the chain to get to the base and the big guys. Several sessions back, the hobgoblins sent a group of assassins after the party to catch them unprepared in the woods as the party made camp for the night.
Four hobgoblins attacked from different sides while the leader lay in wait to jump out at a wounded player. That never happened. The party absolutely wrecked the unprepared assassins who had no idea who they were messing with. Beelock hulked out into hybrid form and ripped two of them apart by himself while their swords and arrows did very little to his resistant hide. The leader never jumped out at anyone. The party just assumed the leader just ran away scared. Turns out, he was taking notes.
Flash forward to last weekend’s session. The party are all level five now and they had located the hobgoblin base. Two hobgoblin sentries were standing outside the doors to the base and the trees were cleared out 30’ from the entrance. The party got the drop on them and the rogue took out the first sentry. Beelock’s turn. He dashed in and puts his horns right into the last sentry’s chest using his Goring Rush. He connected, and the already-wounded hobgoblin sentry goes down on the first hit. The party got ready to search the corpses
This is when the assassins mad their comeback attack. I had dropped a few hints earlier in the session about him feeling like he was being followed, but he couldn’t pin down exactly who it was. This time, they didn’t send the second-stringers. The assassins were led by none other than the same leader who was hiding in the woods the first time around. He led with four dart attacks because he’s a Hobgoblin Iron Shadow. Then a bugbear brute came charging out of the woods up to Beelock and hit him with a critical hit. 2d8 for the morning star hit plus another 2d6 because of surprise attack. Now double all of that because of the natural 20. Beelock took huge damage in a single hit as the party noticed the other three bugbears emerging from the woods.
On Beelock’s next turn, he spent his action to do his hybrid transformation. His hit points had taken a big hit and he wanted that sweet sweet damage resistance. It was a trap. The assassins were not after the party. They were after him specifically and they wanted to bait him into transforming. As soon as he went hybrid, all the bugbears pulled out silver weapons and went to work on him. He was unconscious before the round was over.
Suddenly the party had a huge problem because not only is Beelock 30’+ from the rest of the group, he’s unconscious with a big bugbear standing over him who has not yet acted on the current round and three more bugbear ambushers who the party now realizes are all looking to finish him off. The cleric and the bard both went into life support mode on Beelock while the sorcerer and the rogue tried to deal with the guys on the periphery before they could close on Beelock and finish him off.
In the end, everyone in the party survived and the second assassin team was defeated. Beelock went unconscious twice and missed one death save before it was all over. The party, who was getting ready to take out two hobgoblin sentries and bust into the base suddenly had to take a short rest to hide the bodies and administer some first aid to themselves. And now they know they need to destroy this entire hobgoblin cult before they hire a third team of assassins to make a run at them.
In hindsight, there were a number of elements, both planned and serendipitous that made the encounter special:
Foreshadowing. I dropped hints earlier in the session that Beelock (who rolled high on perception) noticed he was being tailed. But I didn't want to give too much away so i kept it vague and the party was unable to turn the tables and trap the stalker.
Callback. The second team of assassins learned from their horrible failure four sessions back and responded accordingly the second time around.
Surprise. The party thought it was dealing with a very simple and straightforward attack of two weaker enemies that it had already gotten the drop on. Then SURPRISE!
Focus. When battle started, the party assumed the assassins were making another run at them, which they were. The party was not expecting the assassins to focus on a single player. Because of this and because he went down so quickly, the party had to split their priorities between fighting off the attackers and keeping Beelock alive.
Tactics. The assassins baited him into transforming and then switched to silver weapons, letting him know he got tricked.
Tension. Beelock went unconscious pretty quickly with a big bugbear standing over him. He was going to die. The party revived him only to have him knocked out again before they could rescue him. It was pretty tense and that made for a lot of fun.
After this encounter, which really sort of started off the session, the rest of the day was a fairly straightforward entry into the base and cleaning it out of enemies. In fact, the one battle with two more powerful adversaries ended up being kind of a washout and had it not been for the great initial encounter, it would have been an unremarkable session. But the party left off inside the occupied dwarven base. There are still rooms to explore and the party knows there's an old cave somewhere in the dormant volcano to find. They know there is a big bad (and I can talk more about that after the encounter happens) and they know what he's looking for. It will take at least one more session to resolve this story arc. Honestly, I think it will take two more sessions.
This was an awesome read! Thanks for sharing, it gave me some ideas for my own DMing in the future.
I don't really have any memorable sessions to speak of and I'm not currently in a campaign right now, it's been several months since I last played. I've just caught up with season 2 of critical role, looking forward to watching live for the first time this Thursday, and from watching that show I've seen so much and have some many great ideas for trying to make my own campaign that extremely epic. I'm going to be running Dragon Heist soon, and can't wait to try out some of the things I've taken notes on from Critical Role and from these forums and from Reddit and other places on how to be a good DM.
That combat sounds awesome. It just shows how having your enemies being intelligent, and having a plan can make the game so much more immersive and memorable. What a ride! And even though Beelock was probably feeling stressed, there's probably also a stripe of feeling like a bad-ass knowing a team of bad guys had to make a special plan just to take you out. That's some great DMing, Texas!
I run my game on Mondays, so we had our most recent session last night. We were down 1 player who was very sick, but the party is currently in a town "in between" arcs as they decide where to go next so it was easy to just have the one player go off and do some downtime crafting she wanted to do anyways. Basically right now they've been introduced numerous plot hooks and angles they can explore that play into the things they're after, so it's just a matter of them choosing where they'd like to go next. But first-- Some time in a town, since the last time they were in a town was about session 6. :P They're enjoying shopping and interacting with NPCs.
The party (level 7):
Pyrrhae the Wild Magic Sorcerer / Tempest Cleric multiclass. Naia the Arcane Trickster Rogue Balasar the Open Hand Monk Linwood the Seedling (homebrew) Druid (Absent)
A bit of background:The party revived an ancient Conjurer who had been entombed in a magical puzzle cave, only to learn he was put into stasis because he was inflicted with a plague. The intent was to revive him when the cure was found, but his society of mages fell apart before the cure had been found. The party now know they have a few months to find and create a cure so that they have him as an ally. They hope to use his powers along with old magical relics to get access to the eight different planes of magic, which they need to seal off so that a mysterious outside force can't access and feed off of the magic there. The party located the recipe for a cure, fighting off a Mind Flayer with Hobgoblin thralls, and is now gathering resources in a city before going off to hunt for the ingredients.
In addition, Pyrrhae (the sorcerer-cleric) lost her memory recently from a poison inflicted by one of the party's main nemeses. During the previous session she went to a graveyard at night to meet with a Witch who made a potion intended to help, in exchange for some of the parts from the Mind Flayer they killed. The witch warned Pyrrhae that the potion would remain potent until the next dawn, putting a ticking clock on choosing to drink it or not.
So, this session was pretty much all RP, with some players discovering backstory nuggets for their personal arcs and establishing some other helpful relationships for their quest.
The party visited their ally near the city, a rich guy sponsor named Lord Brightwood who's a mystery they tend to get frustrated by. He also has a lost memory, which was recently discovered by the party after knowing him since the early sessions, and they wanted him to remember believing it to be the missing key to the plot's mysteries. They try to convince him to go to the witch, but fail in their persuasions. Pyrrhae instinctively drinks her potion, and remembers lots of things, including things she hadn't remembered before (plot hooks!). She uses her special arcane focus (The Dream Key) which lets her Detect Thoughts once per day to try and figure out why he's resisting. He learns of his fear, and on probing deeper (he failed both saves) she learns its tied to a letter that they discovered after breaking into one of his safes. She gets advantage on trying to persuade him, now realizing how important her own memories were and exactly what he's afraid of learning, and gets a very high roll and delivers a convincing speech! He admits he may visit this witch. The party is very pleased with themselves and head to town, smuggling in some drugs they picked up from the Hobgoblins that they hope to sell. Yep. Great heroes, right?
They head back into town, running into one of the town officials on the way, whom they had met prior. He'd treated them quite rudely, thinking them a danger to his family and the locals, and apologizes because he's recently learned about the heroics they had done outside of the town. He claims to owe them a favour, and offers to escort them to town, unwittingly making their smuggling of drugs easier. From him they learn that a bunch of children that they rescued (at level 4) have been brought to the town by a group of Paladins important to the world's lore. They also try to ply him for information regarding Balasar (the monk's) home in the region, which the official insists he can't speak about. Pyrrhae assists the monk in intimidating him, and he agrees to meet with the party at a dive bar that night.
The party heads to the monastery where the Paladins are staying while in town, and find all but one of the children. Even the Nkosi child they saved (Tome of Beasts humanoid) after genociding the rest of his people (still great heroes). Naia, the rogue, is most taken by this moment as she had been somewhat of a mother to the Nkosi (Lionel). The missing child was the one they knew best, who left the very same morning to be apprentice to the headmaster of an elvish academy that they have been hearing about quite a bit. The party speaks with the Paladins (receiving a blessing from their leader) and explores the monastery (Balasar discovers another clue to his backstory), Pyrrhae writes a letter and packages some gold for the Paladins to send to the missing child, and Naia arranges for the Nkosi child (Lionel) to be sent to her family, where he can be taken care of until her adventure is over, at which point she will take care of him full-time.
With all of that done, the party plans to head to a hunting lodge known as the Huntmaster's Quarry, where they hope to purchase some parts of monsters they need for the next Plot Item - the potion to cure an ancient disease. That's where the session ended off, since our rogue had to work at 4am the next morning and so we didn't want to go too late!
One of m favourite characters that I have made died. He was a changeling bard, with multiple personality disorder, one side being CE and one CG, and we were fighting a horde of bugbears. Our fighter went down, and before our paladin could Lay on Hands, he was trampled to death. The paladin took an arrow to the face, and was captured. But then, my only true friend in the party, our actually-very-nice barbarian went down, and was snared by a net. Suddenly the CG side took over, and I yelled an insult so loud that two bugbears died (they were low health, and I critted a vicious mockery, and also our dm is nice). I rushed in slashing my way through with scimitars, till I was bleeding to death. Finally, an eye missing, a hand disfigured, I got to the barbarian, and cut open his net.
Mirror, the CE side took over, insulting a bugbear to death, and slicing the head of a goblin. My last words were "run" as I hit a goblin in the face with my lute, then with my final spell slot, cast thunderwave, -and rolled a natural twenty. 4d8 points of damage managed to kill basically everything, even as I bled out, smiling.
When the rest of the party got revenge on the bugbears they came back, and saw a grinning (dead) changeling lying in the snow, non-mangled hand raised with the middle finger up.
i love bards.
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I'm the idiot that decides to make Phil Swift in DnD.
What they did. Walk around, complete a lot of goals, ****ed things up without them know it, being r* enough to aid their enemy while knowing full well that they will aid their enemy, made friends with people, cured curses, killed vampire spawns, been at festivals, misslead the guards to allow a tiger to escape. Stuff like that.
What they did. Walk around, complete a lot of goals, ****ed things up without them know it, being r* enough to aid their enemy while knowing full well that they will aid their enemy, made friends with people, cured curses, killed vampire spawns, been at festivals, misslead the guards to allow a tiger to escape. Stuff like that.
9 hours!!! How do you do it?! I'm pooped after 4!
Hell, if I managed to arrange a nine-hour session I'd be pretty frickin amazed
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I'm the idiot that decides to make Phil Swift in DnD.
What they did. Walk around, complete a lot of goals, ****ed things up without them know it, being r* enough to aid their enemy while knowing full well that they will aid their enemy, made friends with people, cured curses, killed vampire spawns, been at festivals, misslead the guards to allow a tiger to escape. Stuff like that.
9 hours!!! How do you do it?! I'm pooped after 4!
I got stamina, and the 13 year olds I play with sure have stamina as well. I believe we only took like lunch and dinner breaks, few bathroom breaks. Also doing a module where you as DM already read most of the story and know it almost by heart helps a lot.
That's still very impressive, wow. I've imagined having a day where me and another DM or two run back to back sessions and so play D&D all day, but I could not envision straight DMing for 9 hours. Sounds super fun!
On Sunday we had our very first session for an undead-fighting campaign set in a semi-homebrew world (we use Greyhawk deities and a few lore elements but the locations and world history are our own) my partner and I cooked up together. This time he's the GM and I'm a player (we switch off throughout the year). I'm playing a LN necromancer of noble birth whose family has for generations been beset with rumors that they've been cursed by Wee Jas; her motivation for fighting undead is that she wants more specimens to study, as she's curious about the difference between undead reanimation and true resurrection, between the mind and the soul, etc etc.
There was word that the town of Kinshire was being beset by zombies, and the church of St. Cuthbert mustered a militia of volunteers to help - our intrepid adventurers included. When we arrived at the town, we did indeed find zombies, but we also found many mysterious mysteries! To whit:
All the zombies were digging a giant hole in the town cemetery and ignored us for the most part, until we were an obvious threat. Indeed, it seems that almost all the villagers managed to escape to the church unharmed, as though the zombies weren't really after them. So what were the zombies after?
Later we encountered some reanimated skeletons that had an arcane rune of some kind painted over one eye socket; this rune seemed to give the skeletons some combat buffs. Who painted that rune, and what does it mean?
There was one villager, name of Harleton Cheston, who had refused to take refuge with the others and instead holed up in his house with his gun collection. When we went to collect him, we found him dead on the floor of apparent asphyxiation - but there was no sign of poison or strangulation. Additionally, he had a pistol in his hand and there was a bullet buried in the doorframe, as if he had attempted to shoot an intruder. However, all the doors and windows were locked when we arrived, with no sign of forced entry. Who was he shooting at?
Most mysterious of all, our ranger noticed a tan line on Cheston's finger that indicated a much-worn ring had been removed. However, nothing else of value (e.g. his gun collection, in a world in which firearms are rare and expensive) was taken. Furthermore, our paladin discovered a piece of vellum made of human skin hidden in a barrel of gunpowder. Inscribed on the vellum was the sigil of an old god of death, Ruedi (sp??), who hasn't been worshiped in decades at least. Was Cheston behind the zombie outbreak? If so, who or what killed him? Did the killer also take his ring, and if so, why?
The excitement wasn't limited to these juicy mysteries; my wizard also should've died halfway through the first session by rights. We came across the body of the village priest of St. Cuthbert, who'd stood guard at the front of the church to protect the parishioners inside. The paladin didn't sense that he was undead, so my wizard went up to examine the body and determine cause of death. (I'm playing her very much like a medical examiner.) Suddenly, the priest reanimated and went full The Exorcist, vomiting acid all over and reducing my wizard from 6 HP to 2. I scooted to a safe distance for the rest of the battle - or so I thought, cuz when the paladin chopped off the zombie priest's head acid went splashing everywhere. I crit failed my Dex save and took 9 more acid damage, which reduced me to -7 - an insta-kill according to RAW.
When the rest of the party found out I was already dead, they took pity on me and decided to invoke a house rule that allows the party to, once per session, either increase a roll by ten or reduce it by ten, if the party unanimously agrees and everyone takes a drink. So they reduced the damage to 1 (DM decided they couldn't negate it completely, which we thought was fair considering the house rule is pretty OP in the first place), and my wiz was just badly injured.
This is my first time playing a wizard. It's harder than I thought, y'all!
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"We're the perfect combination of expendable and unkillable!"
Oh my goodness, yes a Wizard surviving past level 1 is a challenge! It's nice to have a chance to not die in session 1 though-- I guess she'll learn to be a little more cautious in the future?
The locked room murder mystery sounds so fun! I would love to play in a high mystery style game.
Oh my goodness, yes a Wizard surviving past level 1 is a challenge! It's nice to have a chance to not die in session 1 though-- I guess she'll learn to be a little more cautious in the future?
The locked room murder mystery sounds so fun! I would love to play in a high mystery style game.
What kills me (HA! HA!) is that I had done a great job being careful and staying out of harm's way in our previous battle! I took chill touch as a cantrip, and with a range of 120 feet (and a wrought iron fence surrounding the cemetery), I was able to avoid taking any damage from the zombies we encountered earlier. If I hadn't crit-failed my Dex save I would've simply been knocked to zero, and the party would have been able to stabilize me right quick. It was just dumb, bad luck I suppose.
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"We're the perfect combination of expendable and unkillable!"
Last weekend I ran an intro one-shot to Dragon Heist while one of our players was absent. Had a lot of fun with two memorable moments.
One, the player of the most "good" character is just laser-focused on an NPC that is meant to open the door to a fully evil organization. He's all set to do a sidequest the NPC casually mentioned, and I am looking forward to leveraging this against him.
Two, they came across a Kenku that not only could not be killed, but couldn't be touched. Three rounds of 3-on-1, not a single hit on the bird. I followed the adventure suggestion of having the one or two surviving Kenku flee, and all three players had an opportunity attack. All misses. Crazy acrobatics and inventive movements kept the villain within range of attacks for two more turns, all misses. And then the creature vanished into the darkness and was gone.
I ended the session then, on the words "Somewhere out there in the night is the luckiest damn raven alive. And she knows your faces."
Looks like Xanathar just got himself a new lieutenant, and I've got a villain to more properly stat. The Lucky Whistler, she shall be.
I don't know when we'll return. We used it so that we wouldn't have to cancel game night due to the absence of only one or two players, and this weekend we'll be returning to our regular campaign. We last left those intrepid adventurers as they found their camp stalked by a hunting pair of displacer beasts.
I love to hear about other people's campaigns, the crazy things players do, or crazier things that DMs throw at them. ...So share with me what happened at your most recent session! What was your favorite moment? Where did the game leave off? Did you find any cool magic items? Did someone (gulp) die?!
Ooh! This is the thread for me. I thought about making a thread just for my last session because some stuff happened that I'd really like to deconstruct so that I can use the successful elements of the encounter more frequently and learn to be a better DM. I had an encounter planned that could have been fairly insignificant, but it ended up being one of the most memorable encounters in our campaign so far. I'll drop the description into a spoiler for brevity. It involves a character named Beelock who was central to the encounter. He is a Minotaur Blood Hunter of the Order of the Lycan.
A quick setup: The party had mixed it up with a group of hobgoblin cultists and they were fighting their way up the chain to get to the base and the big guys. Several sessions back, the hobgoblins sent a group of assassins after the party to catch them unprepared in the woods as the party made camp for the night.
Four hobgoblins attacked from different sides while the leader lay in wait to jump out at a wounded player. That never happened. The party absolutely wrecked the unprepared assassins who had no idea who they were messing with. Beelock hulked out into hybrid form and ripped two of them apart by himself while their swords and arrows did very little to his resistant hide. The leader never jumped out at anyone. The party just assumed the leader just ran away scared. Turns out, he was taking notes.
Flash forward to last weekend’s session. The party are all level five now and they had located the hobgoblin base. Two hobgoblin sentries were standing outside the doors to the base and the trees were cleared out 30’ from the entrance. The party got the drop on them and the rogue took out the first sentry. Beelock’s turn. He dashed in and puts his horns right into the last sentry’s chest using his Goring Rush. He connected, and the already-wounded hobgoblin sentry goes down on the first hit. The party got ready to search the corpses
This is when the assassins mad their comeback attack. I had dropped a few hints earlier in the session about him feeling like he was being followed, but he couldn’t pin down exactly who it was. This time, they didn’t send the second-stringers. The assassins were led by none other than the same leader who was hiding in the woods the first time around. He led with four dart attacks because he’s a Hobgoblin Iron Shadow. Then a bugbear brute came charging out of the woods up to Beelock and hit him with a critical hit. 2d8 for the morning star hit plus another 2d6 because of surprise attack. Now double all of that because of the natural 20. Beelock took huge damage in a single hit as the party noticed the other three bugbears emerging from the woods.
On Beelock’s next turn, he spent his action to do his hybrid transformation. His hit points had taken a big hit and he wanted that sweet sweet damage resistance. It was a trap. The assassins were not after the party. They were after him specifically and they wanted to bait him into transforming. As soon as he went hybrid, all the bugbears pulled out silver weapons and went to work on him. He was unconscious before the round was over.
Suddenly the party had a huge problem because not only is Beelock 30’+ from the rest of the group, he’s unconscious with a big bugbear standing over him who has not yet acted on the current round and three more bugbear ambushers who the party now realizes are all looking to finish him off. The cleric and the bard both went into life support mode on Beelock while the sorcerer and the rogue tried to deal with the guys on the periphery before they could close on Beelock and finish him off.
In the end, everyone in the party survived and the second assassin team was defeated. Beelock went unconscious twice and missed one death save before it was all over. The party, who was getting ready to take out two hobgoblin sentries and bust into the base suddenly had to take a short rest to hide the bodies and administer some first aid to themselves. And now they know they need to destroy this entire hobgoblin cult before they hire a third team of assassins to make a run at them.
In hindsight, there were a number of elements, both planned and serendipitous that made the encounter special:
After this encounter, which really sort of started off the session, the rest of the day was a fairly straightforward entry into the base and cleaning it out of enemies. In fact, the one battle with two more powerful adversaries ended up being kind of a washout and had it not been for the great initial encounter, it would have been an unremarkable session. But the party left off inside the occupied dwarven base. There are still rooms to explore and the party knows there's an old cave somewhere in the dormant volcano to find. They know there is a big bad (and I can talk more about that after the encounter happens) and they know what he's looking for. It will take at least one more session to resolve this story arc. Honestly, I think it will take two more sessions.
"Not all those who wander are lost"
This was an awesome read! Thanks for sharing, it gave me some ideas for my own DMing in the future.
I don't really have any memorable sessions to speak of and I'm not currently in a campaign right now, it's been several months since I last played. I've just caught up with season 2 of critical role, looking forward to watching live for the first time this Thursday, and from watching that show I've seen so much and have some many great ideas for trying to make my own campaign that extremely epic. I'm going to be running Dragon Heist soon, and can't wait to try out some of the things I've taken notes on from Critical Role and from these forums and from Reddit and other places on how to be a good DM.
That combat sounds awesome. It just shows how having your enemies being intelligent, and having a plan can make the game so much more immersive and memorable. What a ride! And even though Beelock was probably feeling stressed, there's probably also a stripe of feeling like a bad-ass knowing a team of bad guys had to make a special plan just to take you out. That's some great DMing, Texas!
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I run my game on Mondays, so we had our most recent session last night. We were down 1 player who was very sick, but the party is currently in a town "in between" arcs as they decide where to go next so it was easy to just have the one player go off and do some downtime crafting she wanted to do anyways. Basically right now they've been introduced numerous plot hooks and angles they can explore that play into the things they're after, so it's just a matter of them choosing where they'd like to go next. But first-- Some time in a town, since the last time they were in a town was about session 6. :P They're enjoying shopping and interacting with NPCs.
The party (level 7):
Pyrrhae the Wild Magic Sorcerer / Tempest Cleric multiclass.
Naia the Arcane Trickster Rogue
Balasar the Open Hand Monk
Linwood the Seedling (homebrew) Druid (Absent)
A bit of background: The party revived an ancient Conjurer who had been entombed in a magical puzzle cave, only to learn he was put into stasis because he was inflicted with a plague. The intent was to revive him when the cure was found, but his society of mages fell apart before the cure had been found. The party now know they have a few months to find and create a cure so that they have him as an ally. They hope to use his powers along with old magical relics to get access to the eight different planes of magic, which they need to seal off so that a mysterious outside force can't access and feed off of the magic there. The party located the recipe for a cure, fighting off a Mind Flayer with Hobgoblin thralls, and is now gathering resources in a city before going off to hunt for the ingredients.
In addition, Pyrrhae (the sorcerer-cleric) lost her memory recently from a poison inflicted by one of the party's main nemeses. During the previous session she went to a graveyard at night to meet with a Witch who made a potion intended to help, in exchange for some of the parts from the Mind Flayer they killed. The witch warned Pyrrhae that the potion would remain potent until the next dawn, putting a ticking clock on choosing to drink it or not.
So, this session was pretty much all RP, with some players discovering backstory nuggets for their personal arcs and establishing some other helpful relationships for their quest.
The party visited their ally near the city, a rich guy sponsor named Lord Brightwood who's a mystery they tend to get frustrated by. He also has a lost memory, which was recently discovered by the party after knowing him since the early sessions, and they wanted him to remember believing it to be the missing key to the plot's mysteries. They try to convince him to go to the witch, but fail in their persuasions. Pyrrhae instinctively drinks her potion, and remembers lots of things, including things she hadn't remembered before (plot hooks!). She uses her special arcane focus (The Dream Key) which lets her Detect Thoughts once per day to try and figure out why he's resisting. He learns of his fear, and on probing deeper (he failed both saves) she learns its tied to a letter that they discovered after breaking into one of his safes. She gets advantage on trying to persuade him, now realizing how important her own memories were and exactly what he's afraid of learning, and gets a very high roll and delivers a convincing speech! He admits he may visit this witch. The party is very pleased with themselves and head to town, smuggling in some drugs they picked up from the Hobgoblins that they hope to sell. Yep. Great heroes, right?
They head back into town, running into one of the town officials on the way, whom they had met prior. He'd treated them quite rudely, thinking them a danger to his family and the locals, and apologizes because he's recently learned about the heroics they had done outside of the town. He claims to owe them a favour, and offers to escort them to town, unwittingly making their smuggling of drugs easier. From him they learn that a bunch of children that they rescued (at level 4) have been brought to the town by a group of Paladins important to the world's lore. They also try to ply him for information regarding Balasar (the monk's) home in the region, which the official insists he can't speak about. Pyrrhae assists the monk in intimidating him, and he agrees to meet with the party at a dive bar that night.
The party heads to the monastery where the Paladins are staying while in town, and find all but one of the children. Even the Nkosi child they saved (Tome of Beasts humanoid) after genociding the rest of his people (still great heroes). Naia, the rogue, is most taken by this moment as she had been somewhat of a mother to the Nkosi (Lionel). The missing child was the one they knew best, who left the very same morning to be apprentice to the headmaster of an elvish academy that they have been hearing about quite a bit. The party speaks with the Paladins (receiving a blessing from their leader) and explores the monastery (Balasar discovers another clue to his backstory), Pyrrhae writes a letter and packages some gold for the Paladins to send to the missing child, and Naia arranges for the Nkosi child (Lionel) to be sent to her family, where he can be taken care of until her adventure is over, at which point she will take care of him full-time.
With all of that done, the party plans to head to a hunting lodge known as the Huntmaster's Quarry, where they hope to purchase some parts of monsters they need for the next Plot Item - the potion to cure an ancient disease. That's where the session ended off, since our rogue had to work at 4am the next morning and so we didn't want to go too late!
One of m favourite characters that I have made died. He was a changeling bard, with multiple personality disorder, one side being CE and one CG, and we were fighting a horde of bugbears. Our fighter went down, and before our paladin could Lay on Hands, he was trampled to death. The paladin took an arrow to the face, and was captured. But then, my only true friend in the party, our actually-very-nice barbarian went down, and was snared by a net. Suddenly the CG side took over, and I yelled an insult so loud that two bugbears died (they were low health, and I critted a vicious mockery, and also our dm is nice). I rushed in slashing my way through with scimitars, till I was bleeding to death. Finally, an eye missing, a hand disfigured, I got to the barbarian, and cut open his net.
Mirror, the CE side took over, insulting a bugbear to death, and slicing the head of a goblin. My last words were "run" as I hit a goblin in the face with my lute, then with my final spell slot, cast thunderwave, -and rolled a natural twenty. 4d8 points of damage managed to kill basically everything, even as I bled out, smiling.
When the rest of the party got revenge on the bugbears they came back, and saw a grinning (dead) changeling lying in the snow, non-mangled hand raised with the middle finger up.
i love bards.
I'm the idiot that decides to make Phil Swift in DnD.
Also unrelated to that, in the next session I found a good sword :D
I'm the idiot that decides to make Phil Swift in DnD.
Relatable
"Not all those who wander are lost"
I know XD bards are amazing
I'm the idiot that decides to make Phil Swift in DnD.
9 hours!!! How do you do it?! I'm pooped after 4!
Hell, if I managed to arrange a nine-hour session I'd be pretty frickin amazed
I'm the idiot that decides to make Phil Swift in DnD.
That's still very impressive, wow. I've imagined having a day where me and another DM or two run back to back sessions and so play D&D all day, but I could not envision straight DMing for 9 hours. Sounds super fun!
On Sunday we had our very first session for an undead-fighting campaign set in a semi-homebrew world (we use Greyhawk deities and a few lore elements but the locations and world history are our own) my partner and I cooked up together. This time he's the GM and I'm a player (we switch off throughout the year). I'm playing a LN necromancer of noble birth whose family has for generations been beset with rumors that they've been cursed by Wee Jas; her motivation for fighting undead is that she wants more specimens to study, as she's curious about the difference between undead reanimation and true resurrection, between the mind and the soul, etc etc.
There was word that the town of Kinshire was being beset by zombies, and the church of St. Cuthbert mustered a militia of volunteers to help - our intrepid adventurers included. When we arrived at the town, we did indeed find zombies, but we also found many mysterious mysteries! To whit:
The excitement wasn't limited to these juicy mysteries; my wizard also should've died halfway through the first session by rights. We came across the body of the village priest of St. Cuthbert, who'd stood guard at the front of the church to protect the parishioners inside. The paladin didn't sense that he was undead, so my wizard went up to examine the body and determine cause of death. (I'm playing her very much like a medical examiner.) Suddenly, the priest reanimated and went full The Exorcist, vomiting acid all over and reducing my wizard from 6 HP to 2. I scooted to a safe distance for the rest of the battle - or so I thought, cuz when the paladin chopped off the zombie priest's head acid went splashing everywhere. I crit failed my Dex save and took 9 more acid damage, which reduced me to -7 - an insta-kill according to RAW.
When the rest of the party found out I was already dead, they took pity on me and decided to invoke a house rule that allows the party to, once per session, either increase a roll by ten or reduce it by ten, if the party unanimously agrees and everyone takes a drink. So they reduced the damage to 1 (DM decided they couldn't negate it completely, which we thought was fair considering the house rule is pretty OP in the first place), and my wiz was just badly injured.
This is my first time playing a wizard. It's harder than I thought, y'all!
"We're the perfect combination of expendable and unkillable!"
Oh my goodness, yes a Wizard surviving past level 1 is a challenge! It's nice to have a chance to not die in session 1 though-- I guess she'll learn to be a little more cautious in the future?
The locked room murder mystery sounds so fun! I would love to play in a high mystery style game.
What kills me (HA! HA!) is that I had done a great job being careful and staying out of harm's way in our previous battle! I took chill touch as a cantrip, and with a range of 120 feet (and a wrought iron fence surrounding the cemetery), I was able to avoid taking any damage from the zombies we encountered earlier. If I hadn't crit-failed my Dex save I would've simply been knocked to zero, and the party would have been able to stabilize me right quick. It was just dumb, bad luck I suppose.
"We're the perfect combination of expendable and unkillable!"
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ModeratorLast weekend I ran an intro one-shot to Dragon Heist while one of our players was absent. Had a lot of fun with two memorable moments.
One, the player of the most "good" character is just laser-focused on an NPC that is meant to open the door to a fully evil organization. He's all set to do a sidequest the NPC casually mentioned, and I am looking forward to leveraging this against him.
Two, they came across a Kenku that not only could not be killed, but couldn't be touched. Three rounds of 3-on-1, not a single hit on the bird. I followed the adventure suggestion of having the one or two surviving Kenku flee, and all three players had an opportunity attack. All misses. Crazy acrobatics and inventive movements kept the villain within range of attacks for two more turns, all misses. And then the creature vanished into the darkness and was gone.
I ended the session then, on the words "Somewhere out there in the night is the luckiest damn raven alive. And she knows your faces."
Looks like Xanathar just got himself a new lieutenant, and I've got a villain to more properly stat. The Lucky Whistler, she shall be.
I don't know when we'll return. We used it so that we wouldn't have to cancel game night due to the absence of only one or two players, and this weekend we'll be returning to our regular campaign. We last left those intrepid adventurers as they found their camp stalked by a hunting pair of displacer beasts.
Man-- have to love it when the rolls make their own memorable characters!
After declining a heist job from a George Clooney-esque Polar Bear Mafioso, my mage Mutara had no issues making a blood pact with Santa!