Yesterday was a birthday party game. Me DM, one wing person experience player and four players with a year to 0 experience. Did this one shot where most of the characters were 7th level based on the Dream-based lineages presented in a recent issue of Arcadia, plus one Damphyr reskinned to hunger for dreams so rather than "bite" vampirism was psychic draining dreams via melee contact that allowed for the black orbs of the characters eyes to keep it on theme with other character. One shot plan was to do an initial combat encounter based off a dream based one pager I found on DMs Guild, then role play before revelation of the big bad (amethyst dragon from another MCDM publication with cool psychic attack rules). We never got to the BBEG, which was a possibility. But the bassoon was rightfully restored to the raccoon by the saloon in the dunes and the world was righted from the nightmare it had been thrust into.
Building out the pregen party. Besides the aforementioned Dream Damphyr "Gideon Mindwreck" who in a possible campaign has a whole back story that forces more associations with David Blaine. There was a Sand Speaker (race that's made of "sleep sand") who I went Swarmkeeper Ranger skinning their swarm to be sleep sand and reskinned most magic to keep the sand bit. Two were Somnarians (race who's dream nature is more cosmically styled) so Circle of Star Druid was obvious and Elemental Monk made sense too. Last one was a Lucidling (a "species" who are born by accident from the dreams of aberrations) who I styled as a sort of "reverse Warlock". They didn't so much have a "pact" with the old one but basically sort of stole off with its patron's magical knowledge/nature with little the patron could do about it without directly interceding.
Half the party were regular players in my game, the other half had no experience with D&D. Everyone had a good time, there were a few references to actual game world which my active players now want to see more of in the game, and the new to game folks want to play more games so win for the hobby.
My nephew started another character this week. He liked the idea of a Simic Hybrid when he saw it, but the setting isn't Ravnica, so we decided he was mutated as an experiment by the mind flayers his last character was battling. Except he wanted to be a Drow, too. Okay, I actually had some vague notion about linking these mind flayers to the Drow Civil War story I was also fooling around with.
Essentially he wakes up in a tube in an abandoned mind flayer colony having been made into some kind of mutant. The last thing he remembered was investigating the schemes of rival House-So-And-So. Apparently, it was worse than anyone could imagine: they were in league with the illithid! He makes his way back to the Drow city of Zijdespin. Zijdespin is built from several stalactites hanging over a chasm said to have no bottom. The chasm is filled with spiderwebs which are said to lead to every other spot in the universe, if you know how to follow them and you survive the dangers. The nephew gets back to town, steals some crummy clothes from the scum who dwell on the bottom levels. But what he steals enables him to get to the next higher level, where the opportunity for further advancement is found. By the time he is at the level where his home is located, he has a nice suit and a few gold in his pocket. He finds his house, but it is occupied by troops of the rival house. He causes a commotion but escapes and takes refuge with the monks who attend to the priesthood. Finding the highest ranking man to whom he's allowed to speak, he pleads his case. The monk tells him that the priesthood will back his family, but first he has to affect the rescue of the remaining House Elders being held prisoner in the home he just left, and also travel to the Abyss and bring back his second cousin whose troops are currently hunting the Demonweb Pits for demons to enslave and carry home. The nephew heads back to the home - steals his Giant Spider childhood playmate, Finnian, from the stables - and crawls down into the web. They emerge at the hunting grounds and find the troop and we stopped it there.
I think next time the ranking officer in charge of the troop is going to find another target to attack rather than rushing back. The fewer House Elders there are, the more influence she gains when the house is restored.
This week I learned not to attack any of my players’ pets, familiars, or beasts of burden.
It was mostly combat, starting with the minions of the hag the party was going to try to kill. I was trying to play it smart, and I figured a quickling would be plenty smart enough to go for the source of transportation, especially while its will-o-wisp companion was keeping them distracted. The first thing the quickling did was break the axel on their cart, after which it attacked one of their two donkeys, dropping it in one blow.
My players just stared at me for a moment, aghast; then began barraging me with questions and pleas, trying to save it, and one of them actually asked if he could could have interposed himself between the quickling and the donkey, and take the hit instead! I knew they wouldn’t like it, but I had not expected them to be quite so horrified and traumatized! After a moment to collect my thoughts, I declared that from here on out, animals get death saves just like players, and that the donkey was just down, not outright dead. The first thing they did during the next round of combat, was to feed it one of their healing potions!
Then they had a very long discussion about how to protect the donkeys while they went on to kill the hag. I finally ended it by telling them that the warlock’s familiar could lead them away a couple of miles, and then bring them back at a pre-arranged time. After a little dickering, I agreed to let the familiar take one of their Sending Stones, so that they could talk to it while separated. We finally moved on.
The rest of the session was pretty much normal. They killed the hag, harvested her for parts, and we ended there, as we still had to clean the house for a graduation party. So now animals get death saves, and I know better than to attack their animals. I can’t wait to see what they do when they get back to what remains of their cart….
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I live with several severe autoimmune conditions. If I don’t get back to you right away, it’s probably because I’m not feeling well.
As the remaining forces of House Køkk make plans to liberate the house elders, the spiders are restless. Calura and his second cousin Fitz'z ride their spiders up the stone needle at which their camp is made on the outer edges of the Demonweb Pits. Across a blasted badlands, Calura spots a demonic crawler tank, seemingly far from the nearest front line of the Blood War. The type-III demon captured by the drow forces claims to be the captain of the vessel, the Crawling Asylum, marooned here in the Demonwebs after a mutiny. He believes the crew is now wandering the edges of the Demonwebs, lost.
The Lady Eumania, commander of the expedition, gives the order to prepare to board and capture the crew. With a crawler full of sacrifices, the priesthood can't help but take up House Køkk's cause in their battle against rival House DiVower. And if a few of the house elders are killed in the meantime, so much the better for the prospects of Lady Eumania. Unnoticed by her troops, the captive glabrezu is subtly working Lady Eumania's lust for power, saying all the right things to encourage this assault.
Calura receives a pistol, several silver bullets, and a flask of healing potion. Upon infiltrating the massive vessel, Calura and Fitz'z are sent to disable the engine room. Calura uses his soulknife technique to establish telepathic contact with his teammate, but they are separated after Fitz'z mount sustains an injury. Calura proceeds alone, after being warned to avoid the demon ichor used to fuel the cheap and dirty crawler engines in the absence of soul coins. Demon ichor is known to cause bizarre mutations and who knows HOW it would react combined with the genetic tinkering Calura's mind flayer captors already subjected him to?
After a loud siren blares, Calura enters an anomalous chamber which looks like a small human theater. On the stage is what appears to be a young human girl in a party dress, who welcomes him and offers to take him to a tea party. First, he must find a present, then learn a song to sing, and then find and escort Miss White and Miss Peach, while being careful to avoid Miss Blue and Miss Violet (who have recently offended Princess Pink and are not invited to the tea party). The girl also seems to take a strong dislike to Calura's faithful spider mount, referring to him as "the ugliest dog I've ever seen."
The rest of the session was low-level trash mobs and a few puzzles. I made up an art puzzle, blatantly stole a piano puzzle from Silent Hill, and finished with a logic puzzle. My nephew was not crazy about the puzzles (and something is interfering with his telepathy, so he wasn't able to get hints at first), but he stuck with it, so I'm bumping him up a level. Next time, I think it'll be mostly fighting as we get to the actual tea party.
Ok, so I am combining two sessions in one. Session 0 and session 1.5 (had to end early). Warning bit of a long one here!
Characters -
Mordus - Tiefling Rogue (Me)
Brie - Hafling Sorcerer
Emanon - Elf Ranger
Abyzou - Tiefling Sorcerer
"Moss" - Half Orc Paladin.
So this is my first game of DnD ever, I have gotten into Critical Role recently and have been excited to get involved and have a game. For our first session we all woke chained and bound to the floor in a dungeon. We had no recollection of getting there. After waking up we noticed a DMPC (Gob and Miguel) also joining us. They informed us that they had been there for 3 days and not had much to eat. That didn't sit well with me, time to get out of here. After some fumbling around Gob (who apparently has a 20 strength stat) ripped himself free. This mightily pissed off Miguel who realised he could have done that at any point in the past 3 days (Gob has an INT stat of 3).
After quickly knocking out the jailer, we found a key to our stuff and managed to get quickly kitted up. We ran into some cultists throughout the dungeon who were not of too much of an issue. Some close quarters fighting lead to our ranger proning to take a shot with his bow at disadvantage, through Gob's legs to hit the last cultist in the chest. I swiped a cultist mask to my inventory and we found a cermonial dagger which was whispering to us to "Feed Me". We found a half orc prisoner who was looking pretty rough and on his last legs. Abyzou decided to test the dagger out and executed the half orc ... no effect. Should be mentioned Abyzou is Lawful Evil possessed by a demon ... yeah interesting to play with!
After a few more cultists (and nat 1 perception roll from Moss meaning he only noticed the moss growing on the wall, hence the name) we managed to offer the ceremonial dagger to a statue outside a warded door (the last room we had to check). It took the dagger, sprang to life and wandered down the hall before plunging the dagger into its own chest. This lifted the ward on the door and we entered to find "Master Cultist" and who we believe to be our BBEG of wherever we are. After some back and forth in which we tried to talk him down from killing us and trying to find out a bit more information, he opened up several portals beneath all of our feet and we were cast into interplanar travel.
Level up! Now level 2!
Session 1.5 (Moss the Paladin didn't turn up to the session)
Falling through a void we exit and are suddenly free falling. The whole party nail the acrobatics check to land on our feet, except the ranger who faceplanted. The world was different here, the sky was a purple/blue/orange colour and in the horizon the land was folding up on itself. Think Inception or Halo. We had landing in the centre of a stone circle which had some odd runes on them in abyssal. "Lost, Found, Life, Soul, Laughter, Mourning, Broken and Decieved". We had a brief look but were not sure what to make of it, no reaction to touching or investigating and with no immediate idea of what to do, we chose to follow the only path into the forest below.
Laughter and chittering echoed around us in the forest, the sounds of a town and children playing. However, nothing we did or seen showed us anything of the nature. Some good perception rolls and so on led to no new information. After walking the path for a while we came across a man in the path facing away from us. Mordus, Abyzou and Moss approached the man. He held his head in his hands laughing and crying at the same time. When he heard us his torso turned, legs staying facing the opposite direction. Cracks of bones and sickening sounds of flesh tearing, he looked at us and dropped his hands. His eye sockets were hollow and something was wriggling under the skin of his face. The ranger said "nope!" and loosed an arrow hitting it in the chest.
The creature ran to the woods and the laughter and chittering had stopped. Rather than follow this thing deep into the dark woods and risk engaging in something we were unsure of, we continued down the path. We had noticed that the path had changed behind us when we weren't looking. We had heard a scream from behind us, a little girl, this played on my backstory where a child was executed brutally in front of me and I turned to dash to the sound. The forest had overgrown the path as we had been walking and we had to make some athletics checks to avoid the roots and branches. The sound had stopped and we were lost. That is when we encountered two of the creatures we had seen on the road. No arrow sticking out of their chests (maybe there are more) the wriggling under their skin turned out to be long tongues which they used to grapple Moss and failed to grapple Abyzou. A NAT 20 lead to me dealing 19 points of damage and cutting the tongue clean through, freeing Moss.
We managed to clear them but not before they left Abyzou on 6 HP. We came across an abandoned camp where we found a map with an image of a temple on it. A short rest later and we began to make our way towards this temple. Desperate to find a way out of these ever changing woods. A man came charging through the woods and bumped into us. He was delirious and terrified. He kept saying that "they" were everywhere and how did he know we weren't one of them. After trying to discuss whether we could help him Abyzou (Lawful Evil possessed by a damn demon) said "We should just kill him" with malice in his eyes. This told the man everything he needed to know and he bolted deeper into the woods.
We managed to eventually get out of the woods and finally could see the temple a short ways ahead, set into the stone of a mountain. A large purple orb of magic hovered above the spire. We made our way there and whilst investigating for ways in, 4 cultists burst out of the main door with the man we had seen in the woods. One of the pushed a dagger through the base of his skull and threw him to the ground laughing maniacally. Taking an opportunity, I made a 19 sleight of hand check and managed to slip on the cultist mask. Matching their maniacal laughter I made another good roll on deception to convince them I had brought them more prisoners. A quick Minor Illusion from Brie created linked shackles and chains among all of their arms. Two of the cultists failed an INT check on the illusion and believed it. They wanted to take the prisoners to cells but I explained that these needed to see "The Boss", another lucky roll and they agreed.
The session ended with me leading my party through the doors of this temple and 4 cultists guiding us through. I have no idea what we are going to do when we get to the Boss mans quarters, apparently he's not "here" at the moment but we can wait for him. I'm thinking we look for a way to get out of dodge and figure out how to get out of this messed up realm we are in. I really want to get to a tavern and have a nice beer. First couple of sessions have been good fun and really starting to learn my character and interesting to see what happens to him next.
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Yaris Hurley | Water Genasi Monk Lvl 1 |Karrion's Spelljammer Port
Best session ever. First my players, who haven't been engaging much with the overarching plot, were like, "Hang on, can you repeat that? I want to take notes." Then a new NPC dropped who they "loved to hate". New player pulled off a Deception check with just the right fabrication to pique the NPC's interest and win him over. Had a combat with good description and a goal other than kill all the monsters. Players used their abilities perfectly to gain an advantage in the combat.
Busy busy week in the Drow Civil War. After surviving the Crawling Asylum (a demonic supertank) and sacrificing its crew to Lolth, the soldiers of House Køkk stage a lightning raid on their captured home compound to free the hostage House Elders. A few of the elders are killed in the attempt, but the rival house is routed.
As the players head to the Temple to meet with the priesthood to petition them for their political support, the entire structure is rocked by a massive explosion! While the players search for survivors, some titanic otherworldly aberration bursts from the wreckage and begins wiping out anything that moves. Its size renders it nigh impervious to players' weapons, but thinking quickly, one climbs on his trusty spider and leads the chthonic monstrosity on a wild upside-down chase along the roof of the cavern, through the city and towards the giant balrog prince who has been trapped in chains for 500 years, his struggles providing with city with electric power. Freed from its manacles, the giant demon succeeds in annihilating the creature, but both plummet down into the darkness of the bottomless pit over which the city is suspended. Without the demon, all across Zijdespin, the lights begin to go out and the city is quickly plunged into chaos.
The next day, Calura (my nephews' character) is summoned by the House Matron. He is to travel through the flaming ruins of the webs which still fill the pit beneath the city until he finds the passage to Sigil, the pan-dimensional City of Doors. There he must deliver a message to the D.V.A. (The Drow Variance Authority - an organization which coordinates the evil aims of the drow on crystal spheres across the Prime, for the glory of Lolth). He is partnered with the highly unpredictable Krump, (another nephew, cousin to the first).
Owing to Krump's unpredictability and some cousin nonsense I didn't want to get into, Calura ditches Krump and sets off to find the passage alone. Krump, now accompanied by a highly powerful and entirely sketchy demon companion, takes an alternative route which he knows, traveling to The Galleria, a shopping mall in Hell where the ghostly damned wander through stores, unable to touch any of the products. They infiltrate the managers office, steal a bronze key from her desk and then fight their way through a chain family dining establishment to the men's room, where the key transports them to a fancy home in the Lady's Ward in Sigil.
We'll see how things develop from there...
P.S. - Also, the strange genetic experiments conducted on Calura by the mind flayers (which were exacerbated by exposure to the pure chaos of demon ichor) lead to continuing mutations and raise disturbing questions about the future.
Horizon Walker Ranger complains I never give him a reason to use his abilities. All you need to know is that Horizon Walkers have an ability that allows them to briefly enter the Ethereal plane, allowing them to walk through walls etc. They also have another ability that allows them to detect portals.
Old Man: "This boulder has blocked the tunnel, there's an enchanted sword in there" (This isn't what he actually said, I'm paraphrasing"
Ranger: "Damn, too bad the only one of us who didn't dump strength isn't here"
Old Man: "No, this boulder would probably be too heavy for them and it'd take weeks to mine through this with these rubbish tools"
Ranger: "Maybe we should see if someone has any dynamite"
Old Man: "No dynamite here, if only there was a way to walk through solid rock"
Warlock: "Maybe we can find a scroll of meld into stone somewhere?"
Ranger: "I reckon DM's just trolling us, there's no way past that rock"
Old Man "Oh if only one of you lot were one of those special rangers that could move through rock"
Ranger: "Oh, are we letting Rangers swap spells during a short rest, I could add meld into stone"
-DM breaks character at this point-
DM: "Oh if only one of the party had an ability that could get through the rock, hint, hint!"
Warlock: "Misty Step doesn't work through solid rock"
DM: "I know Misty Step doesn't work through solid rock! The Ranger is the one with the subclass ability!"
Ranger: "Oh! Right, now I get it. I use 'detect portal'"
DM: *sigh* "There are no portals nearby"
Ranger: "Do we have to..."
DM: "Ethereal Step"
Ranger: "Oh, oh!!! I didn't know I had that."
DM: "..."
The jokes on him though, the sword is sentient and I changed the personality from sword of justice to Sword that just makes insults and snarky comments.
So there's a lot of backstory to why we're doing this, but our party is robbing a tower in order to steal the powerful magical items inside and replace them with not so dangerous minorly magical duplicates.
The reason for this is that the owner of the tower is going to auction it off soon, and a very bad person is lined up to be the one to buy it all.
Said bad person isn't someone we're in a position to directly attack without huge risk, so instead we're trying to undermine her plan by taking the most dangerous of these artifacts away, likely the reason she's trying to buy the tower in the first place. Since attacking her head on isn't very practical at the moment, we're targeting her goal instead.
We're about 2/3 or so through the tower I think? We'll be hitting it up again next session. So far there's been a lot of fun puzzles, searching around for clues etc on how to proceed. My rogue, who recently hit level 11, has been having a blast using the old expertise/reliable talent combo on things like picking locks or investigating for clues. There's been little combat, really just one gelatinous cube that the monk luckily saw before my rogue got attacked.
I'm not going to go into detail on all of the puzzles but it's been a lot of fun, and I'm looking forward to seeing the rest next session. And if the party manages to pull it off and get away or if we'll be having to go into hiding and flee the country when this all goes down.
The session left off with us entering a chess themed room, which I'm looking forward to because it's been a running gag that my rogue is really into dragonchess but can only rarely find someone to actually play against. And the heist is being done on her birthday.
Mal the Leonin Barbarian (Ancestral Zealot), unable to attend this session
Blancha the Dhampir Druid (Circle of Spores)
And I, the humble DM, playing everyone else.
The party just got back from a long and strenuous voyage where they fought an invading white dragon in a tropical peninsula. Having received 500 gold pieces for their efforts (the Coalition of Pirate Lords pays well), the party did various things and we had a relaxed session of downtime played over the course of one in-game month.
Blancha, being the party's ultimate con artist, hired new employees for her self-titled criminal organization House Blancha, while keeping an eye on Tuft for one particular reason.
Tuft's patron is Blancha's evil vampire father, known as the Night Dealer or Count Siverus.
Blancha hired a grung butler named Michael Ripples, which comes into play later, and a white tiefling wizard named Kate. Blancha's first job for Kate was to send her raven familiar out to find the rest of the party (Blancha is more or less a freelancer who happens to work with the party from time to time), particularly Tuft. Blancha talked to Paris, owner of the otherworldly shop the Panopticus, and other than that had a relaxing month of downtime.
Wren did more things than usual. Wren bought a dagger that could slice through any object on the command word "Gluush", became adequate at playing the violin, explored the pirate haven Sahaugin Stop which the party calls home, and adopted a dog friend that he hopes to teach to use a dagger. However, Wren is worried for the future.
Wren is on the run from the infamous Twilight Empire, a caste-empowered Underdark nation led by a Yuan-Ti emperor and the Red King, the dragon lord of the Underdark, for attempting to steal the Emperor's crown.
Tuft stayed in Sahaugin Stop during the voyage, but he still worked at an artificer and craftsman shop known as Savastor's Hand to pass the time. He helped design the first constructs in Sahaugin Stop for labor and creating new cannons for the Coalition. Overall, Tuft had a nice break from adventuring in his downtime.
On the final night of downtime before Savastor's Day, a celebration of the god of time and constructs, Tuft went into the Chattering Skull Tavern (a tavern run by three docile flameskulls named Ken, Roderick, and Bill) to enjoy himself at the best tavern in Sahaugin Stop. However, after Blancha snuck a note into Tuft's pocket to meet her at her manor, Tuft noticed his old military friend... Private Michael Ripples.
They chat for a little while, and everyone goes back to their homes in a bittersweet tone, especially Tuft himself.
And that was Session 4 of my campaign.
If you want to check out more, go to Tiefling Corner (tieflingcorner.wordpress.com) and view the entire campaign so far.
Yesterday we had a session 0 for a side campaign I decided to run. Because my depression and physical health are so bad, I’m struggling to prep for a homebrew session every week, so I picked up a short, basic side quest campaign to run when I’m not up for a normal one. We just had a conversation, I explained how I’m feeling, reiterating the old table rules, discussing new ones that we needed to create, and creating characters. Nothing fancy or special, or even particularly interesting, but it was productive, so all in all I’m satisfied.
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I live with several severe autoimmune conditions. If I don’t get back to you right away, it’s probably because I’m not feeling well.
During a major encounter for our campaign, the party finally met their match and 2/4 of them were long-term incapacitated (One was planeshifted to the abyss, the other was hit with Feeblemind). I feel bad, but I've been steadily warning them about the increased danger of the campaign and encounters, so they took it pretty well. Next session will deal with the aftermath of the fight.
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It's ok Ranger, you'll always be cool to me.. Unless druid gets another use for its wild shape charges.
Couple of kids wanted to try something different. One has become fascinated by military tactics and wanted to play as a company commander. Gave each of them a unit of 200 musketeers and had them coordinate a two pronged assault on a company of orcs illegally logging in their forest. Chaos ensued, but with overwhelming force, they eventually pulled out a win.
Buoyed by this success, they now intend to take their remaining 350 or so troops and lay siege to the orc capital. That plan probably won’t happen.
Illegal Logging is punishable by multi-pronged assault? Nice.
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Life is very busy unfortunately, gone from most Pbp's indefinitely. If you'd like to contact me, I am on Discord at GreatAxeblade#7595, always happy to chat :)
The city of Zijdespin has divided into armed camps. The forces of House Køkk and its allies battle the forces of House D’Vower as House Byle watches from above - prepared to deliver the killing blow at the moment of its own greatest advantage.
Grau’mere, Matron Mother of House Køkk sends her favorite grandniece and would-be assassin, Eumania, on a daring diplomatic mission. Cut off from the family’s normal allies in the Priesthood of Lolth after a terrorist attack destroyed the Great Temple, Grau’mere must seek assistance from the D.V.A., the Drow Variance Authority. This is an organization located in the dimensional cynosure of Sigil, the City of Doors. Its aim is to coordinate all of the Spider Goddess’ schemes upon all the crystal spheres where drow exist on the Prime Material Plane.
Known only to Grau’mere, her envoy is not Lady Eumania at all, but Calura, a low-ranking male who has developed shapechanging abilities owing to the mutations he suffered as a result of mind flayer experimentation. This sort of gender-bending is anathema to the exceedingly TERF-y Drow, but only the missing Lady Eumania has the necessary rank to be received.
Calura and his escort, Captain Gelless, and their Commander, the Lady Moon, set out with a squad to break through a House D’Vower blockade of the remaining strands of the Demonweb, a multiplanar network of spiderwebs above which their city is suspended.
When they find the usual pathway destroyed, the group attempts to make their way inconspicuously through the Swiss-watch precision gears of Mechanus. Things go wrong almost from the start as Captain Gelless has a complete meltdown and starts randomly fighting modrons. As he and Moon are brought under control, Calura and his faithful spider escape, darting between perfectly-efficient bullet trains before boarding (or more properly, climbing on top of) the train to Terminal Station..
One of those times when your players really make you stop and think hard about the way an encounter was "supposed" to go.
<Spoilers for Hoard of the Dragon Queen>
Our intrepid heroes have finally secured the mill and made it back to the keep when the half-dragon Cyanwrath steps forward and issues his challenge to single combat at the gate to the keep. They dither a bit, almost to the point where the Sergeant NPC steps forward to accept the challenge but our Bard, who's carefully nursed her one remaining spell slot throughout all the night-time encounters that make up the rather brutal Chapter 1 of the adventure, convinces the group's Fighter that she has a plan. The Fighter acquiesces and our heroine steps forward, challenging the half-dragon to the combat but with one condition: should either combatant flee, they are declared vanquished.
I asked for a persuasion check, she rolls a 24, and Cyanwrath agrees to the condition, assuring the small creature in front of him he has no intention of running. The Bard wins the initiative roll and casts Dissonant Whispers. Cyanwrath fails the saving throw and bolts, with his kobold guard taking off after him into the darkness and bringing Chapter 1 to a close.
Cue laughter all around and our Bard, playing in the wee hours of the morning from Australia, gets to go to bed feeling beyond smug and leaving a DM wondering "wtf just happened?", while also smiling his face off.
Fighting the BBEG was not going well only 3 of us along with a couple of npc allies and 2 of us were on 1HP after death ward saved us. Sorlock shouts "trust me" quicken casts scatter to move all the allies away from the boss and himself next to it and breaks the staff of the magi. BBEG gets something like 120 damage despite making its save, killing it and the sorlock is sent to the astral sea with an astral dreadnaught approaching. We then burn a CE candle of invocation we had found in his lair to bring the sorlock back.
Our party is hired by the guard captain of Easthaven to investigate the disappearance of some fishermen, who we learn went missing near some local caves.
We encounter a hag within the cave, who is currently flavoring a cauldron filled with stew with the dismembered parts of these missing fishermen.
Cue combat.
The hag sustains some decent damage during the first round…but the party ignores the floating ball of light, which turns out to be a will ‘o wisp, which proceeds to zap our gnome rogue, nearly killing her.
While this is happening, the party hears a large rumbling approaching.
Just before the hag is about to be killed, a frost giant zombie breaks into the cavern, and takes a single massive swing at our kobold sorcerer.
Critical hit.
Down goes the kobold; if I hadn’t made it so that the semi-rotten zombie wasn’t at full strength, it would have been instant death.
The warlock kills the hag, which makes the giant zombie go inert, while the sorcerer is healed.
The party takes the giant zombie head back to Easthaven, along with the hag’s cauldron, which apparently provides an endless (in doses) amount of stew.
Since we basically have just saved Easthaven from starvation for the winter, the party is declared local heroes.
The town speaker pays an absurd amount of money for the cauldron, and states that he plans on helping the party deal with the duregar menace to understand what evil scheme they’re planning.
Doubleheader yesterday! An unusual, though tiring, treat:
Session 1: My budding generals wanted to carry on with their makeshift battalion-level campaign. Let me state up front that I am not a wargamer or a tactical simulation guy. I'm just trying to entertain kids by kludging together stuff I've read and a set of on-the-fly rules no more complicated than Risk.
Now that their companies are back up to full strength, they wander north, out of the woods, pursuing intruding orcs. Their ultimate intention is to press on through 300 miles of enemy territory, living off the land, and lay siege to the city of Ogre, capital of the Chorzhoi Orcs.
Their assets: 250 troops from the Queen's 53rd Dwarven Fusiliers ("The Old Saucy Lads") and another 250 elven rangers and irregulars.
Their scouts find the main camp of the invading horde: 25,000 mounted troops comprised of untested youngsters, local tribal militias and scattered mercenaries. But the troops aren't occupying the camp at the moment. They seem to have stumbled across a small force of humans from the Grande Armeé of the Beneficent Empire of Cardendos. These troops are retreating through the Middlemarches after an ill-fated campaign into the Kyrghan Autocracy and have been harried through the countryside every step of the way. The dwarven and elven commanders make note of the fact that the human musketeers have formed an infantry square, to prevent the orcish cavalry from flanking their lines. The humans' discipline is good and until they run out of ammunition, they are in no immediate danger.
The players send their own troops to ransack and loot the camp. As the smoke from the fires rises, a large chunk of the orcs ride back to defend the camp. The dwarves form a square, just like they saw earlier, and the elves skirmish and snipe at the orcs from behind cover, causing confusion. Meanwhile, three human cannons continue to pound away at the enemy force. Finally, the confused and demoralized orcs retreat to the nearby river.
The human commander rides over to thank his unexpected allies. He is Field Marshall Ivo Maria Bonelli, Cardendos' greatest military mind (he adds, with no false modesty). A man who has made himself both indispensable and intolerable to Emperor Arsène XIII. He opines over dinner and brandy that the city of Ogre could perhaps be taken with 100,000 men and several hundred cannon. The players decide to head back to the borders of their own kingdom and await new orders.
But before they part, the dwarves use their unparalleled skill in combat engineering to take the supplies found at the camp and build a reinforced log fortress for the human troops to defend and shelter the peasants of the countryside.
Session 2: Calura of House Køkk (disguised as the Lady Eumania) and Captain Gelless of the House Guard have arrived in the fabled Sigil, City of Doors. They do the stuff everyone does their first time in the city (get directions from A’Kin, the Friendly Fiend; see the Lady of Pain disintegrate something displeasing to her for ineffable reasons; travel poloidally along the theta-axis of a torus, etc.).
Finding their way to the Drow Variance Authority, a nondescript building in the Lady's Ward, the two then face their next challenge: The Maze of Ultimate Horror! In a grand marble hall full of drow driven to the verge of insanity, there are five bankers’ windows and two doors. The windows are marked Plant; Maintenance; Security; Operations; and Accounts Receivable. All you need to do to get from one door to the other door is collect the correct combination of signatures on the right form. That’s the Maze. Of Ultimate Horror.
I didn’t subject my players to the full horror, I’m not a monster. Instead, Calura picked the lock on the far door after a few minutes.
In the Director's Office, Calura confronts the mastermind behind the D.V.A., the Lady Kez'z Køkk, his long-lost second cousin once-removed! Kez'z is one of the first NPCs I made for this world and she's been lurking in the shadows of my brain concocting her master plan for a while. The last time we saw her, she was traveling to Zijdespin with a small army of green slaads, preparing to wreak horrible vengeance on the city that exiled her; but then she had a change of heart. Her time on the surface had made her realize that drow, evil though they were, were also themselves victims of horrifying abuse at the claws of Lolth and thus, if she were to seek vengeance against anyone, her proper target should be the Spider Queen herself.
Adopting the symbol of the spider-wasp (Pompilidae), she established the D.V.A. not to streamline coordination between the drow of different crystal spheres, but to add levels of bureaucracy and chaos system-wide, slowly separating the demon goddess from her worshippers and weakening her connection to the Prime Material Plane, essentially devouring the Dark Mother of Chaos from the inside out.
Now that her scheme is reaching its middle stages, Kez'z needed to see for herself this young rogue whose aberrant mutations may make him an integral part of her plan to forge a new Destiny of the Drow!
Yesterday was pretty tame, right up until the end, when it was almost disastrous!
The session started immediately after the last combat from the last session; they had fought and killed a green hag and her minions. It was still early in the in-game day, so they spent the rest of it doing stuff like research, burning corpses, and foraging for medicinal herbs. The next morning, after their long rest, the artificer made woodcarver’s tools, and three of the five set to work on making a new temporary axel for their cart, while the other two did more research and foraging.
The axel took them six hours, due to some very bad rolls. At three in the afternoon, I gave them a choice: they could go at a fast pace, and reach the city by nightfall, but risk breaking the temporary axel. They could go at a normal pace, and be a few miles out at nightfall. Or they could go at a slow pace, and be stealthy, but they would spend another night in the forest. They chose a normal pace, reasoning that they could probably survive an hour of traveling in the dark. The warlock (a Kitsune) changed into her fox form, and she and her familiar took up the task of scouting.
I rolled a random encounter, and announced that they were headed directly for an owlbear den: they could go past, and risk tangling with the residents, or go around, and add an hour to their journey. They went around.
I rolled a second RE, and their perception checks told them that they were being followed by the owlbears, who could smell the barrels of salt pork they were carrying. After a discussion which took much longer than I expected (apparently they were very attached to that salt pork), they finally had the bright idea of putting some meat onto the artificer’s cannon, and have it lead the creatures away from them. It was so creative that I let them have it without any further rolls.
They were barely an hour outside of the city, and I decided that I wasn’t making another RE unless I rolled a nat 20 on the D20. Of course I rolled a nat 20; I called a five-minute break while I flipped through the MM to find something besides owlbears to attack the party with!
A long, painful battle against three werewolves ensued. I was trying so hard to speed combat up (one player needed to leave, which I didn’t know until after combat started) that I misread several things in the stat block, misinterpreted two rules, retconned a mechanic, and changed a spell accidentally. It didn’t help that I rolled SIX more natural 20s over the course of the fight, even though I kept switching between dice!!
We ended the game as soon as they killed the last werewolf. It’s pitch dark, they still haven’t made it back to the city yet, and two of them have contracted lycanthropy. They’re pretty wealthy, and I have plenty of NPCs who can cast Remove Curse, so it shouldn’t be a problem; nonetheless I think our next session should be pretty interesting!
Yesterday was a birthday party game. Me DM, one wing person experience player and four players with a year to 0 experience. Did this one shot where most of the characters were 7th level based on the Dream-based lineages presented in a recent issue of Arcadia, plus one Damphyr reskinned to hunger for dreams so rather than "bite" vampirism was psychic draining dreams via melee contact that allowed for the black orbs of the characters eyes to keep it on theme with other character. One shot plan was to do an initial combat encounter based off a dream based one pager I found on DMs Guild, then role play before revelation of the big bad (amethyst dragon from another MCDM publication with cool psychic attack rules). We never got to the BBEG, which was a possibility. But the bassoon was rightfully restored to the raccoon by the saloon in the dunes and the world was righted from the nightmare it had been thrust into.
Building out the pregen party. Besides the aforementioned Dream Damphyr "Gideon Mindwreck" who in a possible campaign has a whole back story that forces more associations with David Blaine. There was a Sand Speaker (race that's made of "sleep sand") who I went Swarmkeeper Ranger skinning their swarm to be sleep sand and reskinned most magic to keep the sand bit. Two were Somnarians (race who's dream nature is more cosmically styled) so Circle of Star Druid was obvious and Elemental Monk made sense too. Last one was a Lucidling (a "species" who are born by accident from the dreams of aberrations) who I styled as a sort of "reverse Warlock". They didn't so much have a "pact" with the old one but basically sort of stole off with its patron's magical knowledge/nature with little the patron could do about it without directly interceding.
Half the party were regular players in my game, the other half had no experience with D&D. Everyone had a good time, there were a few references to actual game world which my active players now want to see more of in the game, and the new to game folks want to play more games so win for the hobby.
Jander Sunstar is the thinking person's Drizzt, fight me.
My nephew started another character this week. He liked the idea of a Simic Hybrid when he saw it, but the setting isn't Ravnica, so we decided he was mutated as an experiment by the mind flayers his last character was battling. Except he wanted to be a Drow, too. Okay, I actually had some vague notion about linking these mind flayers to the Drow Civil War story I was also fooling around with.
Essentially he wakes up in a tube in an abandoned mind flayer colony having been made into some kind of mutant. The last thing he remembered was investigating the schemes of rival House-So-And-So. Apparently, it was worse than anyone could imagine: they were in league with the illithid! He makes his way back to the Drow city of Zijdespin. Zijdespin is built from several stalactites hanging over a chasm said to have no bottom. The chasm is filled with spiderwebs which are said to lead to every other spot in the universe, if you know how to follow them and you survive the dangers. The nephew gets back to town, steals some crummy clothes from the scum who dwell on the bottom levels. But what he steals enables him to get to the next higher level, where the opportunity for further advancement is found. By the time he is at the level where his home is located, he has a nice suit and a few gold in his pocket. He finds his house, but it is occupied by troops of the rival house. He causes a commotion but escapes and takes refuge with the monks who attend to the priesthood. Finding the highest ranking man to whom he's allowed to speak, he pleads his case. The monk tells him that the priesthood will back his family, but first he has to affect the rescue of the remaining House Elders being held prisoner in the home he just left, and also travel to the Abyss and bring back his second cousin whose troops are currently hunting the Demonweb Pits for demons to enslave and carry home. The nephew heads back to the home - steals his Giant Spider childhood playmate, Finnian, from the stables - and crawls down into the web. They emerge at the hunting grounds and find the troop and we stopped it there.
I think next time the ranking officer in charge of the troop is going to find another target to attack rather than rushing back. The fewer House Elders there are, the more influence she gains when the house is restored.
This week I learned not to attack any of my players’ pets, familiars, or beasts of burden.
It was mostly combat, starting with the minions of the hag the party was going to try to kill. I was trying to play it smart, and I figured a quickling would be plenty smart enough to go for the source of transportation, especially while its will-o-wisp companion was keeping them distracted. The first thing the quickling did was break the axel on their cart, after which it attacked one of their two donkeys, dropping it in one blow.
My players just stared at me for a moment, aghast; then began barraging me with questions and pleas, trying to save it, and one of them actually asked if he could could have interposed himself between the quickling and the donkey, and take the hit instead! I knew they wouldn’t like it, but I had not expected them to be quite so horrified and traumatized! After a moment to collect my thoughts, I declared that from here on out, animals get death saves just like players, and that the donkey was just down, not outright dead. The first thing they did during the next round of combat, was to feed it one of their healing potions!
Then they had a very long discussion about how to protect the donkeys while they went on to kill the hag. I finally ended it by telling them that the warlock’s familiar could lead them away a couple of miles, and then bring them back at a pre-arranged time. After a little dickering, I agreed to let the familiar take one of their Sending Stones, so that they could talk to it while separated. We finally moved on.
The rest of the session was pretty much normal. They killed the hag, harvested her for parts, and we ended there, as we still had to clean the house for a graduation party. So now animals get death saves, and I know better than to attack their animals. I can’t wait to see what they do when they get back to what remains of their cart….
I live with several severe autoimmune conditions. If I don’t get back to you right away, it’s probably because I’m not feeling well.
Playing with the nephew.
As the remaining forces of House Køkk make plans to liberate the house elders, the spiders are restless. Calura and his second cousin Fitz'z ride their spiders up the stone needle at which their camp is made on the outer edges of the Demonweb Pits. Across a blasted badlands, Calura spots a demonic crawler tank, seemingly far from the nearest front line of the Blood War. The type-III demon captured by the drow forces claims to be the captain of the vessel, the Crawling Asylum, marooned here in the Demonwebs after a mutiny. He believes the crew is now wandering the edges of the Demonwebs, lost.
The Lady Eumania, commander of the expedition, gives the order to prepare to board and capture the crew. With a crawler full of sacrifices, the priesthood can't help but take up House Køkk's cause in their battle against rival House DiVower. And if a few of the house elders are killed in the meantime, so much the better for the prospects of Lady Eumania. Unnoticed by her troops, the captive glabrezu is subtly working Lady Eumania's lust for power, saying all the right things to encourage this assault.
Calura receives a pistol, several silver bullets, and a flask of healing potion. Upon infiltrating the massive vessel, Calura and Fitz'z are sent to disable the engine room. Calura uses his soulknife technique to establish telepathic contact with his teammate, but they are separated after Fitz'z mount sustains an injury. Calura proceeds alone, after being warned to avoid the demon ichor used to fuel the cheap and dirty crawler engines in the absence of soul coins. Demon ichor is known to cause bizarre mutations and who knows HOW it would react combined with the genetic tinkering Calura's mind flayer captors already subjected him to?
After a loud siren blares, Calura enters an anomalous chamber which looks like a small human theater. On the stage is what appears to be a young human girl in a party dress, who welcomes him and offers to take him to a tea party. First, he must find a present, then learn a song to sing, and then find and escort Miss White and Miss Peach, while being careful to avoid Miss Blue and Miss Violet (who have recently offended Princess Pink and are not invited to the tea party). The girl also seems to take a strong dislike to Calura's faithful spider mount, referring to him as "the ugliest dog I've ever seen."
The rest of the session was low-level trash mobs and a few puzzles. I made up an art puzzle, blatantly stole a piano puzzle from Silent Hill, and finished with a logic puzzle. My nephew was not crazy about the puzzles (and something is interfering with his telepathy, so he wasn't able to get hints at first), but he stuck with it, so I'm bumping him up a level. Next time, I think it'll be mostly fighting as we get to the actual tea party.
Ok, so I am combining two sessions in one. Session 0 and session 1.5 (had to end early). Warning bit of a long one here!
Characters -
Mordus - Tiefling Rogue (Me)
Brie - Hafling Sorcerer
Emanon - Elf Ranger
Abyzou - Tiefling Sorcerer
"Moss" - Half Orc Paladin.
So this is my first game of DnD ever, I have gotten into Critical Role recently and have been excited to get involved and have a game. For our first session we all woke chained and bound to the floor in a dungeon. We had no recollection of getting there. After waking up we noticed a DMPC (Gob and Miguel) also joining us. They informed us that they had been there for 3 days and not had much to eat. That didn't sit well with me, time to get out of here. After some fumbling around Gob (who apparently has a 20 strength stat) ripped himself free. This mightily pissed off Miguel who realised he could have done that at any point in the past 3 days (Gob has an INT stat of 3).
After quickly knocking out the jailer, we found a key to our stuff and managed to get quickly kitted up. We ran into some cultists throughout the dungeon who were not of too much of an issue. Some close quarters fighting lead to our ranger proning to take a shot with his bow at disadvantage, through Gob's legs to hit the last cultist in the chest. I swiped a cultist mask to my inventory and we found a cermonial dagger which was whispering to us to "Feed Me". We found a half orc prisoner who was looking pretty rough and on his last legs. Abyzou decided to test the dagger out and executed the half orc ... no effect. Should be mentioned Abyzou is Lawful Evil possessed by a demon ... yeah interesting to play with!
After a few more cultists (and nat 1 perception roll from Moss meaning he only noticed the moss growing on the wall, hence the name) we managed to offer the ceremonial dagger to a statue outside a warded door (the last room we had to check). It took the dagger, sprang to life and wandered down the hall before plunging the dagger into its own chest. This lifted the ward on the door and we entered to find "Master Cultist" and who we believe to be our BBEG of wherever we are. After some back and forth in which we tried to talk him down from killing us and trying to find out a bit more information, he opened up several portals beneath all of our feet and we were cast into interplanar travel.
Level up! Now level 2!
Session 1.5 (Moss the Paladin didn't turn up to the session)
Falling through a void we exit and are suddenly free falling. The whole party nail the acrobatics check to land on our feet, except the ranger who faceplanted. The world was different here, the sky was a purple/blue/orange colour and in the horizon the land was folding up on itself. Think Inception or Halo. We had landing in the centre of a stone circle which had some odd runes on them in abyssal. "Lost, Found, Life, Soul, Laughter, Mourning, Broken and Decieved". We had a brief look but were not sure what to make of it, no reaction to touching or investigating and with no immediate idea of what to do, we chose to follow the only path into the forest below.
Laughter and chittering echoed around us in the forest, the sounds of a town and children playing. However, nothing we did or seen showed us anything of the nature. Some good perception rolls and so on led to no new information. After walking the path for a while we came across a man in the path facing away from us. Mordus, Abyzou and Moss approached the man. He held his head in his hands laughing and crying at the same time. When he heard us his torso turned, legs staying facing the opposite direction. Cracks of bones and sickening sounds of flesh tearing, he looked at us and dropped his hands. His eye sockets were hollow and something was wriggling under the skin of his face. The ranger said "nope!" and loosed an arrow hitting it in the chest.
The creature ran to the woods and the laughter and chittering had stopped. Rather than follow this thing deep into the dark woods and risk engaging in something we were unsure of, we continued down the path. We had noticed that the path had changed behind us when we weren't looking. We had heard a scream from behind us, a little girl, this played on my backstory where a child was executed brutally in front of me and I turned to dash to the sound. The forest had overgrown the path as we had been walking and we had to make some athletics checks to avoid the roots and branches. The sound had stopped and we were lost. That is when we encountered two of the creatures we had seen on the road. No arrow sticking out of their chests (maybe there are more) the wriggling under their skin turned out to be long tongues which they used to grapple Moss and failed to grapple Abyzou. A NAT 20 lead to me dealing 19 points of damage and cutting the tongue clean through, freeing Moss.
We managed to clear them but not before they left Abyzou on 6 HP. We came across an abandoned camp where we found a map with an image of a temple on it. A short rest later and we began to make our way towards this temple. Desperate to find a way out of these ever changing woods. A man came charging through the woods and bumped into us. He was delirious and terrified. He kept saying that "they" were everywhere and how did he know we weren't one of them. After trying to discuss whether we could help him Abyzou (Lawful Evil possessed by a damn demon) said "We should just kill him" with malice in his eyes. This told the man everything he needed to know and he bolted deeper into the woods.
We managed to eventually get out of the woods and finally could see the temple a short ways ahead, set into the stone of a mountain. A large purple orb of magic hovered above the spire. We made our way there and whilst investigating for ways in, 4 cultists burst out of the main door with the man we had seen in the woods. One of the pushed a dagger through the base of his skull and threw him to the ground laughing maniacally. Taking an opportunity, I made a 19 sleight of hand check and managed to slip on the cultist mask. Matching their maniacal laughter I made another good roll on deception to convince them I had brought them more prisoners. A quick Minor Illusion from Brie created linked shackles and chains among all of their arms. Two of the cultists failed an INT check on the illusion and believed it. They wanted to take the prisoners to cells but I explained that these needed to see "The Boss", another lucky roll and they agreed.
The session ended with me leading my party through the doors of this temple and 4 cultists guiding us through. I have no idea what we are going to do when we get to the Boss mans quarters, apparently he's not "here" at the moment but we can wait for him. I'm thinking we look for a way to get out of dodge and figure out how to get out of this messed up realm we are in. I really want to get to a tavern and have a nice beer. First couple of sessions have been good fun and really starting to learn my character and interesting to see what happens to him next.
Yaris Hurley | Water Genasi Monk Lvl 1 | Karrion's Spelljammer Port
Best session ever. First my players, who haven't been engaging much with the overarching plot, were like, "Hang on, can you repeat that? I want to take notes." Then a new NPC dropped who they "loved to hate". New player pulled off a Deception check with just the right fabrication to pique the NPC's interest and win him over. Had a combat with good description and a goal other than kill all the monsters. Players used their abilities perfectly to gain an advantage in the combat.
Busy busy week in the Drow Civil War. After surviving the Crawling Asylum (a demonic supertank) and sacrificing its crew to Lolth, the soldiers of House Køkk stage a lightning raid on their captured home compound to free the hostage House Elders. A few of the elders are killed in the attempt, but the rival house is routed.
As the players head to the Temple to meet with the priesthood to petition them for their political support, the entire structure is rocked by a massive explosion! While the players search for survivors, some titanic otherworldly aberration bursts from the wreckage and begins wiping out anything that moves. Its size renders it nigh impervious to players' weapons, but thinking quickly, one climbs on his trusty spider and leads the chthonic monstrosity on a wild upside-down chase along the roof of the cavern, through the city and towards the giant balrog prince who has been trapped in chains for 500 years, his struggles providing with city with electric power. Freed from its manacles, the giant demon succeeds in annihilating the creature, but both plummet down into the darkness of the bottomless pit over which the city is suspended. Without the demon, all across Zijdespin, the lights begin to go out and the city is quickly plunged into chaos.
The next day, Calura (my nephews' character) is summoned by the House Matron. He is to travel through the flaming ruins of the webs which still fill the pit beneath the city until he finds the passage to Sigil, the pan-dimensional City of Doors. There he must deliver a message to the D.V.A. (The Drow Variance Authority - an organization which coordinates the evil aims of the drow on crystal spheres across the Prime, for the glory of Lolth). He is partnered with the highly unpredictable Krump, (another nephew, cousin to the first).
Owing to Krump's unpredictability and some cousin nonsense I didn't want to get into, Calura ditches Krump and sets off to find the passage alone. Krump, now accompanied by a highly powerful and entirely sketchy demon companion, takes an alternative route which he knows, traveling to The Galleria, a shopping mall in Hell where the ghostly damned wander through stores, unable to touch any of the products. They infiltrate the managers office, steal a bronze key from her desk and then fight their way through a chain family dining establishment to the men's room, where the key transports them to a fancy home in the Lady's Ward in Sigil.
We'll see how things develop from there...
P.S. - Also, the strange genetic experiments conducted on Calura by the mind flayers (which were exacerbated by exposure to the pure chaos of demon ichor) lead to continuing mutations and raise disturbing questions about the future.
Horizon Walker Ranger complains I never give him a reason to use his abilities. All you need to know is that Horizon Walkers have an ability that allows them to briefly enter the Ethereal plane, allowing them to walk through walls etc. They also have another ability that allows them to detect portals.
Old Man: "This boulder has blocked the tunnel, there's an enchanted sword in there" (This isn't what he actually said, I'm paraphrasing"
Ranger: "Damn, too bad the only one of us who didn't dump strength isn't here"
Old Man: "No, this boulder would probably be too heavy for them and it'd take weeks to mine through this with these rubbish tools"
Ranger: "Maybe we should see if someone has any dynamite"
Old Man: "No dynamite here, if only there was a way to walk through solid rock"
Warlock: "Maybe we can find a scroll of meld into stone somewhere?"
Ranger: "I reckon DM's just trolling us, there's no way past that rock"
Old Man "Oh if only one of you lot were one of those special rangers that could move through rock"
Ranger: "Oh, are we letting Rangers swap spells during a short rest, I could add meld into stone"
-DM breaks character at this point-
DM: "Oh if only one of the party had an ability that could get through the rock, hint, hint!"
Warlock: "Misty Step doesn't work through solid rock"
DM: "I know Misty Step doesn't work through solid rock! The Ranger is the one with the subclass ability!"
Ranger: "Oh! Right, now I get it. I use 'detect portal'"
DM: *sigh* "There are no portals nearby"
Ranger: "Do we have to..."
DM: "Ethereal Step"
Ranger: "Oh, oh!!! I didn't know I had that."
DM: "..."
The jokes on him though, the sword is sentient and I changed the personality from sword of justice to Sword that just makes insults and snarky comments.
So there's a lot of backstory to why we're doing this, but our party is robbing a tower in order to steal the powerful magical items inside and replace them with not so dangerous minorly magical duplicates.
The reason for this is that the owner of the tower is going to auction it off soon, and a very bad person is lined up to be the one to buy it all.
Said bad person isn't someone we're in a position to directly attack without huge risk, so instead we're trying to undermine her plan by taking the most dangerous of these artifacts away, likely the reason she's trying to buy the tower in the first place. Since attacking her head on isn't very practical at the moment, we're targeting her goal instead.
We're about 2/3 or so through the tower I think? We'll be hitting it up again next session. So far there's been a lot of fun puzzles, searching around for clues etc on how to proceed. My rogue, who recently hit level 11, has been having a blast using the old expertise/reliable talent combo on things like picking locks or investigating for clues. There's been little combat, really just one gelatinous cube that the monk luckily saw before my rogue got attacked.
I'm not going to go into detail on all of the puzzles but it's been a lot of fun, and I'm looking forward to seeing the rest next session. And if the party manages to pull it off and get away or if we'll be having to go into hiding and flee the country when this all goes down.
The session left off with us entering a chess themed room, which I'm looking forward to because it's been a running gag that my rogue is really into dragonchess but can only rarely find someone to actually play against. And the heist is being done on her birthday.
Characters:
Tuft the UA Owlfolk Warlock (Pact of the Undead)
Wren the Human Rogue (Thief)
Mal the Leonin Barbarian (Ancestral Zealot), unable to attend this session
Blancha the Dhampir Druid (Circle of Spores)
And I, the humble DM, playing everyone else.
The party just got back from a long and strenuous voyage where they fought an invading white dragon in a tropical peninsula. Having received 500 gold pieces for their efforts (the Coalition of Pirate Lords pays well), the party did various things and we had a relaxed session of downtime played over the course of one in-game month.
Blancha, being the party's ultimate con artist, hired new employees for her self-titled criminal organization House Blancha, while keeping an eye on Tuft for one particular reason.
Tuft's patron is Blancha's evil vampire father, known as the Night Dealer or Count Siverus.
Blancha hired a grung butler named Michael Ripples, which comes into play later, and a white tiefling wizard named Kate. Blancha's first job for Kate was to send her raven familiar out to find the rest of the party (Blancha is more or less a freelancer who happens to work with the party from time to time), particularly Tuft. Blancha talked to Paris, owner of the otherworldly shop the Panopticus, and other than that had a relaxing month of downtime.
Wren did more things than usual. Wren bought a dagger that could slice through any object on the command word "Gluush", became adequate at playing the violin, explored the pirate haven Sahaugin Stop which the party calls home, and adopted a dog friend that he hopes to teach to use a dagger. However, Wren is worried for the future.
Tuft stayed in Sahaugin Stop during the voyage, but he still worked at an artificer and craftsman shop known as Savastor's Hand to pass the time. He helped design the first constructs in Sahaugin Stop for labor and creating new cannons for the Coalition. Overall, Tuft had a nice break from adventuring in his downtime.
On the final night of downtime before Savastor's Day, a celebration of the god of time and constructs, Tuft went into the Chattering Skull Tavern (a tavern run by three docile flameskulls named Ken, Roderick, and Bill) to enjoy himself at the best tavern in Sahaugin Stop. However, after Blancha snuck a note into Tuft's pocket to meet her at her manor, Tuft noticed his old military friend...
Private Michael Ripples.
They chat for a little while, and everyone goes back to their homes in a bittersweet tone, especially Tuft himself.
And that was Session 4 of my campaign.
If you want to check out more, go to Tiefling Corner (tieflingcorner.wordpress.com) and view the entire campaign so far.
Yesterday we had a session 0 for a side campaign I decided to run. Because my depression and physical health are so bad, I’m struggling to prep for a homebrew session every week, so I picked up a short, basic side quest campaign to run when I’m not up for a normal one. We just had a conversation, I explained how I’m feeling, reiterating the old table rules, discussing new ones that we needed to create, and creating characters. Nothing fancy or special, or even particularly interesting, but it was productive, so all in all I’m satisfied.
I live with several severe autoimmune conditions. If I don’t get back to you right away, it’s probably because I’m not feeling well.
During a major encounter for our campaign, the party finally met their match and 2/4 of them were long-term incapacitated (One was planeshifted to the abyss, the other was hit with Feeblemind). I feel bad, but I've been steadily warning them about the increased danger of the campaign and encounters, so they took it pretty well. Next session will deal with the aftermath of the fight.
It's ok Ranger, you'll always be cool to me.. Unless druid gets another use for its wild shape charges.
Couple of kids wanted to try something different. One has become fascinated by military tactics and wanted to play as a company commander. Gave each of them a unit of 200 musketeers and had them coordinate a two pronged assault on a company of orcs illegally logging in their forest. Chaos ensued, but with overwhelming force, they eventually pulled out a win.
Buoyed by this success, they now intend to take their remaining 350 or so troops and lay siege to the orc capital. That plan probably won’t happen.
Illegal Logging is punishable by multi-pronged assault? Nice.
Life is very busy unfortunately, gone from most Pbp's indefinitely.
If you'd like to contact me, I am on Discord at GreatAxeblade#7595, always happy to chat :)
Homebrew races: ~Otterfolk! Play as a otter!~ Playable Dryad! (Literally just the monster sheet ported to player race)
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Begun, the Drow Civil War has.
The city of Zijdespin has divided into armed camps. The forces of House Køkk and its allies battle the forces of House D’Vower as House Byle watches from above - prepared to deliver the killing blow at the moment of its own greatest advantage.
Grau’mere, Matron Mother of House Køkk sends her favorite grandniece and would-be assassin, Eumania, on a daring diplomatic mission. Cut off from the family’s normal allies in the Priesthood of Lolth after a terrorist attack destroyed the Great Temple, Grau’mere must seek assistance from the D.V.A., the Drow Variance Authority. This is an organization located in the dimensional cynosure of Sigil, the City of Doors. Its aim is to coordinate all of the Spider Goddess’ schemes upon all the crystal spheres where drow exist on the Prime Material Plane.
Known only to Grau’mere, her envoy is not Lady Eumania at all, but Calura, a low-ranking male who has developed shapechanging abilities owing to the mutations he suffered as a result of mind flayer experimentation. This sort of gender-bending is anathema to the exceedingly TERF-y Drow, but only the missing Lady Eumania has the necessary rank to be received.
Calura and his escort, Captain Gelless, and their Commander, the Lady Moon, set out with a squad to break through a House D’Vower blockade of the remaining strands of the Demonweb, a multiplanar network of spiderwebs above which their city is suspended.
When they find the usual pathway destroyed, the group attempts to make their way inconspicuously through the Swiss-watch precision gears of Mechanus. Things go wrong almost from the start as Captain Gelless has a complete meltdown and starts randomly fighting modrons. As he and Moon are brought under control, Calura and his faithful spider escape, darting between perfectly-efficient bullet trains before boarding (or more properly, climbing on top of) the train to Terminal Station..
One of those times when your players really make you stop and think hard about the way an encounter was "supposed" to go.
<Spoilers for Hoard of the Dragon Queen>
Our intrepid heroes have finally secured the mill and made it back to the keep when the half-dragon Cyanwrath steps forward and issues his challenge to single combat at the gate to the keep. They dither a bit, almost to the point where the Sergeant NPC steps forward to accept the challenge but our Bard, who's carefully nursed her one remaining spell slot throughout all the night-time encounters that make up the rather brutal Chapter 1 of the adventure, convinces the group's Fighter that she has a plan. The Fighter acquiesces and our heroine steps forward, challenging the half-dragon to the combat but with one condition: should either combatant flee, they are declared vanquished.
I asked for a persuasion check, she rolls a 24, and Cyanwrath agrees to the condition, assuring the small creature in front of him he has no intention of running. The Bard wins the initiative roll and casts Dissonant Whispers. Cyanwrath fails the saving throw and bolts, with his kobold guard taking off after him into the darkness and bringing Chapter 1 to a close.
Cue laughter all around and our Bard, playing in the wee hours of the morning from Australia, gets to go to bed feeling beyond smug and leaving a DM wondering "wtf just happened?", while also smiling his face off.
We finished our campaign.
Fighting the BBEG was not going well only 3 of us along with a couple of npc allies and 2 of us were on 1HP after death ward saved us. Sorlock shouts "trust me" quicken casts scatter to move all the allies away from the boss and himself next to it and breaks the staff of the magi. BBEG gets something like 120 damage despite making its save, killing it and the sorlock is sent to the astral sea with an astral dreadnaught approaching. We then burn a CE candle of invocation we had found in his lair to bring the sorlock back.
Our party is hired by the guard captain of Easthaven to investigate the disappearance of some fishermen, who we learn went missing near some local caves.
We encounter a hag within the cave, who is currently flavoring a cauldron filled with stew with the dismembered parts of these missing fishermen.
Cue combat.
The hag sustains some decent damage during the first round…but the party ignores the floating ball of light, which turns out to be a will ‘o wisp, which proceeds to zap our gnome rogue, nearly killing her.
While this is happening, the party hears a large rumbling approaching.
Just before the hag is about to be killed, a frost giant zombie breaks into the cavern, and takes a single massive swing at our kobold sorcerer.
Critical hit.
Down goes the kobold; if I hadn’t made it so that the semi-rotten zombie wasn’t at full strength, it would have been instant death.
The warlock kills the hag, which makes the giant zombie go inert, while the sorcerer is healed.
The party takes the giant zombie head back to Easthaven, along with the hag’s cauldron, which apparently provides an endless (in doses) amount of stew.
Since we basically have just saved Easthaven from starvation for the winter, the party is declared local heroes.
The town speaker pays an absurd amount of money for the cauldron, and states that he plans on helping the party deal with the duregar menace to understand what evil scheme they’re planning.
Doubleheader yesterday! An unusual, though tiring, treat:
Session 1: My budding generals wanted to carry on with their makeshift battalion-level campaign. Let me state up front that I am not a wargamer or a tactical simulation guy. I'm just trying to entertain kids by kludging together stuff I've read and a set of on-the-fly rules no more complicated than Risk.
Now that their companies are back up to full strength, they wander north, out of the woods, pursuing intruding orcs. Their ultimate intention is to press on through 300 miles of enemy territory, living off the land, and lay siege to the city of Ogre, capital of the Chorzhoi Orcs.
Their assets: 250 troops from the Queen's 53rd Dwarven Fusiliers ("The Old Saucy Lads") and another 250 elven rangers and irregulars.
Their scouts find the main camp of the invading horde: 25,000 mounted troops comprised of untested youngsters, local tribal militias and scattered mercenaries. But the troops aren't occupying the camp at the moment. They seem to have stumbled across a small force of humans from the Grande Armeé of the Beneficent Empire of Cardendos. These troops are retreating through the Middlemarches after an ill-fated campaign into the Kyrghan Autocracy and have been harried through the countryside every step of the way. The dwarven and elven commanders make note of the fact that the human musketeers have formed an infantry square, to prevent the orcish cavalry from flanking their lines. The humans' discipline is good and until they run out of ammunition, they are in no immediate danger.
The players send their own troops to ransack and loot the camp. As the smoke from the fires rises, a large chunk of the orcs ride back to defend the camp. The dwarves form a square, just like they saw earlier, and the elves skirmish and snipe at the orcs from behind cover, causing confusion. Meanwhile, three human cannons continue to pound away at the enemy force. Finally, the confused and demoralized orcs retreat to the nearby river.
The human commander rides over to thank his unexpected allies. He is Field Marshall Ivo Maria Bonelli, Cardendos' greatest military mind (he adds, with no false modesty). A man who has made himself both indispensable and intolerable to Emperor Arsène XIII. He opines over dinner and brandy that the city of Ogre could perhaps be taken with 100,000 men and several hundred cannon. The players decide to head back to the borders of their own kingdom and await new orders.
But before they part, the dwarves use their unparalleled skill in combat engineering to take the supplies found at the camp and build a reinforced log fortress for the human troops to defend and shelter the peasants of the countryside.
Session 2: Calura of House Køkk (disguised as the Lady Eumania) and Captain Gelless of the House Guard have arrived in the fabled Sigil, City of Doors. They do the stuff everyone does their first time in the city (get directions from A’Kin, the Friendly Fiend; see the Lady of Pain disintegrate something displeasing to her for ineffable reasons; travel poloidally along the theta-axis of a torus, etc.).
Finding their way to the Drow Variance Authority, a nondescript building in the Lady's Ward, the two then face their next challenge: The Maze of Ultimate Horror! In a grand marble hall full of drow driven to the verge of insanity, there are five bankers’ windows and two doors. The windows are marked Plant; Maintenance; Security; Operations; and Accounts Receivable. All you need to do to get from one door to the other door is collect the correct combination of signatures on the right form. That’s the Maze. Of Ultimate Horror.
I didn’t subject my players to the full horror, I’m not a monster. Instead, Calura picked the lock on the far door after a few minutes.
In the Director's Office, Calura confronts the mastermind behind the D.V.A., the Lady Kez'z Køkk, his long-lost second cousin once-removed! Kez'z is one of the first NPCs I made for this world and she's been lurking in the shadows of my brain concocting her master plan for a while. The last time we saw her, she was traveling to Zijdespin with a small army of green slaads, preparing to wreak horrible vengeance on the city that exiled her; but then she had a change of heart. Her time on the surface had made her realize that drow, evil though they were, were also themselves victims of horrifying abuse at the claws of Lolth and thus, if she were to seek vengeance against anyone, her proper target should be the Spider Queen herself.
Adopting the symbol of the spider-wasp (Pompilidae), she established the D.V.A. not to streamline coordination between the drow of different crystal spheres, but to add levels of bureaucracy and chaos system-wide, slowly separating the demon goddess from her worshippers and weakening her connection to the Prime Material Plane, essentially devouring the Dark Mother of Chaos from the inside out.
Now that her scheme is reaching its middle stages, Kez'z needed to see for herself this young rogue whose aberrant mutations may make him an integral part of her plan to forge a new Destiny of the Drow!
Yesterday was pretty tame, right up until the end, when it was almost disastrous!
The session started immediately after the last combat from the last session; they had fought and killed a green hag and her minions. It was still early in the in-game day, so they spent the rest of it doing stuff like research, burning corpses, and foraging for medicinal herbs. The next morning, after their long rest, the artificer made woodcarver’s tools, and three of the five set to work on making a new temporary axel for their cart, while the other two did more research and foraging.
The axel took them six hours, due to some very bad rolls. At three in the afternoon, I gave them a choice: they could go at a fast pace, and reach the city by nightfall, but risk breaking the temporary axel. They could go at a normal pace, and be a few miles out at nightfall. Or they could go at a slow pace, and be stealthy, but they would spend another night in the forest. They chose a normal pace, reasoning that they could probably survive an hour of traveling in the dark. The warlock (a Kitsune) changed into her fox form, and she and her familiar took up the task of scouting.
I rolled a random encounter, and announced that they were headed directly for an owlbear den: they could go past, and risk tangling with the residents, or go around, and add an hour to their journey. They went around.
I rolled a second RE, and their perception checks told them that they were being followed by the owlbears, who could smell the barrels of salt pork they were carrying. After a discussion which took much longer than I expected (apparently they were very attached to that salt pork), they finally had the bright idea of putting some meat onto the artificer’s cannon, and have it lead the creatures away from them. It was so creative that I let them have it without any further rolls.
They were barely an hour outside of the city, and I decided that I wasn’t making another RE unless I rolled a nat 20 on the D20. Of course I rolled a nat 20; I called a five-minute break while I flipped through the MM to find something besides owlbears to attack the party with!
A long, painful battle against three werewolves ensued. I was trying so hard to speed combat up (one player needed to leave, which I didn’t know until after combat started) that I misread several things in the stat block, misinterpreted two rules, retconned a mechanic, and changed a spell accidentally. It didn’t help that I rolled SIX more natural 20s over the course of the fight, even though I kept switching between dice!!
We ended the game as soon as they killed the last werewolf. It’s pitch dark, they still haven’t made it back to the city yet, and two of them have contracted lycanthropy. They’re pretty wealthy, and I have plenty of NPCs who can cast Remove Curse, so it shouldn’t be a problem; nonetheless I think our next session should be pretty interesting!
I live with several severe autoimmune conditions. If I don’t get back to you right away, it’s probably because I’m not feeling well.