Game Report: A counteroffer

The PCs return to the dragonborn’s headquarters to praise, as Islith is impressed with their competence. They are given another task, this time to track a caravan to see what they are delivering and why. After some hesitance (‘caravan’ has become a bit of a black word for the party, can’t imagine why), they agree, and head into the southern part of Ar-Aman to meet the cart. They walk into a square that the caravan is likely to pass through and begin hiding in various buildings. Doing so seems to provoke some hags, who were also hiding out in some buildings. At the least convenient time, the wizard and warlord are attacked by one of the hags.

Everyone rushes to the rescue as the cart pulls up, a fat zombie hauling the cart being guarded by a couple of salt spawn. The second hag goes after the cart, while the hag continues to scream at and fluster the party. A shout causes the caravan to topple over, revealing a crapload of bones and a skeleton that was fire. With the Monarchy’s forces far outpacing the hags, the enemies take out one of them, while the other continued to harry the melee adventurers. She eventually fell, and a well-placed turn undead made short work of the rest of them.

Once the cart’s entourage collapsed, a single runed bone raises out of the bonepile and began floating down the street. The party grab ahold of the bone and conservatively follow it through the city. It eventually tried to enter a two-story building that seems to be pitch black inside, even in the daylight. They open the door, see nothing, and cast light to cautiously step inside. They run into some troglodytes, who have perfect darkvision, and are able to continue to through spears and poison rays out of the darkness.

Undetered, they charged into the room, only to eventually be greeted by wights. Wights are bad news. Seriously bad news. While confronted by two of these, the party lost a huge chuck of healing surges and they luckily were taken down before doing too much damage. They eventually broke the darkswitch in the room and got a clear view of the remaining enemies, only to step into the next room and start the process all over again.

The second round of darkness trog fighting went better, thanks to some helpful charging and the secondary forces not being as damaging as wights. They eventually turned the lights on and cleans up, and then immediately decided it was bedtime before they would even consider moving on.

They woke up in the middle of the night, and went back into the small warehouse, marching up the stairs to find some bramble. It turned out to be some dangerous plantlife, but endless fire attacks made them a moot issue, so I handed out some experience and forced them along. They step into a sideroom to find an eladrin who appears to have been sucked dry, who gets up after a healing spell and vanishes into the night. Aware of what issue lied ahead, the team stepped through a door to find a vampire with his feet up at a desk.

The fighter charges, and runs smack into a wall of air 10 feet away from the vampire. The vampire politely asks them to have a seat. He asks them very matter of factly what they are up to, and why they felt the need to do all this dogoodery. He points out that his team and the dragonborn are merely dueling factions, and neither has a greatly claim to the city, each is merely protecting their own interests. He also revealed a third source of contention, the Margrave, the person that was to receive the shipment of bones.

This conversation led to an even split among the players over whether they should hear the vampire out. The cleric and the warlock were more pragmatic about the situation, seeing the vampire’s point and wondering why they couldn’t leave the vampires be and take care of this Margrave character. The wizard, however, doesn’t want to deal with an evil figure, especially one who was apparently feeding on one of his own (an eladrin), and the fighter was flat lawful good and refused to deal with vampires period. The discussion was lengthy and interesting, but the vampire lost patience, and when it seemed he was about to lose the cleric’s support, the vampire dominated him and caused him to place his axe directly through the warlock’s torso.

The fight was official on, the wall was down, and the PCs soon found themselves in trouble. They couldn’t get a hit on the guy, and his regenerative power was in full force due to it being nighttime when they engaged him. It took a great number of daily abilities and some damn good luck to get him to bloodied. After that, though, the got the creature cornered, his abilities wouldn’t recharge, and he didn’t have the good sense to run when it was getting hairy, and eventually fell to ongoing damage from the fighter and wizard.

That character dealt with, and information sufficiently gathered, they ended the adventure.

Lessons learned: Interesting combats are becoming easier to design, but also more obnoxious to run, and keeping track of all the various effects and statuses just gets more complicated. Also, I feel that the team is getting into a bit of a railroad spike, as if the world itself is incredibly small and they’re being bandied about from room to room inside some warehouse, not able to divert from the path. Which is true in the case that there’s nothing, you know, over there, since I don’t divert enough time to creating a lot of detail. Still, I want to open up the game to more open exploration and interpretation, and it’s going to take some effort to pull that off.