Game Report: To the Margrave

The PCs deal with the sudden death of their warlord and confront the genasi’s part in it. A writing of the event is here.

The players discuss how they are going to continue, and where they are going to go. They realize that the majority of their plots point to the Margrave, and they have an artifact that seemed to tug them in that direction, so they follow their instinct and head out towards the Margrave. The second they step out of the room they were staying in, an archer thuds against the door. They step back inside, put on their gameface, and charge out of the room.

The warlock steps out and sees two shadar-kai blocking the path to a medusa in the back. She steps around the door to be missed by an invisible shadar-kai, and then provokes another when she fires an eldritch blast. The rest of the party charges into the hallway, drawing the fire of the shadar-kai as everyone teleports back and forth while the medusa stays back and fires arrows at them. They take out the formerly-invisible stalker characters easily, and only have a little trouble with the rest due to the shadar-kai’s ability to go substantial for a round. The swordmage ping-pongs back and forth down the hall, dealing damage to anyone who threatens her newfound allies, and eventually they corner the medusa, who continued to unsuccessfully turn them to stone until falling.

After the battle, they find a nearby teleporter pad and find themselves once again outside, far from the Company’s headquarters. They use the blade to guide them towards the Margrave. They make it about 25 miles when they come across a broken statue. Seeing this as not the finest location, they start to veer around the statue when the earth shakes and a bullette leaps out of the ground. Its mate soon follows, and when the statue’s base turns out to be trapped, the PCs find themselves cramped.

They eventually separate and bunch the bullettes together, after the majority of them being taken down to bloodied. The creatures made things difficult by charging underneath the players and knocking them over. They eventually manage to fell one of the beasts, and the other one soon followed. Exhausted, they rested in an abandoned building, after first catching sight of the Margrave’s manor, with a dark dragon circling above it.

They walk up to the huge estate and wander around the outside, looking for a possible way in. The front area is crawling with zombies, packed together in front of the front doors, and skeleton soldiers were training in the back courtyard. Nothing seemed terribly interested in fighting them. They eventually decide to try sneaking through the servant’s quarters at the edge of the compound, thinking there may be a hidden entrance.

They were so wrong. Instead they found a saltbound dracolich, a raised dragon fossil that immediately attacked them. The PCs had some control over the dragon for a while, able to put it in a wall of fire and immobilize it, but their plan fell to pieces when the dracolich stunned the party with its frightening presence, ending all of their daily effects, and placed itself in the center of the party, knocking every down with its tail swipe effect. The doppelganger, who had been tagging along, fell unconscious and was getting coup de graced, and they had to quickly give her a potion to keep her from dying.

The players found themselves low on resources and power. They had nothing that could do significant damage to the monster, and so they stumbled along until they eventually landed the killing blow. They had a massive fight against a powerful enemy, only to discover that this building wasn’t connected to the manor at all. They decided to take a minute to collect their thoughts.

Lessons Learned: Gaming day was bumped up an evening due to a conflict, giving me little time to prepare, so there were again a number of encounters that were planned minutes before they occurred. In addition, the recent departure of one of the player’s made me feel the need to fill the gap by fleshing out the character sheet of the tag-along doppelganger. Of course, I couldn’t do it the usual way, and instead created a homebrew class for her. These distractions caused the game to run a little unsmoothly, compounded by the more difficult than usual creatures and unlucky rolls. More effort will be required to make sure this next session doesn’t end in disaster.