Game Report: Guarding the Boat

After defeating the flameharrow, the party continues to make its case to the Halfling in the boat. He’s still pretty skeptical of allowing the party aboard, but they make a good point about protection on the sands and offer use of their store-in-a-bag, and he eventually agrees. He takes them north a good distance, allowing them to take turns resting, and eventually needs to rest himself. He stops the boat and forces them out, telling them to let him sleep. They widdle away their time guarding the boat.

Eventually they catch sight of a figure of a horizon, which appears to be a mummy. The mummy doesn’t approach them, but instead makes a motion and summons a couple of scorpions and swarms to harry the party. They manage very well against the creatures, managing to wrangle them quickly, while they kept an eye out for the mummy, who might appear at any moment. After the last scorpion falls, the mummy is nowhere to be seen, and they take some time debating whether to pursue the creature or not. They decide that the boat is more important, and take up positions around the craft, in case the mummy comes back.

The mummy does come back, flirting outside their available range east of the ship, when an odd pairing come over the hill on the west of the ship; a hooded and maniacal human, and a large and rotting undead dog, who immediately charge the nearest player. The party manages to regroup quickly, however, and after the hooded human calls reinforcements in the form of tiny flesh abominations, the wizard drops an area effect that completely obliterates the minions. The party manages to knock back and daze the dog, and then drop area spell after area spell until the creatures are handily defeated. They quickly run to the other side of the ship to stop the mummy, who must obviously be taking advantage of the distraction, only to find nothing, and they resume their watch.

A long hour later, they finally see the mummy again, this time approaching fast over the hill, sliding across the sand. Expecting the worst, they all get onto the boat, ready to snipe the mummy if need be. This turns out to be a horrible plan, as the mummy reveals his source of transportation is in fact a brown dragon. The rogue rushes forward to deal an incredible amount of damage to the creature, and the rest quickly jump ship to try to avoid its breath weapon, but its all for not, as the dragon opens with a blast of sand that engulfs a huge piece of the playing field.

The two enemies split up, the dragon going after the rogue and warlock while the mummy stays back and takes pot shots, while shrugging off any attack against it with his psychic powers. The wizard creates large damaging areas, but the enemies stay off to the side of either area and continue their assault. The dragon continued to create huge sandstorms that shut down entire turns when a player found himself trapped inside. The players start to fill the pressure, but eventually the wall breaks, and the mummy gets taking down inside a zone of cold while the dragon is quickly surrounded and quartered. It attempts to burrow away from the players, but too late, as he died to ongoing damage underground. The players spent the rest of the day digging him out and fingering their new treasures.

Lessons Learned: When I decided to run a mostly-wilderness campaign, I knew I’d run into issues where the players couldn’t get supplies, so I took a lot of steps to make sure this wasn’t a problem, first with free rations bag (because tracking food is obnoxious), then Mute, and finally the store-in-the-bag. But I find that they use the store-in-the-bag as a bargaining chip a lot more than they should be able to. Hopefully as they approach the only civilized area of Atia, that becomes less of an issue. Also, the webcam scheme we have to allow our swordmage to play is working better than expected, especially after last time we played, but I need to do more preparation so that he isn’t left staring at the backsides of figurines the entire time.