Game Report: The One

The boat suddenly stops when the party catches sight of Alreta on the horizon. The Halfling refuses to go any further, and when the party attempts to convince him that he lied to them, that Alreta is clearly not on fire and that is should be safe to approach, he merely says, “Well, it’s clear some people are delusional.” With a response of “yeah, some people are,” they get off the ship and start walking towards the city.

They come across a platform a few miles from the city. The warlock wants to walk around, sensing a pattern whenever they get close to something like this. She was correct, they caught sight of a salamander lounging underneath the platform, and tried to walk around. The plan failed, however, when some banshrae came charging out of a small hut and started shooting darts at them.

The party maintained their distance, only closing once they’d dealt a good deal of damage to the salamander. The banshrae had some effects that stopped actions, but otherwise the party managed to soundly defeat the creatures with some sound abilities and strategy.

They looted the room that the banshrae came from and found a small haul, and then continued into the city on the horizon. They arrived at midday, to find that the sky was clear, the grass was green, the buildings were made of brick and wood, and everything seemed disturbingly normal. The one thing that wasn’t normal was that there was no one in the streets. They walked tentatively through the streets, in what appears to be the docking district, which is unusually clean and graffiti-free.

They find themselves on a street facing a large building that appears to be labeled “Leroy’s.” They walked towards it, but as they approach an eladrin comes flying off a roof and attempts to stab the swordmage. It’s an ambush, but the players aren’t flustered. Another eladrin and a couple of human wizards appear to fight the party.

The party is much stronger than this threat, however. They manage to pin the eladrin and use multiple area effect attacks on them, and they eventually collapse under the party’s hammer, helped by good attacks by the PCs and poor rolls on the enemies’ part. While the wizards hit them with fireballs and such, they eventually broke and one tried to run, only to be trapped in an alley. The PCs decided to show him mercy, and demanded to know why they were attacked.

The wizard said that they had been jumping newcomers that were coming into the city, just to take their stuff. Apparently the city itself was divided into a number of gangs, and the wizard represented the Outsiders. The party tells him to tell his people that they aren’t to be disturbed while in town, and the wizard runs off scared. They learn that Leroy is a bit of an outlier among the gangs in town, and they step into the bar.

They are greeted with the most charming and nice brand of brigands possible. Everyone looks like a common thug, but are warm and receiving. They meet the bartender and owner, Repentant Leroy. He offers them his place and asks what they are there for. They mention the blade that they’ve been carrying around, and how they want it repaired. He takes them downstairs to an underground market, but come across a surprise when there are multiple devils just walking around. One imp sees them and immediately freaks out and flies off to another room.

The hubbub attracts the attention of what appears to be Leroy’s secret patron, a pit fiend whose alignment was shifted by the End; Il-Selk, leader of the One. He allows the party an audience and replied that he knows where the sword came from and that he wants to see it repaired, but the only artisan of skill his group has was cut off from communication a week ago. He is willing to provide what resources he has to restore connection and get the sword into one piece. The party prepares for the journey.

Lesson Learned: It looks like my tendency for random encounters are coming to an end. The party is starting to catch wise of the obvious traps and are unwilling to actively approach them, and the cleric has some kind of device that makes it impossible to be surprised. It looks like dungeons are going to be the way to go for a while.

The long-distance is working well, and I’m looking for more ways to improve the method. Also, my improvisation skills for names needs to be looked at again; while every single NPC isn’t named Jerry, I flubbed by calling the gang the Outsiders. I need to flesh out the city of Havmarch more before I hit the table again.

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.

Game Report: The Many

The party settled in among the abandoned ship and slept, waking to travel by twilight to avoid being seen. Their plan fails spectacularly when the reach a tall dune, and the rogue rushes to the top, only to be surprised by a bearded devil teleporting in and declaring, “The Many have chosen you.” It takes a swipe at the rogue and then his companions also teleport into the area.

The party has trouble getting up the dune to the bearded devils and their legion forces, and burn many of their teleporting skills getting into position next to the devils. Once everyone is positioned, a new threat in the form of assassin imps appear to aggravate the spellcasters. The party just shrugged and cut down the minions to allow to them focus on the larger creatures.

The devils’ abilities proved horribly dangerous, however. The imps caused poison that would eventually put the players to sleep, while the bearded devils caused bleeding with their glaives. These effects combined with horrible luck on the party’s part caused three characters to fail unconscious and susceptible to the imp’s deadly finishing attacks, and it was only through the use of their limited resources that they managed to keep everyone alive and defeat the devils.

Exhausted, the party fell asleep on the dune, setting up defenses to prevent such a sudden incursion again. They managed to survive a day on the sands and continue north, promising to stay close to the furrows that cuts across the Sandsea.

Later, they come across a boat that seems in perfect condition, perched atop the sand and apparently magical enchanted to chop through the sands as if it were water. They encounter a halfling on the boat, who seemed stubborn in his negotiations in allowing them access to his craft. He also stated that Alreta had burned to the ground, which still didn’t deter the party in their pleading.

At one point, the warlock suggested soft-spokenly that they should just kill the halfling and take his boat. Suddenly, a cloaked figure behind them said that they should continue with that strategy. They turned to see the mysterious stranger, and when the stranger pressed the issue, they tried to walk away, only to discover this stranger was a sadistic undead who summoned three ghosts to his side.

The party was hit by some powerful area attacks, which immobilized and dazed some of them, but after a few turns they managed to spread out to prevent such wideswiping attacks. The party was stunted by these debilitating effects, but they focused their fire against the primary undead, knocking him down quickly, and it didn’t take much longer until the three ghosts were defeated, with the assistance of the halfling in the boat.

Lessons Learned: Sometimes the dice hate you. The first fight of the evening was the worst example, as the dice hitting the table simply refused to go above a 10, making the party’s best attempts fall flat and what should have been an easy encounter, with low-damage enemies turned into a nightmare, with two characters coming really really close to death and everyone going bloodied at some point. The morale killed the table, and they were looking for payback as they went into the second encounter, that went better, but by no means well. Sometimes a fluke is a fluke, and no amount of strategy can protect you from the dice, but luckily the party managed to get through this.

Also, I don't know if it was the atmosphere or failure to read beforehand, but more prep time is still on the agenda, due to a major flub I made when revealing the sadistic undead. To the eye, he was obviously a skeleton in a cloak, but in my description, I managed to say, "He has a bone head, no wait, a bear skull, no I mean..." All seriousness the mysterious stranger had at that point was instantly lost.