D&D 5E Keys from the Golden Vault play reports

[pukunui]

We started "Masterwork Imbroglio" tonight. The player handout map omits the third floor of the tower. As soon as I described that the tower had what appeared to be a third floor, my players decided that that had to be where the painting was. So they've made a beeline for it. After stealing Elix's key, making a copy of it, then planting it on the road to the guildhouse to make it look like he'd dropped it, they approached under cover of night plus pass without trace, avoiding the guards on the balconies.

In through the front door and up the stairs. One PC has slippers of spider climbing while another can cast spider climb, so two of them could avoid the creaky floorboards. The monk rushed the guard in the office and knocked him out after the artificer bunged up the locks to the balcony and bunk room doors to prevent reinforcements. The guard didn't even get a chance to yell out a warning.

Then the vengeance paladin remembered that she has locate object. So now they know that the painting is up in the top of the tower, and I can't conveniently move it somewhere else to extend the adventure ... although, actually, I could ... because she's never seen the painting, so the ping she got is just the nearest "painting". There could be a different painting there. But no, I probably will not bother doing that.

Even if they manage to sneak past Guildmaster Dusk and her lover without waking them up, when they get to the room with the painting, they will trigger a magical alarm that will awaken Dusk so they can't just sneak back out with the painting without having to confront her.

I'll post a full report in the original post once I've finished running the adventure.

 

[pukunui]

Even if they manage to sneak past Guildmaster Dusk and her lover without waking them up, when they get to the room with the painting, they will trigger a magical alarm that will awaken Dusk so they can't just sneak back out with the painting without having to confront her.

Instead of having a magical alarm, I just made it so the portrait called out, "I say, you're not Guildmaster Dusk!" in a loud enough voice that it woke up Dusk and Dartinal. Belwar the monk jumped onto the bed and tried to knock them out by banging their heads together. He knocked out Dartinal, but of course Dusk was too tough. She used a legendary action (she's a modified ambitious assassin from the Book of Many Things) to drop a smoke bomb, enabling her to slip over the railing to the stairs leading down. She then fled through the parlor and out to the other building, raising the alarm as she did so (as per the high alert bit).

Dimble managed to win initiative and got a cloak over the painting before it could magic missile him. He missed spotting the poison gas trap but made his Con save, so it didn't do much to him. But him being a short gnome and the painting being rather large meant it was awkward for him to get it down the stairs ... but he has wayfarer's boots, so he used them to cast expeditious retreat.

The others fought the drunk guild members in the parlor downstairs (I replaced the gladiator with Deadly Nell, a bard based on the stats for Edgin from the D&D movie).

We left it on a cliffhanger, with Belwar and Dimble dashing across the courtyard for the stables (where they hope to find a horse and cart to take the painting away in - they didn't previously explore that part of the compound), while Gwish the oni and Jaymont the doppelganger attempt to intercept. (They were pretty weirded out when an elderly man in an oversize robe came flying out of the open upstairs window and proceeded to attack them with a glaive.) The others were still battling the drunk guys in the parlor.

When we pick it up next weekend, I'm going to have Dusk attempt a parley - she's going to beat the Cognoscenti's offer in an effort to hang on to the painting. Of course the PCs will decline, as that would put them in bad standing with both the Cognoscenti and the Golden Vault. I'm hoping the oni doesn't kill any of the PCs, but we shall see ...

It's certainly turned out to be much more exciting than it seemed like it would be at the end of the first session!