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<blockquote data-quote="thekwp" data-source="post: 6939419" data-attributes="member: 56444"><p><strong>Session 06 - Nov 2, 2016</strong></p><p></p><p><strong>Player Summary</strong></p><p></p><p><strong>The Scouring of Gate Pass</strong></p><p><em>Act Four: The Gauntlet</em></p><p><em></em></p><p>The party proceeded away from Gate Pass. Given that half a day was left, the decided not to stay at the old watchpost just a few miles out of town, and instead push on until dark. There about 30 miles until the edge of the Fire Forest of Innenodar, and that may take a full day or more of travel to get there.</p><p></p><p>A little before dusk, about ten miles into the trip, the party had moved up into a winding section of canyons where the old Elfroad cuts over and through the Otdar mountains heading to the northern border of Dassen. As they came around a bend, Krombholz spotted a few small objects hurled from the top of the canyon at the party and called out a warning. The thunderstones landed distributed through the party, and the resulting noise startled the horses badly.</p><p></p><p>Bromsby, Ceilthanus, Krombholz, and Torrent were all deafened by the explosive noise. Torrent and Ceilthanus's horses also spooked, and the riders were unable to control them. Seeing some of the party having difficulty with their horses and being under fire from above, Bosma calls out for the group to ride ahead together. Gath moves to 'plug the gap' of a narrow side canyon near the area where the thunderstones came from. </p><p></p><p>By the time Bosma, Ceilthanus, and Torrent have all moved down the canyon and round a bend, a group of horsemen where the Black Horse Mercenary bands start to come up the canyon, ready to pursue the party. Gath blocked them from going further, and came under fire from a pair of other Black Horse members on top of the canyon, while a third member with them blew a signal horn. Seeing Torrent and Ceilthanus's horses bolt with them, and seeing Bosma's wave to the group before riding along with them, Krombholz followed. Meanwhile, Dom moved to back up Gath. Seeing an opportunity, Bromsby moved to a position next to the side canyon's entrance to use Color Spray on the horsemen in the canyon. Despite being deaf, he succeeded in casting the spell, dropping the horse into unconsciousness but not the rider.</p><p></p><p>As the group riding moved around the bend and further down the Elfroad, they were fired on by a pair of crossbow men hidden in the thicket on the sides of the road against the canyon walls. Bosma took a swipe at one with his spear as he road past. Krombholz slowed his horse down to take a measured shot from his heavy crossbow. Ceilthanus got control of his horse, and might have continued onward. However, Torrent failed to get control of her horse and her mount ran across an ice patch. The steed slipped and fell, throwing Torrent and leaving her on the ice.</p><p></p><p>The Black Horse horsemen struggled to make progress against Gath. The first horse was down from Bromsby's Color Spray, but the horseman behind that took shots at Gath with his bow. A third could be seen behind that second rider. The first horsemen had resisted the spell's influence, and moved to engage Gath in melee. A rough voice behind the horsemen further down the side canyon called out for the ones in front to make room. The three members of the Black Horse mercenaries from the top of the canyon, all half-orcs, laid crossbow fire down upon the party. Dom bestowed the blessing of the Resplendent Goddess of Fortune upon Gath, who proceeded to strike a series of mighty blows upon the party's foes.</p><p></p><p>Bosma turned back to help deal with the two Black Horse thugs. He attacked the one he had damaged on his first pass, then pulled next to Krombholz to aid him. Ceilthanus dismounted, drew his weapon, and cast a Shield spell to protect himself. Empowering his blade with his magic, he advanced on the Black Horse thug, who abandoned his crossbow in favor of a halberd. On the other side of the canyon, that Black Horse Thug soon brought his halberd to bear as well, taking a swing at Krombholz. Torrent crawled off the ice, and regained her footing, only to come under fire from a pair of additional Black Horse thugs coming around the bend further ahead. They marched slowly at the party, firing and reloading their crossbows as they came.</p><p></p><p>Realizing that Gath had the riders and other Black Horse mercenaries blocked for the moment, Dom called forth a bank of fog in the air above Gath, blocking entirely the view of the elevated attackers. The half-orcs on top of the canyon abandon their positions, throwing a rope off the top of the canyon and starting to descend. As they did this, a squat muscular vaguely canine beast with scaly skin and oozing sores ran forward down the canyon, growling as it came, nimbly dodging past the legs of the horses. It barreled through Gath and his mount, breaking out to the other side in the canyon, where it turned back to a position to attack Gath. Bromsby got a good look at the beast. He recognized it as a trollhound, a magical beast that he little other knowledge about. The viscous bite of the creature against Gath brought a cheer from the Black Horse mercenaries, and one of the scouts who had descended down to the canyon floor moved up next to the trollhound, unlimbering his greataxe. While Dom used his prayers to bestow healing on Gath, Bromsby again cast Color Spray, this time on the trollhound and the Black Horse scout. The scout collapsed unconscious, but the trollhound was merely stunned and blinded.</p><p></p><p>Even with the beast temporarily stopped, the tide of battle continued to turn against the three. One of the other scouts moved forward, the greataxe dealing another dangerous blow to Gath. Dom continued to infuse vigor into Gath, keeping him alive and in the fight but was unable to deal much of a blow himself. Gath scored a serious blow on the trollhound, but the party could tell it was starting to recover from the injury almost immediately. Gath began to call out for fire or anything else that might take the beast down permanently. The remaining scout moved into a position to attack Gath as well.</p><p></p><p>Krombholz and Ceilthanus's combined efforts finally took down one of the Black Horse thugs, and the party turned its attention to the other thug engaged in melee with Krombholz. Torrent moved to support the effort, while the two thugs continued to march advance and fire their crossbows. An additional two thugs came around the bend, also dressed in scale mail with crossbows out, their Black Horse armbands proclaiming them Murderers.</p><p></p><p><em>To Be Continued</em></p><p>[HR][/HR]</p><p><strong>Story Deviation & Extra Details</strong></p><p><strong></strong></p><p>The story in the adventure is a little contradictory at this point. Supposedly, Renard has received a sending offering him a 10,000 gp reward for capturing the Case -- the McGuffin of the first adventure. However, the tactics for the encounter still have his group focused strictly on using non-lethal tactics. There are possible explanations: that Renard and his men are particularly greedy and want the 100 gp reward for the casters on top of the grand prize for the case; or that Renard has not told his men the value of the case and plans to keep that for himself. It seems more likely though that Renard would tell his people and they would concentrate on just taking down their opponents. So, in my campaign they stopped trying to take prisoners and were out for to get the case.</p><p></p><p><strong>Tactical Notes and Conversions</strong></p><p></p><p>To adjust for the larger party size, I increased the number of Bounty Hunter Scouts (2 to 3), Bounty Hunter Thugs (4 to 6; but see below), and Bounty Hunter Horsemen (2 to 3) by 50%. I converted Renard and Kathor to 4th level characters (see the details in <a href="http://www.enworld.org/forum/showthread.php?498466-Adapting-Renard-and-Kathor-for-Pathfinder" target="_blank">this conversion thread</a>); I opted to go with the alternative version of Kathor I posted there with the Eldritch Scion build. The biggest change was the lack of Spirited Charge -- his spell use was indistinguishable. I opted for this choice because I think it will make for a much more interesting build later on. The final adjustment I made for the over sized party was to add an additional CR 3, thereby increasing by 50% the number of CR3 opponents in the encounter. I settled on the trollhound. I had considered a Hell Hound, but decided to reserve that for possible use in the next adventure. I had also considered an ogre or spriggan as additional thug power, but decided that it fit better for Renard to have trained a magical beast than worked out a relationship with one of those in his mercenary company. However, I thought the threat of disease moving into the next adventure as well as the challenge of stopping the trollhound's regeneration (with only one person in the party, Krombholz, having picked up an alchemist flask) would be interesting threats, plus more of a traditional "monster" after the numerous humanoid opponents. </p><p></p><p>I should note that I have been using CR 1/2 warriors, i.e. level 2 warriors, for my pathfinder conversion of the Bounty Hunter Thugs. The source material lists only one feat (Animal Affinity). Given the decision to have them use lethal weapons and the impact Armor as DR had so far, I converted these to using Halberds in addition to their saps, short swords, and crossbows. I also changed their feats to Intimidating Prowess and Weapon Focus (Halberd). The Bounty Hunter Scouts received greataxes instead of morningstars, with rogue talent of bleed. The Bounty Hunter Horsemen added Weapon Focus (lance), and bucklers.</p><p></p><p>I had the Bounty Hunter Scouts throw their thunderstones with the group just before they passed the entry point from the camp site into the main canyon area. When I drew my map I made it moderately narrow, which resulted in the horses squeezing to get through that space. In retrospect, this should be wide enough for horsemen to move at full speed. Either way this creates the scenario where the party did manage to blockade the horsemen in. To get the better reaction a longer delay (round or so) to let party move on might needed </p><p></p><p>In addition, while I had noted it before hand, I really had not thought about the implications of the thunderstones deafening party members. So far, none of the deafened casters has lost a spell as a result of being deafened. It has complicated communication within the party, though. </p><p></p><p>The biggest issue that I had not considered -- which should have been blatantly obvious -- is that the bolting horses split the party. As described above, the group is split now with each half mired in their own fights. That changes the encounter from a tight sequence of challenging fights to a parallel run of a challenging and a very challenging encounter.</p><p></p><p>The party has a few resources they have not made use of. For example, the party has four oils of magic weapon scattered through the group. Under the Armor as DR rules, a magical weapon can bypass the DR of nonmagical armor. So far none of the party members has taken the action to do this.</p><p></p><p>Renard has not gotten into position to be visible to the party yet, and thus has not been able to use his bow yet. Kathor heard the call, but has not arrived yet. He did managed to successfully cast his spells Shield and Magic Weapon, and should arrive in the round we start the next session. Having the party split up has reduced their ability to focus as a group on individuals, drawing out the fight. In addition, the Armor as Damage Reduction and the Wounds and Vigor system were already making battles run slightly longer. The combined result in this particular encounter runs the risk of reversing the "defeat in detail" aspect of the encounter, which should allow the party to overcome a more powerful force by facing it in smaller chunks, and in turn may allow the Black Horse company to do that to them instead.</p><p></p><p><strong>Mechanics Issues</strong></p><p></p><p>"The Plan" section of "Act Four: The Gauntlet" makes references to Point 1, then Point A, which are presumably the same spot. This error is repeated in the Completed Campaign edition as well. </p><p></p><p>The paragraph description on pg 35 says 4 thugs, the list on pg 36 says 2 thugs, and the Combat Stats appendix says 2 thugs. To make matters even more confusing, the placement paragraph on pg 35 tells us there is a thug at location points 3, 4, and 5 -- location for three thugs. So, how many thugs? Clearly, we should have more than 2, since we have the location for 3 of them. I settled on 4 as the base, as under D&D 3.5 that would give you a total EL of 7, excluding Kathor, then adjusted my scaling for six person party from there; it is however confusing and if ever converted or updated should be corrected and clarified.</p><p></p><p>Handling the surprise round proved interesting, and while I feel comfortable with some of the judgments I made on the fly there, I really should have had that thought out before the session. Khrombolz got to use his trait this time (Thieves' Guild Sympathizer) , and many people commented how powerful it seemed. I feel like it is on par with the other traits, all of which are advantageous. For my party, with only one character really focusing hard on perception, and a few others dabbling, having the character with the best perception in the party with the trait will let them make the most of it. I think they will need it. </p><p></p><p>I took the time at the start of the session to review the mounted combat rules with the group, but even then struggling over them a bit slowed down the fight. I should have done that myself seperately to address the Revised Action Economy's impact mounted combat. To handle ranged attacks with horse movements, I adopted the following:</p><p></p><ul> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Horse takes 1 move, no penalty </li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Horse takes 2 moves, -4 </li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Horse takes 3 move, -8 </li> </ul><p>We also had a small amount of confusion over reach, mounted location, and location for attacks, i.e. the old issue on can you attack an adjacent opponent with a reach weapon while mounted. I decided on a house rule that can use a reach weapon while mounted to attack a creature adjacent to the mount, but that the mount grants cover to the target. Essentially, using the normal reach rule you cannot draw a line to the target that will not cross your mount. You can visualize this in real terms as someone standing directly in front of the horse, and you using your reach weapon on the opponent, but having to make sure your mount's head does not get in the way.</p><p></p><p>One of the player's asked for his character to use a skill to make a tactical assessment at the start of the encounter. I let Bosma use Profession (Solider) for tactical assessment, and Dom decided to roll as well. I didn't mind the attempt for an assessment, as he was mostly asking if there was a major flaw in his intended action. However, letting another player jump in on an action and interrupt the discussion with their own checks and results was not good on my part. If I am going to encourage players to make creative uses for their skills and abilities, I feel I also should clamp down on that sort of jumping in to keep things focused on the character who's action it is.</p><p></p><p>I failed to have Gath make his roll against disease with the Trollbite at the time of the bite. After the fact, I am considering trying a mechanic for diseases where I will have the player not make their fortitude save until the onset period is handled, or I suppose until the time in which some supernatural means of detect disease is determined. The idea was that an individual would not know if they had contracted a disease or not, and I wanted to use a variation of the affliction poison rules to increase the DC of the save by the number of "doses" (exposures) that had happened. This has a few implications were repeated exposure to low DC diseases can still force someone to make a high DC saving throw, and also for players to have to decide to seek or not seek medical attention without know at first if they are in fact coming down with something. We will see if the booking makes it too much of a pain to track or not.</p><p></p><p><strong>Notable player reactions</strong></p><p></p><p>Steven was not there, so Bromsby was run by Alex (Ceilthanus).</p><p></p><p>The players are genuinely worried. Rick (Bosma's player) keeps going back over and over again in his head, stuck on the fact that in the first serious encounter with him as leader, they split the party. They party as a whole is aware that they have not gotten a full count or assessment of their foes yet, as was highlighted to them by the appearance on the last part of the last round of two additional Black Horse thugs in the long canyon stretch. However, they all had fun and thought the encounter and lay out a real challenge.</p><p></p><p><strong>Props, music, images, supporting handouts, etc</strong></p><p></p><p>Music for this session was:</p><p></p><ul> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Crysis II by Hans Zimmer </li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Godzilla (2014) by Alexandre Desplat </li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Devil's Own by James Horner </li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">House of Flying Daggers by Shigeru Umebayashi </li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Mission: Impossible by Danny Elfman </li> </ul><p>I use a large graph pad for group discussions to create the long strips of maps, and drew them all ahead of time. So, I had four strips for the map, and pulled out the strip for the appropriate stretch of canyon as the party go to it, as they had no idea how long the total run was. I added a couple of ice patches as well on the long 200 ft section for additional detail, which proved to have an impact on the game. I had printed tokens for all the horses and opponents, allowing the miniatures and Black Horse mercenary tokens to be placed on top of the horses easily. This made visual working with the encounter easy and clear.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="thekwp, post: 6939419, member: 56444"] [b]Session 06 - Nov 2, 2016[/b] [B]Player Summary[/B] [B]The Scouring of Gate Pass[/B] [I]Act Four: The Gauntlet [/I] The party proceeded away from Gate Pass. Given that half a day was left, the decided not to stay at the old watchpost just a few miles out of town, and instead push on until dark. There about 30 miles until the edge of the Fire Forest of Innenodar, and that may take a full day or more of travel to get there. A little before dusk, about ten miles into the trip, the party had moved up into a winding section of canyons where the old Elfroad cuts over and through the Otdar mountains heading to the northern border of Dassen. As they came around a bend, Krombholz spotted a few small objects hurled from the top of the canyon at the party and called out a warning. The thunderstones landed distributed through the party, and the resulting noise startled the horses badly. Bromsby, Ceilthanus, Krombholz, and Torrent were all deafened by the explosive noise. Torrent and Ceilthanus's horses also spooked, and the riders were unable to control them. Seeing some of the party having difficulty with their horses and being under fire from above, Bosma calls out for the group to ride ahead together. Gath moves to 'plug the gap' of a narrow side canyon near the area where the thunderstones came from. By the time Bosma, Ceilthanus, and Torrent have all moved down the canyon and round a bend, a group of horsemen where the Black Horse Mercenary bands start to come up the canyon, ready to pursue the party. Gath blocked them from going further, and came under fire from a pair of other Black Horse members on top of the canyon, while a third member with them blew a signal horn. Seeing Torrent and Ceilthanus's horses bolt with them, and seeing Bosma's wave to the group before riding along with them, Krombholz followed. Meanwhile, Dom moved to back up Gath. Seeing an opportunity, Bromsby moved to a position next to the side canyon's entrance to use Color Spray on the horsemen in the canyon. Despite being deaf, he succeeded in casting the spell, dropping the horse into unconsciousness but not the rider. As the group riding moved around the bend and further down the Elfroad, they were fired on by a pair of crossbow men hidden in the thicket on the sides of the road against the canyon walls. Bosma took a swipe at one with his spear as he road past. Krombholz slowed his horse down to take a measured shot from his heavy crossbow. Ceilthanus got control of his horse, and might have continued onward. However, Torrent failed to get control of her horse and her mount ran across an ice patch. The steed slipped and fell, throwing Torrent and leaving her on the ice. The Black Horse horsemen struggled to make progress against Gath. The first horse was down from Bromsby's Color Spray, but the horseman behind that took shots at Gath with his bow. A third could be seen behind that second rider. The first horsemen had resisted the spell's influence, and moved to engage Gath in melee. A rough voice behind the horsemen further down the side canyon called out for the ones in front to make room. The three members of the Black Horse mercenaries from the top of the canyon, all half-orcs, laid crossbow fire down upon the party. Dom bestowed the blessing of the Resplendent Goddess of Fortune upon Gath, who proceeded to strike a series of mighty blows upon the party's foes. Bosma turned back to help deal with the two Black Horse thugs. He attacked the one he had damaged on his first pass, then pulled next to Krombholz to aid him. Ceilthanus dismounted, drew his weapon, and cast a Shield spell to protect himself. Empowering his blade with his magic, he advanced on the Black Horse thug, who abandoned his crossbow in favor of a halberd. On the other side of the canyon, that Black Horse Thug soon brought his halberd to bear as well, taking a swing at Krombholz. Torrent crawled off the ice, and regained her footing, only to come under fire from a pair of additional Black Horse thugs coming around the bend further ahead. They marched slowly at the party, firing and reloading their crossbows as they came. Realizing that Gath had the riders and other Black Horse mercenaries blocked for the moment, Dom called forth a bank of fog in the air above Gath, blocking entirely the view of the elevated attackers. The half-orcs on top of the canyon abandon their positions, throwing a rope off the top of the canyon and starting to descend. As they did this, a squat muscular vaguely canine beast with scaly skin and oozing sores ran forward down the canyon, growling as it came, nimbly dodging past the legs of the horses. It barreled through Gath and his mount, breaking out to the other side in the canyon, where it turned back to a position to attack Gath. Bromsby got a good look at the beast. He recognized it as a trollhound, a magical beast that he little other knowledge about. The viscous bite of the creature against Gath brought a cheer from the Black Horse mercenaries, and one of the scouts who had descended down to the canyon floor moved up next to the trollhound, unlimbering his greataxe. While Dom used his prayers to bestow healing on Gath, Bromsby again cast Color Spray, this time on the trollhound and the Black Horse scout. The scout collapsed unconscious, but the trollhound was merely stunned and blinded. Even with the beast temporarily stopped, the tide of battle continued to turn against the three. One of the other scouts moved forward, the greataxe dealing another dangerous blow to Gath. Dom continued to infuse vigor into Gath, keeping him alive and in the fight but was unable to deal much of a blow himself. Gath scored a serious blow on the trollhound, but the party could tell it was starting to recover from the injury almost immediately. Gath began to call out for fire or anything else that might take the beast down permanently. The remaining scout moved into a position to attack Gath as well. Krombholz and Ceilthanus's combined efforts finally took down one of the Black Horse thugs, and the party turned its attention to the other thug engaged in melee with Krombholz. Torrent moved to support the effort, while the two thugs continued to march advance and fire their crossbows. An additional two thugs came around the bend, also dressed in scale mail with crossbows out, their Black Horse armbands proclaiming them Murderers. [I]To Be Continued[/I] [HR][/HR] [B]Story Deviation & Extra Details [/B] The story in the adventure is a little contradictory at this point. Supposedly, Renard has received a sending offering him a 10,000 gp reward for capturing the Case -- the McGuffin of the first adventure. However, the tactics for the encounter still have his group focused strictly on using non-lethal tactics. There are possible explanations: that Renard and his men are particularly greedy and want the 100 gp reward for the casters on top of the grand prize for the case; or that Renard has not told his men the value of the case and plans to keep that for himself. It seems more likely though that Renard would tell his people and they would concentrate on just taking down their opponents. So, in my campaign they stopped trying to take prisoners and were out for to get the case. [B]Tactical Notes and Conversions[/B] To adjust for the larger party size, I increased the number of Bounty Hunter Scouts (2 to 3), Bounty Hunter Thugs (4 to 6; but see below), and Bounty Hunter Horsemen (2 to 3) by 50%. I converted Renard and Kathor to 4th level characters (see the details in [URL="http://www.enworld.org/forum/showthread.php?498466-Adapting-Renard-and-Kathor-for-Pathfinder"]this conversion thread[/URL]); I opted to go with the alternative version of Kathor I posted there with the Eldritch Scion build. The biggest change was the lack of Spirited Charge -- his spell use was indistinguishable. I opted for this choice because I think it will make for a much more interesting build later on. The final adjustment I made for the over sized party was to add an additional CR 3, thereby increasing by 50% the number of CR3 opponents in the encounter. I settled on the trollhound. I had considered a Hell Hound, but decided to reserve that for possible use in the next adventure. I had also considered an ogre or spriggan as additional thug power, but decided that it fit better for Renard to have trained a magical beast than worked out a relationship with one of those in his mercenary company. However, I thought the threat of disease moving into the next adventure as well as the challenge of stopping the trollhound's regeneration (with only one person in the party, Krombholz, having picked up an alchemist flask) would be interesting threats, plus more of a traditional "monster" after the numerous humanoid opponents. I should note that I have been using CR 1/2 warriors, i.e. level 2 warriors, for my pathfinder conversion of the Bounty Hunter Thugs. The source material lists only one feat (Animal Affinity). Given the decision to have them use lethal weapons and the impact Armor as DR had so far, I converted these to using Halberds in addition to their saps, short swords, and crossbows. I also changed their feats to Intimidating Prowess and Weapon Focus (Halberd). The Bounty Hunter Scouts received greataxes instead of morningstars, with rogue talent of bleed. The Bounty Hunter Horsemen added Weapon Focus (lance), and bucklers. I had the Bounty Hunter Scouts throw their thunderstones with the group just before they passed the entry point from the camp site into the main canyon area. When I drew my map I made it moderately narrow, which resulted in the horses squeezing to get through that space. In retrospect, this should be wide enough for horsemen to move at full speed. Either way this creates the scenario where the party did manage to blockade the horsemen in. To get the better reaction a longer delay (round or so) to let party move on might needed In addition, while I had noted it before hand, I really had not thought about the implications of the thunderstones deafening party members. So far, none of the deafened casters has lost a spell as a result of being deafened. It has complicated communication within the party, though. The biggest issue that I had not considered -- which should have been blatantly obvious -- is that the bolting horses split the party. As described above, the group is split now with each half mired in their own fights. That changes the encounter from a tight sequence of challenging fights to a parallel run of a challenging and a very challenging encounter. The party has a few resources they have not made use of. For example, the party has four oils of magic weapon scattered through the group. Under the Armor as DR rules, a magical weapon can bypass the DR of nonmagical armor. So far none of the party members has taken the action to do this. Renard has not gotten into position to be visible to the party yet, and thus has not been able to use his bow yet. Kathor heard the call, but has not arrived yet. He did managed to successfully cast his spells Shield and Magic Weapon, and should arrive in the round we start the next session. Having the party split up has reduced their ability to focus as a group on individuals, drawing out the fight. In addition, the Armor as Damage Reduction and the Wounds and Vigor system were already making battles run slightly longer. The combined result in this particular encounter runs the risk of reversing the "defeat in detail" aspect of the encounter, which should allow the party to overcome a more powerful force by facing it in smaller chunks, and in turn may allow the Black Horse company to do that to them instead. [B]Mechanics Issues[/B] "The Plan" section of "Act Four: The Gauntlet" makes references to Point 1, then Point A, which are presumably the same spot. This error is repeated in the Completed Campaign edition as well. The paragraph description on pg 35 says 4 thugs, the list on pg 36 says 2 thugs, and the Combat Stats appendix says 2 thugs. To make matters even more confusing, the placement paragraph on pg 35 tells us there is a thug at location points 3, 4, and 5 -- location for three thugs. So, how many thugs? Clearly, we should have more than 2, since we have the location for 3 of them. I settled on 4 as the base, as under D&D 3.5 that would give you a total EL of 7, excluding Kathor, then adjusted my scaling for six person party from there; it is however confusing and if ever converted or updated should be corrected and clarified. Handling the surprise round proved interesting, and while I feel comfortable with some of the judgments I made on the fly there, I really should have had that thought out before the session. Khrombolz got to use his trait this time (Thieves' Guild Sympathizer) , and many people commented how powerful it seemed. I feel like it is on par with the other traits, all of which are advantageous. For my party, with only one character really focusing hard on perception, and a few others dabbling, having the character with the best perception in the party with the trait will let them make the most of it. I think they will need it. I took the time at the start of the session to review the mounted combat rules with the group, but even then struggling over them a bit slowed down the fight. I should have done that myself seperately to address the Revised Action Economy's impact mounted combat. To handle ranged attacks with horse movements, I adopted the following: [LIST] [*]Horse takes 1 move, no penalty [*]Horse takes 2 moves, -4 [*]Horse takes 3 move, -8 [/LIST] We also had a small amount of confusion over reach, mounted location, and location for attacks, i.e. the old issue on can you attack an adjacent opponent with a reach weapon while mounted. I decided on a house rule that can use a reach weapon while mounted to attack a creature adjacent to the mount, but that the mount grants cover to the target. Essentially, using the normal reach rule you cannot draw a line to the target that will not cross your mount. You can visualize this in real terms as someone standing directly in front of the horse, and you using your reach weapon on the opponent, but having to make sure your mount's head does not get in the way. One of the player's asked for his character to use a skill to make a tactical assessment at the start of the encounter. I let Bosma use Profession (Solider) for tactical assessment, and Dom decided to roll as well. I didn't mind the attempt for an assessment, as he was mostly asking if there was a major flaw in his intended action. However, letting another player jump in on an action and interrupt the discussion with their own checks and results was not good on my part. If I am going to encourage players to make creative uses for their skills and abilities, I feel I also should clamp down on that sort of jumping in to keep things focused on the character who's action it is. I failed to have Gath make his roll against disease with the Trollbite at the time of the bite. After the fact, I am considering trying a mechanic for diseases where I will have the player not make their fortitude save until the onset period is handled, or I suppose until the time in which some supernatural means of detect disease is determined. The idea was that an individual would not know if they had contracted a disease or not, and I wanted to use a variation of the affliction poison rules to increase the DC of the save by the number of "doses" (exposures) that had happened. This has a few implications were repeated exposure to low DC diseases can still force someone to make a high DC saving throw, and also for players to have to decide to seek or not seek medical attention without know at first if they are in fact coming down with something. We will see if the booking makes it too much of a pain to track or not. [B]Notable player reactions[/B] Steven was not there, so Bromsby was run by Alex (Ceilthanus). The players are genuinely worried. Rick (Bosma's player) keeps going back over and over again in his head, stuck on the fact that in the first serious encounter with him as leader, they split the party. They party as a whole is aware that they have not gotten a full count or assessment of their foes yet, as was highlighted to them by the appearance on the last part of the last round of two additional Black Horse thugs in the long canyon stretch. However, they all had fun and thought the encounter and lay out a real challenge. [B]Props, music, images, supporting handouts, etc[/B] Music for this session was: [LIST] [*]Crysis II by Hans Zimmer [*]Godzilla (2014) by Alexandre Desplat [*]Devil's Own by James Horner [*]House of Flying Daggers by Shigeru Umebayashi [*]Mission: Impossible by Danny Elfman [/LIST] I use a large graph pad for group discussions to create the long strips of maps, and drew them all ahead of time. So, I had four strips for the map, and pulled out the strip for the appropriate stretch of canyon as the party go to it, as they had no idea how long the total run was. I added a couple of ice patches as well on the long 200 ft section for additional detail, which proved to have an impact on the game. I had printed tokens for all the horses and opponents, allowing the miniatures and Black Horse mercenary tokens to be placed on top of the horses easily. This made visual working with the encounter easy and clear. [/QUOTE]
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