NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="MortalPlague" data-source="post: 6270974" data-attributes="member: 62721">I had the chance to run this adventure during the internal playtest, so I'm getting a huge kick out of your play reports, Merric.My group also had the idea to go after Julkoun.  I also felt it necessary to have a random encounter on the road, but I ambushed them with some unmounted goblins being watched by the terrifying Darkenbeast.  The beast was slain by a few lucky rolls, and when it turned back into a cow, the party was pretty nervous.  And confused.Following that encounter, they made friends with the dryad, who pointed the worg camp out to them.  Sure enough, they stormed the camp and took a worg prisoner, with the intention of coming back to them.  Then they circled Julkoun, looking for a way in.  Eventually, they also settled on the covered bridge.The climb down was easy enough, and they slipped through the window into the bridge.  My group decided on the southern passage instead, and crept through the tunnels.  They heard the sounds of Shorg drinking and joking with his comrades, so they crept that way.  With speed and stealth they dashed in and tried to slay him in the first round, but a few poor rolls made that impossible.  The fight was fierce and brutal, and Shorg was on the losing end, but he managed to bellow for help.One of my PCs tried to imitate his voice to say that everything was fine, but they botched the roll badly.  The hunt was afoot.  Goblins were moving about up top in the warehouse, which drove the PCs back into the tunnels.  They tried the other passage and came up into the Inn's cellar.  Our ranger (clad in his lucky hat) had the brilliant idea to tie the doors on the landing to each other so that neither party could open it.  Then the party advanced to the top.  Our ranger opened the door to see a whole host of hobgoblins and about a dozen terrified goblins, all pointing bows at him.  He took about four arrows and fell down the stairs, unconscious.The other PCs managed to close the door, and there was a tense standoff.  Whatever lurked in the rooms off the landing were trying to get out (with no success), and the hobgoblins up top were clearly content to wait.  Our valiant party had no mage, so there was no ability for area damage.  Instead, they tried to use the door for cover and take pot shots, while also being subjected to some missile fire.The Cleric of Bane decided to try and terrify the goblins with a serious intimidate check (and he spoke goblin to boot), which scattered the dozen and left the hobgoblins cursing them.  Then the PCs charged up.  The ranger was first through the door, and he took another volley of arrows, which left him pretty hurt but still fighting.They managed to kill some of the hobgoblins and chase off the others, but at that point, the cook escaped the doors below, and so did the bugbears.  A vicious fight in the tunnels occurred, and the characters decided they'd be best served to retreat back to the dryad's grove and camp out for the night.  They fought a retreat from the bugbears, killing most of them, and then they reached the doorway to the covered bridge.Unfortunately, they didn't realize that some of the hobgoblins had moved to flank them, and had climbed down into the bridge from above.  The ranger, with his lucky hat slightly askew opened the door and took four more arrows.  A running theme to the session, it seemed!It was a pitched fight, even more so as the door at the other end opened.  The PCs were scrambling out the window as the flaming sphere emerged behind them and began to light the bridge on fire.  Climbing out of the bridge, our 'lucky' ranger failed his climb check so badly that he fell out the window instead, and caught himself by the hanging corpse, dangling from the window of a burning bridge.He just managed to climb up in time, the party escaped onto the cliff walls where they began to move along the incline towards the west end of the little 'valley'.  A goblin archer from the top of the wall was firing pot shots at them (at disadvantage for range), but the ranger managed to shoot him while clinging to the wall (also at disadvantage).  The party managed to escape Julkoun, battered and bloody, but alive.---We had a quick wrap-up after that, where the PCs came back the next day to find the goblins had put Julkoun to the torch entirely.  They had lost so many that they couldn't hold the ruins.  I also have the PCs level 3, and they came in and had a quick and dirty rumble with the leader and her surviving hobgoblins.  I really wanted to jump to the next part of the adventure, since Julkoun was effectively done (and we wanted to playtest as much as possible), so we shoehorned a quick resolution in.This was probably one of the best WotC adventures I'd ever played.  Some of the other parts I didn't get a chance to run, or they weren't as stellar as Julkoun, but on the whole, Scourge of the Sword Coast was truly excellent.  I just love the sandbox approach here; one could think of almost a dozen plans to take Julkoun, and any of them could work (or go horribly awry).  All in all, tons of fun.</blockquote>

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