D&D General How Was Your Last Session?

[THEMNGMNT]

29th session of Monte Cook's 3E Banewarrens campaign run with Shadow of the Demon Lord on Owlbear Rodeo.

Five player characters at Level 5:

• Dwarf Berserker/Warrior. Heir to a lost kingdom. His trinket is half of a treasure map.
• Elf Wizard/Magician. Outcast from elven lands, raised in Ptolus, keeper of a dark secret. His magical traditions are Arcana, Teleportation, Chaos, and Fey.
• Goblin Oracle/Magician. Responsible for the destruction of his tribe. Specialized in the Fire and Forbidden magic traditions.
• Changeling Spellbinder/Rogue. Created by House Vladaam to replace a child they kidnapped and held in servitude. Naturally, she wants revenge. Two weapon fighter with the Battle tradition.
• Human Paladin/Priest. Cleric of Lothian, the primary god of Ptolus. His magical traditions are Life, Theurgy, and Battle. His wife was murdered by undead and now he seeks answers.

In this session, the players and their allies in the Longfingers thieves guild laid a trap for a boggle. The boggle was knocking over guild safehouses and stealing their loot. The players had encountered the boggle in their very first session. Then, it had been bound to the Pactlords and looted the Banewarrens of a valuable artifact before escaping Pactlord control. But it's a selfish, greedy little thing without an altruistic bone in its body. The players were looking to capture the boggle to unravel more of the mystery behind the Pactlords and to curry favor with the Longfingers.

The bait in the trap was a magical gem. The gem was inside an opulent manor. (I used the lovely Merchant Prince's Villa map from Tomb of Annihilation.) I asked the players to describe the gem. The elf wizard's player suggested it was a massive crystalline shard with magical properties. I asked, What sort of qualities? Another player proposed that it was a window into the past. I suggested that some scholars suspected it was a window into both the past, present, and potential future: The Shard of Future Past.

One of the players asked if he could look into the shard and see anything. Of course, I said. Then all the players took turns peering into the Shard. I gave them all visions of the future -- foreshadowing upcoming events in the campaign. (Of course, all this was spontaneous and unplanned. Awesome stuff.)

• The elf wizard saw his captive mentor having his brain consumed by Pactlord mind flayer.
• The changeling spellbinder saw the patriarch of House Vladaam held captive in the attic of his family estate.
• The dwarf berserker saw an ambush by a degenerate lost clan of dwarves on a narrow bridge over a chasm deep inside the Banewarrens.
• The human paladin saw an aristocratic undead lord standing in a cathedral of blood, reading from tome of legendary evil, with a strange image reflected in his eyes -- the paladin's wife.
• The goblin oracle saw that his dead tribe had been resurrected as zombies in service to the same undead lord.

Soon after, the boggle teleported through the ceiling and slid down a string of goo toward the Shard. The wizard had enscribed an invisible pentagram around the gem. Anyone touching the pentagram would be paralyzed for an hour. The boggle spotted the characters just as it was about to snatch the Shard. It tried to escape but a volley of magic missiles severed its goo string and sent it tumbling onto the pentagram. Captured!

Interrogation revealed the boggle's backstory. TL;DR is that it stole an artifact from the Banewarrens -- the "un-key" that could unmake any Bane Key -- and betrayed the Pactlords. With the un-key, the characters could destroy all the Bane Keys, thereby preventing anyone from entering the Banewarrens in the future. They demanded the boggle give them the un-key. It refused -- unless they could first destroy the Pactlords and the magical Quaan that bound them together.

Sure, yeah, the characters could do that. But they still wanted the un-key first. The boggle refused. At that moment, four men entered in the manor -- guards employed by the Longfingers. The players thought the guards were on their side. Then they realized that each guard had been possessed by a boggle. It was time to roll for initiative!

Next session: Boggled!

 

[Richards]

Then they realized that each guard had been possessed by a boggle.

That's literally mind-boggling!

Johnathan

 

[Richards]

In today's "Dreams of Erthe" campaign, the following happened:

1. The elf sorcerer discovered he had a "worry-wart" network living inside of him. He was infected seven adventures ago; it just took this long for the creature to create a large enough network throughout the elf's body so it could establish telepathic contact. Now it has six extendable eyestalks (that look like beauty marks when not extended) growing out of his body and is asking a barrage of questions about the elf and the world around him. (The main creature, a nibish-riule, is an amorphous being living in the Far Realm and viewing the Material Plane through these eyestalks (and, to a lesser extent, the elf's memories) and is somewhat surprised at how "boring" a world this is - the trees, for instance, just move their tops a little bit when it's windy, instead of levitating or turning into a flock of flying fish or doing anything else that might liven things up a bit - not at all like back home!

2. The PCs arrived in the town where the next trapped dreamer was supposed to be, but nobody knew anything. Based on a peek at the dream in question (a half-orc being arrested for the murder of two humans), they decided to try first the town guardsman headquarters and then the prison, but were told at both places there was nobody who'd been asleep for days or weeks.

3. The PCs spoke with the elven administrator in the prison (abandoning their weapons behind to do so), who was very curt with them and sent them away after their questions had been answered. They decided to try to sneak back in later, but...

4. On their way out a sheet phantom popped up out of the holding cell's toilet hole and attacked a guard. The PCs helped fight it off, but then were booted out of the prison by the elf administrator.

5. Sneaking back in (the half-orc cleric/paladin carrying the extradimensional lamp in which the other PCs were hiding, then casting a gaseous form spell upon himself), explored the area, found the prisoners' had all been transformed into ghouls/ghasts, and the half-orc prisoner was in fact trapped in his dreams in one of the solitary confinement pits, the other containing a spellstiched ghast.

6. The half-orc became solid, entered the lamp, explained the situation to the other PCs, rescued the half-orc prisoner (who they left in the lamp to deal with later), gave his ring of invisibility to the human bard/rogue who then picked the locks back into the prison mess hall, and tried to sneak back out of the prison except...

7. The elf administrator's invisible quasit familiar saw the door to the lower level open and close by itself, detected good and picked up the bard's aura, and alerted his master (actually a necromancer wizard who had turned the human prisoners into undead and charmed the guards and cook earlier).

8. The jig now up, the PCs prepped combat spells and exited the lamp, only to discover the elf necromancer had released the undead with orders to slay everyone in the building, so it became a big fight with the PCs fighting off the undead, the necromancer, and his quasit familiar, all while trying to rescue the guards and cook.

9. After winning the fight, they skedaddled out of town and later revived the half-orc, whose full dream-memory showed he'd entered the alley to help the human woman, who was being robbed by a human man, and in trying to save her the thief stabbed her in the gut, killing her, and the thief was then slain by the half-orc as they wrestled to get/retain the short sword. When the three town guardsman showed up, they found two dead humans and a half-orc holding the murder weapon standing above them. The PCs immediately hired the half-orc on as a hireling, to take care of their riding mounts and draft animals.

Johnathan

 

[Blue]

We were down a player for a regular game and the DM did a 3rd level one-shot murder mystery. There were five adventurers caught who could have done it, and each had a motive.

The nifty bit was it was a bit of a force - whichever we accused was the actual murderer. The evidence could be interpreted in ways to apply to each of them.

However, the DM put it in his world that he's run multiple campaigns in and sprinkled in some connections, so among the correspondence we found a rather threatening letter from someone he's been setting up as a behind-the-scenes big bad. But the other two references we've ever seen the name was two campaigns ago in a necromancer's correspondence, and a reunion two-shot of the group from three campaigns ago. What I'm saying is no players remembered the name, and the characters had no way of knowing it.

So even though there was good (but not 100%) evidence that there was one murderer, we got completely hooked up on the fact that it could not be a coincidence that five people each with a murder-worthy grievance hooked up and then took a job for the very person they all independently hated so therefore they were all distractions by the real murderer from that letter, and tried to work out how the adventuring party got together.

So a simple murder mystery that forced the party to be right got completely derailed by a single extraneous "important" clue and overthinking on the player's part.

We still had fun.

 

[THEMNGMNT]

That's literally mind-boggling!

Johnathan

I've gained a real affection for boggles -- the stat block for the 4E version(s) is great. I try to use them in my games a lot.

 

[Older Beholder]

I ran my first session haven taken over from one of the DMs in our group who’d been running a campaign for over two years which finished recently with our characters reaching level 20.

Our sessions are usually 3 hrs, played over discord.

I may have undercooked the prep a little bit as I didn’t have a huge amount planned going in.

It was a good excuse to flesh out a homebrew town I had an idea for as a jumping off point. They all left it to the last minute to write their characters so there wasn’t a huge amount of tying in backstories, but I‘m OK with building that stuff in the first couple of sessions.

I did a tavern start with the players introducing their characters and on a positive note, I went to the bathroom after their introductions and came back to find them still just role playing amongst themselves.

Leaving the tavern later the party encountered a Nibolg giving a little street performance, surrounded by a group of Goblins and Boggles. They demand the group pay for watching the performance and a fight breaks out. To try and make the fight a bit more memorable the Nibolg was using a Gazer beholder that’s been impaled on a spike as a scepter.

There was some roleplaying in the aftermath with a few hooks put in front of the characters some they explored and some they didn’t. Eventually a talking flower (I used Amidor from Wild Beyond the Witchlight) approaches the group in service of a sorcerer, looking to hire adventurers to help track down a missing Yuan-Ti warlock, last seen in the swamplands nearby. From there it was onto the adventure with a bit of exploration and another combat scene before finding a clue. And that was pretty much where we left off.

In the end I had a few extra scenes that we didn’t get to and some other things that the group didn’t explore, not to mention a bit of detail I forgot. But everyone seemed to enjoy it.

Next session will be exploring a Duergar tomb, visiting a new part of town and meeting the mysterious employer.

 

[Guest 7034872]

Because it was a one-shot in which I didn't have to DM and played a Great Weapon battle master who just whaled on stuff, I'd say it was great! I loved not having to think.

 

[Retreater]

We finally decided to resurrect the campaign we started before COVID, even though it's now on VTT. We're back to the group's favorite characters, 6th level, in 5e - ready to pick up their stories. The first session (two weeks ago) was largely a Session 0.5, but last night's game was fully into exploring the world. Because our sessions are short, we had one encounter where the pilgrims who entered the roadside inn devolved into wights. A half-dozen wights against five 6th-level PCs (and two 1st-level followers) wasn't much of a challenge - but it was a good change of pace to the recent string of TPKs we've had in other systems.

 

[THEMNGMNT]

41st and 42nd sessions of my Dragon Heist/Deck of Many Things mashup. 8th level half-orc cavalier fighter, halfling swashbuckler rogue, and half-elf evoker wizard/grave cleric.

Forgot to recap this!

This adventure is an interlude. The evoker's backstory is centered on parents murdered under mysterious circumstances. Both were wizards. He's discovered that they were double agents for Blackstaff Tower posing as rogue mages of the Tower Arcane in Luskan. They were murdered by a wizard of the Tower in alliance with a mind flayer in the Xanathar Guild. The evoker has also learned that he was left some sort of magical inheritance. He doesn't know what it is, but he knows it can be found in the family scriptorium.

Session 41 started with the party finding a secret door in the scriptorium. It led to an underground chamber. There were two doors: one rimed with ice, the other glowing with heat.

Now, I had determined that the inheritance was either a Staff of Frost or a Staff of Fire, depending upon the door chosen. The problem was that while I had a solid fire-themed adventure, I couldn't find or make up a decent ice-themed adventure. Not to say there aren't good ice-themed adventures, but I was looking for something short and flavorful. I just couldn't find it. I decided that which ever door the party selected, they would be transported to the fire-themed adventure.

Remember this. It becomes important later.

The characters opened the ice-themed door and were instantly transported to a pillar of black iron in the middle of a lake of lava. I was using the map of the Weeping Colossus from Princes of the Apocalypse. I repurposed it to make this the stronghold of the Archmage of Evocation -- one of the rulers of the Tower Arcane -- deep below Luskan. (This is all my own spin on Forgotten Realms lore.) The Archmage had come into possession of the Staff of Ice after the death of the evoker's parents -- but was not responsible for it herself. I had an epic fight planned. Naturally, the players decided to negotiate.

The evoker possessed a Crystalline Chronicle, which contained the consciousness of the Archmage of Divination. The Archmage of Evocation was willing to trade the Staff of Frost for the Crystalline Chronicle. But the Archmage of Divination was terrified of being under the control of the Archmage of Evocation. So the evoker refused.

At this point, the Archmage of Evocation was considering destroying the party. It would have been easy. The party was surrounded by a dozen wizards while an hostile red dragon circled the Weeping Colossus. But the Archmage knew the characters were hunting the wizard that had killed the evoker's parents. She offered to trade the staff for the wizard -- alive. Not because she wanted to save him. But because she wanted to kill him herself. The evoker agreed to the deal. She warned the characters that if they failed, she would send the dragon after them. With that, the party was sent back whence they came.

I presumed the obvious next step was for the characters to hunt down the murderous wizard. Nope. Instead they decided to open the other door. The fire door. The door for which I had no adventure.

I called a five minute break. I cracked open my copy of Rime of the Frost Maiden. And I started flipping pages. Quickly I landed on the Dark Duchess. A ship trapped in ice, remains of the dead crew, now the lair of a white dragon. That's...pretty cool. So like maybe the evoker's grandfather brought the Staff of Fire on an expedition to slay a white dragon but was instead killed by it but used a ritual to bind the staff to the scriptorium so anyone opening that door would be transported here...? Yeah, let's go with that.

The characters upon opening the fire door found themselves standing on a vast sheet of polar ice...

Next session: White dragon!

 

[Imaculata]

After searching the sewers for an hour or so, underneath a town terrorized by a strange monster, we finally found its lair. During the big battle that followed, one of our party members got grappled by the beast, and dragged down to the bottom of a reservoir.

"You all owe me a beer for this!", my barbarian loudly proclaimed, as he dived after his compagnion, into the disgusting sewage water, to save him. And save him he did!