D&D General How Was Your Last Session?

[THEMNGMNT]

35th session of Monte Cook's 3E Banewarrens campaign run with Shadow of the Demon Lord on Owlbear Rodeo.

Five player characters at Level 7:

• Dwarf Executioner/Berserker/Warrior. Heir to a lost kingdom. His trinket is half of a treasure map.
• Elf Librarian/Wizard/Magician. Outcast from elven lands, raised in Ptolus, keeper of a dark secret. His magical traditions are Arcana, Teleportation, Chaos, and Fey.
• Goblin Pyromancer/Oracle/Magician. Responsible for the destruction of his tribe. Specialized in the Fire and Forbidden magic traditions, with a dose of Divination.
• Changeling Dervish/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 Defender/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.

After 15 sessions of intrigue and mayhem in Ptolus, the characters returned to the Banewarrens. They began at the beginning, in the Broken Seal. This area had become a bit of a graveyard from all the previous fighting. Yet now all the corpses were missing. It looked like they had picked themselves off the floor and walked deeper into the Banewarrens. In Ptolus, the characters had tangled with a death cult of necromancers called the Dreadsworn, and it now seemed the cult had entered the Banewarrens...

The human paladin used his ability to detect corruption to reveal a group of undead waiting in ambush. These were guardians of the Banewarrens co-opted by the Dreadsworn: 2 barrow wights and a wight commander with a cursed gem that could summon wraiths. The wights went down without too much effort but the wraith moved fast and hit hard. After the battle, the dwarf barbarian shattered the gem and the changeling rogue pocketed the fragments. What they don't know is the gem reforms in 1d6+4 hours...

Moving into the Outer Vaults, the characters decided to forego any additional exploration and instead get as deep inside the Banewarrens as quickly as possible. Along the way they saw signs that someone(s) had broken into several of the vaults, looting the cursed banes within. That's not good...

Before long the characters reached the exit to the Outer Vaults, which is as far as they had previously come. The exit was a Sealed Door that required a Bane Key to open. As far as they knew, they are the only ones with a Bane Key. Yet the door was open and the way to the Inner Vaults lay ahead. That's really not good...!

Next session: The Inner Vaults!

 

[Richards]

Today was a great "Dreams of Erthe" session: our player recovering from surgery healed up faster than expected, so we started back up about 2 weeks earlier than originally anticipated. And we ran through two short adventures, taking us from noon to about 5:30 PM.

The first one, "Underdark Trails," was a series of Underdark encounters, as the five PCs and a newly-hired NPC dwarf ranger guide tried to follow a map to the location of a kobold warren with a statue whose eyes were dreamstones the Queen of Dreams wanted them to harvest and bring back to the surface. They encountered the following: a lurker above; nine giant cockroaches (three of them ridden by quaggoths, recently escaped from a duergar slave city); a pair of duergar mounted on steeders who came looking for the escaped quaggoths while the PCs were in the midst of battle with them (and to the duergar, the PCs made perfectly good "future slaves"); a stone giant and his pet dire bear; a cavern lizard; and finally a female svirfneblin. This last encounter was the weirdest of the adventure, as she rounded a corner, looked at the PCs in horror, started bleeding from all orifices, and died within seconds, muttering the word "deathborn" in her own language (which fortunately the dwarven ranger spoke and could translate). They don't know what to make of that.

The second adventure, "Dreamstone Vision," got the PCs to the kobold warren, where they encountered the following: an amphisbaena; the statue of a 10-foot-tall kobold, with 51 (illusory) kobolds standing in rows worshiping it; a pair of kobolds who tossed weak wooden cages filled with scorpions down at the PCs (resulting in two scorpion swarms skittering about); about a dozen kobold warriors, some of which popped up from holes underneath the illusory worshipers and blended right in before tossing spears around; a pair of kobold sentries somewhat protected by a 20-foot-deep pit trap/latrine covered with a horizontal illusory wall (which the half-orc cleric/paladin fell into, feather falling into the poop with no way to stop his eventual landing - there went that pair of boots, they'll never get clean!); a dark naga; and the kobold leaders: a fighter, a sorcerer, and four rogues. They got the dreamstones and are ready to go back to the surface, but that'll be the next adventure - and will the way still be clear for them, or will they need to find another way to the surface? (Smart money's on the latter.) But in the meantime, everyone level up to 8th, please.

Johnathan

 

[DragonBelow]

I'm sure we won't see them again.

 

[Older Beholder]

We ended up a player down as he had dinner plans, but said he’d be online later, and to play on without him. (we play over discord)

I normally just postpone if someone can’t play, but we’d missed a couple of sessions in a row and I was keen to get things moving again.

I had some random tables for a new part of town the characters had arrived at, so rather than just roll once before moving on, I kept rolling and trying to stretch out the material with improv. I used the chili eating contest from Radiant Citadel and added important NPCs as the other contestants to make things more interesting.

The session lasted a couple of hours, while trying to sneak across town during a gnoll raid the players made some terrible stealth rolls and got spotted, so rather than run combat with a missing player I finished up early with the aim to jump straight into the action next session.

 

[Mind of tempest]

I have finally had a session it was a taster for beginners and I was late but I was a gnome wizard and I did most of the damage.

 

[el-remmen]

It was great! It was my intermittent remote Revenants of Saltmarsh campaign and the players finally finished up Salvage Operation. It was dicey for a while as they struggled to flee the sinking ship being crushed by a giant octopus while hauling the salvage they were looking for out, but they did it and no one died! I think my group finally learned the lesson of at least trying for a short rest when it is needed and there is no immediate time pressure. (though the time pressure came after)

 

[THEMNGMNT]

36th session of Monte Cook's 3E Banewarrens campaign run with Shadow of the Demon Lord on Owlbear Rodeo.

Five player characters at Level 7:

• Dwarf Executioner/Berserker/Warrior. He seeks the Axehammer of the Lost Clan, rumored to be in the Banewarrens.
• Elf Librarian/Wizard/Magician. Outcast from elven lands, raised in Ptolus, keeper of a dark secret. His magical traditions are Arcana, Teleportation, Chaos, and Fey.
• Goblin Pyromancer/Oracle/Magician. Responsible for the destruction of his tribe. Specialized in the Fire and Forbidden magic traditions, with a dose of Divination.
• Changeling Dervish/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 Defender/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.

The characters entered the Inner Vaults of the Banewarrens. They had a complete map drawn by the dwarven builders who constructed these vaults, but did not know the contents of any room. The dwarf executioner/berserker believed the axehammer could be found on this level and had a burning designer to claim it.

There were three major encounters this session:

First, the characters fought the Betrayed, an acolyte of the builder of the Banewarrens, Danar, who was tortured to death when Danar fell from grace and became the Dread One. The Betrayed had allied with a rival faction that had recently entered the Banewarrens -- an undead death cult called the Dreadsworn. He revealed that the leader of this expedition was the wife of the human defender/paladin. This was big news. The Betrayed was a formidable opponent but the superior action economy of the characters soon overwhelmed him.

Second, the characters found a grand hall with statues of Danar and his most powerful allies. A magical forcefield prevented them progressing through the great hall. They deducted that the statues were a puzzle and figured out the solution. The forcefield vanished. The characters passed through the great hall into the tomb of the dwarven Lord of the Lost Clan. The dwarf executioner knew that this is where the axehammer would be found! But instead they found the Lord's tomb smashed and the axehammer missing. A secret door indicated the looters' point of entry. The characters passed through the secret door into a long corridor, which lead to...

Third, somewhere on the other side of the Inner Vaults there was a sudden, catastrophic explosion. The corridor the characters were in began to collapse. They fled the corridor into a large and now-ruined chamber. From their map they knew that the exit from this level of the Inner Chamber was right around the corner. They debated whether to follow the looters to the exit or explore the source of the explosion.

Next session: I think it's gonna be the explosion...

 

[Blue]

Last sessions was great! Well, last session was a tad clunky with a touch of DM fiat and perhaps checks called for things that were a sure thing. But it was great because it was one of our long time player's first foray into DMing! And she had an interesting one-shot, either homebrew or adapted quickly to center around the backstories for characters she got the night before the game. Good mix of combat and RP.

She did sooooo much better than my first (ahem, campaign) DMing, and I think really enjoyed our enjoyment of the session.

So a good time was had by all, and maybe we'll have another DM bringing her visions to the group.

 

[Bigsta]

As DM, my players finished our 4th 5e Ravenloft campaign, which was our 2nd campaign to get to level 20, and which was the culmination of an ongoing storyline that began when 5e released 8 years ago. The overall arch went Ravenloft (Grand Conjunction 2e conversion) -> Ravenloft (Curse of Strahd) -> Darksun -> Tomb of Annihilation -> Ravenloft (homebrew campaign) -> Ravenloft (post-VGTR campaign; at the end the PCs restored the Core, returning Ravenloft to 2e cosmology).

Darklord Erandus Vol literally spent 30 minutes in realtime recaping the entire storyline to the PCs.

My crowning achievement during the most recent campaign, making my wife cry when she learned from her Darksun character (now an NPC) that her character from the first campaign (a half-giant gladiator also from Darksun) had died of cancer while running an orphanage in Tyr. She was given a state burial as a hero of the city-state and of the people.

 

[Richards]

In tonight's Ghourmand Vale game session, we were tasked with finding and killing the dire boar that had been tearing up the trees and eating the vegetables in the garden of the farm where the Temple of Saint Cuthbert in the Vale gets most of its provisions. Tracking the dire boar, we came to an open door in the side of a hill and saw a (normal-sized) boar enter it. But there was no time to investigate, for the dire boar had scented us as was rushing in to attack. By the time we killed it and entered the cellar, there was no sign of the smaller boar. But a carrion crawler was digging its way into the cellar, so we killed it, then found a set of spiral stairs leading up.

The next level up was mostly empty, but we found (and fought, and killed) a cockatrice in a side room. Then we went to the top floor, where we heard a bunch of squealing puppies inside the curtains of a four-poster bed and ended up fighting a wolf with a small pouch around its neck. This turned out to be a spellcasting wolf with an imp friend, who caused us no small amount of trouble - not surprisingly, because it wasn't a wolf at all but a barghest. That was the toughest fight thus far in our burgeoning adventuring careers (we're 3rd level, although we hit 4th by the end of the session), partly because we rolled like crap once we got up to that top level. If it hadn't been for our elven paladin of Pelor getting a confirmed crit in conjunction with a smite evil attack using a +1 flaming burst longsword (which resulted in a whopping 41 points of damage with one blow!), we very well might have had out first PC death. But we prevailed, and the pouch wasn't a spell component pouch as we had first guessed, but a magic diamond that unlocked the secret vault of the wizard who originally lived in the building (and had been eaten by the barghest long before we showed up). So we each got 2,000 gp for our troubles, plus a bunch of cool stuff (immovable rod, +1 bracers of armor, +2 ring of protection, rod of wonder). And now we're 4th level, so my sorcerer finally learned the scorching ray spell and can start to pull his own weight a bit more than he has been doing.

By the way, the normal-sized boar had been the imp, polymorphed. And we can now add "newborn barghest puppies" to the list of things we've killed (although none of us is super eager to add "Puppy-Slayer" to our names - we might leave that part out of the bard songs detailing our adventures).

Johnathan