D&D General How Was Your Last Session?

[Richards]

First of all: am I the only one still playing in this thread? This'll be four of my posts in a row!

Tonight's "Ghourmand Vale" session was short - just a single encounter, in which an NPC rogue we all hate - "Shambles" Maguffin - came running through a crowded marketplace claiming he was being chased by "people who wanted to eat him." It turns out he and his band of no-good thieves had fallen through a gate into the Ravenloft-ish lands of Jasgund Singh (a rakshasa), and spent about three weeks there, during which time all but he, a female elf rogue, and a male human bard had been turned to evil. When the elf opted to tell off Jasgund and try to storm out of his banquet, he had his new followers (Shambles' team) fall upon her and start to devour her. Shambles and the bard ran away, got separated, and Shambles ended up in the marketplace where our PCs happened to be at. He was being chased by two of Jasgund's fanatical followers: two women, human in appearance, who quickly shifted into hybrid weretiger form once they caught up to Shambles. We fought them off, but not before one of them managed to kill the NPC rogue (aw, shucks! - did I mention we all hated him from his first appearance?). By the time we had the weretigresses unconscious, the marketplace had been deserted by the panicked crowds, so we let our halfling rogue slit their throats and be done with them.

Johnathan

 

[Older Beholder]

Last night I ran my first session since the characters were transported to Dark Sun after a teleporter accident. (5th session of the campaign with the characters at level 3)

It was mostly just a bunch of random encounter tables and Con saves for exhaustion. There was a bit of a dungeon delve in one of the random encounters, so when they got to that the paladin in the group sensed a great evil underground, but due to the levels of exhaustion already suffered they decided to avoid the area completely. (which is fine, I'd done a pretty loose prep so nothing was overly fleshed out)

They ended up seeing a Braxat on the horizon in the distance, failed a bunch of stealth rolls trying to avoid it. I decided to end the session a bit early so the game ended on a cliff-hanger of the massive monster closing in on them. (whilst also giving me time to work on the encounter to make it a bit more interesting.)

It ended up being a pretty short, combat heavy session. The players seemed to have a good time while commenting on how dangerous and harsh the world seemed. I'm pretty amazed at much use I'm getting out of the Spelljammer monsters book.

 

[THEMNGMNT]

43rd session of my Neverwinter campaign. Three 8th level characters: half-orc vengeance paladin, human genie warlock, drow evoker wizard. We're playing online and sessions are about 2 hours long.

Here's the situation: Characters are up against a guild of drow rogues commanded by a mind flayer. The guild is about to receive a shipment of magical weapons sent via griffon courier. The courier service is a legitimate business with no connection to the guild -- they're not exactly civilians, more like an armored car service, but not criminals. The characters are attempting to intercept the shipment. And the guild knows it. For this heist I'm using the Feathergale Spire map from Princes of the Apocalypse. I've never played that adventure but I've used the maps in it a lot. A lot.

We started the session mid-heist:

• From a rooftop near the spire, the wizard saw three griffons with riders approach -- the shipment. At that moment a black dragon flew overhead. Yet another party attempting to intercept the shipment. The wizard used a sending stone to alert the paladin.
• Inside the spire, the paladin excused himself from a conversation with a clerk and raced up the stairwell toward the roof. In the stairwell he was intercepted by a guard. The paladin shoved the guard down the stairs and continued upward.
• Inside the spire, the invisible warlock had been detected by a displacer beast kitten and her handler. She ran out the front door and closed it behind her -- thus alerting the pair of guards protecting the entrance.
• Behind the wizard, a drider scuttled onto the roof and fired an arrow at him, missing. The wizard polymorphed the drider into a rat. A rat with eight legs.
• On the spire's landing, the paladin waved off the approaching flight. They broke formation and dived for the cover of the city below. Too late. The dragon was upon them.
• On the bridge leading to the tower, the guards attacked the invisible warlock. She dodged their attacks and jumped down to the ground level -- the griffon stables. She threw open a door and found herself face to face with a "tame" griffon.
• Meanwhile, the wizard stomped on the rat -- and missed. So the wizard tried to fry it with firebolt. And missed again. The rat has 1 hit point.
• Atop the spire, the paladin watched as the warlock came into view -- flying on a griffon. Only the warlock was invisible. So he didn't actually see her on the griffon. But what he did see was the dragon breathe a stream of acid and disintegrate one of the courier griffons with a single hit.

If you're reading this closely, I retconned the green dragon to a black dragon.

Next session: Save vs dragon breath!

 

[THEMNGMNT]

39th session of Monte Cook's 3E Banewarrens campaign run with Shadow of the Demon Lord on Owlbear Rodeo. We haven't played in nearly a month as real life as put some unexpected demands on my time.

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 are in the Inner Vaults of the Banewarrens, next to a deep crater caused by a massive explosion. The strange magical aurora emanating from the crater causes every spell cast within it to open a portal to hell. As a result, the characters had fought three demons, each more powerful than the last. And the last demon had killed the human paladin before being banished back to hell.

The characters also tangled with a faction of undead and their human allies known as the Dreadsworn. The good news is that they were all destroyed or dead. The bad news is that the human necromancers re-animated as undead.

Two characters were already dead or dying. One of the undead cornered the goblin oracle and dropped him. Now there were only two characters still conscious. Fortunately they finished off the undead and revived their comrades.

Nailbiter!

The characters decided to retreat to a corrupted temple with a broken altar. Along the way they got mixed up in a room with some strange doors that wouldn't unlock. They couldn't figure out the puzzle, so they backtracked and found their way to the broken altar via a different route.

They laid the paladin's corpse upon the altar and began a ritual. In their possession was the feather of an angel they had freed from the Banewarrens and helped ascend to heaven. Its magic could return the paladin to life.

We cut away to the paladin's spirit in hell. (In Shadow of the Demon Lord, everyone goes to hell...at least for a while.) He found himself under a gray sky in a dead forest filled with sleepwalkers who burned like candles. His wife was one of the walkers. She approached him. She said her soul was held by an evil master who would not release her. She apologized for what she might do. She was not in control of her actions.

Blood began to seep from the ground. It rose above the paladin's feet, to his thighs, then his waist. He was in a sea of blood. A voice spoke out from behind him. He turned. And found himself alone with a handsome man, dressed like a noble, wearing an inverted ankh cross. The man was polite and playful. He revealed that he too once served Lothian, but decided that the best way to fight evil was with the tools of evil. He offered to free the soul of the paladin's wife. All he wanted in return was the Book of Inverted Darkness. In the Banewarrens, this book is a major artifact. Perhaps the major artifact. It corrupted the master of the Banewarrens and turned him into the Dread One, the setting's ultimate villain. The paladin refused the deal. "Don't blame me for what comes next," said the man.

The paladin awoke -- alive!

Next session: In or out?

 

[jasper]

My last session, has me serious considering to start having people reserve or comment they are coming. I had 3. And the only reason I three was. The shut in I picked up. The Local Al coordinator show up and stuck around. And around 7 PM he called and guilt tripped another player to showing up so the shut in could play.
Then the shut in showed his buttocks, and the guilted player gave me the signal he was going home.
I know Covid, homebrew, and schedules change but, I am getting tired of announcing a time and it take 30+ minutes for everyone to the table.

 

[Richards]

In today's "Dreams of Erthe" session (the adventure was called "Pregnant Pause"), the PCs successfully awoke a pregnant woman from the dream coma she'd been in for two months (so despite being eight months pregnant when she fell asleep, she's actually been pregnant for 10 months - the dream comas induce a sort of magical stasis in the victim so time doesn't pass for them, and they require no food or water, etc.). However, the local cleric (whom the PCs met on the way to the farmhouse where the woman had been sleeping) had roused the able-bodied men in the farming village and led them to the farmhouse, claiming the fact she was still pregnant after 10 months meant she was carrying a demon-baby, and furthermore claimed the PCs were demons in disguise come to ensure the demonspawn's successful birth. As a result, the five PCs were up against about two dozen commoners (farmers), two rogues, four lower-level clerics, two low-level druids, and the 8th-level cleric who was leading the mob.

Fortunately, the half-orc cleric/paladin was able to determine none of the mob was evil and the human bard managed to fascinate the 8th-level cleric and one of the rogues, taking them out of the picture immediately. But, forewarned that the farmers they were up against were merely misled, not actively evil, the PCs managed to fight them off using nonlethal methods (other than killing one of the eagle animal companions of the druids, who had been attacking the bard). Even when a quasit showed up and tried reinforcing the claims that the PCs were all evil, they managed to prove otherwise (by slaying the quasit, stopping a cleric with a tanglefoot bag despite having lethal methods at hand, and eventually planting a suggestion on the cleric leader to announce that he had been wrong and for everyone to stand down). They managed to free him from the domination effect he'd been under; it turns out a cerebrilith had been summoned to the Material Plane and escaped control of the wizard who had summoned it, and now it and the quasit that had come along for the ride were free to cause as much mischief as they could. They ended up fighting the cerebrilith in the mausoleum at the town's temple, taking him down at the very last moment before he teleported away. (He was literally down to 1 hp and was about to escape, only one of the two PCs within range for an Attack of Opportunity managed to connect before it could flee.)

Johnathan

 

[Older Beholder]

Last night one of the players in our Thursday group wanted to run a Call of Cthulhu one shot as a break from D&D.
I've only ever played CoC a couple of times so was really excited about it. I'm not a big fan of the 1920's setting, as I don't have much frame of reference for the time period, but chose an out of work private investigator for my character and tried to lean into it.

The thing I like about not playing D&D is being able to take focus off the rules and get into roleplaying a character.
We never really had much chance of solving the mystery of out what was going on, instead the narrative focused on us trying to get to a party but we kept stumbling into weird scenes on the road etc...

In the end my character got killed by some mythos creature that came through the windscreen and ate my face off while I was driving. It was a lot of fun. (I rolled 3 out of 3d6 for luck when making the character, so he was always living on borrowed time)

 

[pogre]

We were in full delve mode today. The party is working through the Goodman Games Original Adventures Reincarnated The Temple of Elemental Evil. They did a nice job for the most part of playing some factions off against each other in the first level below the Temple.

However, word is about to get back to the temple about what they did at the Moathouse!

 

[Richards]

In tonight's "Ghourmand Vale" adventure, we were sent looking for a missing member of an elven delegation, an archer called Captain Oakcrown that our own archer, Chaevaris, seemed to know and dislike. In fact, Chaevaris asked to be called by a different name while we were looking for him and insisted on wearing a hood during the mission. When we got to the area of the forest in which he was last seen, we encountered a frightened raccoon running as fast as it could away from a longbow hunter; the hunter turned out to be Captain Oakcrown and the raccoon a wildshaped elven druid. Oakcrown, apparently not liking the odds now that the druid had four allies, took off, and we tracked him to a cabin in the woods two miles away. The druid warned us there was an elf woman in the cabin who could charm people to do her bidding. My sorcerer sent his grackle familiar scouting around the cabin, and he discovered Oakcrown hiding in a tree near the cabin and the elven woman and a male elven bard inside the cabin.

We made our plans: I loaded up my familiar with a touch of idiocy spell and had my unseen servant, Ogilvy, smash the glass from a window pane, so my grackle could fly in and deliver the touch spell to the elf woman while I blasted her with a charge from my wand of magic missile. In the meantime, our halfling rogue pushed open the front door and lobbed a spear at the woman while our half-elf paladin charged her. It was there we found out they'd anticipated our attack and made plans: my grackle was blasted by a magic missile spell from an invisible elven sorcerer and the paladin overcame the bard's hideous laughter spell and a charm attempt from the woman. The paladin used a smite evil on the woman, we ganged up on her (hoping the others, who weren't evil - the paladin checked - would snap out of it if we killed her), while Chaevaris and Oakthron sniped each other with arrows outside. Eventually, we killed the woman (who turned out to be a foxwoman with game stats updated from 1E to 3.5) and the others "woke" out of their charm effects as we'd hoped. We even rescued an elven girl in the basement of the cabin, who the foxwoman had planned to turn into a lycanthrope and raise as her own, and we uncovered a rather nice load of treasure hidden in her "fox den."

But the big shocker was Oakcrown, who continued shooting at Chaevaris (who shot right back at him), until we made them stop. Chaevaris told him "It's definitely off!" and Oakcrown agreed, saying he should have known better than to have dealings with low-born rabble, and after insisting on explanations we got them all right: Chaevaris, whom we'd all assumed this whole time was a rather androgynous male elf, was in fact female and her family had arranged her marriage to Oakcrown, an archer who had trained with the family. Chaevaris, not wanting anything to do with an arranged marriage, took off from Greyhawk by signing onto a 19-day caravan to Ghourmand Vale in our first adventure, thinking to flee the situation. Oakcrown hadn't taken being ditched like that very well, which had fostered a hatred for his former intended. And the other two PCs felt terrible for having assumed Chaevaris was a guy this whole time; I cleverly covered myself by pretending I'd known all along but assumed she had a good reason for trying to pass herself off as a male and simply played along. (In reality I'd figured it out when my son, who plays Chaevaris, provided me with a minimal version of "his" backstory and I filled in the missing bits - that, plus the image he'd chosen for Chaevaris had looked pretty feminine in the face.) But this whole time, when writing up the Story Hour version of our adventures, I've studiously avoided using any pronouns at all when describing Chaevaris, so when the "big reveal" eventually occurred it would all still be accurate.

Johnathan

 

[ilgatto]

AD&D 2E. A homegrown sequel to N4 Treasure Hunt.

PCs: Corduwin Kelmore (human Fighter 4); Fonlon (half-elf Bard 3); Lubomir (human Druid 3); Ludolf Raban (human Mage 4); Walewein Smitzoon (human Ranger 5).