Thank you. I'm very proud of that encounter.
D&D General How Was Your Last Session?
- Thread starter doctorbadwolf
- Start date
Ridiculous. The players decided to Leroy Jenkins a situation that could have been dealt with peacefully and now we are in the TPK danger zone. It's Avernus, so there are safety measures built in but those are unsatisfying.
I am beginning to tire of the linear nature of the Avernus campaign anyway. If it was just an adventure, it would be fine, but the idea of forcing the players to follow one breadcrumb to the next for another 5 months really fills me with dread. I might condense the latter half of the module and set it up so the PCs hit the climax at like 9th or 10th level.
I am beginning to tire of the linear nature of the Avernus campaign anyway. If it was just an adventure, it would be fine, but the idea of forcing the players to follow one breadcrumb to the next for another 5 months really fills me with dread. I might condense the latter half of the module and set it up so the PCs hit the climax at like 9th or 10th level.
The Green Hermit
Hero
The roper we encountered was easily bribed. Even still, it creeped my players out by immediately snatching any dead combatants for a quick meal.
In a word: sucky. We're 8th-level PCs and we were set up against a pair of back-to-back CR 11 encounters. What really sucked was I could barely even hit the opponents I was up against (AC 27 in one case), and then when I did manage to hit I couldn't overcome the DR 10 to actually deal any damage. My 13-year-old nephew was in the same boat as I was and was getting really frustrated, and together we prevented our cleric from doing anything helpful but constantly heal us to keep us from dying. So it was a night of watching the other two players slowly whittle down the enemies while we whiffed and took damage and got healed up to do it all again.
Making it worse: I found almost instantly a way to fetch the relic we'd been sent to fetch while bypassing combat altogether, but it would have brought the adventure to a screeching halt 90 minutes early...so, in the interests of having a fun time, we decided to just go ahead and fight the statues we were sure were going to animate and/or transform into the creatures they represented. Yeah, that was a mistake.
And worst of all: we had been maneuvered into this adventure in the first place by a CR 22 enemy who last adventure had cast geas/quest spells on us forcing us to do her bidding or waste away to nothing. So we went in, got the relic, turned it over to her to avoid the deadly geas/quest spell effects...and have now given a super-weapon to our greatest mortal enemy. I trust the DM enough that we'll eventually be given an opportunity in the future to undo the stuff we were forced into doing this adventure, but it still left a bad taste in everyone's mouth.
And it certainly didn't help that our dice hated us all night.
Oh well, tomorrow's a scheduled session in our other campaign. Hopefully that'll go better: the 20th-level PCs are about to return to Oerth in their brand new Gamma World powered armor and mechs. Won't the orc army attacking their home kingdom be surprised!
Johnathan
Making it worse: I found almost instantly a way to fetch the relic we'd been sent to fetch while bypassing combat altogether, but it would have brought the adventure to a screeching halt 90 minutes early...so, in the interests of having a fun time, we decided to just go ahead and fight the statues we were sure were going to animate and/or transform into the creatures they represented. Yeah, that was a mistake.
And worst of all: we had been maneuvered into this adventure in the first place by a CR 22 enemy who last adventure had cast geas/quest spells on us forcing us to do her bidding or waste away to nothing. So we went in, got the relic, turned it over to her to avoid the deadly geas/quest spell effects...and have now given a super-weapon to our greatest mortal enemy. I trust the DM enough that we'll eventually be given an opportunity in the future to undo the stuff we were forced into doing this adventure, but it still left a bad taste in everyone's mouth.
And it certainly didn't help that our dice hated us all night.
Oh well, tomorrow's a scheduled session in our other campaign. Hopefully that'll go better: the 20th-level PCs are about to return to Oerth in their brand new Gamma World powered armor and mechs. Won't the orc army attacking their home kingdom be surprised!
Johnathan
Last edited:
88th session of our campaign. 5 player characters at 14th level.
The player characters all arrived in Waterdeep via teleportation spell. Waterdeep has been conquered by frost giants secretly aided by the Zhentarim. Manshoon, the leader of the Zhentarim, has seized Blackstaff Tower, captured Vajra Safahr, and is attempting to attune with and control the Blackstaff.
Frost giants had staked out the characters' safe house, so when they teleported in they were immediately attacked by frost giants, winter wolves, yetis, and an abominable yeti. It wasn't much of a challenge but helped set the scene.
Once they disposed of the giants, the characters used the message spell to contact their allies in the city and determine next steps. It became clear that several of their allies are under threat by the Zhentarim. The players had to make the hard choice to aid their friends or focus on taking out Manshoon at Blackstaff Tower. They chose the latter.
Next episode: Assault on Blackstaff Tower!
The player characters all arrived in Waterdeep via teleportation spell. Waterdeep has been conquered by frost giants secretly aided by the Zhentarim. Manshoon, the leader of the Zhentarim, has seized Blackstaff Tower, captured Vajra Safahr, and is attempting to attune with and control the Blackstaff.
Frost giants had staked out the characters' safe house, so when they teleported in they were immediately attacked by frost giants, winter wolves, yetis, and an abominable yeti. It wasn't much of a challenge but helped set the scene.
Once they disposed of the giants, the characters used the message spell to contact their allies in the city and determine next steps. It became clear that several of their allies are under threat by the Zhentarim. The players had to make the hard choice to aid their friends or focus on taking out Manshoon at Blackstaff Tower. They chose the latter.
Next episode: Assault on Blackstaff Tower!
Have you checked out the Alexandrian Remix of Descent Into Avernus? It's not yet in Hell, but when it gets there I'm sure it'll have good advice for fixing that exact problem.
It went well.
I ran the Alchemist's Repose from Questing Beast mixed with Emerald Order from Kobold Press' Demon Cults & Secret Societies which I had setup on Roll20.
It's all set in Dolmenwood from Necrotic Gnome. I use 5e D&D.
Alchemist' Repose
necroticgnome.com
I ran the Alchemist's Repose from Questing Beast mixed with Emerald Order from Kobold Press' Demon Cults & Secret Societies which I had setup on Roll20.
It's all set in Dolmenwood from Necrotic Gnome. I use 5e D&D.
Alchemist' Repose
Dolmenwood
Necrotic Gnome's weird fairy tale campaign setting. Dolmenwood is a creepy forest on the edges of civilisation, steeped in occult energies, riddled with fungus, and haunted by fairies both wicked and kind. Dolmenwood is being developed as a set of three hardcover books — the Dolmenwood Player's...
necroticgnome.com
Blue
Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal
We hit into this from the player side. We had this ridiculously long "do X to get Y to give to Z to get A so we can go back to someone to get B." And at Z we realized our actions would be doing more harm than good. Hmm, in a non-spoilery way, giving something round to someone who was handy.
We talked about following up on another clue we had, and the DM was basically "that's a whole different quest line, you'll be losing the last several sessions of progress and this opportunity won't be here again if your attempt that".
In terms of adventure design, I really disliked that. No flexibility built in on long, very linear quest chains. Nothing different we could offer at any point, and since it was a sequence of trying to get something to go back to the original quest giver, we didn't have what they wanted and no way to get it if we didn't complete it.
Blue
Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal
FANTASTIC!
Last session was the first session: Session 0 of my new homebrew campaign. And I explicitly left lots of plot details that weren't of immediate/obvious importance in the first act as undefined to flesh out with the players. This is part of what I wrote:
"I'm going to be putting background details about your characters in your hands as much as you are comfortable.
For example, I have no pre-determined pantheon, so if you want to play a worshiper (cleric or otherwise), we can flesh out who you worship together. Want a compassionate god of the dead? Check. Unsure if you want a kind goddess of hearth, home and community or a strict taskmaster of civilization as your nemesis? We'll talk it out. Is the moon a comforting symbol of womenhood or the ever-watching eye of the shadowy god of secrets?
And this goes for more than that. Want a knightly order, a hermit mentor, a wizard academy, or a thievely guildmaster of street urchins right out of Dickens? We can work it out. "
So after the standard Session 0 stuff we start talking about characters. One person is planning on playing a halfling druid. And be busts out with:
"In some editions, druid worship nature gods, in others just a nebulous 'nature' - where do they get the power? You talk about the moon got me thinking. What if the moon is the skull of a decapitated god. And the continents are just parts of it's mangled body floating in the seas."
We had a lot going on, including people hitting on big things that would impact some of the stuff I'd written - but would work in very nicely, perhaps better than what I originally had.
In the end, everyone left inspired and with details of their character to work out, and I stayed up until Dark O'Clock in the morning writing up notes from the session so I don't drop any.
All in all a very successful session 0, and bodes well for the first play session of the campaign.
Last session was the first session: Session 0 of my new homebrew campaign. And I explicitly left lots of plot details that weren't of immediate/obvious importance in the first act as undefined to flesh out with the players. This is part of what I wrote:
"I'm going to be putting background details about your characters in your hands as much as you are comfortable.
For example, I have no pre-determined pantheon, so if you want to play a worshiper (cleric or otherwise), we can flesh out who you worship together. Want a compassionate god of the dead? Check. Unsure if you want a kind goddess of hearth, home and community or a strict taskmaster of civilization as your nemesis? We'll talk it out. Is the moon a comforting symbol of womenhood or the ever-watching eye of the shadowy god of secrets?
And this goes for more than that. Want a knightly order, a hermit mentor, a wizard academy, or a thievely guildmaster of street urchins right out of Dickens? We can work it out. "
So after the standard Session 0 stuff we start talking about characters. One person is planning on playing a halfling druid. And be busts out with:
"In some editions, druid worship nature gods, in others just a nebulous 'nature' - where do they get the power? You talk about the moon got me thinking. What if the moon is the skull of a decapitated god. And the continents are just parts of it's mangled body floating in the seas."
We had a lot going on, including people hitting on big things that would impact some of the stuff I'd written - but would work in very nicely, perhaps better than what I originally had.
In the end, everyone left inspired and with details of their character to work out, and I stayed up until Dark O'Clock in the morning writing up notes from the session so I don't drop any.
All in all a very successful session 0, and bodes well for the first play session of the campaign.
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