D&D General How Was Your Last Session?

[el-remmen]

Fun! Lots of fighting and sneaking about.

The party is still in the swamp lair and after searching the quarters of the lieutenants they defeated, finding a bunch of potions, a magical great axe that the barbarian was psyched to find. But they also found a secret passage that they decided to explore that actually let them avoid a bunch of encounters and get down to to the lower level and get the drop on the high priest and some of his minions. I had this fight planned out like a minor set-piece and the opponent had the ability to control the water in the chamber, flooding it to hamper party movement and allow the amphisbaena in the pool beneath the altar free reign in the chamber. However, since the party popped out from the priest's escape tunnel unexpectedly, it was a little bit of an anti-climactic fight - but there were no complaints, the party appreciated their victory and even took care of the arriving reinforcements with well-placed stinking cloud spell.

The gnome's curiosity got the better of him, causing him to crawl into a partially collapsed chamber, where he got partially crushed by rubble and nearly stuck in a giant spider's web. Thankfully, the barbarian was able to toss a rope in and pull him out by brute force (though more rubble fell and did even more damage - I think that was the only damage the gnome took all session).

Oh and at one point they found a scroll of revivify and instead of joy the general response was "Oh great! Now we know the gloves are off."

They also freed some prisoners and agonized a bit over what to do with them. They finally directed the more martially-oriented prisoners to where they could find their confiscated gear and encouraged them to retrieve it, find a safe place for the others (including a rich merchant, a 10 year old boy whose little sister has already been fed to guard crocodiles, and a sickly teenager) and then return to help deal with the remaining threat.

In the meantime, the PCs did some (futile) searching for a big treasure room they heard about and went back up to the upper level to take out a troglodyte guard room. They tried to get the drop on these as well, but too many hissing whispers on one side of the door alerted the trogs so they reversed the ambush on the PCs. This time a well-placed entangle turned the tide and they made quick work of the trogs including a meatseeker.

We called the session there. Unfortunately, August is looking too busy for us to meet, so our next scheduled session is September 11th.

This is where the PCs (and one NPC ally) left off in terms of HPs/HD.

 

[The Green Hermit]

Pretty good but short. There are dangers with incorporating 1 PC into the main story too much even if all players agree to the idea in session 0. 1 player who was linked to the main story could not make it meaning when the rest of the party got to the point were advancing the story would be awkward with out him we called it for the night. If you are going to make a plot around a specific blood line of one of the PCs, probably make 2 of the players family members so you can progress even when one is absent.

Other then that we had a solid combat and a bit of exploration. I have a hard time tempting my PCs with magic gear. There was a shop selling magic items made from necromancy, such as unliving leather armor and an undead insect monster turned into an acid thrower, and the only one player showed any interest in any of it. I even had a remote control mummy you could transfer your own mind into, no body was interested.

My players would have been all over that!

 

[THEMNGMNT]

28th session of Dragon Heist/Deck of Many Things mashup. 6th level half-orc cavalier fighter, halfling swashbuckler rogue, and half-elf evoker wizard.

Two sessions ago, the wizard died in a pitched battle with the Waterdeep City Watch. The player characters cut down 12 city guards. A bad spot for the PCs and a low point in the campaign.

In this session, the PCs used an artifact called the Silver Chalice of Siamorphe to resurrect the wizard. The fighter's player narrated a really touching ritual. Then we cut to the wizard's dreamlike vision of death where he encountered his dead parents and they told him the secret reason for their murder: They were double agents working for the Blackstaff against the Arcane Brotherhood, but they were betrayed and murdered by an evil wizard and a rogue mind flayer. As life and consciousness returned, he now had new insights into his origin and a clear target for his revenge...

...and he gained a level of grave cleric, because we wanted his near-death experience to have a mechanical impact.

Meanwhile, the rogue's uncle underlined the hard truth that they were now the most wanted men in Waterdeep. They needed to find a way to clear their names, or frame someone else, or bring the dead back to life...or they'd be swinging from the end of a rope. The players had a lengthy discussion about numerous far fetched schemes and finally settled on this: They will break into the temple in the City of Dead where the City Watch they murdered are lying in state, steal the corpses, and then resurrect them.

So that's next session.

Can't wait.

 

[Ogre Mage]

It was the first session of a new campaign. We are playing The Curse of Strahd online. It was a bit disorganized as first sessions often are. But overall I thought it was a good start and am looking forward to the campaign. Town officials in Daggerford sent us out to hunt werewolves. We got lost in the mists and wound up in Ravenloft. Most of the session was spent trying to figure out where we were. There was no combat. We stumbled into Krezk and the guards would not let us in. The burgomaster in Krezk sent us out to find out what happened to their wine delivery. We were en route to the Wizard of the Wines when the session ended.

It is a pretty large party -- 7 players!

Wood Elf Circle of Spores Druid
Wood Elf Moon Druid
Human Grave Domain Cleric
Human Twilight Domain Cleric
Hill Dwarf Rune Knight Fighter
High Elf Swashbuckler Rogue
Tiefling Necromancer Wizard

 

[The Green Hermit]

Since the players high tailed it to Waterdeep after the dragon cultists "celebrated" Tiamat's Day of Vengeance by slaughtering all the guests at the inn and then ran off, I think I'm going to give them the option of staying with the original plan or morphing. I am going to have Leosin give them the choice of continuing on with their quest or getting the inn from Dragon Heist as their reward and possibly morphing into Dungeon of the Mad Mage. If they choose the latter, I am going to keep bringing the dragons up, so they have the option of going back at some point.

Any ideas for merging the two? I was thinking of having them possibly try to gain allies from the underdark, since dragons are a menance in the mines, too.

 

[Richards]

We talked our way out of an expected fight, then found a mind flayer willing to work with us in translating some old illithid texts if we'd take out some encroaching duergar he wanted slain but was prohibited by treaty from dealing with himself. In fighting the duergar we ended up also fighting a pair of ropers as well, but we managed to handle them all fairly easily. (We're 13th level at this point in the campaign.) And we found out the reason for our dwarven fighter's 5 Intelligence: he had a portion of his memories blocked off and in getting them restored (and his Intelligence boosted up to his apparently-original 12), we reactivated his inherent psionic powers.

And, last but certainly not least, my lizardfolk PC got the sorceress PC to admit (under a zone of truth spell, no less) that toads do not always burst into flame when you try to eat them and that the fact that her toad familiar did just that when I had tried eating him months ago had been an elaborate trick using a variant of the fire shield spell. I spent a good chunk of the time in the city eating a bag of toads now that I knew it was safe to do so, not letting the fact that I was wearing a hat of disguise to look like a dwarf (so as not to frighten the mostly human population of the city) preventing me from enjoying my snacks. From the looks I got, you'd think the sight of a dwarf chewing his way through a bag of toads was unusual or something, but then that's mammals for you....

Johnathan

 

[Richards]

In today's "Dreams of Erthe" campaign, we went through two short adventures.

The first one was really short and sweet, as it was basically just one big encounter. The PCs were in a new dukedom and had gone to the temple of the god of wealth to convert some of their money to the local currency. (Because otherwise they charge you 20% above and beyond the normal price for having to deal with "foreign currencies.") While there, in a temple that also serves as a bank, with all of their weapons in a holding area just outside the bank/temple proper, they were part of the group of innocent bystanders there when a band of five bandits decided this was a good time to rob the place. So the five unarmed 3rd-level PCs had to fight off five armed bandits - kind of an unfair fight, although of the whole group of combatants one bandit was slain and the other four captured alive without any casualties on the part of the PCs, so all worked out well. And there was even a reward, as these were notorious criminal wanted for a whole slew of previous crimes.

The second adventure was more on track with the overall campaign goal of freeing people who have been stuck in their dreams. The latest dream-prisoner was a dwarf in an Underdark city just beyond the one the dwarf priestess PC was born and raised in, so after visiting her parents they trekked on to the other city, while dealing with an ambush by a solitary, half-starved choker (an easy kill) and then an hour later another ambush by a band of troglodytes led by a cleric. Dealing with that took up most of the adventure, but when they got to the dreamer they got their butts handed to them big time: they were basically up against an advanced gorynych (three-headed dragon, using a Ghidorah figure from the Godzilla movies as a "miniature") and three of the PCs were slain in the first round. (Fortunately, as it was just a dream, all it did was kick the PCs out of the dream and wake them up.) They went in and tried again several times with the same results, so upon the advice of their moogle dreamwalker trainers, they left a dreamstone on the forehead of the dreaming dwarf and will come back for him much later in their adventuring careers, when they're better able to deal with a CR 24 threat. (The whole point of this exercise was just to point out that not all dreams are going to be able to be defeated immediately.) And then on the way back to the surface (involving another night's stay in the first Underdark city), they helped rescue a brand-new dream victim who had just gotten caught up in his dream the previous night. This was easier to handle, as in his dream he was being chased by a giant with a huge hand in place of his head.

The dwarf priestess also purchased a dire goat riding mount from her city before the group departed. She named him "Pyrite.'

Johnathan

 

[TheAlkaizer]

Session number five of our Starfinder campaign.

A technomancer, an operative, an envoy, a solarian and a biohacker.

Last session my group had infiltrated a high-class hotel on the planet Verces to steal some very exclusive club passes from members of the bands that would perform there. They need to get in there to spy on/intervene in a meeting between a scientist that stole some important research data and a unit of a terrorist organization known as Sandstorm Nine. They succeeded on obtaining four passes; they're missing one for the fifth member.

This session, they formulated plan, did some shopping. One of the members, having worked in shipyards in his background, applied for a stage technician job at the club, and this session he went through a short interview and got the job. Then, back at their hotel, they learned that a shadowy Sarcesian came and inquired about them. The hotel's owner did not divulge anything. But one of the team member, the Operative, recognized the individual from camera footage as his rival detective. He wondered why his rival was looking into his business and sent him a message through the infosphere to meet up in a public space.

They met. The Operative invited his rival to sit down but was refused. He asked his rival why he was looking for him. His rival refused to share information, but offered to trade. It seemed that they both had different goals/missions, but for the moment, were both looking for the same individual. The Operative refused to trade information.

To finish the session, the rival pulled a revolver out in the open and put it against the Operative's forehead. The rest of the team rushed to his aid, one of them even taking the car out on the plaza to "bump" the rival. I described how the car moved a few feets beyond where the rival stood, and after the vehicle stopped, they all saw the upper part of his body jutting from the hood. They all thought they had just killed the dude.

But then he turned around as if nothing at happened, pointed at each team member, identifying them "A shirren... a gnome... a maraquoi... a skittermander." And ended by saying "I've got all the information I've need" after which, being only an hologram, he disappeared.

My players were shocked to have been played like that!

 

[Richards]

So tonight, after the way to get to a vanished Underdark dwarven city was "unlocked" from our dwarven fighter's mind (where it had been psionically stored away), we used the dwarf's sudden knowledge to find a safe way to the vanished city of Brunniir. We'd spotted it in the distance before on the Plane of Shadow, but whereas last time we traveled through the Plane of Shadow to where Brunniir was, this time we traveled through the Underdark to where Brunniir used to be and then went through a planar gate directly into the middle of the city. It turns out it's much, much safer to do it that way, as there are hordes of incorporeal undead swarming around the outskirts of the city, trying to get in - and it's been that way for the past 500 years or so, when the dwarven city was first shunted out of the Material Plane.

So we ended up on a week-long trek through various Underdark passages, encountering a purple worm on day 2, an elder black pudding on day 5, and a swarm of undead (a caller in darkness, three dread wraiths, and two advanced shadows) who had been intrigued by the "leaking" of shadow energy in the vicinity of the planar gate that eventually took us to Brunniir on day 7. Of the three encounters, it was the last one that was the deadliest, as my lizardfolk PC (after surviving the psionic attack that would have zapped him straight from his normal 129 hp total to -1 hp), failed the Will save in the following round that forced him to automatically self-crit in a suicide attempt. So I raged (3 levels of barbarian) and attacked myself with my own magical battleaxe - and then the gnome cleric swooped in and killed the thing off in one round after I'd spent three rounds dropping it down from 71 hp to 15 hp all on my own while the other four PCs dealt with the lesser threats. (He's a little 3-foot-tall glory hound, that one! And that's after refusing to even try to turn the various undead until after he'd spent the first round seeing to his own personal safety with a death ward spell.)

And empowered magic missile spells are the way to go against incorporeal undead, as our human sorceress proved.

Johnathan

 

[Ogre Mage]

We continued on the road through the forest to the Wizard of the Wines. We encountered a group of four human travelers on the road with a wagon and a dead horse. The ground was covered with blood. They said wolves had attacked and killed their horse. As we passed around them, they transformed into werewolves and attacked! Two more werewolves came out from hiding and joined the attack. Our rune knight enlarged via giant's might and our moon druid turned into a bear. They engaged the enemy in melee. I opened with twilight sanctuary. The next round I cast moonbeam and began burning the werewolves with Selune's radiance. The second strike of the moonbeam forced one of the werewolves back into human form just as the rune knight's flaming weapon killed another. That seemed to rattle them and they began to retreat. We managed to kill two more as they fled, the other three escaped.

As we continued on the forest road, we encountered a man who claimed to be the seneschal of Count Strahd von Zarovich. He said the Count invited us to dinner at his castle and he could guarantee us safe passage if we came with him now. We were suspicious of the invitation and said we had a mission to complete for the Burgomaster of Krezk, perhaps we could visit the Count after we finished our current obligation. The seneschal said he would convey our message to Count Strahd and departed.