D&D General How Was Your Last Session?

[THEMNGMNT]

41st session of Monte Cook's 3E Banewarrens campaign run with Shadow of the Demon Lord on Owlbear Rodeo. Another short session, which seems to be common with us during the Holidays.

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 murdered wife was has returned as undead and now he seeks to stop her.

The characters have reached Map 2 of the Inner Vaults. In my version of this adventure, it's a cave complex filled with devolved, degenerated descendants of the Lost Clan of dwarves which built the Banewarrens.

They found themselves standing on a rough stone ledge overlooking a large natural cavern cloaked in darkness. There was a new knotted rope descending from the ledge to the cavern floor -- a sign that someone came before them. Likely the rival adventuring party sent by House Vladaam. They descended the rope.

The floor of the cavern was filled with stalagmites which turned this place into a disorienting maze. After several minutes of travel, they came across the corpses of several troglodyte-like banebrutes -- the devolved dwarves mentioned above. They had been killed with sword and spell. Again, signs of Vladaam's adventurers.

Eventually, they reached the far side of the cavern. A wide staircase ascended from the floor to the next section of the dungeon. Here, they were ambushed by banebrutes. Eight of them were on the stairs. And an uncounted number were hiding in the stalagmites behind the characters. The banebrutes to the rear began to pelt the characters with rocks, herding them toward the stairs.

This should have been a relatively simple fight against a horde of mooks, but the elf wizard got cut off from the rest of the party and was felled by hurled rocks. Miraculously, he rolled high on the Shadow of the Demon Lord equivalent to the death saving throw and returned to consciousness with one point of Health. He hurried up the stairs to join his allies.

The session ended as the characters exited the cavern.

Next session: The adventurers of House Vladaam!

 

[Richards]

In today's "Dreams of Erthe" session, the PCs:

• Were notified in the Dreamlands that the notorious thief "The Fox" (whom the PCs have assumed is a young noblewoman, Lady Arabella Vulpina) is being chased by an assassin devil and needs their help in setting an ambush to kill her
• Were attacked in the marshlands by a group of five eblis
• Rescued a six-year-old boy who had been trapped in his dreams for three and a half weeks (I had the players perform their PCs' actions in real time via a vigorous game of "the floor is lava")
• Set up the ambush of the assassin devil in a temple of Clem, God of Fishing
• Slew not only the assassin devil, but the evil wizard (and his imp familiar) who had set the devil on the Fox, after she stole a magic item he'd been working on that would have opened a permanent planar gate to the Nine Hells
• Got rewarded by Lady Arabella Vulpina (yep, she's the Fox after all - although they hadn't suspected she was also a dreamwalker like them) and set up a system by which they can communicate with her over long distances

Johnathan

 

[THEMNGMNT]

This is a recap of sessions 42, 43, and 44 of my Neverwinter campaign. Apparently I forgot to recap those! We haven't played much in the last 3 months of the year as I've had a lot of real life conflicts.

Three 8th level characters: half-orc vengeance paladin, human genie warlock, drow evoker wizard. At the end of session 44 the characters earned 9th level.

All three sessions were part of an extended heist action sequence as the characters infiltrated Griffonwing Spire. (I used the Feathergale Spire map from Princes of the Apocalypse.) Griffongwing Courier is an organization of my invention that is basically the Pony Express of the North.

Previously, the characters had come into conflict with a mindflayer and his drow minions. They were attempting breed an Elder Brain that could telepathically control the citizens of Neverwinter. The characters have discovered that there are allied mindflayers in Luskan and Waterdeep attempting to breed their own Elder Brains.

The characters learned that the mindflayer from Waterdeep has sent a shipment of magic items to Neverwinter via Griffonwing Courier. The couriers have no idea what they're hauling or for whom -- think of them as armored car guards. The characters want that magic for themselves.

The first session consisted of the players planning and commencing the heist. If you've ever been part of one of these sessions you know how they go. The paladin posed as a customer with a set of unreasonable demands to get the couriers discombobulated and disorganized. The warlock turned invisible and snuck in behind him. The wizard provided overwatch from outside. It didn't take long before the warlock had been sniffed out by a baby displacer beast and the guards were on high alert. Shennanigans ensued.

The second session commenced when three drow arrived at the spire, the intended recipients of the shipment. They were under an illusion, posing as wealthy high elves. A drider attacked the wizard. The wizard used polymorph to turn it into a rat. Then he tried and failed for the next four turns to kill the 1 hit point rat due to a series of truly awful rolls. When he finally boot stomped the rat it was deeply satisfying. Meanwhile, the warlock had freed a griffon from the stables, mounted it, and flew onto the roof. The paladin had forced his way onto the roof and jumped onto the warlock's griffon. By now, the couriers from Waterdeep were in plain sight -- three riders mounted on three griffons -- and approaching the spire. That's when the dragon arrived.

The third session was a three way aerial dogfight. The black dragon was the wild card. No one knew why it was there, but they knew what it wanted -- the magic treasure. Its first acid breath attack dissolved one of the griffons. In the second round it used bite/claw/claw to rip through a second griffon. In the third round it was yanking the saddle bags off the dead griffon and readying to fly off with the magical treasure. But the third griffon and its rider harried the dragon. The warlock and paladin had closed in, too. The paladin smited with a spear of dragon slaying. The dragon was bloodied. Around this time the mindflayer arrived, mounted on a mooncalf, which grappled the dragon. (I used the stats of a death kiss beholder, which gave the tentacly, bloodsucking feel I wanted.) The warlock failed a saving throw from the mindflayer and began attacking the paladin. Everyone on every side was close to zero hit points and it came down to who was going to hit first.

The paladin pulled out his potion of gaseous form, drank it, then used a bonus action to misty step right in front of the mindflayer's mouth. I could see where this was going...and I let him have it. The mindflayer inhaled the paladin. In the following turn, the paladin returned to his regular form -- and exploded the mindflayer from the inside. Was that a rules exploit? I don't know. Probably. But now that player has a story he'll be talking about for the rest of his life. Plus the characters had tangled multiple times with the mindflayer and it felt like now was the right time to close this chapter of our story.

The dragon shredded the warlock's griffon. She tumbled to the ground. On her turn, she activated her genie-lock flight ability, then blasted the dragon out of the sky with two hits from eldritch blast.

Epic finale to a very satisfying arc.

Next session: Loot harder!

EDIT: Actually, I did recap sessions 42 and 43. Huh. Well, I guess this is the recap of the recap.

 

[THEMNGMNT]

42nd 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 murdered wife was has returned as undead and now he seeks to stop her.

The characters are deep in the Banewarrens. They are tracking a group of rival adventurers working for House Vladaam. The rivals have the Last Axe of the Lost Clan, a dwarven artifact that the dwarf warrior wants for himself.

In this session, the charactes navigated the length of Map 2 of the Inner Vaults. They traversed a cavernous chamber that suppressed all magic. They passed a few Vault Doors holding banes, which they have learned not to tamper with. And finally they arrived at a massive ascending staircase -- sort of like a reverse version of the Bridge at Khazad-Dum sequence from Fellowship of the Ring.

Previously, the dwarf had a mystic vision of this location. At the top of the staircase were the adventuring rivals. Their leader, Gwar Nightstone, possessed the axe. (Well, it's actually an axehammer, because that's metal AF.) The axehammer gives him control over the degenerated dwarven troglodytes that inhabit this section of the Banewarrens. As they characters raced up the stairs, they could see dwarven trogs swarming up the side of the stairs from the cavern below. It was an epic moment.

The elf wizard gets a lot of mileage out of the Fetch spell. He used it to swipe the axe from Gwar, then give the axe to the dwarf warrior. I hate that spell! Spoiler alert: The rivals are going to use it on the characters next session!

The rival clockwork (basically a warforged) descended the stairs to block the characters. He was surrounded and destroyed by the goblin oracle, human paladin, and changeling rogue.

The dwarf warrior then used the magic of the axehammer to leap 60 feet right into the midst of the rivals. He came down hard, his impact knocking everyone back, damaging them all, and killing one outright.

We paused there. The players are feeling pretty awesome. It won't last.

Next session: Counterattack!

 

[Richards]

In today's "Dreams of Erthe" campaign session I ran them through an adventure called "Dead Man's Party." The PCs arrived in the small town of Billingsway to awaken another dreamer - this one dreaming of being taken away by four evil clowns and three evil harlequins to be eaten - and found the village square being decorated and set up for a celebration of the life of a local wizard who had just died. The PCs entered the dream, defeated the creepy clowns and harlequins (thereby awakening the dreamer), and then while they were in town they swung by the party. It was hosted by the dead wizard's apprentice, who presented his master in a glass-topped coffin on a podium at the front of the gathering, explaining the wizard, Seamus Volossio, had suffered in life with a crippling shyness that had prevented him from engaging in partygoing and decided to have a party in his honor once he'd passed away. Being intrigued by automatons, he had crafted beer barrel and ale barrel golems to provide free drinks at his "wake," and his apprentice hired the serving girls from the town's two taverns so everyone could attend.

Of course, my players, being the suspicious buggers that they are, decided - all but one - that they weren't going to imbibe any of the free beer and ale being handed out, fearing this was some sort of nefarious plot. (The half-orc cleric/paladin was the only one to drink with the villagers, which made him a very popular guy and earned him the nicknames "Beastman" and "Chugger.")

But of course, my players were right to be suspicious, for all was not what it seemed. There was nothing wrong with the beer or ale - it was perfectly fine and perfectly safe - but after several hours of revelry, with the full moon high in the night sky, the apprentice gave the signal and the attack began. Four of the tavern girls had been wearing necklaces that they hadn't realized had an erinyes embedded within, and at the signal they swapped places with the girls wearing the necklaces: the girls were now in an extradimensional space while the erinyes had full reign. They - and the beer barrel and ale barrel golems - all started attacking and killing the drunken villagers, because the first night of the full moon after his death was the only time to perform the ritual that would transform Volossio into a necropolitan - if enough sacrifices were made. (He was an 11th-level wizard in life, so he needed 110 HD of sacrifices, among the roughly 200-250 people attending the "dead man's party.")

The PCs started off by attacking the erinyes, but eventually they realized they needed to stop the golems as well. The spellsword almost immediately killed the apprentice, and the elven sorcerer ran afoul of a tent he was sure held some sort of mechanical body for Volossio's spirit to inhabit (nope, it was a mimic, there to keep the villagers inside the "kill zone" - which he found out the hard way). This was a difficult fight, for while the PCs were concentrating on taking down the erinyes and the golems, they were mostly content with slaying as many villagers as possible to get the sacrifice total high enough to resurrect Volossio in an eternal undead body; let's just say the body count got pretty high before the PCs managed to turn things around. In any case, they took care of the attackers, prevented Volossio's transformation, and then checked out his keep at the edge of the village to make sure it didn't have any other surprises on hand. There they took out a chain golem, electrical iron cobra, dread guard, plus some animated zombies and skeletons and two boneless (it turned out Volossio liked creating undead creatures as well as constructs), and cleaned out his spellbooks and personal treasure.

Then it was on to the next town and the next dreamer, a dwarven mining town called Flamecleft four days away. But the Billingsway morticians and gravediggers are going to busy for quite a while....

Johnathan

 

[THEMNGMNT]

43rd and 44th sessions of my Dragon Heist/Deck of Many Things mashup. Half-orc cavalier fighter, halfling swashbuckler rogue, and half-elf evoker wizard/grave cleric. At the end of these sessions, everyone reached Level 9.

I'll keep this short as these episodes were played in November and December and I never got around to recapping them. The characters had stepped through a portal in Waterdeep that left them stranded in the arctic wasteland of the Sea of Moving Ice. They found a ship locked in the ice pack that had been there for 50 years. The crew was dead. Most succumbed to the environment, the rest picked off by a white dragon.

The captain of this ship was the grandfather of the wizard. The wizard recovered his staff of fire.

That's when the white dragon showed up.

The wizard conducted a ritual to reopen the portal to Waterdeep while the other two held off the white dragon.

And, yeah, they did it.

Next session: Return to Grimshackle!

 

[Imaculata]

Just started a brand new 5e pirate campaign, which opened with a bar brawl.

During the chaos the party was introduced to one another. I play Ramirez Fereyra, a human ranger who likes to spin tall tales of his heroic adventures, and who has a senile pet crocodile called Capitan that wears a captain's hat. Then we have Nobu, a half orc samurai who is quiet but intimidating, with a huge blade at his side. Pete, a scrawney half elf wizard. Daisy, a sneaky halfling druid who is curious to a fault. And lastly Carion, a stern untrustworthy half elf warlock, who seems to be hearing voices in his head.

Our chaotic party is on a quest to recover 3 mysterious black boxes, which seem to drive their owners mad. We found the first one quick enough. The next is in a colder climate, and another is underwater, in a shipwreck. Our employer is the mysterious captain Fell, who employed us after witnessing the bar brawl. Cpt Fell is clearly hiding the purpose of the boxes from us, but he pays well, so we didn't ask further questions.

 

[THEMNGMNT]

43rd session of Monte Cook's 3E Banewarrens campaign run with Shadow of the Demon Lord on Owlbear Rodeo. Five player characters. They dinged Level 8 at the end of this session.

• 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 murdered wife was has returned as undead and now he seeks to stop her.

The characters are deep in the Banewarrens, mid-fight with a group of rival adventurers working for House Vladaam. They are fighting over the Axehammer of the Lost Clan, a dwarven artifact. The battle is on a giant staircase similar to the Bridge at Khazad-Dum sequence from Fellowship of the Ring. The devolved dwarves of the Lost Clan are climbing up the staircase to rip apart the enemies of the Axehammer's wielder. Fortunately, the dwarf warrior had the Axehammer. Unfortunately, it didn't last long.

In the last session, the players killed two of the rivals. This session started with the three remaining rivals striking back. Glitterdeath, the evil pixie, used a spell called Fetch to steal the Axehammer from the dwarf warrior. Gwar, the dwarven leader of the rivals, grabbed the Axehammer and commanded the devolved dwarves to attack the characters. He then used the magic of the Axehammer to shatter the staircase. It began to crumble beneath the characters' feet. Skeemo, the gnome alchemist, healed up the rivals and then transformed himself into a hulking monstrosity.

Over the next several rounds, the paladin, rogue, and goblin oracle were swarmed by devolved dwarves, fighting their way up the staircase as it disintegrated beneath their feet. The elf wizard teleported here and there, summoning a sprite that put Glitterdeath to sleep with its enchanted arrows. The dwarf warrior went toe to toe with Gwar -- and lost. The elf wizard unleashed a blast of arcane lightning that fried Gwar. Skeemo, the sole survivor, surrendered.

Pretty good fight.

We have about 10 sessions left in this campaign. The end is nigh!

Next session: The Baneheart!

 

[Richards]

In Wednesday's "Ghourmand Vale" session we were tasked with retrieving the stolen statue of a frost barbarian...which turned out to be a living frost barbarian turned to stone as a way to be smuggled into position. We were to teleport into the hold of the pirate ship onto which he'd been taken, along with a unsavory-looking rogue who knew how the crate he was in was marked. However, when we teleported into the ship's hold it was empty, the ship was canted at an angle and had been run aground with a hole in its hull. We fought off a band of five skum that were taking the last of the cargo off the ship, then after we dealt with them we trailed the others who had made away with the ship's cargo. We ended up in a cave in a grotto between two cliffs, fighting off more skum and then a scrag who wandered by. But after dealing with all of them and searching through the stolen merchandise, we found not one frost barbarian statue but two: one was a guy and one was a girl. Just to be sure, we took both of them, but only after wresting the means of teleportation away from the untrusty rogue and "piloting" it back home ourselves. We turned over the statues, got paid, and then refused to cut the crooked guardsman running that part of town in to a part of our earnings. (We have a paladin in our party: did he really think asking a paladin for a bribe was a good idea?)

Johnathan

 

[Vael]

So ... I ran my Session 0 for Light of Xaryxis ... and ... my Session 0s need work. Or at least, I need to manage my own expectations. Or maybe my players are just too used to building characters as an individual exercise.

I went in, figuring ... here's where I can let the Players collaborate, do some shared world-building and such.

This shouldn't be too spoilery, but the adventure begins on any world, it gets threatened by an out of this world threat. PCs begin at 5th level, so I told them, they can choose the world and how they know each other, mentioned my planned house-rules (not doing the usual strict initiative and trying out the OneDnD playtest rules around Inspiration). And after a brief nixing on Dark Sun, Dragonlance was settled on, there was some discussion on general classes and concepts and then everyone kinda dispersed.

So, I dunno. I thought I'd get more discussion, more engagement, but that didn't happen. It didn't help that there was a very phased in arrival, it's an online game and I really miss playing DnD in person, but yeah, is this kinda how session 0s are?