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Message: <blockquote data-quote="JamesonCourage" data-source="post: 6447179" data-attributes="member: 6668292">Sorry for the delay in the write-up, I've been life-ing pretty hard recently.Anyways, we had a short 4-hour session, and here's what we got in:[sblock]The party had just stumbled onto about ten drow (a priestess of Lolth and nine male followers with hand crossbows and scimitars), and I called for a skill challenge to deal with them (since the PCs had indicated that they wanted to talk rather than fight... probably a wise decision). I ran it as a 10/3 skill challenge, and the players had some problems trying to find ways to use their good skills... so they ended up rolling untrained skills a few times, as it made more sense. Anyway, here's about how it played out:The PCs basically only spoke with the priestess. They first convinced her to listen to them at all as part of the challenge, and then tried to get her to talk to them privately. She refused, but agreed to listen to them in front of her guards. The wilden Scout picked up that one of the guards kept eyeing the priestess, and his hand crossbow would twitch ever-so-slightly towards her every once in a while. He pointed it out to the priestess, who seemed amused by it. She revealed that his family had been fed to the vampires of Vecna that they were working with, and she asked the drow guard if he wanted to kill her. He said yes, and pointed his crossbow at her. She calmly held her arms up and told him to shoot, which he did without hesitation. The dwarven Fighter tried jumping in the way and blocking the bolt, but failed his skill check (the only failure of the skill challenge), and was hit by the bolt. He took some damage and some ongoing poison damage (though his dwarven racial against poison plus his Invulnerable Coat of Arnd artifact armor gave him +7 on the DC 10 check to get rid of the poison, and he saved pretty easily).The priestess called down a medium-sized spider (from a hidden illusory ceiling) which fell on the drow, biting him and then beginning to wrap him up. The next PC reversed the failure (with a use of an Advantage) and identified the poison, warning the priestess against it. The wilden Scout took the opportunity to transform into a similar spider (he's multi-class Druid) and speak with the spider (via a Wilderness Knack plus a feat that lets him substitute Nature for Insight when interacting with natural beasts, or something like that). He told it to keep an eye open for other threats, and it communicated that it was already doing so on behalf of its biological mother (a Nature check told the Scout that this wasn't normal spider behavior). When the Scout transformed back, the priestess seemed impressed with the ability to communicate with spiders and to masquerade as one, and the PCs laid out their plan to have her usurp the current priestess and take over the drow outpost. The priestess tried to convince the Warpriest of The Raven Queen to perform a quick ritual to blind his god to his activities for the extent of the mutiny, but he refused. One last successful check (a Bluff check by the Elementalist/Bard to convince the priestess that they were only interesting in profit and that they'd be willing to die for her, as shown by the dwarf taking the poison bolt for her), and the skill challenge ended.The priestess agreed to attempting to overthrow her superior, but she said it would be impossible as long as the priestess was allied with the vampires of Vecna. The vampire leader was located deeper into the caverns, and she asked the PCs to kill him and any patrols / witnesses they found along the way. If they returned back successful, then she would lead them to the drow outpost to overthrow the current high priestess. The PCs agreed, and they started deeper into the caverns with her directions (and a Moderate Dungeoneering check done by the Scout).It wasn't long before they ran across some familiar faces... their own. The PCs had been party-wiped by their twisted copies in the previous session, and they found them wandering down this rock hallway. There was three copies of the dwarven Fighter, one of the Scout, and one of the Elementalist. The fight was tough, but it was pretty decisive in favor of the PCs (who all felt good finishing off the bad guys who'd killed them once already). They were curious why / how the twisted copies had gotten inside this area and passed the drow, but since they didn't have any answers, they proceeded towards the vampire leader.The Scout could hear some footsteps up ahead, and it turned out it was a drow patrol. This fight also drained some resources, but after killing the drow leader extremely quickly (a critical hit helped with that) and weathering a round of drow darkness, they took out the minions fairly quickly and then focused down the two standard monsters. They looted the weapons, which were mostly magical (would fire poison bolts), but the Elementalist identified them as poisoning any user who wasn't a drow. They thought about destroying the weapons, but decided to pocket them (in the bag of holding) in case they needed to bribe some drow at some point or something.Another short rest, and they continued on. The hallway ended at a cave entrance, and the Scout could hear bats inside. He transformed into a medium-sized spider and switched into his Lurking Spider stance (to get a +5 when climbing), and made his way into the cave alone, crawling around the walls and keeping his (many) eyes open. Inside the three-chamber cave, he saw a couple dozen bats and a lot of dead bodies (mostly drow), but no vampires, so he returned to the group, transformed to his natural form, and reported. They decided to explore the cave as a group and check it for magic. While walking in, the Scout (now in his Soaring Hawk stance for +2 Perception, letting him hit a Hard Perception passively) noticed an illusory ceiling just before the cave entrance that he'd missed before (since he was in his Lurking Spider stance). Just as he warned the party, six vampires fell from the ceiling around the party.[/sblock]Unfortunately, we were out of time, so I called it there. I think the players will immediately attack instead of trying to pry information out first, but we'll see what they do when we play again in about a week and a half. Anyway, it was pretty fun, and I'm glad we're playing again <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /></blockquote>

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