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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Aegeri" data-source="post: 5493084" data-attributes="member: 78116">Dark Sun: The Builder's CrySaturday's game began with the party freshly leveled up to 4 and deciding what to do with their unconscious Jhakar. After some debate, one of the players had a great idea and decided to use the Jhakar to find where the Ssurran's were camped out. At this point this was nowhere in the "script" and I had intended to leave the stuff with the ssurrans - why they are chasing the PCs so vigorously and in such numbers - to much later in this module (towards the end). But this idea made me rethink that and in a risky move, I dropped a lot of my previous work to run with the PCs new idea.This always has its consequences - particularly in preparation but it is important to remember that you should go with your PCs ideas as much as possible (especially if they make sense). I also liked it because it lets me put the ssurran's out of the way and move to other monsters later on. The main problem of course was the PCs needed a logical way to deal with the Jhakar's uncanny senses. This ability basically means the Jhakar ignores concealment, which makes it a bit hard to hide from the beastie as he's running back home (this is a desert).After some rather appropriate for the setting - if morbid - discussion about wearing ssurran skins as a kind of impromptu disguise, the party chose to just use scent glands and clothing to mask their scent. Effectively they couldn't hide from creatures visually, but they could hide from the Jhakar's sense of smell. Mechanically I decided to represent this with a global effect, none of the Jhakar's with the uncanny sense trait would gain any benefit from it. So this meant the PCs could more easily use stealth to move past the Jhakar's without being noticed.This plan was pretty sound to me, because I had described quite a host of Ssurran's descending upon the caravan. As the caravan guards were winning the fight clearly and the Ssurrans were not yet fully routed or fleeing there was no threat to the caravan. This gave the party an ideal opportunity to get back to the far less defended ssurran camp (or whatever hidey hole they were in) to kill the one they knew was leading them (the skull covered shaman from a few sessions ago).The players initiated their plans and started to follow the Jhakar as it tracked toward the east and then south. It was following a subtle and safe route towards a mountainous region nearby to the caravan's path. After some checks for stealth, the party managed to avoid notice from a group of scouting ssurrans and moved into a very hilly region of dunes. These dunes were quite dangerous as numerous highly silty regions - dangerous to any creature unfamiliar with the terrain - littered the more solid sandy path. After the Jhakar disappeared over a large dune in the distance, the PCs found a very silty depression between two large dunes.Upon entering a ssurran dune stalker came over the ridge and encountered the PCs. The ssurran rapidly realized not all was right in the world and signaled a group of hidden Jhakar's and Kanks - placed within the silt in an ambush position. It's worth noting fluff wise - though during the game this wasn't clear to the PCs - that they had already passed several of these ambush positions. The scent from the dead ssurrans they smothered on themselves, ensured that the previous Jhakar's didn't even notice them pass as anything out of the ordinary.Unfortunately now they had been signaled by the ssurran sentry this wasn't going to be the case. Several Jhakar's - including the somewhat more vicious Jhakar trapjaw - plus a handful of kanks rose from within the silt to attack!<img src="http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v305/Aegeri/SentryMadness1.jpg" alt="" class="fr-fic fr-dii fr-draggable " data-size="" style="" /> The players first priority was eliminating the sentry before he could run off and raise the alarm. Hence the rapid movement of Ka'Cha and Eshara to intercept him.The PCs started immediately getting into combat with the sentry as a priority, leaving the other characters - plus bob the crodlu of course - to deal with the remaining Jhakar and Kanks. The sentry of course was rapidly screwed in this combat, as Eshara used lodestone lure to hold him adjacent while the monk pelted the crap out of him as well. Any chance of the PCs giving themselves away was removed easily on the first turn - reducing the drama of the combat a bit I felt. The assassin quickly dispatched a Jhakar in a single gory blow, which just goes to show how handy death attack is (otherwise the monster would have got a turn on 2 hp or so!).Once again though I can't help but comment on just how paranoid the Jhakar's seem to make PCs with their opportunistic chomp. Although only level 1 beasties, their numbers and the damage they can do with a solid chomp makes PCs very paranoid of ending their turn around them. Squishy characters especially have a lot to fear from the deadly jaws of the Jhakar. With CA a solid chomp can deal 20+ points of damage. The net effect is usually changing what the PC will do, where initiate in particular choose a more defensive action over pure blasting.Overall though the combat was handled well, but I actually did have a specific goal in mind as well in this encounter. Other than the potential drama of being discovered, I wanted to wear down the parties extra "member" bob a bit. Now bob has 3 surges and 55 hp (I gave him some extra surges so he could be useful in the odd combat). I count him - technically - as party equipment and while he has his own actions, I tend to ignore him when determining the XP value of an encounter. This is a whole crapload of HP though for the party and his pounce power is quite useful. This lets him move eight squares and attack twice is more than handy.Here my goal was actually to deliberately attack him and wear down his HP. This would make committing bob for the extra attacking power to future encounters a more difficult decision. Unfortunately for bob acid REALLY loves him and the spitting kanks reliably pelted him with it. Bob did get some beaky revenge a bit later on, but by the end of the combat bob ended on 0 surges and around 49 HP remaining. That's a bit for an emergency, but ultimately means he'll probably have to hang back (or risk terrible terrible death).<img src="http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v305/Aegeri/SentryMadness2.jpg" alt="" class="fr-fic fr-dii fr-draggable " data-size="" style="" /> Kanks and acid seemed to disagree with poor bob quite firmly. The crodlu was most unimpressed with his repeated acid dosing this encounter - losing most of his surges.The encounter was handled very easily in the end - though I did get a good chunk out of the new leader. At the same time important lessons were learned in how to present information. As I mentioned earlier on, the PCs didn't really notice the effect of their scent masking due to it being unclear what was happening while following. The ambushing creatures above seemed to be a bit deus ex machina like in mechanics (coming out of nowhere effectively). This made me think about how to present this sort of challenge to the PCs using a map, so it was more clear what exactly was happening as they travel. I mean athas is basically sand dunes, silt and rocks - a pretty miserable place. So conveying what the PCs actions have done to avoid encounters was something I didn't really do that well. I think the players felt that they had been a bit forced into an encounter (in some ways yes though - but I wanted to make things a bit dramatic!), when in reality they had actually entirely avoided one with their scent gland trick.For the next section of the campaign, I'll address this by using a map and breaking down encounters some more. So when the PCs get to certain places, they can more easily tell what is going on and what they are trying to avoid (or how what they're doing might avoid it). This will give some tangible visual feedback to the descriptions and help clarify what is happening. I am eager to see how this is received next week, because I have some pretty solid ideas how to make this fun and interesting. The side benefit is that it will make travel feel a bit more tangible as well by just having a local map.</blockquote>

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