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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Scorponox" data-source="post: 5387713" data-attributes="member: 93144">Ok, as  Steel Dragons asked upthread, the Wood Beholder fight was tonight! And this one was a classic. On the way to Ft. Kaylea, they encountered two nasty huge centipedes, that took a pretty big chunk out of their spells and HP. But they ended up with two strands of centipede silk, which they found out from their procurer NPC (He's like a merchant that knows the value of many items, and helps them pick out what to get from the corpses of the monsters they's slain.) is pretty valuable to seamstresses. They rest for the night in the wilderness, and head out in the morning. As I planned already, they ran into a group of merchants, who were arguing about what they should do. The adventurers ask them, and they ask the adventurers to look over the little hill. They then see the Wood Beholder.They are nice adventurers, so they actually don't ask for any money, but instead decide to get rid of it for free. The merchants join them on top of the hill in anticipation.The party setup was Dwarf Cleric, Dwarf Fighter, Human Swashbuckler, and Human Sorceress.They ask if anyone there knows anything about the Wood Beholder. Since they decided to bring along Sara the gardener, I rewarded them by telling them all the attacks of this plant, saving the part about the fairies, which I figured would be very specialized knowledge. Since Sara was a gardener, she would most likely be pretty familiar with this type of plant. The Procurer also told them how valuable the flowers are, and mentioned the very rich like to have them on their party gowns.The Wood Beholder lumbered along the road, and the sorcerer casts invisible on the fighter. Sara then says she has heard these can see through invisibility. She was a commoner, and she would interpret it this way, when in reality, what the Wood Beholder really had was Tremorsense.The fighter moves towards the tree, and the Cleric loads his crossbow and shoots it, hitting the plant in the arm. Note: This is important in the development of the story, because it was the adventurers who fired first, despite the Wood Beholder not attacking them at all. The Wood Beholder screams a low-pitched scream that sounds like it echoes straight from the caverns of Hades, and lumbers a little bit more swiftly towards the party. Swashbuckler moves between the trees of the forest, trying to get close to the thing to avoid any ranged attacks, if it has any. Fighter then gives out a Dwarven war cry, and charges the Wood Beholder. But as he nears, the giant tree spews fourth its sleeping gas! (Readied action) The brave Dwarven fighter, still invisible, keels over and enters dreamland, hitting the forest floor with a clang.Note: There was some discussion on the interpretation of the rules for Sleep. They said they think the person is still standing when they get hit with sleep spells, but it made no sense to us, since we don't know anyone who sleeps standing up. So we houseruled in the falling down while asleep.The battle went on, with the Wood Beholder doing all it could to hold off the adventurers. It hit the well armored fighter with it's +10 atk arms several times, doing severe damage often. The poison needles, however, did not manage to pierce the armor of many of the adventurers, but still managed to poison the Sorceress twice. She also managed to avoid the silencing gas, just staying out of range and summoning fourth an army of badgers that helped the adventurers fight the Wood Ticks the Wood Beholder constantly spit out. The Swashbuckler found himself entangled in the vines a few times, surrounded by Wood Ticks, but managed to break out at one point and head towards the Cleric, standing at a distance. The Cleric was able to restore his HP, which was down to less than 1/4 at one point. The Cleric also cast this one spell on the Fighter that allowed him to share damage with the Fighter, so when the Wood Beholder's massive arms beat the Fighter like a red-headed stepchild, the Cleric was able to soften the blows. At one point in the fight, I thought maybe the players were getting a bit tired of the fight, so I made the Wood Beholder retreat off the road and into the forest when its HP was down to 40%. They could've let it go at this point, as it was off the road and out of the caravan's hair. But nope, then continued to follow it into the forest, doing all they could to hack this thing down. The Dwarven Fighter, with his waraxe, did a lot of damage, as his axe gave him a +1 bonus to damage against plants.The Wood Beholder was looking the worse for wear, and the crowd started cheering them on. (I gave them a +1 bonus to atk rolls for morale. <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=":)" /> )They finally managed to kill it, and with a great thud, the monster fell to the ground. The crowd of merchants and the NPCs travelling with them erupted in cheers and whoops!As they tried to finish off the Wood Ticks, the crowd started moving towards the downed Wood Beholder, and they heard people arguing in the crowd. Their NPC friends moved ahead of them and blocked them. They said "Some of them said they wanted to grab the flowers!" Which the crowd argued about and started claiming innocence and pointing fingers. Some said they had just never seen one of these monsters up close before and wanted to get a peak. Others wanted to admire the beautiful flowers found on the Wood Beholder. They started asking if they could buy the flowers, in which the adventurers said they are not selling them.The merchants were also pretty thankful that they got rid of the Wood Beholder, and gave them 30 crossbow bolts, 20 arrows (which they asked for) and 200 gold pieces.After the commotion was over, the merchants packed up and said they'll probably see them in Fort Kaylea. The Cleric said, since everyone is travelling in the same direction, why not travel together? The merchants agreed, and they reached the rest stop called Ravenstead, where they checked into the tavern.The rest of the story, next week!</blockquote>

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