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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Whizbang Dustyboots" data-source="post: 3373961" data-attributes="member: 11760">My father, a decorated Vietnam War veteran, likes to quote 19th century Prussian soldier Helmuth von Moltke's line, "no plan survives first contact with the enemy."This has been very true for the Midwood campaign. This entire adventure was a result of two characters trying to screw the group out of loot that, realistically, they would have probably just handed over to Renraw anyway.In an effort to have the entire adventure not be sitting in the snow, waiting for non-existent bandits to show up, I decided to have a group of kobold adventurers from Green Mountain come by and recover the dead the Maidensbridge group had discovered inside the cairn in their first adventure.(The stuff the kobolds allude to were things I had planned for the background of the setting, but I had set things up as sort of a sandbox and intended to let the player characters set the course for the campaign. This adventure set that course, all right.)I figured I'd show the group -- which included several folks new to D&D -- that kobolds are both kind of wussy in general, but that not all of them will be. So I created three classed kobolds, Pick (cleric of Tiamat 3), Blacktooth (ranger 2), Wormy (rogue 2) and three level 1 warrior mooks. The group could mow down the mooks but the others would be a fun challenge for the full group, but a beatable one -- this was just supposed to be a little side trek, after all.So, naturally, the group fractures into multiple subgroups, one of the kobolds becomes a hostage, Bufer goes nuts and volunteers himself as a hostage, and then two characters take on a challenge meant for the whole group.Pick has the Trickery domain, and I decided to play her as smart as possible, as for the past few years, my wife has played a well-respected cleric and priest in various MMORPGs, and I wanted to impart some of that to Pick, and make her a real threat. So she uses her 2nd level domain spell, invisibility, blesses her group and then lays in with the fire-and-forget spiritual weapon, which was nastier than I realized.Even with me forgetting to remove Emus' summoned wolf after a single round, things ended up much bloodier than expected. Not everyone is alive by the time Renraw, Katadid and Tucker arrive.So much for plans. The consequences of Katadid's negotiation with Wormy help snowball Renraw's trick into something that eventually sends the campaign off in yet another direction in the next adventure ...</blockquote>

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