HalfOrc HalfBiscuit said:
Rel, thank you very much for a highly entertaining storyhour, which you topped off with an excellent climax and a beautifully crafted epilogue.
Throughout, I have been impressed with your skill both as a DM and as a writer - I hope you do take up the storyhour "pen" once again for some future campaign.
Thank you (and the rest of you who have posted) for the compliments. I'm sure that my haitus from starting a new story hour will run for at least a couple more months or so unless my Eberron campaign comes to a crashing halt. But in the mean time I intend to finish writing up a couple more of the adventures I've done for my little girl and you can read about those in my Samantha the Red story hour. Samantha the Red is turning 4 in July and growing more sophistocated all the time, so making adventures for her is becoming more challenging and more fun. I also just recently introduced her to some new movies that are providing a lot of fuel for her adventuring fires, those being
Willow and
The Princess Bride. She loves em'.
I'm very glad to hear it ... Heroes should always get there rewards!
That first bit is something that I'm not sure came out in the Story Hour. The Dragon Hoard was so huge that there was no way that the PC's could haul it out when they departed to go fight Bale. They picked up most of the magic items including those that would prove most critical in the upcoming battle (notably the Necklace of Iron Body, the Figurine of the Hippogriff, the Belt of the Suevi, the Lucky Rabbits Foot and of course the Bloodstone Blade). But some of the bulkier magic items like the Floating Throne and the huge mounds of coins simply had to wait.
So Lazarius made a point of returning to he hoard to slowly bring out all the loot to share with the party members and others. As I recall, some of the copper was handed over to the Fodor Tribes to facilitate them getting trade going with the Empire as soon as possible. As a funny aside, they immediately paid over a goodly chunk of this to Tadius Silvanus in payment for some of the magic he had given them as "Emergency War Supplies" and he immediately paid it back to secure the land upon which he intended to start his academy.
Lazarius had been eyeing the Tower of Aquae Sulis, once owned by one of the Dragon's victims, since they first saw it. But Nacalius, one of the Glynden Council members had moved in and was setting himself up as the de facto Mayor of Aquae Sulis. Nacalius had been a pain in their collective ass since the very first night of the whole campaign and it gave Lazarius no small measure of enjoyment to buy the property from beneath him under threat of Lightning Bolt.
One final (probably) question: mechanically, what was it that caused the Bloodstome blade to finally hit stone and do its work when it did? A critical? Cumulative damage? Or ... umm ... dramatic licence?
Interestingly enough, Cathal actually rolled an inordinately large number of criticals agains Bale. At least three including that final blow. But that was not what triggered the magic of the Bloodstone Blade. Bale was getting a Fort save against it every time it struck and only had to roll above a 3 to make it. Since I roll in the open, the players waited with bated breath at each save and each time were disappointed. When it got down to Cathal's last critical I think that Bale made that save as well. BUT, I give out these "Fate Chips" that you can use to re-roll any d20 roll. The players usually kept these in reserve to save thier own characters and had already burned quite a few avoiding the Meteor Swarms and so forth during this encounter. But they also knew that one more Full Attack by Bale and Cathal and probably Marcus were going to be dead. So, they spent a Fate Chip to make Bale re-roll his save and I rolled a 2. Bale gets stoned.
This is one way in which I seem to get lucky over and over again. Rolling in the open is a blessing and a hazard because it provides a lot of tension but things can easily end in disaster. But somehow, some way, the players in my games (including my one-shot Game Day games) always seem to pull out that critical roll or cause an essential failure on a save that ends things in dramatic victory. It is fairly uncanny and probably accounts for a sizeable chunk of my reputation as a good (but Rat-Bastard) GM. If the dice fell just a bit differently then I would likely be regarded as a Killer GM.
