I ran my first session of The Scouring of Gate Pass yesterday with the following party configuration: a fighter, a paladin, and a wizard...all human and built on 32 point buy and max starting money. The fighter and the paladin I actually created myself for the players who didn't have access to a PHB before the game. Two of the players were newbies, and one hadn't played since second edition.
The session started on an amusing note of the party going to the Poison Apple Pub and upon finding it locked they started discussing a wide array of options of what they should do to get in and after letting them be paralyzed with indecision for about 10 minutes of real time I suggested the radical course of action of knocking.
I decided to forgo Torrent's full page of boxed text monologuing and just had her quickly run down the bullet points of what she needed their help with. The ambush actually went pretty well for the party, since they had three fairly well armored warrior-types to soak up what the bounty hunters were dishing out. The fighter did go unconscious and the paladin took a bit of a beating too, but they were ultimately victorious.
After that, I had the party encounter the woman in the burning building scenerio, which they handled by having the fighter climb up to get the woman (as he hand the best Climb modifier) and then realized that the climb down would be a lot harder trying to carry the woman he threw down a sheet for the others (with the help of some of the onlookers) to catch her in, then the fighter fell climbing back down. The others were keeping the sheet ready under him just in case that happened, though, so no harm befell him.
Wanting to move things along, I went straight from there to Act 2. The encounter with "Rivereye" grated on me as it had a lot of one of my least favorite parts of DMing: NPCs talking to NPCs. Everyone wanted Torrent to do all the talking with "Rivereye" until they got suspicious of him and he tried to slip away while the the party was distracted arguing amongst themselves (as at this point the party was deciding that they didn't trust Torrent because something was obviously wrong and Rivereye wasn't detecting as Evil. They did end up capturing Rivereye and through some interrogation along with strong intimidation tactics by the fighter they discovered he was really Larion and got the lead to Shealis at Gabal's. After getting that lead the lantern archon stepped in and demanded Larion be released. The party and the archon argued briefly about it before the celestial gave the party a final warning and when the wizard attempted to continue the arguement she was dropped with a single ray of light. This prompted the rest of the party to immediately let Larion go and the two departed.
Torrent healed the wizard and the party found the real Rivereye. It was decided that the party should rest before going to Gabal's Academy and that's where we decided to end the session.
Overall it was a good session, despite me being a bit rusty at face to face DMing and not having as much time to prepare for the session as I would have liked. Because I ended up having to do a bunch of errands the morning of the game I ended up not having my "cheat sheets" ready and only had the battlemat for the ambush printed up and ready (not that the encounter at the depository really needed a battlemat anyway).
. Regardless, it should be a good time. I hope everyone else is having a great game so far too!![:]](http://www.enworld.org/forum/images/smilies/devious.png "Devious :]")
