NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="gideonpepys" data-source="post: 6247941" data-attributes="member: 79141">Session 98a - Cruel Variant?A month ago we left team B in a perilous situation: in the clutches of Lorcan Kell. Our first session of the New Year began with a campaign recap, following which I drew a single building on the battle map and placed minis inside.  We rolled for initiative. Kell won and in his first move dropped Niniel and almost dropped Sevitar. The situation appeared hopeless and the players were resigned to losing their secondary characters. They knew how dangerous Kell was, because this had already happened once in our campaign: just after Digging for Lies we sent a team of level 7 cameo characters after Lorcan.  They discovered they had been double-crossed by one of their own number and were massacred.  (The scene even included an exploding mechanised carriage.  Funny that...) Anyway, not satisfied with pulling the same trick twice I decided to reverse the polarity of a time-honoured DMing tradition  -  that of withholding vital information from the PCs in order to bring about a dramatic encounter . Usually this is done to their detriment, but not this time: I told the group (after Kell's first round) that this 'cruel variant' would arise only if they failed to root out all of the moles in their strike force.  But they had discovered the lot when one of them asked Quentin Augst to identify them (a fact they reminded me of immediately).  That very same day they had discussed using the moles to feed Kell misinformation, but could not think of an easy way to do so (a fact I reminded them of in turn).  Also on that very same day one of the strike force officers had gone to Professor Ludo Marcione of Team B with a tip-off that would lead to the arrest of an old enemy (and another strike against Kell). What if, I asked, that officer had turned out to be one of the moles? After some thought, Malthusius' player (playing Sevitar right now, as Malthusius is missing) said that Malthusius would have taken the matter up with Dester Rathtine. Let's say you did, I responded.  And let's say that Rathtine, after some digging, discovered that the sting on Lepage was a set-up - that Kell had been boasting about how he would have his revenge on the RHC after all?  What would you do then? Call it off, said one player. No, said another.  We'd use the mole to trick Kell and set him up.That's what I thought you'd say, I replied:With that, I drew the surrounding buildings on to the map, placed Kell's retinue and carriage in the street, asked the players where they would like their Unit A characters to be hiding, and told them to roll initiative for them too.  Uru, having been told he could place himself anywhere on the map chose to position himself in the rafters just above Kell!  I added that Harkover Lee was somewhere close by, suppressing Kell's escape route with a dimension lock ritual (ably assisted by Leon and Will).The players were overjoyed. "Happy New Year!" I said.</blockquote>

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