Monday AAR- TPK #3

Just kidding. Close though.

Sister Brangwen (Mona) and Ruby (Ashli) met with an elf named Heian Galanadel (Victor) who had a map to an ancient elven citadel buried beneath a ruined temple.

For those of you playing the home game, I used the mini-megadungeon Dyson's Delve. I was a little behind in preparation because I had been setting things up on the campaign's Obsidian Portal site, blogging here and a bunch of other little projects.

John decided not to play for reasons I can only guess at, so Drisnir was absent from the party, back-storied out with a tale of a prostitute he'd fallen in love with and wanted to make an honest woman of. Em's character was absent and got no such story to explain why, which was odd because we knew she wasn't going to play for much longer. The party picked up a hireling named Lorenzo (which made me decide I need to keep a sheet of campaign appropriate names near me while I DM) to act as a torchbearer/porter on the expedition.

The expedition started off quite well. The party ran into no random encounters during their four days of travel north on the old Iron Trail and their were no planned ones. They had no trouble locating the old Temple of Epona that sat atop the dungeon complex. They quickly found the entrance to the crypt area. The goblin guards were no trouble for them, nor were their hobgoblin superiors. Ruby took them both out in a single round with her mad archery skillz. They made their way to the crypt area and made pretty short work of dispatching the zombie in the sarcophagus, except for Ruby fumbling a burning flask of oil and getting some minor burns.

Unfortunately the party then dithered a bit on which direction to go and got their first wandering monsters. Five firebeetles. The firebeetles won initiative and attacked the party, scoring rapid hits on the heretofore unhittable Heian. Heian dropped to unconsciousness, followed shortly by Sister Brangwen and then, despite her mad archery skillz, Ruby too. Only Lorenzo stayed standing to save the day. He took out the two remaining firebeetles with flaming oil. He then retreated to the Hobgoblin captain's room with the wounded, spiked the door and waited for Sister Brangwen to regain consciousness so she could start casting healing spells on herself and the others.

Tactically the party played better than they have in previous weeks, I think the channelizing effect of the dungeon setting helped immensely there. It sucks that a random encounter nearly took the party out (technically it did take the party out, Lorenzo is a hireling after all and was only fighting as a last resort to save his own hide). Mona forgot to level Sister Brangwen with regards to spells, which was a huge factor. I think she keeps forgetting that she isn't a fighter, despite the ecclesiastical name. Ruby owned the battle field with her archery, not so much with, one of Ashli's favorite tactics, flaming oil. Heian was not too bad, being lower level than the others made life a little more difficult, but I had given him xp=1/2(party avg. xp), which made him a level 2 fighter. That's an old house rule we had from the 2nd edition AD&D days when we had a new player join the game or an old PC died and was, for whatever reason, not resurrected.

Next Sunday John has assured me that he will be playing, maybe not with Drisnir, but playing anyway. Drisnir would be helpful being a level3 fighter, but John says he has lost interest in that character. Lee may make her first appearance in the campaign, but if she does we have to wait to start until after she gets out of church and makes it here, which sets us about two hours behind schedule and Victor often has to leave early; so I guess we'll see how that works out. If Lee plays, Em will probably want to play. Whether or not she plays her current character is unknown, but if she doesn't work on her character this week she won't be playing. I hate it when she tries to join the game at the last minute and holds everyone up while she rolls a new character and equips it.

I also created an NPC mage to join the party, because apparently no one wants to be stuck playing a first level magic-user, but the lack of spellcasters is not great for the party as a whole. I guess it'll be decided whether Gwendolyn the mage joins the party or not based on whether Lee wants to play a magic-user. I suspect she will want to play her half-orc fighter Eema. She made Eema back in October and we started to play a bit, but then that new campaign never even saw a real session of play because of work/school commitments.