Encounters Sessions 1-5 The Story So far

This post is to catch us up on the Encounters series of Dungeons & Dragons.  As a reminder, anyone can join us for a D&D session Wednesdays, 6pm-8pm at Morningstar Games on Montgomery Crossroads in Savannah, GA.  No preparation, experience, or knowledge required.  If you like, feel free to comment and we save a seat for you.  I'm usually there by 5pm or so setting up if you want to stop in early.

Name Summary so far:
Lady Anya Tamora, Ruler of Crystal Brook
Lord Carric, Ruler of the Sildaine Forest
Count Varis Sybar, Ruler of Sybar
Juliana, daughter of Carric
Orlando, son of Tamora

After volunteering to help Sybar, he sends you to visit with Tamora and Carric to talk to each.   Between the two you piece together the clues and decide to follow Juliana and Orlando to the Crystal Cave.  Lord Seldaine believe that the Crystal Cave is a crossing into the Feywild.  Once our party passes through the Crystal Cave (and its challenges) they come upon Juliana surrounded by frolicking leprechauns.  She seems confused and lost and also calls herself Caerwyn.

From Caerwyn's confused dialogue, and the leprechans' riddles you discern that Caerwyn also had a lover; his name was Porpherio.  Orlando/Porpherio ran off with some radiant super good looking women when he arrived here.  You are an island in the Feywild sea called Porpherio's garden.  Juliana/Caerwyn requests you take her to see an agent of the archfey.  Caerwyn is the daughter of the Green Lord, Oran (an archfey).  Porpherio was Caerwyn's husband.  They ruled the island together a long time ago and have since "slumbered" here.  A hag named Soryth, the Dream Queen, cast a spell to reawaken them, but were interrupted the Oran's agent Ragnar, and the Summer Queen's, Tiandra's, agent Uma.  Uma is also the adopted mother of Porpherio.  The came as they sensed the slumber of Caerwyn and Porpherio become disrupted.  The interruption caused a problem of its own.  Juliana and Orlando were there as prisoners but escaped during the interruption.

Your party also learned the hag, Soryth, is now staying in the Palace of Spires, which requires a magic key set.  The keys are leaves, one each of shamrock, mistletoe, oak and a rose.  The leprechauns give you a shamrock as you set out to talk to the archfey agents.

You could work with either, but each blames the other for the problems that occurred in interrupting Soryth's spell.  They want to prevent a civil war among them, and enlist you to do a little meddling in the others camp.  You decided to meddle for Ragnar and successfully recruit 2 unicorns in Uma's camp to come with Ragnar. 

And that is where we left off at the end of Session 5.  Session 6 occurred this Wednesday, 12/28/11, and since it is still fresh, I will post that separately shortly.  That will get us all caught up on the story and ready to look ahead to Session 7, the first Wednesday of the new year.  Hope to see you there!

Encounters Sessions Introduction

I've been DMing at Morningstar Games on Montgomery Crossroads for 6 weeks now.  For those that don't know, the makers of Dungeons and Dragons (Wizards of the Coast) has a series of games on Wednesday nights called the Encounters Series.  WotC provides a 13 week adventure broken into 13 encounters (one a week).  The encounters are streamlined and designed so that a new player can walk in and be able to play a game.  At the same time, experience players can do the same, or bring their own character.  All the rules are identical to a real game, its just the encounters are designed with time in mind.  Two hours, and your out.

Talking with the gang at Morningstar Games, we decided to exchange links and I would start commenting on the Encounters games. 

Now that the introductions are done, here's more on the story we are telling in this 13 week adventure.  It's titled "Beyond the Crystal Cave".  The back page was a fascinating history of the adventure.  This adventure was first published nearly 30 years ago in the UK.  Apparently that region of the world is not as fascinated by hack and slash as us American's and the original story rewarded players for avoiding conflict and using diplomacy.  From the same page, I also found a favorite quote on this page I shared with our players on Session 1, "The adventure is designed to be both amusing and irritating to players, though simply amusing to the Dungeon Master."  I love that.

From the DM perspective, this adventure was TOUGH to wrap my head around.  It got easier once I took this story one encounter at a time, but it is full of pairs of names all related to other pairs of names.  In trying to be brief I will summarize the story and names so far in Sessions 1-5.

Strange mists, winds, and creatures are now roaming the areas around the town of Crystalbrook.  The Crystalbrookers blame the fey (a reace of magic/natural creatures) in the nearby Sildaine Forest.  The fey, in turn, blame the Crystalbrookers for these problems and accuse them of practicing black magic.  This has been escalating for a year now. 

A final straw in this escalation causes the rulers of these two lands to attempt to come to resolution.  Lady Anya Tamora, ruler of Crystalbrook, finds her son Orlando missing.  On the same day, Lord Carric, ruler of the Sildaine Forest, finds his daughter Juliana missing.  They both suspect that their children may be lovers, but disagree on the specifics and intentions.  Count Varis Sybar, ruler of nearby Sybar, is called in to mediate and aid.  Varis searches for heroes to be his agents in this matter.  What do you know, several frequent Morningstar Games every Wednesday night at 6pm.who answered the call.

Session 5 Adventure notes

Played from 4pm to 10pm tonight.  Seemed like our players were challenged enough in the 2.5 encounters we finished.  Here is what happened.

Our characters found themselves still in the cave they cleared last session with the noises coming from the right cave and quite coming from the left.  They stood behind their decision to go left, but though they had discussed leaving Yelsha's summoned wolf to guard the right cave, they decided to take the wolf with them in their adventure.

Early Day 7: After several hours of traveling in the caverns at an incline and steadily decreasing temperature, the came to a wider cave area approximately 20' wide and 20' tall.  In the center of this area was a chasm they found to be 20' wide and 30' deep.  Upon closer inspection (with light) two fire bats flurried out of the dark chasm and harried our heroes.  While fighting the very hard to hit fire bats, more critters were heard deeper in the chasm.  They kept trying to climb out, and on occasion one would escape.  When they did they were discovered to be fire beetles, who frequently sprayed fire in a blast 3 hitting many of our heroes.  In all, there ended up being 4 fire beetles and the 2 difficult fire bats.  Yelsha (druid) and Abraxus (dragonborn) were knocked unconscious during the battle (Yelsha twice).  Fortunately, the party has 3 characters who can heal).

After dispatching the fire creatures, they had to face the challenge of crossing the chasm.   There happened to be a log on the far side of the chasm.  The party lowered Keira (elf rogue - striker) down the chasm with a rope (successfully) and then Kiera free climbed the other side of the chasm.  It took her 3 tries, but she succeeded with out harm.  After further discussion they decided to tie her rope to the log (Keira is awesome at knot tying) and the party was able to pull the log across the chasm.  They took turns crossing the log, and they all were acrobatic enough to cross without incident (less exciting,
I know).

As they traveled further in from there, the temperature continued to decrease and the gradient of uphill increased.  They finally reached a round room with 6 caves entrances to choose from (aside from the way they came in).  The tried pretty much every skill in the book on each cave to try and determine the correct path.  The ruled out 2 pretty quickly, found that 2 more probably contained more Kobolds, and were left with 2 suspects.  Keira stepped in one and determined the path was dangerous and the cave may collapse.  During their inspections they heard popping in cracking and the earth and felt rushed to make a decision so they went into the 4th cave from the left with a leap of faith.

Midday, Day 7: On that path, they come to an area where two shadow bats attack out of the darkness.  The air is quite cold and a breeze has begun to be noticed.  As they are fighting the two shadow bats, a baby dragon stumbles into the narrow tunnel at the opposite end.  It's look is more of curiosity than menace, until the dragon witnesses the destruction of a bat at our hero's hands.  Abraxus, tried to communicate with the dragon (both speaking draconic), but only got "Goo-goo, gaa-ga, poor batty" out of it.  Shava (cleric), wanted a pet and tried to calm the dragon down.  With some success the dragon did calm, (buying the party an extra round), before the dragon became enraged by player attacks.  Yelsha, used a turn to run under the dragons legs, granting a failed opportunity attack, but putting herself in flanking position.   First, Yelsha used her wolf companion as a harrier to give the party combat advantage.  When the dragon finally killed the wolf (with 2 sets of double claw attacks, and a left claw that could never seem to hit), Yelsha used a power that caused herself to grant combat advantage against the dragon for her nearby presence.  Shava's strategy at this point, now get this, was to jump on the dragon's back (clever), but then he proceeded to "hug" the dragon.   This is not a miss print.  I almost imagined him wearing bell bottoms and tie die.   "Make peace not war."  The dragon was not impressed, especially while all of Shava'a allies were hitting the dragon with arrows, lighting, halberds, and swords.

Ultimately, our heroes slayed the baby dragon.  During the aftermath, Shava mourned for the dragon while Yelsha explored her surroundings on the back side of the dragon carcass.  She found the entrance to a large cavern with a beam of light shining down on a large pile of silver treasure.  She could tell the breeze from this cavern was gentle, then calm, gentle, then calm.  Most importantly, she found a bag of 376 silver pieces with a sword laying next to it. After close inspection by the party, they determine that this is not only a Faelwyn's sword, but a +1 Lifedrinker Long Sword.  It has a value of 1000gp, but Faeilwn is offering 1200gp for its return.   The party lets Varis (Elf Ranger - Scout) carry the sword as he could use it to assist in their retreat or attempt to gain the treasure in the next room.  He may even be weary to give it back.

So what will our characters do?  Do they venture into the large cavern, that seems to be the cavern that Faelwyn fled from an Adult White Dragon, to gain even more treasure?  Or do they retreat back through the caves to back through the possibly collapsing hall of tunnels, and then have to recross the large chasm?  What was in the cave to the right at the beginning of the Session?  Do they return the sword to Faelwyn gaining 1200gp, and the experience of completed minor quest, or do they wield his family's heirloom in bloody battle to help complete their primary mission?

Stay tuned next time.  We hope to convene again January 2nd at noon but we have a few members to check their schedule before we verify.

Also, we are looking for 1 more player to join our party.  We are playing Dungeons and Dragons 4th Edition, but for our current portion of the story line we would probably ask any new players to play an existing character (Glyth, I believe).

As always, any feedback is welcome.  I would love to incorporate some in upcoming encounters/adventures.  We haven't really even cracked the surface of the overall story that started with King Hrothgar's summons to the Arena of Trials and the mission that he gave on its successful conclusion.

     Experience Points:
          Encounter 11 - Left Entrance (Chasm) - 900 XP
          Encounter 12 - Cave Level 2 (aMAZEing) - TBD upon successful exit
          Encounter 13 - The Final Approach - 1050 XP
     Total Experience: 1950 XP, by 7 players (1 NPC), 278 XP each player

I would expect several characters to level after an encounter or two next session, so bring level 3 characters with you just in case.

My wife ruined my map!

While I had my camera out, I decided to documents the two maps we have drawn for our campaign. 

My first is the arena that the first 11 encounters (or mini-encounters) occurred in.  I designed the map on 8.5" x 11" grid paper, and then my wife drew it onto the 1" grid paper (36" x lots of feet). Of course, to prove her artistic superiority, she also gave everything depth and shadow.  We did use some green Lego bricks to make the bushes pop and even a Lego tree from one of my youngest daughter's Lego kits.

Unfortunately, my wife ruined my second map, the Great Hall of Palancia Castle.   By ruined, I mean she did such a good job on the first map, that she wasn't ready to spend so much time on the second map and made me draw the map for my own hobby.  Sheesh!   I excelled in tracing straight lines on grid paper.  

I cut out some rectangles of card board to show dining tables in the Great Hall, an oval conference table in the King's War Room at the top right, and lots of couches in the Social Hall at the bottom.  The Brown diagonal lines are the slightly elevated stage that the dance competition occurred on from Session 2.

DnD Lego Miniature Fashion Show!

So as promised in an earlier post, here's Shava.  Shava is my brother's Elf Cleric, who has a mace, large shield, and currently chain mail armor.

The very session after his party bought some horses, including a warhorse, he brought this well-appointed steed with him.

 Here is the final fashion show.   My brother is planning on leveling Shava up to be able to wear Scale and then Plate armour.  He already has the "clothing" ready to go so he can quickly change into the appropriate armour.

Yes, my brother WILL stop the game to change his lego character's weapon or armour out to match the story.

Alas, poor D&D Dungeon Tiles!

Gotta love my players, but I owe them some extra torture next session.  I posted earlier how excited was to get an early Christmas present.  My wife even paid to express ship my new D&D Dungeon Tiles so I could have them for the game last session.   Would you believe my players found every encounter they possibly could, that did NOT use the tiles, and ended the session just before I got to use them?

So next session, I should definitely get to use them.  I think I am going to make them fight some extra dragons now, too.  Those promised dungeon pictures using the tiles are still coming, but now I have to wait for two more weeks before I can share them...

OOOooorrrr...I could just say <SPOILER ALERT> here and give you a preview of one of them.  Here it is. 

It's not exactly possible to design any dungeon you want, but it is pretty flexible.  Typically, I describe the features I want in my handmade DM guide and then start playing with tiles until I get something that fits.  In this case, I wanted a narrow, constricted path to enter, an open area, followed by another narrow, constricted path.  Sometimes the details grow as your tiles fit right, and in this case, I kept replacing some tiles to make it look more right.  Specifically, I like to get the black edges (impassible terrain) around the edges for more definition.  In one tile, I couldn't quite get the black edges to match (see the wide tile just before the bottom constricted path).

As my last steps, I photograph the dungeon and then import the picture into my DM guide and add monster notes on top of it.  I can't keep the tiles out and arranged indefinitely so the picture helps me rebuild it.  I stack all my tiles from largest to smallest, so I can roughly find the pieces I am looking for (and I can keep the tiles fairly compact for protected storage.

I can't wait to see how easy or hard this system is actually going to be.

Session 4 Adventure Notes

Our dubious characters ended the last session having defeated a group of humans at the encampment NW of Palancia.  They knew more guards were on the way.  I certainly did not disappoint them.   Three more guards appear from each opposing side of the map, each with an animal in toe (2 had hyenas, 1 had a guard drake).  After ending the lives of the animals and every human who might have some information, they searched the battlefields and picked up some useful contingent weapons such as a cross bow and a halberd (with reach).  They also found a crudely drawn and deteriorating map of the lands between Palancia and Hilliana.  They had to transcribe the map to their own work to preserver the information.  Basically, they can now tell that from the encampment NW of Palancia, to a cross road is a day's ride.  The can see that the path west at the crossroads leads to a cave in the side of a mountain range that seems to fit the description of where Faelwyn lost his sword and captured the hatchling frost dragon.  They also see that Hilliana is a days ride North of the crossroads, and seems to be surrounded by 3 other encampments. 

After their discoveries they headed back to grab their horses and wagons to bring them to the encampment they just cleared.  When they got there, a roving wolf pack encircled them.  A murmur of TPK occurred (from Varis's player as usual) but they again were successful, despite being knocked prone a few times.  They gathered their horses and wagons and headed back to the encampment. 

End of Day 4: Our adventurers arrive back at the encampment and start a long rest, which is promptly interrupted in the first hour by howling.  Varis is on first watch, and what is his solution?  Arouse all the adventurers, and yell, "Climb up the trees!"  So, of 7 characters, Shava fails to climb the tree and lands prone on his butt.  Abraxus (A large dragonborn) runs around going "what do I do, what do i do? as he is too heavy to climb a tree.  He ultimately darts into the covered wagon right before a large dire wolf mounted by a guard, and 2 gray wolves appear from the trail.  Our heroes target the rider first, mostly from the trees, and eventually drop him.  Abraxus blows his cover to run out and attack, but quickly finds him self surrounded, knocked prone, and then unconscious.  Shava, having stood up off his butt, at this point, uses his Healing Word, to revive Abraxus, but Abraxus is still surrounded and weak.  She cleverly uses her Bluff skill to play dead, and the wolves move on to another target.   The Dire Wolf is the last left, and begins to run away when the party sees fit to dispatch their foe like so much fertilizer.

Our heroes, finally get a chance for much needed rest and get spend a good bit of the night sleeping and recharging their powers and health.

Morning Day 5: Feeling well rested, and having reviewed their crudely drawn map, our heroes decide to at least go as far as the crossroads and decide what do from there.  Shockingly, they reach the crossroads without incident, and with a little daylight to spare.  They decide to east toward their quest for Faelwyn's sword despite trepidations as a how a party of their experience level will handle a dragon that must surely live there, and entrusting their lives to fate (just call me fate). 

Evening Day 5: They don't want to kill themselves traveling toward danger, so they rest along side the road again for the night.  The rest is uneventful, and they head out in the morning while it is still dark.

Late Day 6:  They see the mountains rise on their approach, and eventually an area that must be the cave on the map, and the start of their quest for Faelywn's sword.  They dismount and proceed cautiously on foot toward the opening.  They approach the final few feet cautiously, but then Shava runs out and trashes through the bushes discovered a goblin corpse.  He screams out to the party, "Guys, look at this."  At his symphony of noise induction, dozens of foot falls are heard coming from the cave.  Lines of Kobolds start pouring out of the caves from multiple entrances, some that were obscured by bushes as well.  Most surround Shava and few head toward the flank.  Jadis remains in the rear casting spells from across the small creek.  Yelsha can't see over a rock protrution so gracefully climb  onto the shoulders of the tall Abraxus and loses and arrow from that position.   Abraxus then abruptly drops Yelsha on her butt, and runs into battle to try and help Shava.  Keira also runs to Shava's aid, and Varis approaches but from a small distance and picks them off of Shava from relative safety.  Glyth works on the contingent coming from the flank with help from Jadis in the rear.  Shava takes a beating, but eventually the horde thins out and the Kobold's lose their nerve and begin to head back into the cave toward an opening on right rear of the cave.  Our heroes give chase and drop the last two kobolds, just before they disappear into the darkness of the entrance in the right side of the cave.  As the party is cleaning up, they hear disturbing noises from the cave the Kobold's were trying to escape through.  They decide to have Yelsha summon her wolf companion to guard that entrance while they explore the quieter path to the left of the cave.

And here is where we paused until Saturday, December 17th, at 4pm.  Our players will have to hold their breath to find out what might come from the right side cave, or to see if the quite path of the left cave leads to adventure...or misadventure.

Experience Points:
     Encounter 6.1 - NW Encampment Wave 2 - 825 XP
     Encounter 7 - Roving Wolf Pack - 750 XP
     Encounter 8 - Roving Wolf Pack 2 - 850 XP
     Encounter 9 - Cave Entrance - 600 XP

Total XP - 3025 divided by 7 characters (1 NPC, 6 PC) = 432 XP each

As always, I am looking for comments from players and non-player alike.  Players, help me fine tune the story that you played through, this is all from memory.  Non-Players, any where you think the story should go?  Is there a particular plot point that was lame or admirable?

Artistic versus Creative

Some would say I am not very creative, but I argue that I am just not very artistic.  The first challenge in naming this blog was AVAILABILITY.  So, I immediately came up with the acronym ROT for Random Organized Thoughts.   I do not think that the things in this blog are rot.  It literally took me 2 extra seconds to do this.  Not art involved, but I thought naming something out of nothing counts as creative.  After all, creating a D&D campaign is creative, but I lean on my wife and daughters to lend me a hand on the artistic part. 

Creatively I can pull together existing artwork to bring a world to life.  Such as reusing maps I already have to fit my world.  I love these dungeon tiles that are predawn with the right terrain and then I can fit them together. Heck, if the campaign story, though I hope it seems original in the end, is pulling from numerous places and blending them in a, I hope, unique way.  Thanks to Varis/Jadis/Glyth's player for pointing me in that direction to get started.

A quiz to see if we can start some comment posting.  Can you name the sources for any of these items that appear in my campaign?

A.)  "Thank you, but our princess is in another castle"
B.) King Hrothgar
C.) Palancia (this one is tough, the root word is from a source).

There's definitely some more blatant "borrowing" coming, but I don't want to spoil it yet.  See some of you Saturday, and look forward to the Campaign Notes shortly after!

My First Encounters DM Experience

DMing for someone else's campaign, for complete strangers, is/was a daunting experience.  Mind you, I enjoyed it immensely, but didn't feel like I was prepared enough.  Darn J-O-B getting in the way this week :)  Of course the J-O-B is what allows me to do this in the first place.

Next week I will try and get more details on the monsters ahead of time, that was the main challenge.  We had 7 players Wednesday, and I was teaching D&D to some, updating a few players, learning some new rules of the Feywild, and trying to figure out how to play some fairly complex low level monsters (poison darts, nets, and basic attacks, all with instant reactions to various PC actions, and this darn fog kept moving around the board - never had to role play weather before).

I did get some nifty game tokens out of it.  Nothing fancy, but some colored token to represent monsters that are color coded and numbered.  Should be handy for monsters in a pinch, instead of finding (if they exist) tokens with right faces drawn on them.

Can't wait until Saturday's "Thank you, but our princess is in another castle!"