DM Chronicles, Session 2: When Cool meets Satisfaction, (Part 1)

Previously in Phil’s game:

The PCs got their asses handed to them by an overwhelming encounter with a group of Yugoloths in an Elven temple. Invited to leave rapidly because of threats of open rebellion and slashed tires, the fiends disappeared in the Ptolus night. Battered and bitter, the PCs meet with Ptolus’ elven leadership to plan their next move…

Last night’s game was much better than the one before. The players and I had a lot of fun. They got to be Grade ‘A’ Badasses and I got to meet the objectives of my 1st DMing challenge. (A tendency for run-on sentences and a deluge of links, welcome to my blog!)

Preamble: New guy joins crew

The 5th player showed up this week:

Cruger: 7th level Hellbred (Fiendish Codex II) Crusader (Book of Nine Swords). Played by Eric. Modeled on the semi fiendish Prince of Persia character from the game. Think dark, tortured Paladin.

Aside: All players but Cixi (The Iron Hero archer) are Neutral Good. Cixi has no alignment and that’s a story for another time. Still, I have never seen an all good party in my 24 years of DMing. It’s going to bring a fresh perspective to the game.

Session 2: When Cool meets Satisfaction or ‘it pays to listen to your own advice for once!’

Scene 1 Planning the Payback!
The scene met it’s objective. The players role-played a bit and planned. I had an NPC from the last session show up, saying he had followed the fiends to a Ratmen hideout in the sewers. He drew a map to get there. I dropped not so subtle hints that the NPC, who was supposedly a somewhat inept Fighter’s guild recruit, seemed more than he was. The Elven leader proposed to finance a raid of the hideout to wipe the fiends once and for all. Sweet revenge!

I also had my first of many Freudian slips and referred to the NPC as ‘The Rogue’ early in the encounter. Ahhhh man, I really gotta either a) Ease up on the beer or b) Give names to all NPCs so I refer to them as such and not as what they are on my gaming notes.

Aside the second: I do this a LOT. So much so that I think my players more or less expect this from me. I can’t keep a secret or a monster’s name for myself for more than 5 minutes.

Then I gave the PCs the money to buy the gear for the mission and the players seemed to enjoy choosing clerical magical items they thought they would need for the mission. Everybody was now ready for some serious sewer crawling.

Scene 2: He’s a f’ing genius!

Shortly after having entered the Sewers, the PCs come to a group of severely wounded (and one dead) Rat Hunters. These civil-servants-turned-bounty-hunters, disguised as ratmen, had just been pulverized by a walking piece of Quartz (a Crystaline Troll, from the Monster Manual III, can only be killed by Sonic attacks). During the fighting, the monster broke through the Sewer tunnel’s walls, falling into a chasm and taking a female Rat Hunter with itself. Halvar, the remaining conscious Hunter implored the PCs to save his girl or at the very least recover her body. He promised them his whole Rat Hunter gear as well as his colleagues’ rat disguises if they recovered Tersa.

Followed a well orchestrated climb down into a Mushroom Cavern. There they found an uncouncious Tersa, whose wounds seemed tended to. They also met with the Troll. After a few tense minutes (and the obligatory Cylo… errr Evil detector, the thing wasn’t evil) the player’s pieced together what happened. When the Troll attempted to ‘smile’ the tension went out.

Aside the third: I played the Chaotic Neutral Troll wayyyyyy too friendly wayyyy too fast. Although I had no intention of attacking the group, I had planned a somewhat tenser scene. Maybe I should have described the smile as a snarl… Except that snarl does not really translate well into French. ‘Rictus’ is the closest I can find right now. Franky (Cixi’s player) later told me that had I not said the troll smiled, he’d have shot before even thinking about parleying… which goes to say that I might have played it right after all.

The next part of the encounter’s challenge was for the Troll to negotiate it’s return to the sewers by offering Tersa back… without having a common language with the PCs. The troll, at and INT score of 6, only spoke Giant which I kept describing as ‘sounding like glass being ground to dust by rocks’. Using signs, it conveyed that it mistook the hunters for actual ratmen and realized its mistake once it dropped in the cavern. The group spontaneously said ‘He’s a f’ing genius for a troll’ and that became the evening’s quote! (Scene successful). I had fun roleplaying a creature using signs only.

Once the bargain was reached, everyone returned to the sewers and Tersa joined Halvar, who promised her a nice little bakery in Ptolus’ mildest neighborhood. One of the evening’s strong point was when the players refused to take the now Ex-hunter’s gear. When Halvar insisted the take the loot, mentioning the bakery, Math, playing Aravar the Elven Duskblade, pumped the air and went ‘All right!’…. Classic RPG moment here.

Aside the fourth: At that point, I realized that the while the Troll’s reason for being in the Sewers was to do some cliché extortion at a nearby underground bridge (as well as some Rat hunting on the side) I needed it to know at least a few words of the Common language for said extortion to have any chance of success. So I reverted to a trick I had used before with the same players…

The Troll (I’ll name it Quartzie I think) then beckoned the players to follow it and said in halting Common: ‘Pay or Die!’ in a bright, hopeful tone. The players groaned and commented yet again on the Troll’s intellect (I guess this is what you call a Trope).

The rest in part 2.