See part 1 here.
The Banquet
We started with all PCs participating in a seemingly endless Banquet hosted by the local Merchant Baron, Brandobaris the Fat. Late into the scene’s night, after some interesting Roleplaying, Brandobaris opened a casket of Drow Wine, reputed to turn into a deadly poison 5 minutes after being exposed to air.
All PCs tried it carefully, while Brandobaris quaffed the whole cask in one large gulp. He then burped loudly and fell unconscious… a sigh of relief going through the whole Banquet Hall.
Ninja Sleepy Time!
PCs moved on to the hall’s second floor, where the guest bedrooms were, as Brandobaris was carried to his extensive quarters. Most PCs moved to their assigned room in the early hours of the morning, with Takeo coming in last after having done one last review of the premises. Fizban and Bjerm elected to have their trance/rest at the far end of the corridor where a balcony overlooking the sea stood (See Figure).
Soon after Takeo joined the rest of his buddies, all PCs heard an unnatural hush fall over the whole pavilion. I made an attack roll vs all PCs Will defense. All but Takeo were affected by a deep slumber.
That’s when a shuffling noise was heard under the door and a strange cloying vapour seeped from underneath it. Takeo moved in behind his room’s door, ready to ambush whatever was trying to sneak in the room.
He struck hard and fast, but only managed to scratch the Brutish Silver-backed Ape-Man Swordsman. A furious fight exploded between the two while the other PCs woke up and ran to join the fun.
The Assassin (a lurker) managed to hit Takeo very hard twice thanks to his auto-combat advantage rechargeable power. At that point, I was describing each hit, swings and misses with numerous details of dodges, sparks and the assassin using the Censer as a shield (total fluff but it really was cool to describe).
The assassin was mortally dispatched with no permanent injuries to the PCs.
Running an investigation… literally!
The following investigation, somewhat disturbed by the legendary snoring of Brandobaris, revealed that no other assassins were around and that the PCs seemed to have been the only targets.
The assassin was found to be a Zain-Kin, a race of slave Ape-Men known to have served the long dead enchanters of Parhok. Said enchanters were thought to have self-destructed around the time of the cataclysm.
The assassin’s tracks were very fresh and led northbound toward the elven forests surrounding the Eladrin capital of Baragramir. The tracks went very far, the assassin had walked for several days to get so near Hobble’s Point.
Fictive Geography Aside: I may write a gazetteer series of my campaign’s world as we build it. Right now it consists of a coastline with a huge Crater surrounded by dead lands/waters (hints to long time readers… crater used to be Ptolus). There’s also a Halfling port named Hobble’s point 2 days east of the crater and an elven region of forested hills around an Eladrin City (Baragramir, 2 days north of Hobble’s Point) built on the ruins of an ancient eleven city of the same name. That’s it.
Obligatory Ravine Scene
The PCs followed the tracks northwards for 4 days! Bringing them through the inhabited forest, past Baragramir and into some undiscovered ruins featuring a recent 200′ long, 60′ wide and several hundred feet deep rift. That’s where the tracks stopped.
All PCs with good passive perception felt observed for quite some time. After a short exploration of the surroundings, it was determined that the assassin had come from the rift. Peeking into the rift showed that a waterfall crashed atop a walkway joining a pair of matching doorways about 300 feet down.
We fast forwarded the climbing and rappelling scene (except to check that there was enough rope). Once Bjerm (the 1st to climb down) was level with the doorways, he noticed that a rusted broken down set of scything blades was protruding from under one of the doorways.
As this was reached, the party saw their topmost rope drop down the ravine and two small figures standing way over them, chucking 15 lbs boulders up their heads. Takeo was hit hard, hanging on the rope through sheer willpower (read: a high d20 roll).
Bjerm tried to jump on the platform but it triggered a still functional pit trap. Now a bit later in the round, while PCs were being pelted with boulders, Yan pointed out that he didn’t ‘get’ that the door was opened and would have tried to swing inside the doorway and not on the obviously trapped platform (he noticed the rusted blades under the walkway).
We did a partial retcon by allowing a Saving Throw to see if Bjerm grabbed onto the pit’s edge instead of falling. He did and remained on the rope. Everyone was happy.
Just as this happened, Roco got hit by a boulder and slipped from the rope, falling into the pit… only to be grabbed by Bjerm at the last minute. (All the time I was trying to describe the action as dramatically as possible, down to the wetness spreading into Roco’s shining leather pants).
Now that’s a Battlemap!
After a short rest in the corridor, the party made it to a strange multi-tiered arcane laboratory filled with ruined benches, jerking brains in jars and skeletons. Like a funnel, the room featured 20′ wide ledges arranged in tiers.
As Roco and Bjerm were investigating the room looking for traps on the floor in the first few squares of the Walkway.
When the rogue hit the second square, the invisible imp flying above released a sphere filled with a Needlefang Swarm (think a few scores of Jurasic Park 2’s 20 inch high little raptors) that crashed on Roco and Bjerm… At the same time, 10 skeletons rose and attacked!
PCs moved on all levels and the combat was truly action driven… I really like battlemaps set over multiple levels, it makes tactical decisions more exciting.
I had an absolute blast describing how the Needlefang Swarm knocked down PCs and tore their armour, clothing and skin to shreds. It also ‘talked’ to the Dragonborn Warlord (Takeo) in primal draconic: “Why you kills us brotherssss”
It was just so cool!
After some close calls, all skellies and the swarm were dealt with. The party rested again and headed down to the Portal door on the floor of the bottom level. While looking for traps or marking, the party was attacked by the transparent Gelatinous Cube (an Elite level 5 monster BTW… PCs are level 1) sitting over the only apparent exit of this room.
The Cube promptly ‘ate’ 4 out of the 6 PCs by engulfing and dazing them, putting a serious dent in the group’s fun factor.
Of course, the Eladrins both teleported on the upper tiers and started shooting Magic Missiles and Eldritch Blasts. The cleric sent Sacred flames and Lasers of Faith while the warlord was shooting javelins into it. After a few failed attempts at escaping, Bjerm and Roco fought from inside the cube, while getting healed repeatedly for acid digestion from both the cleric and the warlord.
It was like the Gelatinous Cube was the Galactica and the PCs were Cylon Basestars/Internal agents.
It finally collapsed in a pool of acidic bile after the cleric Sacred Flamed it for its 154th hit point.
It was 11 PM, we called it a night.
Best Campaign start ever!
Lessons Learned:
- Making silly voices, describing things enthusiastically and ignoring your friends snickerings when you are being a bit too silly for their comfort is SO worth it.
- Don’t hand out XPs when dead tired, I don’t give enough for Roleplaying (that’s why I’m going to double XPs each session if we keep this level of energy and enthusiasm).
- There’s some sort of subtle power struggle between me and some players when they insist on arguing things that just aren’t all that important for the fun of the game. I think it’s just a male friends thing but I may look into this.
What players liked:
- The feeling of a party that finally has a reason to adventure together.
- Killing that Cube!
- The atmosphere of the whole game!
What Players disliked:
- While dice rolls were played, some traps still felt arbitrary to some. I might also have taken an overly active role in placing the minis on the map when I triggered the Swarm trap.
- Burning Daily powers because of a flubbed dice roll absolutely sucks.
- The combat against the cube was somewhat static… especially with the 2 PCs stuck in it. I’ll likely never use one again, it’s done it’s thing for us.
Credits: Goodman Games (Adventure), Harley Stroh (Adventure), Britt Martin and Clyde Caldwell (Art and maps)
Great campaign log!
Quick question: How much XP are you giving out?
I’m struggling with how much XP to provide my players in 4th Edition.
So the maps were pre-generated for a module? Darn. Was hoping you had some magical program for doing so.
Sounds like a good start to an adventure!
@Brent: Thanks! I’m going with 2X the straight XP of Combat encounters since the adventure features no Quest XPs or Rolplaying rewards.
@Rafe: The maps are scans of the module’s maps yes. There is no magical programs map… the usual products like Campaign Cartographers and Dunjdini are still around.
It was a great start!
Mmm…delightfully deadly, so it seems…
Gelatinous cubes are often anti-fun machines…especially when kept at the bottom of the BBEG’s Office Pit Trap…
“Sure, spikes are fun, but the clean-up is absolutely dreadful! You wouldn’t believe how much those services charge these days. Things were sweet back before those damn gnomes got the King Todd to legalize their so-called ‘worker’s union.’ Well, TO HELL WITH THAT! The cube is a much more efficient means of disposing of unwanted guests anyways…”
Earl Dethkyl pivots in his chair and stares out his window at the full moon. He lets loose a pained sigh as he reminisces the good ol’ days.
“…though I sure do miss the cries of agony in the last minutes of their pitiful lives…things just aren’t what they used to be.”
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That just sounded like fun! Nice start to the campaign. Gelatinous Cubes suck! Of course, that makes killing them so much sweeter 😉
Tomcat1066s last blog post..How You Play the Game
Sounds like a great start to the campaign. I like how you have kept your past campaign world, and advanced it forward for 4e.
I have only use the Cube as a monster once, but it was for an Xcrawl game, and the area was specifically designed for it: a maze of 10′ hallways, with cubes falling from the ceiling. It is such a classic monster, that it is worth running once.
Enjoying the online recaps of your game, and I really like the bottom section with the what went right, wrong, etc. That is something every GM should be doing after their games.
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I’m sorry, and forgive my bluntness, but it doesn’t seem so special. All right, your group was in the right mood and everybody had tons and tons of fun, but it doesn’t mean the module was great. It looks like a lot of traps and random fights with monsters, with little thematic or storytelling reasons to bind it all. Was there a story behind it, beyond “abandoned ruin, lotsa monsters have made their lair there over the years, roll for initiative”?
Also you say the group enjoyed “The feeling of a party that finally has a reason to adventure together”. As far as I can see, there was no such reason at all, or at least none better than the classic “you are hired by a local nobleman to recover a lost sword from the bowels of an ancient tomb”. Did I miss it?
I don’t think my players would enjoy it; it certainly wouldn’t satisfy me. Too “classical” for our taste.
You are indeed blunt as I feel you are judging things rapidly and based on the limited things I can post (to avoid spoiling it for my players who are also readers). I also gather that your RPG values probably differ from mine. As long as we can agree to disagree, and remain civil about it, we’ll go along splendidly.
What is special about the adventure is that all these things are there for a reason. It just isn’t obvious to the players (and the readers) yet. I invite you to take the discussions to the goodman games forums (where I posted about this series) so we can discuss the details that might interest you.
Suffice it to say that the Rift recently “unsealed” something thought to be long lost.
As for your second comment about party unity, I can tell you that I went around the table and asked each Player for an Elevator pitch about their characters. Then I went around the table again and I asked each player to pair up with another PC and create one Relationship between both.
Then we discussed how they met and built this fictive prequel quest about saving a halfling fort from Human pirates… All this fueled by players input and without playing this pre-adventure.
After that, all players felt that they had a reason to stick together… something we had never achieved before.
A very valid point, it is definitively a classic. It’s a mix of the Ghost Tower of Inverness, Dwellers of the Forbidden City and the Vault of the Drow.
I happen to like this type of game… I by no means imply that you should.
Peace out my blunt friend! =)
I’m glad your players enjoyed fighting the big baddy. A lot of the 4th ed. big baddies have been demoralizing to my players (I’m running shadowfell, and there have been some fights that just seemed to hard to us).
We’ve done a couple of things, one is to hand out anger tokens every time someone misses (still figuring out the mechanics of AoE for that, but..) with the idea that when they get 5 they can have +5 on a to-hit roll…and when they sleep they lose them. It makes my players happier, and has yet to be used. Which makes it kind of awesome.
The other thing that we did was to give a once-per-session mulligan on daily powers. If you miss with a daily power, you can choose to use your mulligan and have it not go away. That’s only been used once, but it makes my players more likely to try to use their daily powers, instead of hording them and, consequently, never using them.
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@Joe: Those are good ideas to address some of my players ‘disliked’
Thanks!
Well, if there is a sound story reason behind all these encounters, which you didn’t post because your players read this, and there was more to the “united party” thing that you didn’t explain because it wasn’t the point of the post, then yes, I guess I was too hasty in judging the module. But hey, I didn’t (and don’t) have all the information. It’s just that monster bashes for the sake of it don’t agree with me, and that’s what it seemed.
Anyway I still think that a good session is not the same as a good module, and one is not necessarily related to the other. One of my funniest moments as a player was running from a crazed garbage truck droid in Star Wars, even though the story wasn’t that great. A discussion for another day, perhaps.
And it goes without saying that we can prefer different styles of playing (you seem to like dungeons, I don’t) and civilly agree to disagree. It’s just that I find most of your posts quite interesting, and I had to say something when I didn’t agree with this one. Blunt peace out.
Coolness man!
I do like dungeons… albeit ones that feature 5 rooms/encounters or less.
Most of my group is made up of Butt Kickers. I once said that’d fight toothless Dire Weasels with wet towels if they could.
Thanks for the positive feedback and the honest sharing of your thoughts. I don’t run a personality cult here, people are allowed to disagree.
I throw them in the Rev’s Cube Pit when they do, but I’m always very polite about it.
=)
It’s true…his victims usually hear him say, “Well…have a nice trip!” just before the big drop…the ooze muffles the rest of his quip, but there’s no stopping the French-Canadian guffawing that ensues…
@amatriain – The united party thing is explained in Part 1 of this series…there’s a link at the top of the page…
Of course, there was one time when it backfired on Chatty…damn Eladrin and their Fey Step…as Chatty was in the midst of uncontrollable laughter, the recent escapee bullrushed him into his own pit, asking Chatty if he “had a nice quip”…
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