DM Chronicles: Session 3, Snaking Toward the Lost City of ‘Meh’

Previously in Chatty’s game:

Dodging rolling boulders and fighting technicolor giant snakes, our heroes explore the depth of the recently uncovered ruins of a lost civilization.  They are seeking who or what sent an Ape Man assassin against them.

There’s no reason to beat my DM head against the table and implore all the saints of creation, sometime a game just doesn’t fly.  In such cases, You pick up the pieces and move on to the next.  The game was not actually bad.  It started well enough and the 1st half was great.

The second half became confusing and I lost my train of thought. I ended up pressing the fast forward button to bring the adventure to a point I was comfortable running again and we concluded the session shortly after that.

I had spent the whole week working almost exclusively on getting the Kobold Love convention playtest ready.  I kept pushing prepping for my campaign to later in the week and I finally reached the point on Friday afternoon where I convinced myself : “It’s a published adventure, I can wing it…”

… and I could have, if the adventure had cooperated with my limited prep time reality.

Regardless, we started the game where the party was leaving behind a dead cave-swamp to explore some winding tunnels. In it they found a little room with two skeletons of long dead ape-men.  The PCs rested there (6 days since the start of the adventure).

After resting, the party explored the caves some more. I don’t like mazes in adventures so I usually just hand wave it as ‘you spend some time orienting yourselves in all these twisting tunnels.

I described that there were wavy grooves on the walls and floors with several small holes appearing here and there.  As they were progressing, I described that some vipers were appearing out of the holes and traveling in the snaky grooves all toward the same direction.

The image of hundreds of years of snakes traveling and making these groves in the stone walls was efficiently etched in my exploration-driven players. Incidentally enough, that wasn’t in the adventure but it made sense to introduce…

The lost Snake Temple

That part of the adventure (Dragora’s Dungeon) has a series of rooms/snares built around a snake theme, including an altar guarded by undead snakes.  I decided to combine all the rooms, (except the traps, as the players were downright sick of them) into a large cavern featuring a small temple dedicated to a Snake God.  The cavern featured a deep crevice where all the vipers were going to.

Further examination revealed a snake headed Rod and a well preserved skin from a Shimmering Boa (the big bad from the last game session) on the altar.

As the tomb raiding adventurers reached for the goodies, 3 Snake-shaped Wraiths rose from the altar and two swarms of Vipers spewed out of the crevices to move toward the PCs.

Now the one thing that stood out for me in this fight was the nasty surprise I played on Franky’s Warlock.

In the last 2 sessions, Franky has had the pleasure of playing a PC that basically hits from afar and teleports away from danger, never getting in any real danger.  During this fight, Masaru the warlock was cornered and getting pummeled in the temple by a Viper swarm.

Looking at the map, Franky asked if he had line of sight through an adjacent arrow slit shown on the battlemap. I said he had and he promptly teleported out of the building.

You should have seen his face when I described how the viper swarm squeezed through the slit, pouring out of the building and going for the harried and bloodied warlock.

The fight was concluded shortly after and the party scored a new snakeskin Cloak that allowed someone to teleport and gain Combat Advantage once a day.  The wand (originally a staff) was a +1 magic wand that allowed a user to immobilize a target at distance and cause ongoing poison damage once daily.

The players explored some more and followed a stream that became a waterfall 500 feet over…

The Lost City of Bad Acting Ape NPCs

The opening through which the waterfall fell was actually one of the mouths of a gigantic Statue of Tiamat overlooking a ruined underground city illuminated by a no less giant glowing sphere.

While the visual was stunning and the city lay open to titillate the PCs with promises of adventure, the adventure started crashing on me at this point.

Partly because I was not prepared past this point, but also because some details started to derail the group’s suspension of disbelief.

You see, when the PCs fled the city, they each had 50′ of rope each.  Said ropes were all used to climb down the 300′ feet deep crevice that lead to the dungeon.  There were all left on the initial crevice to allow climbing out upon the PCs’ return.

Well, now the party was now standing 500′ over the city’s ground and no ropes were left nor were any found before.

Hindsight Aside: The nearby swamp, while mostly made up of dead vegetation, had vines horrors stalking it, so technically there were enough vines to act as ropes. No one thought of that, least of all me.

So by making some very dubious calls about Teleportation (i.e. that inertia is instantly canceled upon ‘porting), I had 2 Eladrin, one teleporting cloak-wearing rogue and a feather falling cleric jump while the Warlord and Fighter climbed the wall the old fashion way.

That’s when I sprung the encounter of Spiretop Drakes moving in on the climbers to steal their small gear (mainly javelins).  I really did not want to have a fight when 2/3 of the group was already on the ground so I asked if the players resisted the grab for their small gear (they didn’t) and we moved on.

The adventure was very unclear as to where the PCs landed from the climb/jump.  While I was frantically looking trhough the section for the info, I lost faith in my abilities to DM this part of the adventure.

The city is a large and mostly undefined and  all the Ape Men live there.  The city is made of 5 sections, a large ruined area, 3 neighborhood housing the 3 main noble houses (Mages, Sodliers, Assassins) and a Temple of Tiamat.

The adventure provides 3 plots, one for each Noble house as to thier plans with the PCs. There was also many random wencounters and random building tables to populate the ruins.

My natural gaming style is not friendly to scenes randomly generated at the table.  So I resorted to what I was more comfortable with and I let the player walk to the most evident landmark (A guard tower).  That tower being the headquarter of the Mage faction of the city, I had them meet with the apparently friendly leaders of the faction.

Instead of playing the meeting like a skill challenege (I missed the challenege rules before it was too late) I basically gave the PCs the mages cover story: “We are genuinely curious about you strangers and want no trouble, you want to be escorted to the Temple? We’ll gladly offer our protection”

It felt false and could have been presented more dynamically, but the players got to learn the following:

• A Green Dragon and her human concubine arrived a few weeks ago,
• The Dragon was heralded as the avatar of Tiamat by the more zealous Ape-men factions
• The Human and Dragon used the temple as thier base of operation.

The players accepted the offer and we moved directly to the temple, circumventing all the other encounters and going directly to the adventure’s final part.

Had I been better prepared, I would have dropped the PCs away from the Noble Houses and prepared a few exploratory scenes in the city with hints of each house agenda and giving the PCs a choice to meet the house of their choice.

Suffice it to say that at the Temple, a corregraphed ambush was sprung with 40 Ape-men popping from each side of the pyramidal temple while the PCs were halfway up the stairs leading to the temple’s entrance. When the Green dragon landed on the plaza below the PCs, they decided that running inside the temple was the better choice (as the adventure assumes).

The Bronze doors of the temple conviniently locked from the inside.

In the temple, the adventurers had to deal with some sort of semi-automatic pendulum blades trap.  Dodging it and looking for a way up to intercept those activating the trap, the PCs found a scrying pool set on spying them and a double set of stairs.

Said stairs led to a sumptuous throne room where Dragora was lounging lazily, waiting for them.

As I was re-reading the encounter I was hit by this one important detail:

The adventure does not give a reason why the assassin attacked the party in the first scene, the DM is invited to weave this in his existing/future campaign plots…

…what?  At this stage? After I lost faith and am disappointed with my game so far?

That was just a bit too much for me and I stopped the game there.

Fortunately, when I was driving Franky home after the game, I shared my disappointment and Franky was supportive and helped me brainstorm a way to salvage the adventure.

I came up with a fiendish idea to work in the whole “Humans are evil pirate scum” theme and I retconned that Dragora was wearing the colors of the dreaded Crimson Fleet of the southern Islands. I then worked out how she figured in the plans of the pirates and why she lured the PCs to this ruined city of slave Ape-Men.

That will surely make things a bit more interesting and helped me define how to end this mini-campaign.

Lessons Learned:

• Make time to prep your game.  If you can’t, have a backup plan you are truly comfortable with.
• Late September, early October is when seasonal depression starts to set in for me and some of my players.  Plan around it with lighter adventures and aim for satisfying esperiences for all.

What players liked:

• The Snake Temple Encounter, very Indiana Jones
• The interaction with the Ape Men, however brief and railroady it might have been.

What Players disliked:

• Getting confused by the way the city encounters turned out, some expected better defined objectives or more exploration.
• Traps… everyone has had thier share of it for the time being

Bottom line: Next game will be better, it will feature the end onf the current adventure and it will pave the way to the final chapter of the mini campaign.

Want a hint?  Well how does a Pirate fleet drop one of it’s members and her pet dragon 4 days walking distance from the coast?

Cheers!