As mentioned before, I slowed down on my crazy posting schedule. I’m still around, only less so.
See part 1 here.
After defeating the leader of the Bloodreavers, the slavers that brought the PCs to Thunderspire Labyrinth in the first place, our heroes noticed that no slave were left in the compound. One of the rooms where they fought in had several chains and showed recent occupation by slaves.
Ransacking the slaver leader’s room led PCs to a copy of a contract to sell the last batch of slaves to a certain Duergar named Murkelmor Grimmerzhul.
Ding! Obligatory clue for the next part!
While searching around, the PCs found a trap door leading to a corridor linking the slave pens to the compound’s kitchen. The rogue made a stealthy approach and observed that the kitchen/mess hall was occupied by a pair of goblins, three hobgoblins and 2 humans.
While I hinted that these were just riff raff scrubs, the players were still thirsty for mayhem and could not pass up the occasion to score a third surprise attack.
That they did and it was a massacre…
Once again, the warlord/rogue combo worked perfectly well and the wizard unlocked its Elite Controller achievement award by freezing some goons in place.
However, what truly stood out for me in that encounter was what Franky’s Feypact warlock achieved:
(Please be warned that if you hate Eladrin teleportation tricks, you better skip the next paragraph)
At one point in the fight, most of the bad guys were spread around an empty space. When the warlock started his turn, he feystepped into that empty square, cursed a wounded goon, used his Outerworld Stride power (Burst damage to all adjacent creatures, immobilize them, then teleport away)… which killed one of the cursed goons, allowing Franky’s PC to teleport once again.
Whoa, something tells me I’m going to see that trick again… and again.
Also, in these 2 fights, players realized just how more powerful thier action points became with a tactical warlord in their midst. A point used as an attacks got a pretty large bonus to hit AND to damage because of some of Mike’s warlord class features.
In fact, I brought up the point that our group tends to save Action Points in case of emergencies in combat. They all agreed. I then shared something I read not too long ago about Action Points. A blogger (I forgot to bookmark it, sorry I can’t link to it) was making a case that Action Points were better used early in a fight. If played optimally for the best possible bonuses, PCs can achieve inevitability (i.e. they can’t lose) and the overall challenge drops significantly because some monsters are slain rapidly.
Anyway, the players finished clearing up the dungeon and headed back to the Seven-Pillared Hall (the civilized area of the Labyrinth) to hunt for more clues.
What followed was another nice session of roleplaying, fact finding and general inter-party play acting. While some were looking to retrace the location of the Duergar slaver, Fizban (Eric’s Wizard) started saying out loud that the obvious bad guys of the story were the Mages running this Hall. He tried really hard to convince the rest of the gang to follow in his mad plan to storm the mages’ headquarters.
Of course, no one wanted to go along with the plan. Then Eric said:
“You know how I love saying ‘I told you so’ guys! Mark my words, later in the adventure, when I’m proven right, I’ll let you know that we could have saved a ton of time!”
Ha ha! Funny.
Phil flips to the end of the adventure… smirks a bit and makes a few notes.
During the short investigation for clues that would lead PCs to the next part of the adventure, they learned that Grimmerzhul was the name of the Duergar trading post in the Hall. It was also the name of the largest Duergar clan in the Labyrinth.
They also learned that the Grimmerzhul trading post had placed a large order for food and had just taken delivery.
In the last session, the PCs had approached a NPC who appreared to have been a broker for the Duergar slave trade. That broker sent the PCs to the Bloodreavers.
Now instead of storming the duergar trading post (something the adventure assumes) the group met that broker again and told him that they had been unable to reach a deal with the Bloodreavers. They then said that a business disagreement led to the unfortunate demise of the Bloodreavers. They were now ready to deal directly with the slave traders.
(They had a cover story about looking to sell slaves to the the highest bidder in the labyrinth).
The broker then offered the following deal. The PCs would be hired to escort a duergar caravan of food to the duergar Hold. Thus the PCs would be free to deal directly with the slave dealers at the Hold and he in turn would get his cut if a deal was brokered.
The PCs, sensing this was a trap, still agreed.
Thus ended the session.
Lessons Learned
- Sometimes, spending an evening just killing monsters is fun!
- A D&D 4e party that learns to cooperate together is very, very lethal
What players liked
- Everyone shined at least once in the fights.
- The pace was good and maintained throughout the night
What player disliked
- A player was ribbed for trying to be more dramatic in describing thier powers, that kinda killed his buzz.
Up next, the journey to the Duergar hold!
Er, wait, “elite controller achievement award?” Is that just a figure of speech or is there actually such a thing?
It was a joke. Its just that its one of the first games where we got to see the Wizard’s Controller aspect. Up until now we’d seen him do mostly damage spells. However in that last game, I got to experience first hand what it felt like to have my own guys immobilized…
“Okay so the Human bandit takes a move act…”
“Huh, Phil? That guy has been immobilized”
“Oh shoot, then he does nothing”
re: “I’ll say I told you so later.”
I would probably, if I were running an adventure, leave things in the current adventure however I’d already planned them, but make a note to have the words turn out to be prophetic in the next adventure. That way nobody’s head gets too swelled.
re: buzzkill on describing actions dramatically
This problem has come up in my play group a lot, especially in transitioning between games (Exalted to D&D 4e to 7th Sea). The big thing for us is: if your dramatic description takes 5 minutes when your action should really take 30 seconds to resolve, there is a problem. There’s a difference between adding a bit of flash and grandstanding/hogging the spotlight.
Where I try to come down on this issue? Both in running and in playing, I favor short descriptions which are specific both about the in-world appearance and the game-mechanics aspects of the action. I enjoy helping players (fellow players or those under my GM auspices) find a mechanical way to represent a cool in-world action effectively, so long as they understand what they want to do well enough to sum it up in one or two sentences.
Good advice on the “I told you so” Ian.
As for the Buzzkill, its not so much that the description takes that much longer, the player is basically describing what the power’s flavour text does, its mostly that no other player currently does it and they tend to make fun of the player who tried harder… that’s not very fun.
I think that a a lot of it is Friday night weariness.
Glad you’re having fun with this adventure too. My PCs just passed the Horned Hold, and we’re digging it, but I’m finding the grind to be a bit much. Lots of “combat encounter, short rest, move onto the next combat encounter.” And our party controller is a bit let down that there don’t seem to be any minions in this mod. But overall, I love the huge dungeon concept, and I LOVE the seven pillared hall.
I heard the “no minion” complaint before and I plan to address this. I still have to read the whole section this week and decide how much of the grind to let my players go through. I’ll probably gauge their reaction. If they still feel like butt kicking next Friday I’ll let them go wild!
Last night, we had a new player at the table (rather an old friend who was in town over the weekend). He had made a lvl 9 warlord to join the party. A we didn’t usually play with warlords, particularly not in higher levels, we didn’t know what to expect.
After a while, everytime the warlord started to juxtapose characters and giving people bonuses to arbitrary rolls (always with a handwave, saying “it’s ok, you don’t have to check the PHB). We started joking about “Ok, your bloodied, that means my Skill Resurge activates, you may spend an action point, retrain a skill, shift three squares, use an encopunter power from the player on your left and regain 1d6+78 HP if your next attack is a basic melee attack” and so on. Great fun 🙂
Btw, check out my new blog polyhedral, linked above.
Jens Alms last blog post..The Dwarven Gate Puzzle