The cog turns

This is another round of catchup blog before the festivities start again this coming weekend. After this we can get some of the silly antics fresh in my mind and onto text for your enjoyment.

New Characters

Well with a TPK comes the session of new characters.

The elven mage of the original group decided to become a human mage. But she also decided to take on a suggestion and aim for the blood mage specialty path in the long run. I think this is a fun class myself.

The druid managed to get away and still exists. But the player was no longer able to turn up due to being an actor (please refrain from rolling of ones eyes). But he is important for he makes his return this coming session.

The player who plays Gretchin also came back and decided that Gretchin was to much fun to play and continued on with her shenanigans.

The rogue Valhalla became a rogue/fighter combination and went melee rogue instead of cross bow rogue. SHe has loved the new combo and the increased kickassidness.

And my favourite (Yes im playing favourites). Allisdair the Cleric Necromancer. Reason why this is my favourite is she chose him to have a French accent.

The fire temple

This adventure i have run before, in fact a lot of the stuff i have done with the girls is stuff I've used before. So the adventures have different stories from different groups.

This is a pure dungeon crawl, i built it in mind with creatures that could survive being locked inside a temple for 1000's of years.

This is a long dungeon and went over two sessions so ill do some summaries.

It started as an overland trek. On the journey they came across an abandoned village that was home to hobgoblins and an ogre. Since hobs were tactically minded i was able to play them with some smarts.

But the players holed themselves up in the watch tower and it became a tactical fight. Gretchin, being gretchin, when a bunch of hobgoblins were at the base of the tower breaking in, jump from the top of the tower in the middle of the gobs and got to use her Whirlwind attack to great effect.

Unfortunatly to much damage was sustained prior to the jump and gretchin fell, the mage fell from the top to arrow fire. The cleric/necromancer was being played by me and i tend not to use them much except for cross bow attacks. The rogue/warrior was doing well but suffering against sheer numbers.

In the end i didn't want another TPK in their first new character session so i made the necromancer animate some zombies to save the day. They were real close to killing them but also real close to dieing so the zombies just tipped it into their favour.

They then healed up and moved onto the temple...

• Killed a manticore who nested out the front of the temple on one of the upper balconies. Forgot to loot the nest till almost the end of the game where i GM nudged them.
• There were two stained glass windows players could enter through. One was broken. The unbroken one was a glass golem. The first group i ran through this managed to kill the glass Golem but it tested them. The girls did not have the ability to kill the golem but they played with it long enough to figure out its pattern and know how to leave it alone.
• I watched the best paranoia from having a grey ooze sitting inside a fireplace. This led to a run around the entrance room with a ooze and golem in tow. They did get the two to fight however and i was chuffed at this turn of events.
• The cleric had a chance to control a really uber undead and failed twice on turn attempts. It was smashed by Gretchin after that.
• Encountered a chain golem
• Again, like before, the other party, when i wrote this, almost TPK'ed on the chain golem.
• These girls just seemed to have the right stuff, as well as a Gretchin with a two handed sword and even with the damage reduction just wiped the floor with it. Gretchin did fall and almost died but the others were able to save her.
• Encountered a wraith, killed that
• Encountered a spell ghoul but again killed that and his cronies

They finished the dungeon and managed to come away with lots of loot and a Staff of summoning flame elementals.

Again i am sorry for the lack of shenanigans in these posts due to it being so long ago.

After this i will make sure all the girly, newbie shenanigans are witnessed in full for your entertainment.

Restart

So i started this blog with full intentions but life got in the way. Not only for me writing this but for the group itself and we have not played for almost a year now.

But they want to play again and this time i am going to keep the antics preserved in this format known as the blogisphere, or possibly twitter as the girls are all addicted to it.

Catch up
Lots happened...


Went to an inn, got paranoid, found some bandits, killed said bandits. One of the bandits was also one of the men in the said Inn. He was stripped nekkid, tortured for information by having sex with the bard (I aint kidding). Kicked some doors in and looted the bandits hideout. Let the guy go.

Met a traveling circus on their way back. The owner was some Texan with a shotgun (With the accent i put on its the logical conclusion even without Texas and a shotgun). Killed a dire tiger and owl bear...just.

Death of a salesmen, bard, thief, mage and cleric
Then the girls managed to find a mission to stop these slave traders.

They started by finding out that slaves from the Ikardi quarter of town were being taken in the night. Since the town is a boom town and the local kingdom forces were hard pressed keeping order and the Ikardi had little value in slaves lives most of this was not advertised. But the player talked to the slaves and found out about the night time slavers.

The slavers were a simple bunch of level 3 rogues with a level 5 leader. What i also used with a level 3 flame arrow spell on the group to produce 50 arrows that did an extra 1d6 damage. This proved to be rather effective in causing damage but they managed to get the group mostly killed. Those that lived were followed back to their lair.

This part i call the gambler, knowing when to hold em, know when to fold them or in this case knowing when to run and knowing where to attack.

The rogue of the group, Valhalla snuck up on the house the remaining rogues were in and opened the door. Unfortunately the rolls all didn't go in her favour and the head of the organisation quick shot an arrow to her causing a crit hit.

This scared the players and they decided it wasn't worth going in to fight and come back later.

Before they made this decision i had already surmised that they would not stick around, as they had be made. Since they had enough slaves to do their dealings they left town. So when the players came back with additional resources the rogues were gone. But i planted enough evidence for them to follow a trail along a river going north. Nothing concrete but enough to keep going.

They wandered into the forest and found an orc encampment. This i put here on purpose to give them something to annihilate and get some extra loot since they had not quite as much as they should of for their level (level 5ish at this stage).

200 orcs in the encampment were quickly decimated by the flying, fire balling wizard, deft archer rogue Valhalla, The mighty warrior Gretchen, Birabella the druid and master of the forest and the cleric of Pelor "Bulls Strength".

Finally they met up with the rogues who were also trading the slaves to some lizardmen. In earlier editions of dnd lizardmen had a taste for human flesh. So i wrote this game with that in mind. Human slaves are being traded for amethyst gems being mined by the lizardmen.

Since the lizardmen were essentially neutral to the party this allowed the Bard to be a rare bonus in the group and started to cast song magic to keep all of the lizardmen out of the impending fight. This worked and allowed me to reduce the numbers from 30 enemies to just 6.



The enemies were 4 standard rogues at level 4, the leader who was a level 7 fighter and decent armour and the female mage who was level 6. I gave them enough information so they knew what these guys were.

Also one other note. The person who played Gretchin had not turned up for quite a few sessions so she was not available.

Combat started...

The mage of the players was first of the initiative rank. She was 5th level and enough int to memorise 2 3rd level spells. I have a mage spell combo that i play and that fly and fireball. Go fly and your almost immune to melee attacks, cast protection from arrows to avoid most missile damage and then rain fiery death on those below.

So this mage also took my suggestion for this spell combo.

And this is why i love the newbies. Most experienced players would of gone the fireball option knowing it could probably take out 3 of the 4 rogues, hurt the warrior badly and potentially kill the mage and make the fight pretty darned easy.

This mage however stuck to the combo and cast fly as the first combat spell.

The mage amongst the enemies knowing she was a spell caster and a major threat knew what to do to remove it. I cast lightning bolt at the elven mage. She failed her save and i rolled well for damage. This killed the player mage outright.

With the major spell DPS out of the picture for the party it was looking grim. The cleric of the group did his normal and went into the combat fray. He suffered a lot of damage at the hands of the enemy warrior and eventually fell.

The druid tried to circle silently around the enemies. This was going to take a few rounds so once the druid was in position to do something the rest of the party looked pretty bad. The druid cut his losses and left the party (and looted the mage in the process).

Finally the cleric, bard and rogue were webbed and after that it was a forgone conclusion.

TPK