Forgotten Realms Campaign - Start to Finish

This is probably going to be a long post. It's also the last post about this campaign so it will talk about the game itself and then have GM commentary at the end. If you've read the posts where I did my best to spin each session into a chapter of a story then some of this will be familiar to you. If not then you get the whole shebang here.

Campaign Summary

The campaign lasted for just over a year and 20 sessions. We were scheduled to play every other week and we kept pretty well to that. I'm surprised. I didn't do the math. However, in game we covered under 30 days.

Over the course of 10 days a wizard, a cleric, a rogue, and a ranger meet up, decide to become an adventuring party, and head out of town towards some ruins they heard were lootable. Traveling with a caravan they find out the road is dangerous even reasonably close to a city before turning off onto a lesser road toward the mountains with the ruins.

While staying over in what amounts to a fantasy world truck stop village (forever named TruckStopVille) they discover some stuff that seems to tie that village to the Underdark. They move on towards the mountains and meet up with another rogue along the way.

While exploring the mountains they find more things that not only imply an Underdark connection but a blocked passage that's supposed to go to the Underdark. They rescue and befriend a goblin tribe at this time. The cleric prevents the ranger from slaughtering them since he has a special hate-on for goblins.

Not finding much they move to a different place in the mountains and find access to the ruins they heard about. The ranger is carried off by a peryton (very crabby bird-stag combo) to an unknown fate. The smaller party explores the ruins, has some trouble with minor Underdark based beasts, and finds an abandoned but ancient hideaway. Maps and design lead them deeper into the mountains.

They find an underground river with boats. The map seemed to imply that upstream was a bad way to go and downstream would get them out. Being an adventuring party they start to go upstream but are turned away by the threat of death by undead. They grudgingly go downstream.

A stopover finds them releasing a demon that had been trapped there and driving the people in the area insane. After releasing the demon they take what they find and the no-longer-insane people help them leave the mountain. They're returning to the village that the party had just left, help them leave the mountain, and go on their way.

With the plan to go back to the big city to follow up on some other possible stuff to do they follow the no-longer-insane people and find the empty wagon. Following footprints they go into the woods next to the road to see what happened. After a spot of trouble they find the people again and a couple of rough campsites. Gathering up the people they head back. The wizard is starting to get a bit stingy on sharing information about stuff they found.

Once back in the big city they try to sell off some stuff, the original rogue is assumed to be part of the large thief's guild in the city due to stuff he had pickpocked before they left the first time, and the wizard is even more reclusive as he does wizard things. They all look for stuff they can do that will line their pockets.

They accept a job guarding a caravan to a nearby city. Along the way they notice some oddness with creatures that seem to be watching them. Once they're in the city they look for more work and settle on a job helping guard a ship making the passage across the big lake so they can get to that area. Abruptly the wizard says he's taking the job, they're not needed, and leaves. The party needs to find other work.

A barbarian attaches herself to the group and they go along with it. There's problems with bandits on the road between this city and the next one so they head out to see what's going on and what they can earn for clearing out a few of them. After a bit of a problem in the city they head out.

There's a bandit hideout back in the woods so they see if they can handle what's there. They can because after some fight the remaining bandits leave the hideout to them. It's a fortified place that has a LOT of loot for them to find, more than they can carry. Rather than leave in the morning they decide to investigate the stairs going down.

They do. They find unused quarters and caverns underneath. They follow the caverns to find some undead and their now deceased owner-cleric who has set up shop by a portal. Investigation shows the portal will take them to another city on the other side of the large lake. They take it an end up in an empty shop but not sure what city they're really in.

The original rogue finds what he was looking for in the form of a new guild to join and leaves them there. He does give them information about a potential bit of larceny on the road into the city in a few days. A young wizard has been trailing them since they got there and after introductions they accept him into the party.

Following the road they do find some excitement in what seems to be the place another ambush was being planned but don't have anyone alive left to question it. The spot is way too perfect for ambushes not to be used on a regular basis.

At this point the story ends. Of the original group only the cleric remains.

GM Commentary

I freely admit this was not my finest hour for being a GM. My pacing was entirely off. My story hooks weren't hooking the players. I didn't have a cohesive story arc for them to follow.

I will say that the group itself never seemed to gel. I gathered them from a MeetUp post and we lost two players after Session Zero which threw things off. We had a lot of discussion about what they wanted out of a game and I tried to give it to them - a mix of role play and combat. However I don't know that everyone was really on that page.

The location of the game moved around. At first we played in the event room of a local craft brewery because that was listed as a place we could play but it turns out they only let one group use it for free. After the uncertainty of that one player offered to let us play at his home. Then that player left and another one offered his place. We played there until for obvious reasons we moved the game online using Discord.

The first player that had to leave (the ranger) had to leave for real life reasons. I'm not sure how sorry people were to see him go since he wasn't really playing as part of the group. He had a character type he seemed locked into regardless of the situation plus he wanted to write a novel about the campaign so he spent a lot of time taking notes. The PCs skills were sorely missed and his character was referenced in future games by the players and by me ("A ranger would sure be handy right about now") which may have contributed to the next player leaving.

That player's spot was filled by a friend of the wizard's player and he chose a rogue as his character. I'm taking the bulk of the blame for his choice since my normal style is to let the player choose the character independent of who else is playing what. He wanted a rogue. He got to play a rogue. Two rogues makes for some challenging GM work.

I tend to have problems balancing treasure per encounter. I need to work on that. It seems to be feast or famine in my games. I do enjoy making magic items tailored to the players and in this case I was trying something new with random time duration items. I prefer to make more low level items that give the players options but they also have to decide if they should use it or not because it takes time to recharge itself. There was the new option of them not knowing how long an effect would last. I'm going to keep that in my pocket for later games if the group is right.

The second player to leave was the wizard. This was after we moved online and he suddenly said he was done in the middle of a session and left. I knew something was wrong and tried to talk to him before it happened but he seemed to have made up his mind and acted on it. The crappy thing is that the first player had to leave because of this guy (real life situation, not personality). It also left the group without any arcane magic.

I adjusted the house rules so that potions could be identified by various PCs based on experience. There was also a magic item they found early (and the wizard was kind enough to leave behind whether he wanted to or not) that let anyone perform the Identify spell. They weren't left in the lurch as much as they could have been.

I was frustrated because every time I tried to pull together a nemesis group to thwart them the group composition changed so I had to start over. The first one had a druid to mess with the ranger but then the ranger left. I was retooling that when things fell apart.

I tried putting together a larger story arc based on their actions and items that they had found along the way. That's when I found out that the group wasn't good at putting together the clues. I tried. Oh how I tried. Finally I realized that I had to spell things out for them if I wanted to get information across. That disappointed me as a GM and made me feel like I was railroading them since they would take the information as gospel and go with it rather than decide what to do on their own.

Another problem for me was the setting itself. Forgotten Realms is great if you're sticking to the Sword Coast where all the Driz'zt books happen. Outside of that it's a brief sketch without much more. Even the locale is mostly empty space. Trying to stick with the setting was more hindrance than help. I had decided to use the locations and make up stuff when it was getting to be more of a burden than I wanted to carry.

I wasn't enjoying this game after about the first half of it. When the wizard player left it was a real problem. One player had a decent back story and I started using it to drive the story forward. The rest boiled down to "out for the lulz" which is useless when it comes to trying to incorporate them into a larger story. I know my one page back story rule can be limiting but I expect more effort than that.

The extremely slow pace of the game also frustrated me and probably them. We couldn't get anywhere. Once we were in a city everyone scattered. Trying to run three different story lines meant that the players who weren't involved didn't have anything to do. They even admitted they knew it was a problem but kept doing it. The original rogue really wanted to do a lot of stuff on his own. I could have done that after the session but things he wanted to do would have in game impact.

That player said he would change to a caster and I accepted after making sure he was really good with leaving his other character behind. I think he was bored with having a second rogue around so a change was good for him. He didn't get much of a chance to show off his magic skills since the game ended soon after the switch.

I knew it was time to end the game when prep time was more of a burden to me than a pleasure. I was tired of having to present them with everything on a platter. I was tired of them splitting the group into splinters that had to be run during the sessions. I was just tired of the group because it never became a party.

Moving online didn't help. I couldn't read body language and people kept talking over each other. Trying to pass information to a player meant me having to stop everyone so I could focus on one thing rather than dashing off a quick note. We got into discussions rather than them accepting what they were given. That slowed things down even more in an already slow game.

What would I have done different? I've really thought about this. At some point I do want to run more games and I'll probably end up in the same situation of a group of strangers from a MeetUp or Facebook group. Here's some of the things I've been considering.

Have more toys in the sandbox. It's great to give the players full control but as someone said if you have a sandbox you need to provide the players with toys. If you don't then they don't know what to do. This game proved it very well.

Find out how much the group likes piecing together what may seem to be random events into a larger whole and then keep an eye on if they can really do it.

Talk about pacing. If they want to spend time in the cities doing role playing things that's great as long as they realize it's going to eat up sessions. I'm fine with as much role play as they want to do, as long as everyone wants to do it.

Talk quite seriously about splitting the party in role playing situations, especially when what they want to do has game impact. There's only one of me so taking a large portion of my time isn't fair to the rest of the players. I'm fine with setting up time outside of the game to take care of business, as long as it doesn't invalidate things that happened in the previous session.

Treasure. I need to get much better about the party finding the appropriate amount of treasure per encounter. I also need to stop making up magic items that can be easily abused to unbalance encounters. I had several of those in this game and it caused me headaches.

Party composition. I don't like forcing people to play characters they don't like but having two rogues showed me just how much of a problem it can be when there's a non-standard group. Losing the wizard was a real eye opener for everyone. I had to tailor encounters both to handle the extra rogue but also take out most magic from their opponents since they had no way to counter it. That brought high fantasy down to low fantasy.

I like the 3.5 rules. I really do. We could have moved the game to Fantasy Grounds and used the OSR except for the Forgotten Realms setting. That was never licensed out. Changing mid-game would have meant losing feats and equipment that the PCs already had. It wouldn't have been fair to expect them to lower their abilities when we had the other option of using a camera and Discord. It wasn't great on the whole but to me it was better than the alternative.

Online vs in-person. Had this game started out online it may have been different. Moving from one format to another was difficult for everyone. We did our best.

Did I fail as a GM? Yes. Did they fail as a group? Yes.

I think we had a decent start and then it began to fall apart when the first of the story arcs I tried to include came into being. That's when I found out the players weren't good or weren't interested in the long game. I started looking for modules I could adapt to run over a couple of sessions that were interesting to me and allowed for them to be challenged. Either I'm very choosy or there aren't many of those. I did find some publishers I like a lot for that kind of thing so that's good for the future.

Had the game continued it would have been a series of module adventures strung together with some of my own ideas to keep them into a cohesive story. I know I would have still had problems with the role play/combat balance just based on their reactions to events. Maybe not problems so much as adjustments to the balance.

I know real life had a big impact on everyone's mood. Abruptly losing a player was also a blow since I think I was the only one who saw it coming and that's because it's part of my job to monitor the player satisfaction. We wanted to escape the stuff in the real world but we also carried it with us. That made games more frenetic and more focused than prior. Losing the physical proximity didn't help keep the group together either.

I don't know when in person gaming will start up again. I also don't know where we can game. The local store where I used to try to game moved to another storefront and there's no good place to run role playing games. Other stores may have them but I think the setup is the same - they've got tables for playing MtG and some wargaming but nothing that will work well for RPGs. We'd have to take two of the tables and find a way to be heard over anything else going on in the store. Plus make sure there's space for us.

I've been debating the idea of running one shots with pre-gens online. I want to learn the system so I can run longer games there as well as find out if I can enjoy running online. For all that I'm antisocial I think I need the energy that comes from a gaming group. If I can get and give some of that online then it may work. Maybe having the program handle all the mechanics is the key there.

I don't miss this gaming group like I do the previous ones. I was friends with most of those groups. I didn't become friends with this group. That may be another problem I had with engaging them or at least wanting to engage with them. At least I know that there's far less chance of it happening with an online only group and can adjust my expectations accordingly.

Summary

This game was mostly a failure for a number of reasons. As the GM I can take on a lot of those reasons but not all of them. I'm not going to hang that around my neck. I've learned from it and will hopefully bring those lessons into the next games I run. I also know now that I can't force the necessary creativity to run good games. When that happens I need to talk it out with the group and see what can be done, if anything. That's another burden I can't take on myself.

I may have to give up on 3.5 Forgotten Realms as a setting. 5e is so prevalent now that I'm coming to terms with the fact that may be the version I have to run. I do have books and online books for it. I may find I enjoy it as I get used to it. Having cut my teeth on 3.5 it's a downgrade to go to 5e, especially with the latest changes to races or whatever they're calling them these days. Political correctness has been wiping a lot of the things I liked about the game and I know I can't tell people to ignore those changes, even though it's my prerogative as the GM to make those decisions. I'm not that stupid.

I wanted to give people reading this some kind of conclusion to the campaign since I started writing about it. I felt it was only fair. I didn't get the chance to do that with the group since after our last session and my email telling them I was ending the game I haven't heard from any of them. That was another tick mark in the "wasn't a tight group" column.

Finally, I never truly felt appreciated as a GM. I know that sounds petty. It's how I feel. They said all the right things at the right times, I'll give them that. Their actions showed me more. I'm not expecting banners and huge amounts of praise. It would have been nice to not have to chip in for the food I didn't get a chance to eat since I was running the game. And it would have been nice to get at least one token of appreciation from them for the work I did. Not knowing if that's petty or not doesn't help either.

So, Um, What's Going On?

If you follow me on Twitter (hi!) or are a Facebook friend (hi!) then you know the real life stuff that's going on with me. If you don't know me from either of those places then all you need to know is that real life stuff is going on with me.

I've been quiet here because I haven't felt I would have much to say about gaming, which is the primary focus on this blog lately.

The game hasn't been going well. I think it's a combination of an ill-matched group, an ill-matched GM and group, and moving the game online. The only thing out of those three that could possibly be changed is the online part but it wouldn't fix the other two.

The ill-matched group has some odd dynamics since it's morphed so many times. There's now a husband and wife team, their friend (at least I think he's their friend, he may be the friend of the guy who abruptly left), and one person who's stuck through from the beginning. Their characters haven't meshed into a party - they're four people hanging out and doing stuff but they're not a PARTY in that they're forming interpersonal relationships. Not the players, the characters. Which is also the players but not really.

Only one player gave me enough backstory to work any of it into the game. The others gave me a little along the lines of "I'm trying to find my father but not really" and "I want to learn more magic before I go home". That's not enough for me to find a way to work them into a story. It's separate people with separate goals.

Here's where I get to vent a little. I want them to enjoy the game. I want them to try to put together larger pictures from what they gather as they adventure. I want everyone to have fun. But this group just can't see clues. I wondered if I was being too subtle so I literally attacked them with NPCs that should have spurred them into trying to figure out why they were being followed. Nope. As soon as the encounter was over they barely talked about it even though the NPCs got away. When they were attacked again, same result. How much more obvious do I have to be that there's something going on?

This is why I think the group and I aren't a match. My GM style doesn't mesh with their play style. That's not saying either one is bad. That's saying they don't work well as a game. It means no one is having as much fun as they could and should.

This leads into why my short lived "How I Roll" suddenly ended. I couldn't come up with enough things to continue it. That was an offshoot of me doing game prep and how things worked in my game. Since I no longer get any pleasure from game prep and the things that go on in my game aren't worth mentioning it ended that set of posts. Maybe in the future I'll pick it up again, maybe not. I don't know how much people liked it.

Ending a game is a difficult decision. I've done it in the past when I knew I wasn't giving them the game they deserved. I never heard from any of the players again after it ended so I know I made the right choice. That hurt, by the way. No one even thanked me for that game or the one before (most of the group was from the previous game that ended due to players moving away).

Ending a game in these times is an even more difficult decision. Everyone needs an escape. Gaming is a wonderful escape. But when it becomes something I dread rather than look forward to with anticipation then I know there's problems. Big problems.

I've tried to fix it by asking players what they wanted out of the game and got non-committal answers that didn't help me at all. They were along the lines of what I already said. Mostly they want to play and this is a game they have. It's not that they want to play MY game. It's that they want to play A game. At least that's the feeling I'm getting.

I could run a series of loosely collected pre-generated adventures to keep the game going. No one seems to be looking for a long term story arc. But that would put me in the position of reading Powerpoint slides. That's not what I want to do. Sure, it's easy to prep. Print off a map, print off the adventure, run them through it. I have plenty of those that I use for inspiration. But if that's all they want then there's a lot of other GMs to do that. I want to get engrossed in the story they weave. I'm there to support that and they're not storytellers.

This is me talking myself into ending the game, if you couldn't tell.

I am looking at Fantasy Grounds and running regular one shot adventures for people who just want to show up, grab a pre-generated character, and play for a few hours with no long term consequences. There's so much league play these days where every result is a permanent result I want to think that there's people out there who want carefree play too.

That would let me have some fun with adventures and also play with no long term consequences. Sure it might seem little different than what I said I didn't like about my current game but it's different. It's meant to last a few hours then end forever. One shots as opposed to a string of encounters.

I have a few days left before I need to make a decision. Wednesday before the game is my traditional time to contact the group and remind them we're playing. That's a way for people to say if they can't play as well. I canceled the last game due to the stuff from the first paragraph and one player would have had to cancel anyway due to their real life stuff. So we're already several weeks out from the last session.

What will I do for a creative outlet?

I can work on learning Fantasy Grounds since I like learning things and seeing how to make games there.

I can work on my hobbies.

But I know that my full creativity is blocked at the moment. It's been blocked for a while. The world changed. We're all excused for having bad mental reactions to what's going on. For me it means that I don't think I can run games right now. I can't give myself over to the fun of figuring out imaginary challenges to overcome when we're all dealing with real life challenges. That's not fun.

Anyway. I wanted to let you know that I've been feeling guilty about not posting an update. I'm still around and I hope to be posting about other things that I can do. They probably won't involve gaming as much. I have many other hobbies and interests that I enjoy sharing. Maybe switching to those will put me in a better place to be creative in general.

Forgotten Realms Campaign - The State of the Game

I know I've been really bad about updating the blog with the story that's unfolding. To be perfectly honest it's because I'm not invested in it.

I'll also admit (here) that I'm not all that invested in the gaming group either. It's one that was assembled using MeetUp and then the holes filled with people players knew. If you've read through you know that the group has changed significantly and only two of the original group is still playing. Not that I was attached to that group either.

I kept hoping that as we played things would become more friendly in person. They didn't. And then the world changed and we moved the game online. That kept people distant even when we're playing.

I'm having a lot of trouble getting interested in each session. I used to enjoy game prep because I would work at finding things that the group would enjoy while spotlighting at least one character. Now? I dig through published adventures looking for something to last a few sessions.

One of the reasons I stopped updating this is because I'm really behind on my notes. Using the Rocketbook is great except when it's not. And right now it's not. I have the transcribed notes that I still need to review because OCR is good but it's not good enough to deal with gaming terms and my handwriting. I can see where some GMs would be really happen with it. I'm not and decided I'm going back to paper going forward.

Yes, I know I still need to update the notes that are pending. I feel better about doing it since I know there's an end. Then it's regular handwritten notes like I've done for all my other games. The concept of being able to search for terms and such is nice. I've found that when I would really need it I don't have that capability because it's in the middle of the game.

I will still take pictures of the maps since that's darn handy for setting up continuing sessions. I'm kicking myself for not doing that in previous games as well. It allows for me to redraw maps before the game actually starts.

My lack of interest in the game means I haven't bothered to draw up any original maps. There's no real point to it when there's perfectly good maps out there I can use. As I said I'm grabbing adventures and ideas from other sources so why not the maps too? That's a whole set of tools taking up room on my hard drive now. It happens.

The thought in the back of my mind is that if I'm not having fun I should end the game. I've considered it seriously. There's a couple of things that are keeping me from doing it.

One is that this is the only social interaction I have, as little as it is. If I stopped gaming I wouldn't have any conversation outside of work stuff. That's a hard thing to consider, given that I was isolated before this all happened.

Another is that they seem to be enjoying the game. No one has told me otherwise (even the guy who left didn't say anything) and I've been trying to watch for signs of disinterest. Everyone seems happy enough when we confirm we're gaming. So they're getting something out of it. I feel that sense of obligation.

Maybe if we could start gaming in person again I might feel better about things. I miss the social interplay and cues that you only get in person. I miss handing out the cards with loot and magic items. I miss using terrain bits I can't use now because they get in the way of the camera. It might just be "online fatigue" that's my problem.

Regardless I don't see myself updating the blog with the campaign story in the future. I was struggling to make it a good narrative and never felt like I succeeded to my own satisfaction. If I can't make it interesting to myself then what hope is it to make it interesting to others?

This sounds a lot like a Debbie Downer post. It isn't the most cheerful one I've done. It has some of the serious issues that have been plaguing me about the game. However since I had started doing the narrative I felt that some kind of closure was in order.

If you've been hoping for more updates this will be a disappointment. Unless something really big happens I'm not going to post again. That includes if we dissolve the game. I would consider that big enough to post about because I'll try to give an analysis of why we did. I don't expect it but it's always a possibility when you have a gaming group.

Forgotten Realms Campaign - Game Update

This is a post to let you know the campaign is still going after a hiatus while we waited to see if we could continue in person or if we had to go online.

We did go online using Discord and there's quite a few sessions I have to transcribe my notes and make them into posts here.

Stay tuned!

Forgotten Realms Campaign - An Unexpected Hideout

[GM commentary is in square brackets. Refer to the Forgotten Realms Page for more detailed information about the characters and setting.]

Everyone takes some time to rest after the battle and get patched up, which seems to be less important than looting the bodies when no one is on the verge of dying. Izzy easily heals everyone who has been hurt and they decide to stay where they are to rest rather than moving on or back up.

Daylor hears some scurrying sounds further down the passage during his watch and passes the information on to the next person. No one else hears noise during the night.

In the morning, or at least after everyone is awake since they're deep underground, they look around the area more closely. The webs that hid the chitines seem to be more than random - they seem to form a barrier between the staircase and the rest of whatever is deeper in the mountain.

As kind of a side note they get into a discussion about how spiders spin the webs. L'oric states they spin them out of their butts, which is pretty much accepted by all of them. Finy gets up his courage and goes to see if that's what happens here.

The chitines are wearing leather loincloth/skirts that don't seem to have any special significance. Izzy checked. Finy goes behind one and lifts up the loincloth of one to find out that it's female and doesn't seem to have any extra parts. The rest of the party is literally cringing at this. They've all noticed that there's something on their stomachs that is probably where they spin webs. They noticed this while trying to look at anything but where Finy was and what he was doing.

Izzy is still trying to figure out the connection between these chitines and Lloth but she's not remembering it. They didn't spend a lot of time on her in classes and she was distracted by a very attractive classmate in the seat next to her at the time. She thinks it was a footnote more than anything important.

They move deeper into the complex. Fiuy and Daylor once again split trap finding duties into each taking one side of the corridor - Daylor to the right and Finy to the left. They keep an eye on things and do more thorough searches about every thirty feet or so. The walls are covered in webs, some thin and wispy while others are more substantial.

From are large cocoons hanging from the stalactites as they proceed. They're pretty certain they know what's in them and that they could have ended up in them as well. They revise how long ago the last party was down here by the fact that they weren't in cocoons. Yet.

Daylor sees a pair of thicker web strands running parallel to the floor and disappearing down the length of the cavern. Finy doesn't see any on his side but is getting very interested in the cocoons as they go. Daylor points out some ledges he's seeing about twenty feet up on the wall, on both sides and in no real pattern. They discuss this and guess they're meant to be nesting/resting places for the chitines as they seem about the right size.

Finy gives in to his curiosity about the cocoons and decides to climb up to get one when he finds one close enough to a ledge to make it possible. It takes him a little work to get up the wall and he's covered in webs by the time he makes it to the ledge. Looking in he confirms that the space is about the size needed for one of the chitines to comfortably fit and there's no webbing in them.

While they watch him make the climb Izzy and Daylor hear noise from further down the hallway. L'oric has been focused on Finy and trying to figure out how to catch him if he falls so he's not paying as much attention as the others. Izzy and Daylor have their focus split between what Finy is doing and watching for trouble.

Finy is at the limit of his reach when he uses his rapier to try to cut the thick strand of webbing holding the cocoon to the stalactite. The light weapon sticks to the web and he yanks it free without pulling himself off the ledge at the same time. Sheathing the now sticky rapier he pulls out his dagger as he's bound and determined to get himself a cocoon now.

Holding his dagger in his teeth he steadies himself to jump from the ledge to the cocoon. L'oric sees this and tries to stop him but Finy leaps. He is able to grab the cocoon and hold onto it as it sways from his momentum. Moving up he starts cutting the strand holding it (and him) to the ceiling.

Everyone is now focused on Finy sawing away at the only thing keeping him from meeting the floor in a rather painful way. Izzy gets everyone to use a blanket to catch him when he falls. She has to use her blanket as L'oric states quite emphatically they're not using his to catch the web covered halfling and whatever is in that cocoon.

The three of them hold the blanket under Finy and brace themselves when he finally severs the web. They're paying complete attention to the task and seem to have forgotten that there was noise further along or they've decided this is a more immediate need. Finy somehow bypasses the blanket to land on the floor below.

In doing so he also crushes the cocoon and falls inside. While the rest of the party is trying to figure out what the heck just happened he's searching what's now all around him. Digging around in old bits of bone and desiccated flesh he finds some buttons and buckles, which he shows the party and then puts into his pocket. They all felt that the cocoons held bodies and now they've confirmed it.

Izzy tries to help Finy out of the mess by grabbing the back of his jacket but he easily avoids her and gets himself out. He's now added bits of bone and desiccated flesh to the webs sticking to him and isn't really a very pleasant sight.

L'oric is bored by Finy's antics now and pays attention to the distance where they heard the noises. They see closer than when they were first heard and he tells that to everyone. They can't interpret the echos to know more than that.

While they're relaying the information a trio of javelins fly into their midst, one of them hitting Izzy and then falling out rather than wedging into her flesh. She's really upset at this happening again. L'oric sets the lantern down behind her so they can try to see what's happening while keeping their hands free.

L'oric casts Light on a rock and throws it down the hallway. It's a large enough radius that it illuminates the entire area including the ceiling. Daylor sees shadows moving around the stalactites and they realize these chitines can also be up there. They take a very brief moment to try to decide what direction the javelins are coming from but can't quite figure out if they're all coming from above or not.

Daylor activates his gloves and moves up the wall and to the edge of the ceiling to try to spot what's up there. L'oric fires an arrow at a shadow and doesn't hear it hit anything, blaming bad dwarven fletching. Izzy picks up the javelin that hit her and sets herself to throw it. Finy has moved behind her and sees her strike a heroic pose worthy of being on a low relief carving. He also sees her fumble the javelin just before she throws it and it falls to the ground behind her.

Finy sees the lantern and looks at his readied crossbow. He takes the time to rip a piece of cloth, wrap it around the head of the bolt, and prepare to send his makeshift fire arrow into the webbing on the ceiling to try to set it on fire, taking away their cover.

Another trio of javelins fly into the group and one finds L'oric on a glancing blow. Finy sets himself and fires his crossbow. The bolt isn't well balanced but it's a large and close enough target that it does tangle itself in the webbing without going out and starts enough of a fire that the web is now burning.

The smoke and distraction prevent anyone from actions and Daylor moves further into the ceiling to try to see something to attack, hopefully without being attacked himself. The webbing burns further as the flames are well established. The chitine moves away from the fire and down the wall opposite of where Daylor is.

Unfortunately for it Izzy is waiting there with a mace full of frustration at not being able to do much in combat to this point. Seeing the chitine fall in front of her she has an outlet for that frustration. With a mighty blow and a ringing "Meeting the dawn, bitch!" she crushes the chitine and it drops into a mangled heap at her feet.

[The image is of two things. The left is the not-to-scale hallway they're progressing. The tick marks are where the rogues do more thorough searches since I had them do 3 checks. The right is the aftermath of the battle with the chitine. Orange is the light spell and the area of webbing being burned (blue Xs). The orange d4 is the current area on fire. The random d6 was Daylor's indication that he was using his gloves and was not on the ground.]

No other attacks come from that end of the hallway. Thinking it through they realize that the thick strands of webbing that Daylor saw are most likely trip wires to alert the chitines (and whatever else is there) that there's prey. Finy pulled on one when he made his climb to get his cocoon. L'oric brings up the idea that they lead back to the main nest but it gets lost in the discussion about trip wires.

Searching further Finy finds a hidden door set into the wall. There's slight depressions that his hands will fit into at about waist level. Holding his hands there Daylor searches out the edges of the door to find it's about five feet high by three feet wide. Plenty tall for halflings, gnomes, and most dwarves. Izzy, L'oric, and Daylor all carefully examine the door in their own ways.

Izzy sees that there's a glyph on the door and as they look at it she understands what it does. If anyone other than a halfling opens the door that person - and many of them around - will get hit with electrical damage. This baffles everyone as to why a door aligned with halflings would be here at all.

Everyone makes suggestions on how to open the door. Finy tries various combinations of words until he says "Open" in halfling. And the door simply opens It's beveled to prevent it from being forced open easily and they're cautious about opening it so they can look inside. There's no traps to be found at the entry so they all move into the room.

L'oric is very excited about the skill necessary to place that glyph and wants to rush in to find out more. He's also looking forward to searching out the place since that seems to be where his interest is.  Daylor and Finy want to carefully search the room they're in before they move to the entry to the next room they see. It takes some persuasion to keep Izzy and L'oric from going into the next room first.

The first room has some tables and chairs along with a small flat chest near the doorway. Careful investigation turns up an empty chest and disappointed rogues. They decide it's simply a place to put stuff by the door and turn their attention to the next room.

No traps on the open doorway and in they go.

The next room is far larger. It has more tables, a nook that seems cozy, and a pyramid statue near one side of the room. There's a long table facing it and chairs long one side, also facing the pyramid. The other tables are larger but similar to the ones in the entry area.

The pyramid gets their attention. It's about three feet high and has a scooped out top rather than a point. It's not in bad shape but there's rubble around the base. The top has been hollowed out to about the size of a halfling's cupped hand and there's a desiccated spider corpse in it. Finy crawls around to find writing on the base - in halfling. He translates it for everyone and Izzy writes it in her journal.

THIS IS WHERE THOSE WHO ARE STONE OF HEART AND WILL NOT ATONE BECOME STONE IN TRUTH

They debate this and then look at the rubble around the statue more closely. With some imagination they can see part of a hand in it. The table facing it gets more of a hard look and they see the center chair is more ornate than the two flanking it. Daylor and Finy aren't saying much about this setup.

They range out in the room to examine it further. The furniture is similar in make and there's a secretary desk in the corner with a writing surface and a number of cubbies and cabinets in the top section. It's a rogue magnet which works quite well. They're going to wait for one of the others to detect magic before touching the thing, given the possibilities of that status.

[Entry on the left. The blue is simply furniture, the orange is interesting furniture. The rock thing is the pyramid statue and will be replaced by a d4 in future games because I didn't think of that at the time.]

GM NOTES

Oh yeah. I have notes.

Finy's teleport ring shouldn't have had the effect he had. I did some research and the official 3.5 decision is whatever state you're in when you teleport is the state you arrive in, whatever it is. It started with asking about being prone and then momentum came into it. The answer is that the translocation property is all that changes. So he would have taken falling damage. It was only 10 feet and he's a rogue so even with the negatives I would put on it for him holding/being stuck to the cocoon he'd take almost no damage. I need to let him know about that for the future. I don't expect an argument since I'm using the WotC answer.

I screwed up making the Gloves of Spider Climbing. They last too long. Right now they last 2d6 minutes and the roll had them active for 24 minutes. That's just too long based on the spell. So I'm going to probably take it down to 2d3 minutes to match the spell duration. I can't use combat rounds for measurement because I know he'll use them for non-combat times. Hopefully he'll take the correction well.

The gloves have a random duration and he rolled it when he activated them. I explained that I was the one to roll or what's the point of making it random? He'll still know how long they'll last so the extra thrill of uncertainty is gone. Funny enough we both rolled the same number.

I got all the descriptors for the hideaway they're in from various dungeon dressing products (I can't find the freaking links but I'll get them somewhere). I like how they work together to make something more interesting and unusual. I printed out a bunch of options so I can choose the ones that work best on the fly. I prefer that to planning the whole thing out and then finding that I need to make changes anyway.

I'm also basing the hideaway on the "5 Room Dungeon" designs all over the place. So they'll have 5 rooms that lead into another 5 rooms until they've figured out the hideout. I already know what it's there for and what they'll find but we'll see how it morphs out.

I'm not sure why this session seemed to not have as much going on as the previous ones. My notes are shorter and there's not so many of them. I have to wonder if we just had a slower pace or if I mistimed it. I'll see how the next one goes since there will be combat and other things going on to help keep the excitement level up.

I found that one player specifically was unhappy with the higher amount of ranged combat since she's very bad at it. I need to keep that in mind so there's more melee that she can have a better chance at scoring in and not being so darn frustrated. I'm glad she showed it in this session so that I can make changes to what happens going forward.

I also found one player is all about the dungeon crawling. Ok then. He's very excited about this and about the possibility of finding magic stuff. Knowing that I can tweak the hideout and where it takes them later.

I'm also disappointed that the players for the rogues aren't seeing that I'm all but laying out a guild hall in front of them. Either the players aren't getting it or they're playing it that way. I need to ask which one it is since one answer directly impacts me. I'm thinking it might be a combination since I've already found out that one player isn't the best at piecing together things from clues and hints. I already had to lay things out more explicitly in private conversation for him to follow the breadcrumbs to the answer.

There was also a lot of metagaming going on this time. I finally had to ask flat out if what they're saying is what they're doing. They're better than this. The rogues were about to start looting the secretary desk without checking for magic or saying they were looking for traps. I asked them if that's what they were really going to do - just blindly start opening doors and reaching into cubbies. They were a bit taken aback but I'd had it at that point. I'm not going to apologize. They saw that they were blurring the lines too much for me to know what they were doing so they should be better next time.

No one said they missed the player who had to leave. They did ask about him and whether or not he asked me to run a game for him so they showed some interest at least. They left it with being relieved that they weren't going to have to put up with his wife and the pressures it brought to the group dynamic.

I had a person contact me on one of the Meetup groups asking if they could join the game. He recently signed up for the group and my game has "Closed" as the first word in the title. As a courtesy I asked the group what they wanted to do even though we had discussed and dismissed the possibility of adding another player last session. They said they didn't want another player and like the group we have. I expected that to be the answer so I wasn't surprised. I let the person asking know that I would ask and I just realized I never told him the answer. Whoops. I'll do that and offer to run a game if he gets a group and location together, as I always do.

All in all they're doing well. There may be a slight skill point shift for one of them since they don't need it where it is now and I'm happy to let them move it since the original use was my idea. I'm fair that way. I hate wasted skills and feats.

Forgotten Realms Campaign - They Chose Down...

[GM commentary is in square brackets. Refer to the Forgotten Realms Page for more detailed information about the characters and setting.]

After an uneventful night spent in the tunnel entrance [No one seems to care when they're camping next to corpses. Go figure.] they want to use their new magic item to try to figure out what the brass eyeball does but the loot they found doesn't have the right kind of gemstone.

Finy offers up one of his and they are pleasantly surprised to find out that the eyeball will allow the person who activates it to see things as they really are - including things hidden by magic - for a short period of time, taking two days to recharge from being used. They consider it to be a handy item even with those limitations. [It works the same as True Seeing for one minute, once per day, every two days.]

They also see that as the spell works the web takes on the color of the gemstone it's consuming. This is a pretty nifty effect and a credit to whoever made it. [Cough, cough. It was me.]

Given how useful that brass eyeball is is they want to keep it handy. Finy immediately offers to hold it but for some odd reason the rest of the party prefers to let Izzy be the keeper. Finy takes this in stride, as he takes so many things.

Leaving their horses secured in the tunnel entrance they make their way down the mountain to try to find that trail that L'oric pointed out. They find a lesser trail breaking off the main one and it leads to the side of the mountain. It's been used and it leads to steps and handholds hacked into the mountain side, going up. Careful checking turns up a local copper coin dropped in the dust as well. The spacing on the steps seems to be meant for human-sized creatures rather than giants or dwarves.

Before they start the climb Nihilus checks the weather and forecasts a bright sunny day. The entire party gives each other the side eye at that, given his terrible record at forecasting the weather. They can already see the clouds on the horizon that he somehow missed.

Carefully climbing up the mountain takes about an hour with no missteps or problems. They're well carved enough to provide a good route up to a hole that's been crudely cut into the mountainside. The walls are about a foot deep and the opening is just large enough to admit one person at a time - about 5 feet tall and 3 feet wide. There's a small ledge outside the hole so two people (or two people and a halfling) can stand outside of it.

They decide this isn't ancient work or part of the original construction. The sun is at the wrong angle to light up much of what's inside the hole and Izzy thinks she sees someone watching them from the top. L'oric looks carefully and doesn't see anything or anyone. He tries pointing that out to Izzy but she's adamant that there is someone up there even if she can't see anyone now. She shoots an arrow that doesn't hit anything, even rock, but keeps a wary eye out because of her certainty that someone is there. L'oric lets her do and think what she wants at this point.

Finy nominates himself to go into the hole and no one seems to have a problem with that. He finds himself in a chamber that's cut out of the mountain and is sized for giants. The cavern is empty as far as he can tell and there's a thick layer of dust on the floor. He finds that there's layers of footprints in the dust going into the chamber and out of sight of where he went.

Returning he relates what he saw to the group and Nihilus goes to have his own look. He determines it was three sets of tracks and they were spaced out over time. They also only go in one direction - into the chamber. Finy and Daylor have a bit of a conversation with body language and eyebrows relating their opinion of his skills.

Since there's really only one direction to go they parallel the footprints into the chamber. At the far end is an open giant-sized doorway with the remains of metal hinges still visible. On the walls are some metal torch holders in various states of disrepair where they still exist at all. There's a very old campfire by the doors that seems to have been made of suspiciously door shaped planks of wood. Poking around finds more hinges in the ashes.

The metalwork isn't bad but it isn't great. It's about what they expect from giants. Everyone is of that opinion that "good, not great" is the default state of giant work.

Finy takes the lead out of the chamber and follows the curving hallway that slopes down and then back up. During this he's checking for traps and seeing places in the dust where previous visitors have done the same thing. Daylor is also checking as he goes, which does not escape Finy's notice. They split up the search. Finy obviously moves his belt pouch to the side where Daylor isn't.

As they go L'oric believes he heard stone moving behind them in the chamber that they left. They all listen and there's nothing. They decide to continue going away from the chamber, following the trail. While they're doing this L'oric is speculating about what's in the room he's decided is at the top of the mountain based on the cuts he believes are windows. He wants to find it so he can look.

At the end of the hallway is a stone spiral staircase. The steps are sized for giants, which means they're about four feet tall per stair. Finy, who is three feet tall, hauls himself up to look at the next step. He finds he's not the only one who's done this and that it seems everyone went up and then back down.

Given L'oric's desire to see what's up there and their general loot-happiness they choose to go up the stairs rather than down. After a decent amount of very tall steps the footprints change and they find two very large feathers on the stair. And a few old human bones. At this point they can see the footprints change and one set of them is deeper in the dust before the next stair.

No one suggests going back at this point. They go up and find only one party has continued past this point, and they also came back. Two stairs later they find more, fresher bones. This is where the footprints turn around and go back. They find a word scrawled on the stair wall - Peryton.

Nihilus sees that and runs past everyone up the stairs. They're racking their memories to see if the word makes any sense. Izzy and L'oric put the pieces together to realize that a peryton is a large, nasty, magical animal that does things like eats people. Right around then they hear a screech and Nihilus shouting. Before they can decide if he needs help both sounds get fainter and further away.

[The players recognized that this was me giving the character an ambiguous 'out' to the game. They accepted it and appreciated the way it was done rather than a stupid/heroic death. This way Nihilus is still available for NPC use if I choose. The player was also pleased at this and had more questions than he should have had when I told him what happened.]

The group decides that discretion is the better part of not being eaten by a large, nasty, magical animal and go back down. They make it as far as the chamber where they started before they need to rest for the night.

Rearranging the watch order since they're down a person they set themselves for the night. During the second watch period L'oric sees writing on the wall glowing very faintly, about twenty feet up from the ground. It takes him a bit to read it - it's in common - to find that it says "Oxos sucks dwarf d....". He relays this to each subsequent watch and then to Daylor in the morning, who had first watch.

Daylor recognized the name as stone giant lineage. He doesn't know much more than that but they all get a good laugh out of the graffiti. They start to ponder how it could be done before they realize they really, really, really don't want to know.

As they move to the staircase Izzy makes the very grave and wise pronouncement that going down the stairs is going to be easy but getting back up them will be difficult. There's a moment of silence at this completely obvious bit of wisdom then they start down the stairs. There's concern that the murder bird (as they refer to the peryton) is going to come down and eat them. L'oric is particularly concerned for some reason but they're all nervous about it to a certain extent.

Half a day's travel brings them to the fate of one of the previous groups. A large block of stone has some skeletal legs sticking out from under it and the edges of crushed armor. He finds the pressure plate they triggered and notes that's a kind of trap they may find again. The bodies have been thoroughly looted so they find nothing.

There's still two sets of footprints going down the stairs.

Further down Daylor nearly falls into an already triggered spiked pit trap he didn't notice but is able to catch himself before he falls in. There's a narrow ledge around the sides and front of the trap that can be walked with care.

Looking into it they find five bodies with surprised looks on what's left of their faces. Looking more carefully they find footprints in the muck below the bodies and Finy offers to have a rummage around. He finds very little and what he does find is either tucked into corners or not worth taking. He leaves the copper pieces and regular thief's tools (after checking with Daylor on that second one). He does palm a ring he finds. There's also a ruined scroll that they decide to keep.

Given the narrowness of the ledge around the trap and the spikeyness of the trap itself they take the time to rig a rope handrail to make sure everyone can safely move down this stair. Their caution pays off and everyone gets to the next stair without a mishap. Even Izzy.

There's only one set of footprints going down the stairs now.

A few steps later Finy stops everyone as he investigates a trap trigger he found. When he can't figure out what it does he blames it on the shadows in the stairs but is cautious moving forward. Daylor has a look as he goes by and sees that Finy was very carefully examining a bit of rock sticking out of the wall. He doesn't bring this up to anyone.

As Daylor stands up he feels a very slight breeze from below and what feels like a spiderweb on the wall. L'oric takes an interest in the web and looks at it more closely. His considered answer is that it's spiderweb, it's useful for some spells, and it comes out of a spider's butt. [I love low rolls.]

Daylor notices a blocked up doorway as they're paused. It's not expert work, it's lesser work that what carved out the chamber and staircase, but it's solid. The wind from below is just a bit stronger and it's carrying some webs as well. No one wonders if they missed other blocked up doorways on the way down because they were so focused on traps and not falling down the really big stairs.

L'oric decides to try to pull out one of the rocks from the doorway. He gets a grip, pulls, his grip slips, and he ends up on his elegant sun elf butt. A pebble does fall down and hit him on the head, as convention says it must. He isn't going to let this go unchallenged. He tries again, pushing and pulling. The rocks don't move but no more pebbles fall so for him it's a win.

He's the only one who tries to get through the door. The rest had a look and realized that they didn't have the equipment or skill to break it down.

They find more blocked up doorways as they progress, all on the same side of the stairs and all well made. They're various ages and not hidden in any way.

The breeze and webs from below keep getting stronger as they descend. There's web strands on the walls now. Finy and Daylor get some paper from Izzy to make tiny torches to burn away the webbing from where they want to check for traps.

Daylor finds a broken web strand that had spanned the width of the stairs. Not much further he finds an intact strand and the footprints seem to have stepped over this one. Finy is seeing that the webbing on the walls is getting thicker. Daylor looks but doesn't see anything different in the webs that he hasn't been seeing all along.

As they're looking at the webbing a number of hand-sized hairy spiders attack from all directions. This is not a good day for the spiders as they're turned into spider kabobs in very short order. They don't even get a nibble before they're slaughtered. [Damn those useless spiders.]

They continue down two more stairs until Finy finds a leg but not its owner. Being much more cautious he promptly falls into a web pit trap on the landing below. He's a twisty little halfling so is able to grab one of the hardened web spikes around the edge and pull himself out.

As they try to figure out what happened to Finy a trio of javelins come sailing into their midst. Izzy catches one with her shoulder but her armor gives her some protection from major damage. It takes a bit for everyone to catch their bearings and see the wall of webbing across the landing about thirty feet back. They also see the remains of what was most likely the last set of visitors in the center and sides of the floor.

Finy pulls out the lantern and Daylor throws it at the webs, igniting the center of them. More javelins are thrown, this time with Finy and L'oric getting nicked. They can't see what's attacking them but as the web burns they see three figures of some kind behind it.

Izzy casts a spell to cover the area with mist to prevent more targeted strikes and centers her spell on where Finy is standing. The figures run out of the burning web and at the group. They're four armed, half human-ish, half spider. And they're not pleased. They're brandishing swords now as they move forward.

Even though they have no idea what they're fighting the group makes an excellent account of themselves. It takes about the same amount of time to dispatch these creatures as it did the spiders above, although they don't make creature kabobs this time.

The final attack goes to Finy with an admirable tumble and stab to the last standing/wavering creature. Who then promptly falls down. Finy avoids being squished, kind of forgetting that could happen.

The creatures don't have anything on them but the previous visitors not only have their own equipment but what they took off the previous two parties. Being a more experienced adventuring party Izzy casts a spell to detect any magic items they may be holding. There's a decent amount of coins, a number of gemstones, spell scrolls, and several magical items as well as mundane weapons.

Using gemstones from the loot L'oric is able to use the web to identify the three magic items. Finy had put the ring from earlier into his pocket rather than his backpack so it showed up when the spell was cast. He lets them identify it as well. There's just enough gemstones to identify all four items unless they want to start using much more valuable ones.

There's both divine and arcane spell scrolls so those are quickly and easily sorted out. As they settle in for the evening in a place they feel is relatively safe they discuss the treasures they found and what is best suited for who.

The items they found are:

• A set of gloves that let the wearer climb up walls and ceilings as if they were a spider but they work for a random amount of time when they're used and can be used once a day.
• A pair of bracers that will deal out extra damage if the person wearing them makes an excellent strike and can do this twice per day.
• An anklet that will let the wearer teleport to a spot they can see up to ten feet away from their current location and do so without error, twice per day.
• A ring that makes it easier for the wearer to hide and disguise themselves which requires two days to recharge each of the abilities.

The corpses have had their edibles removed and are kind of sucked dry but haven't been moved much.

GM Notes

I really didn't want to have that player's character leave on a cheesy or insignificant note. Rushing up to a deadly creature seemed in keeping with his actions and would carry him away. After I told the player what was done he really did thank me for removing him without making it permanent. Then he wanted to keep the peryton as his animal companion. I had to remind him he wasn't at a level to get one. I also had to remind him that his options were limited to the list in the druid class and that the peryton is a magical animal and can't be a companion anyway. That doesn't mean they can't be tamed so he's happy with that.

I thought I had them go too deep into the mountain so I decided it was 200 feet.

I picked out the magic items to suit the characters and give them more advantages at times. By limiting how often things can be used it makes them less powerful as magic items but darn useful in the right situations. It makes them think about using them rather than something that's activated all the time. Things will get more interesting the more they have since they're limited on how many of each kind of item they can wear.

The gloves are obviously of spider climb. The person using them has to roll for how long the effect lasts - 4d6 minutes. That adds to the tension since they won't know until they activate them. So sometimes they may have to rush things or they fall down, go boom.

The gauntlets deal out an extra 2d6 of damage one handed, 3d6 damage two handed when the wearer makes a critical hit. Since the chances of that tend to be 10% more or less having them work twice per day isn't overpowering. They also choose when to activate them after they know they've done the critical hit so they can decide to save the effect or use it, depending on what they're doing. Again it puts the player in the driver's seat.

The anklet is a teleport without error with a distance of ten feet. I may have to reduce the number of times it can be used per day but the value isn't that great so maybe not. When I made these I was going for the lower end items. I also don't think anklets can be worn with magic boots since they're in the same body area. I'll double check that one. That would make it another limiting factor.

The ring gives a +10 to hide for 2d6 minutes and works as the Disguise Self spell for 4d6 minutes. They can be used independent of each other. But both of them take two days to recharge when used.

I'm getting into the random amount of time that a magic item effect works. I'll see how it plays out in game. My goal was to add extra tension to the situation since they can't be completely certain of how their plan is going to work if they expected the item to work for longer than it will. Or what happens when it stops working since they're not in control of it. I'll also ask them players what they think of it and adjust as needed.

Finy's player talked to me after the game to discuss how to keep magic items he wanted to hide from being seen. I didn't realize he put the ring in his bag of holding, which would have shielded it from the Detect Magic spell. I apologized and said I would think of a way. Tonight I texted him one of my famous obscure questions - "Odd or even?" - and he chose odd. The d10 also came up odd. So there's going to be an extra outside pocket on the bag of holding, on his dominant hand side, where he can put things quickly. If there's people around he needs to make a slight of hand check but that's going to be a low DC given how natural the movement is in general. Problem solved and it only works for small items.

I'm tracking combat in my Rocketbook now which is why I could be more detailed in the combat descriptions. Prior to this I was using my old method of tracking on scrap paper and then tossing it away since I only had to track initiative and turns. I still track those but now I can make more notes on what happened so there's a record. And I can make these entries slightly more interesting.

I have some time before the next game so I can plan it out. There's two ways I very much don't want them to go out of this area because they're death. Since the players don't want to go to the Underdark and both ways would lead there eventually I should be able to let them make the decision. If not then they didn't heed the clear warnings. I will make them very clear warnings.

I'm also going to have them finish the details on their backup characters so I can level them up to match the game. They're going to be the nemesis party and it started back in the last town they were at. Of course no one knows what's going on since not many GMs will put in this kind of effort or situation. Using their own backup characters is just mean but so fun.

I would have added a bard to the nemesis party so that they could have sarcastic songs following them around but The Witcher series lessens my enthusiasm for that. I did it well before the series in another game but that doesn't matter. For a while bards are going to be difficult to bring into the game without the comparisons being made. I don't want to have to add those quotes to the punishment list, especially since I haven't watched the series yet.

Forgotten Realms Campaign - Real Life Changes

Sadly we had to lose a player for the game.

Nihilus's player will no longer be able to join the group. We're all sad to see him go. There's a chance that he'll gather up another group and I'll run a game for them (which means TWO different campaigns to read!) but for now he'll be written out of the story.

I'm debating between a heroic death or an unknown fate for Nihilus. I honestly don't think that the player will be joining us again but I also don't think anyone in the game wants to see the character die. The way I have things planned for the next session will allow for either.

We all know these things happen. As the GM I'm the one who polled the group with the changed situation and then told the player what the result was. It sucks but it's part of my job to mediate between players and this falls under that umbrella.

To be fair the player with the real life conflict was willing to make the call but eventually understood that it was something I should do. I'm the impartial third party. We both agreed that having fired people in the past it's no fun but sometimes it has to be done.

The player was fully understanding of the circumstances - since many of them were his - so I don't think there's hard feelings to be had. He knew the special situation of one of the players when it comes to real life so he made his choices.

This is a reminder to me and will be to the rest of the group that no matter how much fun gaming is our real lives come first. We see this when we have to cancel or reschedule games but it hits home hard when someone has to leave the game because of it.

As a group we'll talk about whether or not we want to try to find another player. We're at four and we only play when everyone is there anyway. If there's someone who's itching to get into the game I'll gladly interview them. Otherwise we'll see what happens.

Now I'm off to finish prepping for tomorrow. I'm very, very lucky that the plans weren't heavily focused on his character so that I'd have to make big last minute changes. I do have to adjust the encounters because we're down a player but that's not going to be difficult. It just means fewer opponents or I lower their stats a little.

Forgotten Realms Campaign - A Promise to Keep

[GM commentary is in square brackets. Refer to the Forgotten Realms Page for more detailed information about the characters and setting.]

A sun elf traveling to Cormyr hears about a group of sun elves (like himself) traveling in the area and decides to see what they're like. He follows their trail west and then south down the road by the mountains. He doesn't stay in the town they did the night before.

Catching up to them he greets them heartily. He's riding a horse and has a rather tattered and torn appearance. At the sound of a horse approaching the group does what the group does. Izzy stands in the middle of the road after sending the goblins into hiding. Nihilus hides on the opposite side of the road. L'oric hides by the side of the road. Finy goes back into his tent.

When Izzy sees a half sun elf she drops her mace and shield and yells out "Dad!". This naturally confuses the stranger on the horse who says that while he may have sired children she's far too old to be one. She also notices that he's not a full blood elf and knows he can't be her father. At her yell everyone else groans and comes out of hiding. Except the goblins.

Introductions are made all around and Daylor takes off the rags to show he's nicely dressed underneath. They all have a short discussion on the benefits of the disguise of being poor while traveling. Without much fuss he convinces them that he should join up since he's also looking for some adventure and excitement. [I asked them to be experienced role players about having him join the group. Once again they agreed. No one wanted to spend the session trying to add the new player to the party.]

Izzy retrieves the goblins who are all tied on a lead. At that they continue to head south, looking for trails into the mountains. It's much easier in the daylight and Nihilus finds a trail. It does help that the goblins know the general area and have said as much to Izzy. Nihilus refuses to admit they helped.

Looking up the mountains they can make out a switchback road that leads to what is probably a tunnel entrance. There's a few fresh avalanches as well. L'oric sees another road to the north of the larger one and points it out. They decide to take the more traveled road.

A 10 minute drawing of what they see when they look at the mountains. Not to scale, not a map. But darn good for 10 minutes I think.

The trail is large enough for their horses, which was a concern for them going into the mountain. Nihilus finds the cart tracks that seem to match the odd cart from the inn. But he doesn't find any hoofprints. L'oric has a look as well and sees prints that belong to lizards. Nihilus, after looking at the tracks being pointed out, determines they're wyvern tracks. L'oric disagrees and when pressed says they belong to "a big ass lizard".

Izzy asks the goblins about the tunnel and about what made the tracks (since she assumes they know about the situation). They don't have much information about the tunnel but try to run when asked about the lizard. While she's doing that Daylor has a look and thinks that the tunnel is mostly natural but has been worked to be taller. [I was going to have evidence that the grey dwarves fed the lizards with goblins but that didn't work into the story. Still they would be afraid of the big ass lizards.]

It takes most of the morning to get up the road and they find an avalanche has covered half of the road. The other half is clear and Nihilus thinks the avalanche has stabilized. Looking at the road L'oric & Izzy see that it's a maintained road. Nihilus sees that it's a very well maintained road with stonework repairs. [Duh. Dwarves. But no one said anything about a connection at the table.]

The tunnel entrance is coming into view when they pass the avalanche when Nihilus sees a boot sticking out from the rubble. He dismounts and starts digging without telling anyone. When they go back to investigate what the heck he's doing they see the lower leg he's uncovered. Izzy every so gracefully stumbles on the path and knocks some rocks down the mountain, causing some of the avalanche below them to move as well.

Finy takes off the boot and knitted sock (both grey) and swears he can feel something in the seam of the sock as he carefully searches them. When questioned about what he's doing by L'oric he talks about things being hidden in boots which gives L'oric the idea of hiding a knife there. Finy puts the sock away for later investigation. The rest of the group is asking him why he wants that smelly thing.

When Izzy asks what he found Nihilus pulls out his blade to cut off the leg to show her. She chastises him for what he was going to do and has a look at what has been uncovered. After having a look she thinks he's been dead about 2 tendays, which matches the timeline Nihilus put on when it happened. [I had to break in hard and fast when the player said "I cut off his leg". Not only would he not have done that in one cut with the weapon he has his character would know about being in civilization that it would be improper to do it. This is going to lead to a talk with the player about his apparent need to want to be 'wild' but still be in settled lands. He can't have both.]

They are able to get the body out of the rubble and by guessing at what it looked like before a bunch of a mountain rolled over it that it matches the descriptions they've been given of grey dwarves. Finy searches the body and drops the warhammer on his foot. He tosses it off the side of the road, into the avalanche, and everyone yells at him both for the noise and for throwing away loot. He defends himself by saying it hurt his foot.

During his search he doesn't turn up anything else of interest. The belt pouch had a few coppers in it which he left there. Nihilus digs through the backpack and the only thing not destroyed were 4 dried mushrooms he'd never seen before so he takes them. Izzy performs rites over it as a good cleric should. She had to explain that to Nihilus as to why should would bother. Everyone else understood without asking.

While Izzy is doing her cleric thing Finy is intent on finding whatever is in that sock. He ends up shredding it down to nothing without finding whatever it was. He thinks that he just missed it somehow and gets annoyed.

Since the sun is behind the mountains they decide to camp where they are. There was discussion about continuing to the tunnel but wiser minds pointed out that going up a mountain road into an unknown tunnel at night - a tunnel that may lead to the Underdark - was probably not a great idea.

While they were doing all this the goblins built themselves a little campsite and have a tiny fire burning. No one from the group can find any firewood to cook dinner. It's all thin scrub and not dry enough. When Izzy asks the goblins what they're burning they all hold up sticks they'd carried up from the road. Goblins 1 - Party 0.

During the night L'oric hears something moving around near the top of the avalanche area. He casts Light and tries to see what's up there. Nihilus - who never seems to be in Reverie when things happen - also sees nothing and blames the Light spell. L'oric is certain he saw motion up there and is confident it's either a grey dwarf or a wyvern. He did that to poke at Nihilus and it worked quite well. The light wakes up the goblins and they now call L'oric "Stupid Elf Bright Light".  [At this point L'oric's player remembered he has a raven familiar. I tend not to remind players of things like familiars because they should be doing that for themselves. He's experienced enough not to try to retcon it into the search.]

The day breaks nice and sunny to the east. Nihilus forecasts that it's going to be a bright sunny day. After more trail rations they head up the rest of the trail to the tunnel. The way it's angled the late morning sun doesn't penetrate very far for them to see at a distance. While they're still a reasonable distance away Finy goes off to scout.

He hears two different sets of voices - one set is high pitched and the other is low pitched. He can't make out how many of each there are or what they're saying. When he comes back he startles Izzy who squeals like a goblin. After he relates what he saw and heard Izzy tells the goblins they need to come with the group and they strongly disagree. No one wants to leave them near the horses so they secure the horses to one section of the mountain and the goblins to a different one. [I play down these parts in game because I don't want them getting paranoid about leaving things that have to be left. It's reasonable that they could secure the horses and goblins for the short period of time they expect to be gone.]

Finy asks if there's some word or phrase they can use with the captive goblins to show their good intentions. The one that approached Izzy is offended that they would be expected to share secrets but finds another way. He has them cut off one of the dreadlocks from another goblin as proof they're the same tribe. [I guess in my world goblins use different kinds of hair decoration for the tribes. I'll have to make sure this is in my general notes and use it later as needed. Not bad for something thought up on the fly, in my opinion.]

From the fuss the goblins raised Finy recognizes that the high pitched voices in the tunnel are goblins. The ones in there are more panicked than the angry goblins they have in front of them but he's sure it's the same kind of creature.

While Izzy works with the goblins to get the token and to try to make sure they're safe along with the group's horses and supplies Nihilus is trying to persuade the others that they should kill the goblins which leads them into the start of a philosophical discussion on the nature of keeping promises, evil creatures, and what to do about them. Before it gets too far it's time to move up.

As they approach the tunnel entrance rain starts to fall. They were so busy with what they were all doing they didn't notice the clouds moving in. They all look at Nihilus, who said it would be a sunny day. Finy remarks to Izzy and L'oric that he thinks their ranger is broken. Nihilus either didn't hear it or pretends not to hear it. Neither Izzy or L'orid disagree with Finy.

As they get closer to the cave they can hear the voices. L'oric and Daylor recognize the deeper voices as speaking a dialect of Dwarvish. Izzy can hear the goblins. At this point they still can't determine how many of each are in the tunnel.

Nihilus decides to go to the opposite side of the tunnel entrance from where they're approaching. So he runs across the tunnel entrance. backlit by the late morning sun. Finy is making rude gestures at the loss of surprise now. Finy grumbles as he slides into the tunnel, clinging to the wall. As he enters a mist appears that blocks most of the tunnel entrance, leaving the sides clear.

This mist causes a bit of concern since they don't know who cast it or why but they're taking advantage of the cover it provides. The rest of the party works into the cavern along the sides. They see groups of goblins, just as thin and worn as the ones they captured, on both sides of the tunnel. They're chained together in groups of four.

When Finy goes to pick the lock on the manacle holding who they assume to be a shaman he pulls away and points to the rest of the goblins around him. The manacles are of the same dwarven make as the lock on the warehouse with runes on the manacles and on the chains. Finy shrugs but leaves them locked up.

L'oric sens his raven in to scout out where the grey dwarves are. It comes back and tells him "Behind the food". He has no idea what that means and says he should have asked it to find out how many there were as well. He relays the information that the dwarves are probably further back in the tunnel.

As they progress into the tunnel they see the end of a wagon under a very large amount of rock. It seems that the tunnel roof has collapsed onto the wagon and blocked the way. There's no dwarves to be seen so they go further in, finding the other groups of goblins chained together as well.

As they get closer to the wagon they can see there's been work trying to dig it out and clear the tunnel. They guess that the goblins were doing it but still don't see the dwarves. They approach it with caution, seeing it's the same material and make as the one back at the inn. That's one mystery solved, in their mind.

The tunnel entrance showing where it's blocked with rubble. The blue and yellow tokens are all groups of goblins.

As they get closer a crossbow bolt hits L'oric and a grey dwarf appears on top of what's left of the wagon. Izzy is able to dispatch it in quickly and as they're getting their breath the wagon upends and breaks apart. A VERY LARGE grey dwarf is standing in the wreckage and swings a warhammer at Finy. Nihilus slices at it but only cuts the bandages off its leg before Finy is able to do the necessary work of making it a deceased grey dwarf.

After they catch their breath they search the bodies and the wagon. The key for the manacles is easily found and Izzy takes the hair with her when she goes to free the goblins. She shows it to them and they aren't quite as terrified. She unlocks them and sees a severe, fresh burn mark on the one they picked out as the shaman. L'oric thinks that the manacles are enchanted to discourage magic use while they're worn.

Izzy goes back to heal the shaman after freeing the rest of them but he's done it himself and is healing the others. Finy takes the goblin hair from her as she goes to heal L'oric. The others find three well used lizard skin whips, four sets of the manacles, two light crossbows, and 2 warhammers. Searching the wagon shows broken wood that is probably from crates and barrels of trade goods from the town they were just in. L'oric is trying very hard to find wine but is disappointed.

Finy finds a number of small gems in the belt pouches along with 1 gold piece and 7 silver pieces that have the same look as the ones in the cash box at the warehouse. He shows the coins to the group. He doesn't show the gems.

Detecting magic finds a brass eyeball in one pouch and an ebony box wedged under one of the rocks in the wagon. They set the eyeball aside and open the box. Incautiously. Inside is a carved ivory web and instructions for use in the top of the box both in the spiky writing they can't read and in elven. They realize that they might be able to use the elven to translate the other language. The instructions tell them how to use the web to identify magic items. It needs a gemstone worth at least 100 gold pieces in the center for it to activate and the gemstone will be consumed.

They look to find that the goblins are long gone and took their kin with them from outside. They can see them running down one of the ravines. They shrug and go back inside to make camp for the night and look over their stuff.

GM Notes

First and foremost my goal here was to get them that magic item to identify other magic items. With one arcane caster who is multi-classing they were going to be very light on the ability to identify things. There's limits to how often it can be used but no more so than for a regular caster, really.

Now that they've found their passage to the Underdark and can't follow it they've got another path they can follow. There were two kinds of things they were looking to do here so now they can do the second one. Or they can leave. From the discussion they're going to see what that other road leads to so more than likely they're staying.

This game had a lot of metagaming happening and I kept having to pull them back. Part of it was adding a new player, part of it was the player writing the book and wanting to discuss parts of it while we were playing, and part of it is gaming in general. I asked them to keep it to a minimum and they would look ashamed but it didn't completely stop them.

I need to take better combat notes or keep my combat sheets until after I write up my notes. I'm not completely sure who did what during that last combat so I guessed. I can always correct it later if it matters. Since no one was seriously injured and no one seems to be counting coup it shouldn't be an issue for these. More a note for myself than for the group.

The tunnel setup is 3D printed Dungeonsticks (that I still need to finish painting) and they work very well to get up a fast layout. I kept adding on as they progressed and that helped immersion. They're also portable so they're easy for me to carry around. The tokens are pieces from a Stratego game with colored and numbered paper sleeves taped over them. I know I could 3D print other ones but I like these, I have these, and they work so I don't need to replace them. Even better they take up the correct amount of space even when they're prone (on their side) or down (flat).

The new player integrated well and that makes me happy. I'm hoping that integration stays well as we have more games. I think it will and there was plenty of role play going on as well as effective combat.

What I've been doing with the low level characters is building up the encounters so that they're excited about them and then giving them opponents who are enough to challenge them without being too much of a challenge. I learned from those damn thorn bushes. Extended combats are fun when they're more powerful, not now. Those grey dwarves were darn squishy and that's even with their level adjustment. I thought the combat would last a few more rounds but they were happy with the quick victory this time.