The penultimate fight was way shorter than I planned. I’d forgotten how badass the PCs were, so I had a bunch of level 3 guys which went down really, really quickly. I always underestimate the players. That said, it worked out really well in the end— the PCs took those guys down fast and hard, which left more time for the final fight and the epilogue.

The last fight went well. I had Evan take over a custom-designed monster, whom I was afraid would steamroll the PCs. Probably he could’ve been more interesting— he had a few fairly powerful encounter powers, most of which were Standard actions, meaning that he could only use them kind of slowly. One of them was a recharge power, but it probably should’ve been another one instead of his ability to reconsitute goblins into pesky zombie minions. I probably should’ve weeded out one or more attacks in order to replace them with something that could be a move or a minor. Maybe a Flaming Sphere-like ability, for example.

In terms of having a player control an NPC, I’d say it went well. I trusted Evan to do the right thing after telling him to not, say, just fly over the PCs and plink them. This group worked well enough that I don’t think Evan had a problem with being killed in the end.

In fact, let me state for the record that this was Evan’s idea originally— I didn’t just take over his PC without his consent! The jumping off point was when he said he could see himself turning into an antagonist, someone that the party would have to fight. It was such a great idea that I couldn’t resist.

Pacing went well. The pacing went relatively well. I didn’t feel too bad about not giving them in-game “stuff” for some things like the supply room, as it offered clues (read: it had been undisturbed for a long time).

Expository stuff for Rubican could’ve used work. This was fun for Evan and I and more boring for others, I suspect. I like doing one on one stuff, and that’s fine in itself. The problem was that nobody else had any idea what was happening, which was kind of a shame after all that build-up. Perhaps the party could’ve seen/heard the last set of visions. Admittedly, some of this was due to the fact that I wanted to end it, which meant I didn’t have time for more interesting expository stuff. In the future, I plan to involve multiple players in “side” plots.

Improv went well. I’m not sure how much I should reveal what was made up and what wasn’t. I don’t want to ruin the impression for any of my players that everything wasn’t prepared, but let’s be honest: I didn’t prepare everything. So if you’re a player from my game and you don’t want to know, skip this!

I made up the weapons at the end on the spot. I had a dungeon tile for the corner there, forgot to do anything with it, and decided it had to be something good when people decided to explore it. Likewise, I gave them some books that I hadn’t planned originally— one of them for creating portals, and a couple of zolem manuals. I didn’t plan my descriptions for the staging area. Aaaand I didn’t plan anything past the PCs teleporting back to Er-Eret.

In the end, I’m happy with how all that went.

I finished a goddamn game. And now I can say that my game finished! It took god only knows how long. At least six months. …nine months, judging by when I put up session #1! Awesome. As I may’ve mentioned, most of my games end in neglect, either due to scheduling conflicts or my interest wanes.

What’s next?

Good question. Most likely it’s an Arcane Power game, since that book is out and Divine Power isn’t. The player roster will probably see some changes, and it will more than likely be a different format of play. I’ve also got a couple of things I might want to try and execute on in my next game (e.g., “rituals are important”).

You’re in a room

The PCs were in a room that ostensibly acted as a barracks. After examining the room, they noticed that there were runes of warding that protected the room. Since Ratha and Rubican had reasonable familiarity with the language of Bael-Turath, they were able to complete the spell and rest.

They deciphered the missives, of which there were two. One concerned a portal, and contained orders to shut down the portal in order to retreat to the Usurper’s strongpoint. There were also orders to execute any prisoners. The other missive was from an inferior officer who begged the addressee to keep the portal open.

The PCs discussed the implications of there being a portal here— questions as to whether the goblins were using this arose, whether the goblins were actually being exploited by something else— and before long they decided to rest.

Rubican had a dream, where the Usurper made him kneel. Rubican resisted and although it chagrined the Usurper, he congratulated Rubican on his persistence and strength of will. Then he disappeared. Rubican didn’t wake up; rather, he saw across the clearing a woman who radiated heat. He approached her, and offered a hand despite the scorching air around her. She cut the shard out of his hand, and showed him a vision of plains of endless fire.

The next day they explored the rest of the complex. They found a storage room, which contained little of value beyond what could be considered historical artifacts. They found the holding cells, wherein the executed prisoners had risen back to life, still locked in cells, and more or less harmless.

Finally, they found the portal room. There was a bright sphere of light and a runic circle. On the floor were ashes, which had been undisturbed. The presence of ash was conclusive proof that this place had been undisturbed.

They entered the portal and explored a bit after realizing that the portal had closed behind them and that they were stuck. The notion was that the room they arrived in was a staging area for troops. This became clearer as, once they explored, they discovered that there were other, now dormant, portal circles. They also heard voices, and chose to investigate.

The last confrontation

When they found the source of the voices, they saw a bunch of goblins, one of whom was attempting to build a new Zombie/Zolem/Zombie fat-man. The rest were gambling.

The chieftain nearly lost his wits when he saw Ratha and Rubican together, as he had some sense that Rubican was affiliated with the Usurper, and after having moved a bunch, it was evident that Ratha was of the Star Pact. The PCs tried to extract more information, and found mostly that he was struggling to rebuilt the goblin army. Evenutally the PCs convinced him that he’d been betrayed, at which point he lost all reason and ordered his goblins to attack.

It was a short fight. Once the goblins all died, though, the jeweled finery that the chief goblin had been wearing began to crack and explode. A mist formed, which took on a humanoid shape, and rushed at Rubican.

At this point, Rubican had another vision. The Usurper demanded Rubican’s full cooperation. The Mother of Embers, as she identified herself, appeared behind the Usurper. When the Usurper noticed, he flew into a rage, and offered Rubican power and wealth at his side. Rubican chose the Mother of Embers. In response, the Usurper assumed control of Rubican and the battle began.

It was a longer fight than before, but odds were against the Usurper, even though he was able to reconstitute the goblins and raise the Zolem. Once the final blow was struck, the Usurper combusted and dissipated, leaving behind a fine white ash, almost like sand.

The PCs searched the room and found a number of books preserved. This was the Usurper’s lab, perhaps one of many. One of these books had a scroll of teleportation in it, which necessitated that someone involved have an intimate connection with the teleport destination.

Another thing they found were some old Bael-Turathi weapons, obviously magical but clearly outside the bounds of what magic was available in modern times.

They cast the teleportation ritual, and appeared in Er-Eret.

Epilogue

Eventually, Sighni, Ansa, Ratha, Lexa, and Alec got together and discussed the implications of what happened, and resolved to do some more research. Ansa advised against keeping the Bael-Turathi weaponry, as it might awaken or attract evil. They were also acutely aware that this was probably not the end of the Usurper.

Lexa hung on to a couple of the daggers. They whispered to her, and with each passing day, she grew closer to understanding. We decided that, in all probability, she would go insane, especially since her beloved crime lord was in such a dangerous line of work.

Long-term, Alac’s plan was to raise money for Er-Eret from the antiquities they found in the outpost.

That night, when they were celebrating, they saw a familiar face reflected in the bonfire: Rubican, who lived on in some parallel realm of pure and scorching fire.

Done!

I’ll have more in the postmortem, but it was nice to have a not-entirely-shitty resolution to this campaign. Everyone seemed pleased enough, and I was glad I could put it to rest.

I also got my hands on Arcane Power, which of course looks pretty sweet so far.

That’s all for now, though, blog. I must has my sleeps, you see.

The PCs are in a spot I’m none too happy about. My inspiration is failing and I feel a bit trapped; that’s as good an explanation I can offer for the weeks of silence on this blog, honestly. So, rather than dragging this out further and try to salvage it, we’re going to end it in the next session or two. Quite simply, there comes a time when I’ve gotta lance the boil and cut straight to rapid exposition and a couple of battles.

I’m pretty sure at least one of my players reads this, so I’m not going to go into details. But I did leave myself this out; this was my original plan, and everything else was a wrinkle or variation on this.

If I may be premature about this game, particularly in the context of my performance, I’d say it was a mixed bag. The first couple of sessions were reasonably good, I’d say. Maybe the second one is one of the best sessions I’ve run. From there, it got harder, chiefly because I didn’t know how to structure a D&D game in order to make it interesting. Some of that was self-inflicted doubt; rather than focus on what I thought would be good, I spent a lot of time trying to figure out what I should be doing, if that distinction makes any sense. I had ideas but I didn’t execute most of them because I didn’t know how to introduce them.

I think perhaps one of my biggest mistakes with Er-Eret was to send the PCs on their way too soon. The timeline could’ve been slowed down, such that a second or third attack was necessary to bring the place to its knees. Alternatively, forcing the PCs to attack more than once, allowing more evidence to mount or giving them a better idea of where they’re headed, might’ve been a smarter move and provided more engaging play. As it stands now, it was “go from point A to point B and have some fights on the way.” That’s OK as far as it goes, but I wanted more.

As far as my level of confidence with D&D is concerned, I’m still not there. The next game that I run will probably be scaled back somewhat in terms of ambition— I’ll start with what I’m most familiar with, which is character interaction (as opposed to dungeon design, traveling, exploration, and the like), translate that into D&D, and take it from there.  I’ll have a more solid plan for getting PCs together, a tighter arc, and then we can decide after one or two sessions if we want to keep playing these characters or what

Because yes, even though the corpse of my old game isn’t even cold, I’m already thinking about my next game. I’m leaning heavily towards a game consisting of PCs with a divine power source only. I may have to stretch that a bit, since I believe there are only four (i.e., cleric, paladin, invoker, avenger). The characters would, in theory, be affiliated with the same or similar religious organizations, and could act in some professional capacity. An inquisition-style dynamic would let them perform investigations, fight, and politick to their hearts’ content. It might also give them opportunities to do some dungeon crawling.

That’s all for now, blog. You see, while I’ve designed the last couple of bits, I haven’t committed much fluff to paper. I’ve also got to nail down the details for the last encounter, since this session could actually end up being fairly quick.

Let me tell you, blog, that I had a heck of a time preparing for this one. I just couldn’t concentrate, and I didn’t know what I needed to do. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

I’m not used to running dungeons. For one thing, I didn’t do any perception/stealth checks while people were tromping around. In retrospect: what? The formula for both encounters was 1) PCs enter room, and 2) combat begins. Tracking perception and stealth checks would emphasize that dungeons are dangerous, that monsters will poke around if they hear activity. 

The bigger problem is that I don’t know what makes dungeons interesting except in terms of flavor text (which I’m not that great at, either). I typically try to deconstruct or thwart tropes for my games, at least to some extent. For dungeons, I’m really not familiar enough with the play style to accomplish that yet, which means I should probably read up on other dungeons.

My prep sucked. As an outgrowth of the above, my prep was spotty. My excuse, I guess, is that I haven’t run a real session since, oh, August. This is also the first time I’ve run a dungeon basically ever.

So, yes, my ideas weren’t as fleshed out as they could’ve been. This dungeon makes sense and all, but I think I should’ve restructured it so that the PCs could’ve gotten the hook for it much sooner.

I also need to provide more “stuff” for people. I think dungeons should have kind of a mini-narrative to them beyond simply going from room to room and fighting things. I am not going to try to do anything super special this time, both because this is not the climax and because I don’t want to get too ambitious. But it would help to introduce PCs to this narrative sooner rather than later, or at least do a better job of it. 

On the other hand, I am not in a bad place right now: they’re down to a couple of surges, they are scared to rest in this place, but they can’t get out, so they’re looking for a place to rest. Tension!

Dungeon Tiles: good. I acquired a bunch of these off Amazon, via the remains of a gift certificate, and they are pretty good. If nothing else, they helped me focus on certain shapes rather than trying to figure out what belongs on a sheet of graph paper, and they saved me the trouble of having to draw that shit.

I don’t have a perfect system for this yet, but sketching out & labeling the dungeon on graph paper after building it out of tiles seems to work. Then I set aside those tiles before game time and it’s easy to build things. I think they added a lot to the game in the end.

Monsters die really fast. This party is particularly striker-heavy, with a 2h ranger, star pact warlock, and a brutal rogue. Notably absent is a defender, so I kept hesitating on the quantity of monsters, what type, and what they’d do. I don’t want a TPK!

You can see where this is going, I imagine. The first encounter was a breeze (although I have to say that I like regenerating monsters). The second one went better, in no small part because of a specter getting his Spectral Barrage off more than once. (Insubstantial monsters aren’t as bad as I thought they’d be.)

Of course, by “better,” I mean that it was more challenging. It’s easy to be a little disappointed that the monsters don’t at least put some people into danger. The PCs, on the other hand, did rather well. There were three or four crits last night, and the rogue, ranger, and mage really did run roughshod over my poor little skeletons. This is despite the fact that most people were out of daily powers.

I keep forgetting this, to the point where I should just have a post-it permanently attached to the Monster Manual: outside of solos and elites, monsters really only get a few chances to hit the PCs. They have good attack bonuses so that they do some damage in those few rounds that they’re alive, because PCs are incredibly resilient, and because monsters often miss.

The PCs left Er-Eret, traveling through the surrounding countryside. Alac carried the banner of Er-Eret, and as they passed people along the way, some greeted and saluted them, while others merely glanced at them, and resumed what they were doing.

By the afternoon, they were on the outskirts of what could be considered Er-Eret, and in the distance they saw a burnt-out farmstead. Ratha spotted them first, and saw that they were in fact goblins.

The party snuck up on the goblins. Rubican re-ignited the burnt out barn, and the rest of the PCs quickly went to work on the unprepared goblins. The fight was settled in short order, as the goblins were unprepared and our PCs had learned a thing or two about fighting since they set out for Er-Eret.

After defeating the goblins, the PCs found an ash pit that contained a number of human and dwarf remains. Alac ordered that they take the goblins who were apparently in charge and put their heads on a pike. They lit the rest of the goblins’ bodies on fire, but not before burying the remains of the slain humans and dwarves.

This camp appeared to be some kind of staging area, so they ransacked it for weapons and destroyed them.

After making camp for the night somewhere else along the line, the PCs traveled into the Blackwood, so named at least in part for the darkness incurred by the tall, thick branches of the trees.

The trail was fairly easy to follow, though as dusk arrived, it became more difficult to see. They followed the path to a point near a hilly area, with what might have been an old path. Sighni advised that they simply continue to track the goblins, despite the spiderwebs indicating that this was the territory of spiders.

As the party proceeded, they heard noises in the brush, and caught glimpses of spiders moving through. They tried various distractions, which delayed but ultimately did not prevent the spiders from hounding them to a clearing.

It was perhaps the most challenging battle of the game so far, with the ettercaps and spiders poisoning and webbing the PCs. Ratha lost consciousness towards the end of the battle, but otherwise the PCs were victorious.

After the last ettercap died, the PCs stopped to take stock and rest. They noticed that there were spider-webs strewn about here and there; this was some sort of lair, and the bundles indicated that there were many victims here. The party found a variety of useful items that were no longer needed by the unfortunates who’d found themselves at the mercy of these spider-folk.

THE END

That’s where we stopped. There’s more up and coming, but this was a logical stopping point, as some people had to get up early this morning.

I might have more on the post-mortem now that I’ve gotten this summary out of my system— I won’t lie to you, blog: I postponed writing this because of how unhappy I was. Maybe I’ll have a second postmortem on some specifics once I get over my frustration.

Let’s get right into it.

Cool

I didn’t kill anybody. I was afraid that I would seriously mess people up with the second encounter. It had four level 4 creatures and a level 5, and I thought that surely everyone would be pretty fucked up, being only level three. Not so! The worst that happened was that I managed to drop Jesse/Ratha once, in the second fight, towards the very end.

I’m a lot less worried about these guys, despite the fact that we have no defender in the group.

Evan’s game is next week and the week after. OK, strictly speaking, this isn’t related to my game, except that I’m really looking forward to a couple weeks’ of not DMing.

Not Cool

Journey-style play. I really, really don’t know how to do this. This is probably the biggest issue that colored everything else.

I sort of wanted some interesting bits to happen on the way to the Main Thing. I worked on some ideas, and I thought how it should play out. I was unable to communicate any of them, or the ones that I did either confused people or didn’t come off very well.

This is a bummer. My mode of thinking where I sort of go through where, in my head, I explain what’s happening to the players, just didn’t engage properly or I didn’t do it thoroughly enough. Or somethin’.

Magic items & treasure. This sort of conflicts with journey-style play, in that it seems strange to give them money and whatnot when they won’t have an opportunity to spend it for kind of a while. My plan was that, instead of giving out a bunch of treasure, I’d give out a bunch of magic items that people could afford to buy if they had treasure, and they were fairly sensible ones based on what I knew would be coming up.

I’ve also deviated somewhat from the established progression, having leveled everyone so quickly.

Choices. There were some parts where I did not take into account player choice as much as I should have. In another case, I meant to provide a couple of choices, but it didn’t work out. This was compounded by my attempts at journey-style play; I didn’t have some of the fallback stuff that I feel like you get for free.

Outdoor-style encounters are also trickier in that, depending on how they happen, there’s a lot of leeway in how they start off.

I mean, there I was, lamenting the fact that I’m no good at outdoor adventures or “journey design” or whatever you want to call it. Then I sat down and started iterating on existing ideas, and I have enough material for a couple of sessions. I’m excited again, blog!

The only thing I have to be careful about— and this is something conscious, that I want to do myself— is keeping a thread that ties it all together. It’s easy to have these points of interest be unconnected, but that’s not what I want.

Maybe it’s more accurate to say that I’m challenging myself. Here’s what I’m going for:

• Provide choices along this journey.
• Tie many of these points of interest to a common theme.
• Reveal more about the history of the area through these apparently unconnected places.

It’s fair to say that I might fail, and I’ll be OK with that; I just have to remind myself that I’ve never actually run this style of play before, so I’m flying blind. I’m relying on my instincts of what I think is cool as a player.

We’ll see how I do! Regardless, I think we’ll have fun, provided I don’t make the encounters too hard.

Cool

Plans. I am pleased to say that my plans worked out. This is kind of a meta-point, really; I didn’t have any major fuck-ups as I did last time.

Speaking of plans, I’m overflowing with ideas about the next few sessions. This is actually where I really want to be: an exotic location that is as much as a blank slate as I’d like it to be.

I finally have a goddamn freaking party now. I was worried about this, and it turned out to be the single most satisfying result of this session: everyone is together in a way that I don’t feel is ham-fisted or railroading. Seriously. One of my players even commented that it didn’t even feel like I was trying to get them all together the whole time. I hope I can maintain that level of subtlety!

The North Wall. I prepared a “city streets” map and it worked really well. People were maneuvering and using cover. I got to use a pseudo-customized monster that was mostly described differently. I didn’t feel like I was in danger of killing anybody. In fact, I’d say that the fight was a little bit on the easy side, mainly because I reduced monster damage dice and they happened not to hit as often as I expected.

Also, Sighni and Lexa both terrify me. Sighni basically took out two major combatants. Lexa and Alac worked together to reduce my 68 hit point golem to fodder for Rubican’s Burning Hands. And Ratha used a couple of daily or encounter abilities to waste a couple of guys, too.

This party may be down a defender, but they are serious business, and I really enjoy watching them work.

A balanced NPC. The NPC with whom the PCs interacted most in this session was Ansa, the priestess of Moradin, and what amounted to the voice of Er-Eret, even though her leadership role is supposedly informal. Part of it is that she’s the only one willing to put the effort into bringing Alac around to her way of thinking, and part of it is that she’s exceedingly diplomatic and level-headed.

Consequently, I was worried she would come of either as a GMPC, the Plot Bat, Railroading, or any number of other negative associations. If it’s a binary choice, I would rather put a PC in a prominent or experimental role than an NPC.

An informal poll of my players told me that she worked. Excellent! I’ll take that.

Improv. Despite my plans, there were some bits I had to improv. For example, I was concerned about the tavern scene, as I was rather quickly running out of reasons for violence not to erupt. I really, really didn’t think Alac would go quite so far, but it worked out OK, I think.

Level 3. That’s right: they’re level 3 now! I was sorely tempted to begin with, and Bryan brought up the winning point: higher level PCs correlates more interesting encounters as it opens up a range of monsters I can throw at the PCs. I love this, and I’m excited when people level up. I love looking at people’s characters and seeing what they picked.

I don’t think the leveling pace will remain this fast, though. Probably it will slow to once every other session unless something major happens, such as in this session.

Not Cool

Concerns about acrimony. All right, this isn’t quite “Not Cool” in the way you might think. It’s a concern.

Alac and Sighni really, really don’t get along. The shouting match that happened this session was par for the course, and while I am not sure if they would come to blows, I think Sighni really needs an ally here.

Lexa and Alac really don’t get along, either. As before, I’m slightly worried that murder might ensue. It’s possible that there’s some room here for an alliance between Sighni and Lexa, or at least a modicum of friendship. I haven’t figured out how, just yet.

Motivation. Lexa worries me. I am concerned I might not have enough things for her that play specifically to her character. This will take some thought and possibly some work, but I think this new environment offers me some opportunities.

Treasure. I’ve got a small, treasure-related dilemma here, which might be worthy of a separate post at some point. In short, I’m not sure how this party is going to handle splitting treasure. Up until now, there wasn’t much, but Lexa— who searched the corpses that Ratha and Rubican did not— got most of it, having looted the bodies. I’ll have to think about this a bit.

This is not to say that it was flawless. I’m afraid a lot of people were bored while I was doing stuff with a few different PCs, for example. The conflict between Alac and Sighni is still a bit too acrimonious. But for the most part, I was happy with it.

I’d also like to say that a lot happened. I can’t remember all of it and I might’ve messed up the order of some scenes. Also, as always, some things happened outside the common view, so I’ve left that out, too.

Ready? (Oh, man, this shit is long.)

Go!

Previously in Er-Eret…

I picked up where we left off last time. Ratha, Lexa, and Sighni were in the inn that most people frequent. (There’s another inn, but it’s primarily for dwarves, who in this case don’t take kindly to strangers.)

Unfortunately, I’m drawing a blank on some of what happened before, well, you’ll see. I believe that, by this point, it was mid- to late-afternoon. Alac spent some time looking over financial documents that had been left in the manor. Rubican studied. Sighni, Lexa, and Ratha were socializing in the inn.

Nobody had much to do, so time passed and everyone eventually went to bed. At some point during the day it rained heavily and tapered off to a drizzle.

The North Wall

Alac was woken by the sound of someone walking around in the manor. It turned out to be Rubican, who was pacing; he had a “bad dream.”

Then they heard a loud crash, coming from the north end of town.

All of the PCs, one way or another, went to the north. Ratha heard from a guard that there was some kind of attack underway, though they had no idea what, and that nothing like this had happened before.

When the PCs arrived on the scene, they saw a large breach in the north wall. This was presumably caused by the large, bloated golem that, upon further examination, was a pastiche of body parts. Where there might’ve been stitches, there were glowing orange runes of binding, undeath, and animation. This zombie-golem thing was accompanied by a couple of goblin skirmishers, a goblin sharpshooter, and a goblin with a wand dressed in some strange, tattered regalia, who I call a necromancer.

The PCs also noticed rather quickly that there were a half-dozen or so corpses of guards in the area, which were crushed, javelin’d, or crossbow’d to death.

Combat! Honestly, the monsters barely laid a finger on the PCs, although Rubican and Ratha did take a serious hit or two. More on this in my postmortem. Sighni the ranger made short work of the necromancer and sharpshooter, while Lexa the rogue and Alac the warlord nailed the zombie-golem and did some damage to a skirmisher or two. Rubican torched a bunch of guys, and Ratha opportunistically attacked and killed a few.

Almost immediately after fighting ceased, Sighni took off for the south, saying she’d heard that there might still be an attack in progress to the south. Alac remounted his horse and headed south also.

Ratha, meanwhile, declared that these monsters might still be dangerous, and rolled a goddamn 20. More on this in the post-mortem, too. Ratha didn’t find much before he called Rubican over to help examine the corpse, though he took the goblin necromancer’s regalia with him.

Ratha carved up some of the skin with the runes on it, which were no longer glowing once the creature had been defeated. He and Rubican conferred a bit on what it might be.

Alac arrived south to find Ansa talking to what appeared to be a high-ranking guard. She had seen battle, as evidenced by the blood on her armor. It turned out that the goblins had also attacked from the south, although the guards and Ansa had only barely managed to repel it. They also lost a great deal of guards.

She was concerned when she heard about the undead golem, and voiced concerns about how organized the goblins were. Alac told her that there would be a town meeting and that he had a plan. He also spoke a bit to the guard, who, when asked if he was the captain, said “I am now.” Taking into account the guards that didn’t return from the north as well as the losses at the south, the guards numbered perhaps a dozen altogether.

Lexa, Rubican, and Ratha gathered at the tavern, where people who had been awoken by the commotion were discussing what happened. Ratha and Rubican related the story of what happened at the north wall, playing up both Alac and Sighni’s role in the fighting. Lexa prowled the edge of the crowd, planting doubt in the minds of the cynics and skeptics.

Ultimately, people went back home, as did the PCs. Fast-forward to the meeting in the morning.

Problems & Solutions

It was chilly and drizzling. Rather than having the meeting outside, in the town square, Alac arranged it to be in the tavern. Townspeople had to cluster around the building, and were none too pleased about having to stand in the rain.

Alac began to give a speech about shared sacrifice, about rebuilding the town. Essentially this turned into a shouting match between Sighni, the increasingly irate mob outside, and Alac. The town council members who were present were mostly aghast. Sighni began to speak, but Alac shouted her down, and moved towards her as if to silence her. Before the situation got out of hand, Ansa spoke.

This was the first merchant caravan in a year, she said. Where did he expect to get this tax money? The town has no money. Did he think that the people enjoyed wearing rags? And what time did the town have to train an army? The goblins would surely not let up their near-weekly raids.

At one point, Rubican stepped forward and offered at least one solution to Er-Eret’s problems. He could create a makeshift barrier in place of the gap now in the wall.

Alac countered by asking what her plan was. What choice do they have? Would she send farmers to fight the goblins? No, she said. She would send Alac, and she would send Sighni. Alac relented, and the meeting soon broke up, as the people went about their business.

Rubican and Ratha approached Ansa with a sample of the runes. Ansa looked at them, and based on having discussed this with Sighni earlier, declared them to be old magic, magic not seen since the empire of Bael Turath. She escorted Rubican and Ratha to the temple library and left them in the hands of Edward, a farm boy with some small potential now turned librarian.

There was some question as to whether the goblins were capable of this. The consensus was that this was an unusual level of sophistication, and that they either had help, in the form of someone organizing them, or access to some resource they didn’t have before.

Speaking Plainly, Then

Ansa and Sighni then met with Alac. There was a lot of plain speaking here. Previously, Ansa neglected to dress him down publicly, as she believed to some extent that Alac could greatly aid the town. In turn, Alac said that he understood why the previous people had abandoned this town, that the town leadership had failed the town through incompetence or neglect, and that the only reason people were angry was because people would always be angry when a new lord arrives. Ansa countered by explaining that he knew nothing of the town and if she didn’t think he had potential, she’d be working against him.

After some of this back and forth, they decided to set aside their disagreements, as they both agreed on one main point: nothing good could happen for the town while the goblins attacked. Alac asked who else they could send beyond Sighni and Alac.

Ansa pointed out that some had already proved themselves, based on what she heard about the battle at the north wall. Further, she’d heard of another extraordinary fighter, Lexa, who demonstrated herself to be quite capable in yesterday’s attack on the caravan. It took some prompting, but ultimately he did remember her. When Alac asked send Sighni to go get Lexa, Ansa suggested that perhaps he go in person.

The Proposal

Alac talked to Rubican and Ratha about his plan to track and destroy the goblins. The two tieflings readily accepted, being very interested in the origin of these runes as well as the history of Bael Turath.

While Alac spoke with Rubican and Ansa about acquiring materials to repair the wall, Ratha went to the tavern to speak with Lexa. Ratha solicted her help in the form of protection as well as another pair of eyes to watch the other members of the group. He also told her that Alac was coming to her with a business proposal.

Not long thereafter, Alac arrived, and although he did not remember her terribly well (which of course was a great source of irritation to the tiefling), he offered her a share in Er-Eret’s future prosperity, and in the short term, a share of the inevitable spoils that would come from the goblins.

Magic Show

Once Rubican acquired the materials he needed to repair the wall, he made a great display of it. Glowing runes trailed off of his clothes as he walked to the north wall, and a crowd accumulated over time. Alac took care to be seen directing the repairs, and Rubican did his best to make the ritual flashy and impressive. No one noticed that he kept some of the materials to himself.

Same Time Next Week

I’ll most likely be playing again this week, as Evan’s fairly busy with Real Life stuff, meaning he more than likely won’t be able to prepare a session for his own game. This is just as well because I prepared a bunch more material than I actually used in this session.