RPGaDay is about blogging (or whatever) every day in August. I’m dipping my toes in again, late again, but I’m doing it. To see all this year’s RPGaDay posts, see my summary, and I have a page listing all my contributions over the years.
Day two is Most recently played. Day three is Most often played RPG. Since these are the same, I’m going to take them together.
My most recent session was the latest in my long-running D&D 5E campaign. The previous session was a major one because we’ve just lost a player who had to move to Glasgow for his work, so we organised a big session on a Sunday so that he could travel across and join us for one final session.
The party have been encountering portal bombs, and had got a lead to a manufactory hidden somewhere in the tanneries. After visiting the enclosure of the butchers they got the lead from, they heard about ruins on the edge of the tanneries. They made their way there, and after running a gauntlet of zombies limbs and rats, found their way through an illusory wall down into the cellars beneath the ruins.
I tried something new this time. Rather than give them the drawing, I described it and let them draw it themselves.
First they found a room full of rot grubs, with a couple of items buried among them. Rather to my surprise, they managed to nip in, collect the items and get back out again. They don’t yet really know what they’ve found – I chose a couple of minor items from The Griffon’s Saddlebag which amused me – but somehow they managed to gain them without any harm.
They had a bit more trouble with the carrion crawler – especially Jinnie who was using her shoes of spider climbing to walk on the ceiling and encountered it face-to-face – and they also found and (eventually) finished off some ghouls. Rather to the annoyance of one of the players who was very aware they were rather on a time limit, and these side battles just ate up time.
Going back round the corner (the carrion crawler having been chased off), they came to another door – and this is where the fact they were drawing their map had an effect. It took them a minute to realise from my description of some dead rotting bodies that this led back to the room where they had killed the ghouls.
Next door – there was a bit of a smell and sandbags; they realised this was where the midden next to the tanneries was oozing in through cracks, and being held back.
A bit more of a trek along a long corridor, empty except for the carrion crawler which was now trapped (so they finished it off when it tried to run past), and they came to a storage room where there were instructions for how to make portal bombs, along with rings and various small creatures in jars. There was also a pair of double doors, and this led to the big battle.
This was the actual manufactory – some cultists doing the assembly, and a weird rat-faced creature dancing around a brazier.
They attacked, resulting in the rat creature enjoying the heat and a shadow demon appearing behind the leaving player’s character Aerolin (who for some reason went on ahead into the dark), doing him some serious damage before being chased off. A cultist was trying to get to barrels at the back, and managed to set off a portal bomb, allowing some demons in, before he was killed. A moonbeam put paid to the shadow demon, and eventually they had cleared up all the enemies in the room.
And that’s where the farewell session ended. Aerolin had taken a lot of damage, but not completely gone out in a blaze of glory, but it looked like everything was cleared.
So last week we had the next session without Aerolin’s player. They had cleared all the enemies, but not closed the portal, and before they could, several dretches and a barlgura came through. The barlgura attacked, and (we decided) finished off Aerolin, so he did get his blaze of glory, before the others finished off the barlgura. Honestly, a CR5 monster is easy pickings for a level 5 party…
The dretches headed around rather aimlessly, and one of them wandered near some barrels in the corner – which had the effect I had been hoping for. Gareth lit a bonfire beneath the dretch…and the barrels…and the barrels (full of portal bombs) exploded.
They didn’t realise this immediately, but this weakened the walls of the ruin (remember, next to the midden), and they started to collapse, eventually breaking with a rush of foul fluid and rotting body parts which swept through the room. They grabbed Aerolin’s body, along with the body of one of the cultists, and fled the room, closing the doors and using an iron spike to hold them closed.
At this point the party casually started looking through the store rooms again, even taking time to try to carve an address into a hide (because he didn’t have any writing implements). In retrospect I feel I shouldn’t have let the door hold as long… Gareth, again the voice of reason, eventually persuaded the rest of them to continue fleeing, and although a side wall broke just as they were approaching, they managed to get past and through. (Again, in retrospect, I feel I should have penalised their slow retreat more and had the wall rather more broken through when they got it, forcing them to wade through the effluent to retreat).
They got out, and since it was night, headed to a nearby woods outside the city to camp.
The RPG
As I’ve mentioned at various points in this blog, I’m playing fairly vanilla D&D 5e (2014 edition), set in my interpretation of the city of Akorros in the Republic of Darokin in The Known World of the Mystara Gazetteers (published in the late 1980s under the BECMI boxed set ruleset). Since BECMI only had humans, dwarves, elves and halflings, my world also is quite restricted in character options. I have allowed a gnome and a half-orc, but at the moment this campaign only has humans, halflings, elves, and dwarves.
I do have some house-ruling, particularly around healing. Long Rest healing is (Hit Dice)/2 with a healer’s kit, or (Hit Dice)/4 without – i.e. roll your hit dice, add constitution modifier, and then divide the result. So for a level 5 fighter with 14 CON, they can roll 5d10, add 10 (for the CON bonus), and then divide by either 2 or 4.
We also use a technique I learned from The Angry GM at the start of the session – everyone re-introduces their character, describing what they look like, what visible weapons and armour they have, and something interesting we learned in the previous session. That reminds everyone who we have, and a bit of where we are (since we normally meet for 2-3 hours every two weeks).
One other thing we have introduced is Weapon Mastery from Level Up! Advanced 5th Edition. As a GM, this has turned out to be rather frustrating! A couple of them have taken a feat which allows them to protect each other, and increase their AC by 2. Which, given they already have pretty high AC due to plate armour and good dex means they are very hard for me (sorry, monsters) to hit. Grrr!
And that’s what I’ve played most recently and most often…
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