I did say on Friday that I was going to try to tweet live updates as the gaming weekend progressed. I managed a grand total of zero tweets. The problem was that there was never a convenient time to tweet and if my players had kept picking up their phones to text or tweet I would have been unimpressed so doing the same to them just wasn’t going to work. I have written the whole idea of tweeting from game sessions off as a bad job.
So here is a quick run down of the players progress…
The party have been trying to map the tunnels under the tower of Ashaba in the town of Shadowdale. Their first incurson ended when they rescued an escaped dwarvish slave. The party had fought a couple of Quaggoth lookouts, avoided a larger patrol in the caves and now had a non-combatant civilian to try to evacuate. They managed to get out with only one more fight which went relatively easily for them and no one was injured beyond a few cuts and bruises. The party at that point consisted of a sorceress, a warrior mage and a cleric all of whom are on their very first adventure.
The Dwarf hostage was given over to Lord Mourgrimm’s healers and the party returned to the Old Skull Inn to rest.
That was the first two sessions in the briefest of detail. This weekends session took up where the last left off with the party coming down for breakfast.
Jhaele, the landlady of the Old Skull Inn, had heard that the party had rescued a slave from the tunnels and as a reward breakfast was on the house for our three heroes. Having fed themselves they make their way back to the tower, greet a few guards they have met before and are show down to the tunnel entrances below the tower. There they are met by the Chief Warder and he has two companions with him. He introduces them to the party and Arnie and Dru.
Having spoken to Simon, the rescued Dwarf the Chief Warder has learned that he was enslaved by the Drow before he escaped. The Drow are almost certainly too much for the three heroes to deal with so he had scoured the town for available adventurers and come up with these two. He introduces Arnie as a warrior and Dru as healer.
The party introduce themselves and then set off to reenter the tunnels. It doesn’t take long before it is obvious that the first incursion has been discovered at the party are confronted by two half orcs and four boorgin (the more intelligent half-breed variant of the quaggoth).
The battle is touch and go for a while and without the new warrior to strengthen their front rank the original party certainly would have lost. The odds are 6 vs 5 in favour of the bad guys but the cleric summons a crocodile right behind one the half orcs and that causes some confusion in their ranks, the fighters engage all four boogin which is brave of them. Dru is sticks with the sorceress and cleric but is ready with her scimitars to defend them but luckily it doesn’t come to that. The battle goes on and the croc takes out one orc, three boogin fall to the fighters and then finally a sleep spell fells the remaining half orc and boogin.
The party is more than prepared to just finish off the boogin, not even entertaining the idea that they could be an intelligent race (they look like grey haired Wookies carrying two-handed swords). They do attempt to interrogate the half orc but his common is very poor and they do not speak Orcish. They even attempt a bit of torture but the half orc is more afraid of his Drow masters than he is of the party and does not believe they would kill him in cold blood. He was wrong is seems.
The party stop a while and tend their wounds, and then press on further into the cave system and eventually having nearly drowned and riled up an already angry cave badger they finally make it into the Drow inhabited portion of the cave system. The do their best to sneak around without giving the alarm and make their way around quite a way. They identify some Drow set booby traps on some disused tunnels, when I say identify I mean the hard way(!) and eventually discover the lair of one or more giant spiders. The party can hear them clacking away amongst a forest of web. The party being dyed in the wool heroes decide that that is too scary and try to find a less dangerous tunnel to investigate but most of them around here seem to show signs of giant spider activity. Eventually they find a tunnel that seems too small for giant spiders and they is more to their taste. In here the find their second dwarf escapee. This chap is in a seriously bad way. He has lost all his fingers to torture, what remains of his hands have been smashed, he tongue ripped out and they even tried to cut his throat. He was then left for dead but amazingly survived.
This chap had difficulty communicating but tries to show them that he is a priest and does manage, at great risk to himself, to heal one of the remaining and more serious wounds that the warrior mage was carrying.
It was not long after this that the party met their first drow. The party tried to retreat to a defensive position before meeting them but well into such disarray that the Drow using their ability to create darkness managed to sneak up to the party and launch an attack, the healer fled immediately and that was enough to put the entire party to flight. At the next junction the party decide to turn and face the Drow before they run headlong into something worse and end up surrounded. They try to arrange themselves in time but this is a new party and they do not really know what each other are capable of. As it happens the cleric has a gift that allows him to create a demonic gate and control the minor demon that comes through. What he does is try to summon this behind the advancing Drow. The sight of the demon puts the drow to flight and the party see the drow rushing them with a demon at their heels. There is no way the party can fight three drow warriors AND a demon so they panic and flee. Everyone bolts past the cleric who is entranced trying to control this demon who kills the first Drow decapitating it. The drow are fleet of foot and soon they are in amongst the party and pushing them out of the way to get away from the demon. The party push back but with swords and it doesn’t take long for the drow to fall in a blood bath.
You have rarely seen such an angry party round on their cleric. I think some of the party will have to clean their armour when they get out of here!
That then was the end of the their time in Faerun until later this year. There was a bit more going on but those were the highlights so to speak.
