PotA Session 3

We started promptly, which was useful.  The party, along with the stablehands and drovers, spread out across the inn yard looking for more fire snakes.  I put two fire cultists in position to keep people out of the warehouse and another two tracking Silaqui, since she was so effective against the fire snakes.  These were standard thug NPCs with the Charger feat added to give them some fire cult flavor -- a suggestion from somewhere that I liked.  There were four more snakes lurking.  The first went off inside the inn, but no one was downstairs to notice.  The second fire snake went off outside the inn; the arsonists had doused the fence with oil to help it catch fire and travel up past the inn's stone foundation.

Some stablehands spotted the new fire.  At this point, the team on Silaqui was able to close and attack.  They had multiattack and all four hits landed, so she dropped.  Fortunately, Truth and Zook were in the area, heard the yells of nearby hands and came over to help.  Meanwhile, Su'uvarax found the warehouse was locked, which he figured meant no fire snakes, so he had wandered closer to the inn and went to address that snake.  Liliandra the minstrel had hopped out a 2nd story window (so much faster than the stairs).  She put the fire snake to sleep, which made her the next target.  Maendir, hanging out in the wagon yard, saw a glow from the warehouse and went over.  When he tried prying the hasp free to open the door, he was attacked by the second team; they dropped him, too.

At this point, the fire cultists were looking entirely too effective, so I cut their hit points by 10 so they'd go down sooner.  Looking back, I misinterpreted their feat:  they use Dash (so a double move) and get a bonus attack, but I was giving them their multiattack instead of a single attack.  Oops.

Since the cultists were so mobile and the party was so spread out, it took a while for them to gain some traction.  Fortunately, the cultists didn't roll so well on their next targets and wound up staying in one place for a round, which gave the party a chance to converge a little.  Once they started helping each other, they were able to work their way through the various targets.

Thoril (the elf barbarian) kept using a Dash to close with a target, which left him without an attack.  Three times in a row, a spellcaster moved into range of his target and finished it with a spell before he had a chance to hit it.  So we got our first running joke -- always an important milestone.  Thoril was able to kill a fire snake with a thrown handaxe, so he wasn't left feeling totally useless.

Unfortunately, Maendir rolled terribly on his death saving throws.  I gave Todd the option of keeping the character or coming up with a new one, and Maendir survived.  Todd didn't see the point of the animal companion -- he was playing a pregen character because he doesn't have the PHB and ranger isn't in the Basic Rules PDF.  We copied the relevant pages for his reference.  I'm glad he's keeping the ranger, but I'm hoping he'll switch to the Hunter archetype so I can stop reading all the "how to fix Beastmaster" threads.

Yesterday, I realized that Todd doesn't have the writeups for all the ranger spells, either, so I bought spell cards.  I wound up buying all the spell cards, because I'm a compleatist.  They look like they would be more useful for classes that prepare spells from a list, as opposed to classes that only know certain spells.

The spellcasters were using Roll20 to cast spells, which is a new thing for them.  Richard wrote a macro for Scorching Ray, which has multiple attacks for the same spell, and shared it with Randy for Zook's magic missile spell.  In other Roll20 developments, I discovered NPC character sheets, which I used for the cultist and fire snake attacks.

Some clues to drop:

• Truth and Zook examined the fire snake casks; I forgot about the shards from the obsidian eggs.
• A couple of merchants are overdue from Waterdeep; this caravan will be asked to watch for them.

Diane sent a note that Freyja will check the weather each morning.  So now I have to come up with some odd weather, which is due to all the elemental energies.  I think rain clouds will get pulled toward the Sumber Hills, which means less rain in other parts of the Sword Coast.  But constant rain would make the fire cult unhappy.  So I think when it rains, it comes down in a deluge -- not good for farming, and this is a breadbasket region.  Other times, the clouds burn off and no rain falls. Some weird wind effects and earth tremors.  Maybe a tornado?  Too big right now, but maybe later as the elemental energies build.

Coming up:  caravan travel.  I think one encounter during the day, when they're strung out, and once at night, when they're in camp.  They also need to find the remains of a caravan that was attacked by the air cult -- so tracks of giant birds.  I need to check the map to see how many days they'll be on the road.  Maybe some benign encounters from the random encounter table, to mix it up.  They should pass at least one caravan coming up from Waterdeep; this would be a good time to drop some news about the missing delegation.

PotA Session 2

We lost a lot of time because I let people choose their tokens in Roll20, which led to people doing image searches and trying out different images.  Looks like the ultimate solution is to use Hero Forge to create a figure, take a picture and paint it in PhotoShop.  Will and Richard are the most into it, so I am leaving them to it.  Richard's character is a tiefling favored soul sorcerer named Truth.

We did some more character intro stuff, signing up for the caravan and sparring or otherwise demonstrating their credentials to be crew instead of cargo.  It took some prodding but Martin remembered that he was looking for books and checked out a shop.  This was a chance to drop some info about the dwarven sage who was in the now-missing delegation.  There are at least three characters looking for answers to particular questions, so wanting to talk to the sage should provide motivation to investigate the delegation's disappearance.  Liliandra can drop more info to get them interested.

Once we recovered Randy from childcare duties, we were able to proceed with the great fire snake extravaganza.  I needed everyone to pick their sleeping spot.  Most of them bunked in the yard around the wagons, and two more were in the barn.  The first fire snake to emerge was in the barn, where the Silaqui the wizard and Zook the gnome were sleeping.  They both had cold spells and were able to deal with it fairly expeditiously, although Zook was attacked before diving into a stall and slamming the door.

As the outdoorsy types headed for the commotion in the barn, they encountered another fire snake emerging next to a wagon.  Silaqui recognized the glowing cask and rolled it away from the wagon before it burst open.  The gathered characters dispatched it with a little struggle.

The stablemaster has the hands and the drovers who were sleeping in the barn searching the yard for more snakes.  Su'uvarax the warlock made a beeline for the cargo warehouse, since it was the only enclosed space.  That's as far as we've gotten.

There are two fire snakes planted in the cargo warehouse and the door has a lock.  I want the party to confront their lack of thieves tools early on, so they can decide if they want to handle it themselves or incorporate Liliandra.  There are two more snakes, one outside the inn and one planted just inside the front door.  They'll be going off more at the same time.  I also have a few cultists to drop into the mix.  Silaqui has been very effective against the fire snakes, so someone will try to take her out, and someone else will want to keep Su'uvarax out of the cargo warehouse.

Once the caravan leaves the inn, I'll do a jackalwere ambush on the second day.  Discovering the remains of a previous caravan, with signs of giant birds, should happen south of Westbridge.  I also want to hit them with a flock of cockatrices, perhaps closer to Red Larch.  Other clues:  the innkeeper will ask Liliandra to keep an eye out for the missing merchants from Waterdeep, and folks in Westbridge will be talking about the siblings who went missing from a nearby homestead.

We're playing in a week, since Richard will be home from college on break.  To do:

• Take another pass through character sheets
• Finalize cultist details
• Reread upcoming sections on Red Larch and the Haunted Keeps

Planning for Session 2

We generally play every two weeks, which gives me time to work on small and big picture stuff. 

The biggish picture has been the plotline for the investigation.  Based on difficulty, the optimal order for the Haunted Keeps is air, earth, water, fire.  However, investigating the delegation's disappearance points to earth and water.  Granted, I can't control how the party proceeds, but if there's a logical through-line, then the party at least has a way to get to the optimal progression.

I had been thinking of having the caravan encounter the remains of a previous caravan, which had been attacked by large birds and was missing bodies -- let all the outdoorsy types exercise their tracking skills to analyze the scene.  That would lead them to Feathergale Spire with suspicions.  However, that means two investigations.  Then I realized:  If I show them a caravan which was attacked by large birds, and they hear about another caravan going awry, they could assume it's the same root cause.  So they deal with the air keep, then have to investigate the delegation, which points to the earth and water keeps.  At that point, they'll probably investigate the fourth keep (fire) because they've figured out the pattern.  If not, they can find out that the "druids" have advertised a ritual which will end the weather problems, which the human barbarian will want to check out.  In a pinch, I can always have Rosemary meet up with some druids in Red Larch, and head out to the fire fest in order to make business contacts.

Next up:  I want the players to have a chance to test out their characters before committing, which implies an adventure in Triboar before the caravan leaves.  I like introducing the fire element early, so we'll let the fire snakes show up here.  They hatch from obsidian eggs, and burning down the inn is totally up the fire cult's alley.  So, a half dozen eggs, each packed in a pitch-lined cask cushioned with straw, left in a few locations around the inn.  Now I have to come up with an inn layout, but I can borrow bits from the Bargewright Inn.

In order to help all the characters get acquainted, I'm going to have them sign up with the caravan master as either cargo or employees.  They'll get to demonstrate their skills.  So, caravan master Marco and head drover Val.  How many wagons?  There will be a couple spare drovers, so let's say 8 wagons and 10 drovers.  Ideally two guards per wagon, but maybe 6 characters and 10 NPCs.  Now I can set up a page in Roll20 for caravan encounters.  I researched element-related creatures and I think a flock of cockatrices would provide a challenge.  Plus the jackalweres from the random encounter table are interesting.

New question:  If the characters sign on as caravan guards, how can they leave the caravan in Red Larch?  Say a caravan arrives from Secomber; part of that will travel north to Triboar and another part will circle south to Waterdeep.  That will give their caravan enough protection to continue without them.

I reviewed all the character sheets in Roll20, as much as was there.  I want to allocate some uncommon magic items, utility doodads.  The barbarian is the only one without darkvision, so we'll want a convenient light source.  The Gem of Brightness seems like something the gnome would have.  The ranger gets a Quiver of Ehlonna for lots of ammunition for the dungeon crawls.  Always nice to have a bag of holding; that seems like something a traveling wizard would pack.  The human barbarian is an Uthgardt, which makes magic tricky.  But she took proficiency in medicine and the herbalism kit, so she gets a jar of Keoghtom's ointment from her shaman.

I like the weapon of warning and the ring of water walking, but they feel a little too powerful for 3rd level.  Maybe a couple of +1 daggers to round things out.  I'll have to study the magic items some more.

Map issues:  Lots of talk about discrepancies in the maps.  I bought the online versions and printed everything out.  Most things line up internally, although I'll rotate a couple of nodes to avoid collisions.  The bigger issue is arranging the Haunted Keeps.  I'm going to resize the Dessarin Valley map scale so 1 hex = 5 miles, not 10.  I'm not too chuffed about lining up the entrances to the surface, since most of them are pretty far from the temples.  However, the Sacred Stone Monastery should move north of the Riverguard Keep.

Things to do:

• Dessarin Valley map adjustments
• Set up Triboar inn in Roll20
• Set up caravan in Roll20
• Prod people to complete characters
• Finish doodad allocation

PotA Session 1

As expected, we spent most of the session working on characters.  I got people thinking about their new characters a couple of months ago, and they had two weeks since our last game to put something together.  Some people did more DM consulting than others.

I was really looking forward to this process as a way to see what people want to get out of the game.  As a DM, I'm finding that I really like narrative, so I want this to be a story.  I didn't want to just plunk people down in a tavern and have them all team up.  I spent time going over the map, picking out likely places for people to be from.  But of course, some people had their own ideas. 

• (Thoril) Will had his character ready a month ago.  He has an elven barbarian based on a Germanic tribe that herded aurochs.  I'm curious to see how the DEX-based barbarian plays out.  As a coming-of-age rite, he is seeking an adventure that will inspire an epic poem.
• (Su'uvarax) Martin decided on a dragonborn warlock, Great Old One patron.  He was separated from his clan and adopted by barbarians.  Also, he went with black scales, with the idea that they're really rare and there's some significance to being a black dragonborn.  When exploring an old site, he discovered a book which had an incantation to invoke Ouroboros. 
• (Freyja) Diane wanted a barbarian to keep it simple and smash things.  Since she wanted to be human, I suggested the variant human build.  I offered her the Uthgardt tribes so she didn't have to come up with a barbarian culture.  I also had the idea of a mission:  the weather has been off, the shaman thinks the city people are causing it with magic, they need someone to investigate.  She wanted the mission to be her idea, as a way of proving herself to her tribe and resolving some personal conflicts.
• (Silaqui) Ellen wanted a fighter/mage combo.  I suggested the Bladesinger arcane tradition, which she liked.  I was thinking she would be from Silverymoon, but she had picked the Far Traveler background and was from Evermeet instead.
• (Maendir) Todd went with a pre-generated ranger, wood elf, Beast Master, owl companion, archery.  I had come up with a story for him:  He was a ranger in the Neverwinter Forest who knew Reidoth and was recruited to help the folk hero defeat the dragon in Thundertree.  (We skipped that part and didn't bother going back.)  Seeing a dragon sparked an interest in exploring the world.  To start off with, he's doing a favor for the noble, playing bodyguard to the noble's second cousin, who is looking for markets for the Phandelver mine in the interior.
• (Zook) Randy settled on a gnome sorcerer with wild magic.  It was awakened when he was exploring some old ruins and now he's trying to find an explanation of what happened to him.  Since gnomes were from hilly areas, I was thinking he could be from either the Dessarin Hills or the hills by Conyberry.  When I heard about the ruins, I decided that he was poking around in the area of the old watchtower from the fallen Netherese empire, near the necromancer from Lost Mines of Phandelver.
• Richard couldn't make the session but when we discussed character ideas when finishing up LMoP, he wanted to do a magic/cleric combination.  I offered to let him use Favored Soul, so he's going with that.  Probably a tiefling.  I'm looking forward to a winged tiefling.

Since the party was light on healing and didn't have anyone with proficiency in thieves' tools, I put together a half-elven bard with the Urchin background.  Liliandra will be useful for feeding information to the party.  The noble's second cousin who's doing business development for the mine isn't leveled.  Rosemary's there to provide a reason for traveling around, and possibly get into useful trouble.

Now that we knew more or less who everyone was, I needed to get them together, along with seeding some adventure hooks.  Silaqui had been traveling all over, so I decided she had gone up along the coast to Neverwinter, and was turning inland for a change.  So she was in a caravan that came across the Triboar Trail, which Maendir and Rosemary joined.  Zook spent some time observing caravan traffic around Conyberry before hopping onto a caravan to Triboar.

I put the dragonborn in the High Forest near the Dessarin River.  When he was grown, he went to Silverymoon to see if he could learn about his missing clan.  They had info on dragonborn history, culture, anatomy -- a lot of academic material, but nothing about specific dragonborn.  He decided to go to Waterdeep to find more dragonborn.  Freyja was trying to find people who knew magic, but Silverymoon was too big a city for her.  She met Su'uvarax on the road out of the city.  She's from the Golden Eagle clan and decided his golden eyes were like the eagles, plus he seemed knowledgeable about magic and it was sad that he was missing his clan.  So they travelled west together.  Su'uvarax had a message from his patron: "Power gathers in the Sumber Hills.  Investigate."  That pointed him to the Long Road, and Triboar.

Thoril was working as a caravan guard along the Long Road, so that got him to Triboar.  I had planned to put his barbarians in the High Forest with Su'uvarax, but Will had picked a different location.  Still, elven barbarians in the region probably keep in touch periodically, so Thoril had heard of Su'uvarax.

I'm using Liliandra and Rosemary to get various people acquainted before they head south on the caravan.  Nice development:  Su'uvarax is looking for libraries, or booksellers, so that will tie in with the sage's books.

Plans:

• The party's caravan will be attacked by something weird.  I'm going to do a little more research, but the current plan is fire snakes.
• Liliandra will tell them about the Haunted Keeps, as something that might interest Silaqui.  Also, she arrived in Triboar with the delegation from Mirabar.  Possibly some of their guards were dragonborn.
• The caravan from Conyberry that Silaqui, Maendir and Rosemary came across with turned south, while the characters lingered in Triboar.  That caravan was attacked by the air cult.  So when the party investigates Feathergale Spire, a halfling spice merchant from that caravan will be working in the kitchens.

Intro

I have been playing various RPGs (mostly D&D) since college. About 1.5 years ago, my twice-a-month group decided to try out D&D 5e and I volunteered to DM. We ran the Lost Mine of Phandelver adventure with the pre-generated characters, because it was just a test. They liked it, we kept going.

When we finished, I wanted to give everyone a chance to play characters of their choice. There were some complaints about starting over again at 1st level -- that the previous year of play would be a "waste." So I compromised on starting at 3rd level, which is when most characters start to branch out.

It took me a while to settle on the material for the next campaign. I don't feel up to writing my own yet, so that meant published sources. I knew that Out of the Abyss was right out; our campaign before this left us bogged down in the Underdark and I'm quite sure most of the players had no desire to go back there. In the end, what tipped the scales toward Princes of the Apocalypse is that most of the players had done the classic Temple of Elemental Evil way back in the dawn of time, before I joined, and they had a great time. Once I found out that PotA was a re-imagining of those same themes, and that it was generally well-received, I made my decision.

My weekly game, where I'm a player, is doing a 5e adaptation of ToEE, so that will be an interesting point of comparison.

We're using Roll20. Most of the game is in-person, but people were bringing tablets and laptops, so it's actually easier than using figures. (My group really likes maps, so theater of the mind didn't do it for them.) Richard is finishing college, so this simplifies the tech challenges of sharing the field of play. We're gradually discovering the various features.

So the players are still getting accustomed to the system, the DM is still getting accustomed to running the campaign, and we're all still getting accustomed to the tool set. It's a big ol' voyage of discovery.