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.