Continuing right on with my backlogged after-action reports from the front lines of 13th Age OP: "Sleeping Dragons."
When we last left our stalwart adventurers, they had found the body of Jont the half-orc treasure hunter. On that body, of course, was the map to the Necropolis. A quick aside: this made no damn sense to me. I mean, was it just tattoo? Then why was this the only copy? Surely he had a written copy that the tattooist (or wizard or whatever) had used to make the tattoo in the first place? How did he make that?
Anyway, the heroes realize (somehow) that you need a compass made of dragon's teeth to use the map. This isn't explained. I recognize that a lot of 13th Age is "whatever you or your players come up with," but it would be nice to have a sort of worst case scenario option for when the players are giving you blank stares and you're not sure why the module writer wrote what he wrote. In our game, the "map" was written in a sort of code, and the dragon tooth device was more of a translator. Sure. Moving on.
The adventurers knew that they could probably find some dragon teeth, or at least someone who knew where to find dragon teeth, in Shadowport. You can buy damn near anything in Shadowport! The party went to a (literally) underground tavern for dwarf rogues in the Copper District, where the streets are actually paved with copper coins from around the world. Neat.
After sweet-talking a few of the locals, the party discovered that a retailer of strange alchemical ingredients named Shez-a-kah operated a shop in a subterranean market frequented by drow. The dwarves in the party were not happy. Long story short, the halfling sorcerer (with demonic heritage and an imp familiar) hit it off with ol' Shez (who also happened to be demonic) and played her in a game of chess. Natural 20! Checkmate in six, lady!
Shez told the party about a group of white dragons that lived atop Gorogan's Maw, a glacial mountain shaped like a demon's face. She secured them passage on a ship, which brought them south. During their voyage, the party put down a mutiny by basically taking the captain out themselves and assuming control of the vessel. The halfling sorcerer (Timm) once again rose to the challenge and became the ship's pilot. So Timm became Cap'n Timm.
Once on Gorogan's Maw, clever play allowed the party to avoid combat with the young white dragons--mostly because Telleryn, the wood elf wizard who was obsessed with animals realized they were too young to have sufficiently magic teeth. So far, the party hadn't rolled initiative. This would change very shortly.
In the next scene, the party came upon a large tribe of kobolds, worshippers of the white dragon, outside of a frozen cavern. I should point out here that a couple of players could not make it to this particular session, so we'd been running a skeleton crew of three PCs: Telleryn, Timm, and Briar Thorn. Briar Thorn was a human archer type who'd been trapped inside a cloak of thorns by an evil wizard. Notice there is no healer or meat shield here. Anywho, when they came upon the kobolds, Cap'n Timm had the bright idea to bluff his way into the dragon's cave by telling the kobolds outside of it that he'd been sent by the white dragon. Who lives inside the cave. And hadn't left. It was a strange lie.
Tangent: some d20 systems have trained a lot of players to be very unimaginative. The exchange that played out several times goes something like this: The talky character with a high CHA tries to bluff their way through a guard and instead of explaining what the lie is, they just say "I'm going to try to talk my way past him," roll the die, and then ask me what they get to add to it. This is problematic for many reasons. First, if the player rolled high, then they're gonna be pissed when you tell them "that won't work, because your lie makes no sense." Second, there is no roleplaying there!
Another tangent: I've embargoed the "we're on the list" trick, along with the "we have this thing for a guy" gambit. I'm not sure why, but this is THE go-to scam for getting past guards. It's unimaginative, and there's no reason it should work. They're professional guards. They know who's on the list. A big party of people who are obviously adventurers? No WAY that guard is buying your bull. Of course, there are exceptions. If you've done your homework and you know to bring the delivery to the side entrance at such and such a time because THAT guard is new. And you forge the Lich King's seal, and you beat up some bad guys so you can dress in their clothes. That might work. But this "I'm a friend of the Diabolist" ain't gonna work.
Anyway, back to Cap'n Timm trying to talk his way past the kobolds. It did not go very well. The kobolds knew immediately that he was an impostor, there to hurt their beloved white dragon. Everyone roll initiative!
The kobolds rolled very well. The heroes did not. All 27 (or however many--there were a lot) converge on Timm, as Briar and Telleryn are still hidden. I fudged the numbers just to keep Timm alive for a round. Now if I were smart, I would have just had them all attack and then carry Tim's unconscious body into the cavern so that Briar and Telleryn could rescue him. I was not that smart.
Telleryn and Briar come out and reveal themselves. Fight fight fight. The kobolds trounce the heroes. Briar's down. Timm is technically dead (like, dead dead). Telleryn has literally one HP left. To prevent a TPK from a bunch of kobolds (KOBOLDS!) I invoke Telleryn's One Unique Thing, which is "Strange Luck." The idea being that when things look their bleakest, something bizarrely (un)lucky happens to save Telleryn's life--but it's like a karma deficit that comes back to bite in the future. Cool, that's enough for one of the kobold's attacks to miss, hit the ground, and crack the ice ledge Timm and Telleryn are on. The fall in an avalanche as the kobolds carry Briar inside the cavern as a gift to their white dragon lord.
Briar awoke frozen in a block of ice, only her head sticking out, finding herself in the lair of the white dragon (it was getting late, so I just made it one dragon instead of the four or whatever the adventure called for). Telleryn and Timm sneaked their way into the cave. Telleryn, who was kind of a high fantasy James Audubon, appealed to the white dragon's vanity by asking to draw him. This distracted him long enough for Briar to work her way free and for Timm to sleight of hand some teeth from a dragon skeleton in the corner. Then Timm and Briar just left. Telleryn hilariously grabbed his books and ran away, which meant the white dragon figured out very quickly that he was now alone in the cave.
He (the dragon's name was Exmin, which I Kaiser Soze'd from the comics on the walls of the shop we play in) flew out and hunted the party as it ran down the mountainside. Timm used his sorcery to trigger another avalanche, and the party used the chaos to escape.
I also ran this session at Strategicon. It was the second of three four-hour sessions, and the table was packed. The party didn't do as well with the chess game this time, but they didn't have to fight Shez, either. They made it to Gorogan's Maw via the city of Horizon, where they interviewed interns from the Archmage's university to find a guide/patron for their trip to the Maw. They chose a young half-elf wizard who wanted to find the white dragon graveyard.
My favorite development of probably the whole day of gaming was when the party, finding some animated skeletons on the trip up the mountain face, followed them into a deep crevasse where the corpse of a necromancer still lay. The necromancer, of course, had been dropped into the crevasse by one of the players as part of his backstory--a wood elf ranger who was on the lam from the Elf Queen's peeps because he hadn't brought the necromancer to justice the right way. One of the characters, playing a sorcerer, put on the necromancer's helmet. That helmet allowed him to control dead things. When the party later fought the baby dragons, he resurrected them as skeletal dracoliches that did his bidding. It was super metal.
Towards the end of the session, a younger player's brother and dad joined in as the rogue and the barbarian. Fun times--the whole oversized party (I think that made it 8 PCs, plus the wizard NPC who just spammed magic missile) took on the white dragon and his kobold minions. There were dracoliches and all kinds of nonsense. The rogue shadow-walked and sliced off the white dragon's head all anime-style.
Pretty sweet.
No comments:
Post a Comment