The final section of the Lost Mines took us a number of sessions spread out over a month or so to complete, due in part to illnesses and interruptions. But last night we finished it up with what should have been a mopping-up operation against a few ghouls in the only remaining unexplored area whose denizens hadn’t already been drawn out by the sounds of combat. “Should have been” because I added more ghouls…
Highlights in this campaign included:
- A mostly-ranged battle across a pit, where even the casters ended up flinging javelins or shooting arrows against opponents who’d move just far enough away to be outside the 30′ range of most of their cantrips, and they were low on higher level spells.
- The barbarian’s attempt to dramatically kick open a door, only to discover as it bounced against its own frame and slowly swung open that it was a) unlocked and b) mounted to swing outward toward her.
- Excellent tactics on the players’ part in facing the aforementioned ghoul swarm. They stationed the paladin and barbarian at the bottom of a stairwell to form a choke point and stood the casters and rangers at the top of a steep embankment where they could rain down death from above while largely unmolested. Ghouls trying to scale the slope to get to them met with limited success.
- A (frustrating for the players, amusing to me) session where after narrowly defeating a Flameskull and its attendant zombies, the party retreated to what they thought to be a safe room, barred the door, and tried to take a rest to recover… only to be interrupted about an hour later by the “FWOOSH!” of their reconstituted foe burning down the door with rays of fire. Luckily he hadn’t gotten his spells back yet, or they’d have been in serious jeopardy as he lobbed fireballs at them during the five times he came back!
After the third Flameskull fight the players finally thought to ask to do arcana or religion checks to see if their characters might know of a method to make the thing stay dead. The paladin knew that holy water was often an effective weapon against the undead, but the characters didn’t have any on them. She also knew that she could make holy water through a one hour ritual requiring water and powdered silver. So after their third defeat of the floating, burning head, they spent an hour grinding their silver coins against the stone floor to produce powder. Then another skull-fight. Then an hour to perform the ritual, completed just in time for the next battle. Finally, after defeating it yet again, they doused the creature’s remains with holy water and were able to take the rest they’d been hoping for (and very much needed at this point)!
Wave Echo Cave in 3D
Because this area contained a mix of both natural and dwarf-delved caverns, I was able to roughly model the main encounter areas by combining elements of both my dungeon and cave tile sets. Setting these up was sometimes a little cumbersome in terms of breaking up the flow of the game, since I mostly couldn’t lay them out in advance without knowing ahead of time which direction the players were taking things.
Last night’s session was different in that I knew the only remaining encounter area was the great hall, so I was able to set things up in advance. This room features raised areas on either side, and putting it together highlighted some weaknesses in my tile game. First, I didn’t have a good way to model the raised sides in a stable fashion. I did have some of my larger dungeon tiles I could stack the cave parts on top of, but not enough to raise them to a height to meet the stairs. I could have bunched up some dungeon stackers, but distributing them so as to provide separate supports for so many individual 3×3 tiles (plus corners) wasn’t realistic. I probably need to make a few relatively plain “stone” blocks of 6″x6″x1″ or so to be used as platforms under raised areas of smaller tiles.
I also quickly found that my cave tiles lent themselves to corridors and small caverns more to than to big areas like this one. I quickly ran out of the flat-sided tiles and had to substitute in some of the edge and corridor pieces to cover enough space. A few 6×6 sized cave tiles have been added to the “to do” list.
What’s next?
We’re probably going to switch back to our neglected Mighty Protectors campaign for a bit starting next week; I finally have at least a few sessions’ worth of plans for that on the back-burner. When we return to D&D it will be to run the Wild Sheep Chase one-shot, followed by the Storm King’s Thunder module. SKT has an available direct tie-in to Phandelver, so it seems like a good jumping-off point. It’s a big, sprawling adventure with a lot of room for exploration all over the continent, and plenty of opportunity for ad-lib, ad-hoc, and interesting side quests, so it should take a while.
Part of the reason for adding D&D to our “play list” as it were was due to the widespread availability of pre-made adventures to reduce the prep time required to get ready for a weekly-ish session. However, I’ve been finding myself really feeling the urge to build my own campaign world with its own sets of characters and locations. That will probably be developing slowly in the background, but won’t really get started until after SKT (and possibly longer, depending on how enamored my players remain with their existing characters at that point).