Well, the big day has come and gone.

The game happened and it went... fine.

Brian actually managed to balance the mission even tighter than I do, and it was really looking bleak at the end there, but we barely managed to pull through, so fears about him running the game too easy didn't pan out.

There were a couple of rules calls I didn't agree with, but I managed to bite my tongue and not say anything. There were a few times when one of the players asked a question (not to anyone in particular) and Brian and I both answered them and gave conflicting responses. I did my best to defer to Brian, but I am not sure how to handle that in the future.

We were joined by a fifth player, he was new to the game and I am not sure if he will be back.


Session report:

Characters:

Sarah Blackwell (me), Human defensive swashbuckler and former monk / samurai.
Ordieth, half elf necromancer and child outcast.
Scraps, Ogre pirate and gourmand
Tiana, pixie priest, healer, and trickster
Fritz, idealistic human generalist mage

The game starts with us on the high seas, our crew dead and our hold plundered by pirates. The ship was damaged in the attack and soon a storm starts are the ship, damaged in the attack, begins taking on water. I tell Scraps, a pirate who was "accidentally" left behind by our attackers, that if he wants to survive he can take our former Boson's job and try and steer us into port and then go below ducks to man the pumps. Tiana flies into the sails and works with the ropes, Fritz, one of our only surviving passengers, uses subtle magic to hold the ship together. Ordieth them comes out of hiding, raises the half dozen pirates who died in the attack as mindless zombies, and orders them to crew the ship, and with their help we are able to hold the ship together to make port in a small harbor on the nearby island of Conixo; neutral ground with no real culture and only notable as being the place where the great nations meet to sign treaties.

(OOC: This was a long skill challenge. It was fairly poorly designed, as there was a penalty for failure and as new characters we don't have great scores, which meant that it was long, frustrating, and used up a disproportionate amount of our party resources. Still, it wasn't terrible, and was fine for a first time DM, and I did my best to keep Bob from bitching).

Frtiz and I find an inn while the others stay with the boat. There are rooms, but no decent food, and the inn keeper apologizes and tells us that both the crops and the fish have failed and the town is starving, and that the local druid, whom they would normally consult about such things, has gone missing.

In the early morning when the storm has cleared I assess the boat, and find that it will take several months, and likely more money than we have and more supplies / labor than can be found in the town, to fix it, and that nobody can afford to buy the ship (or even salvage it for parts) for anywhere close to what it is worth, and we wouldn't be able to supply it for an ocean voyage anyway.

Finding that Ordieth, Scraps, and Tiana are still with the boat, and apparently planning to make off with it, I explain the situation and offer them all positions on the ship and an equal share of the loot. They refuse, telling me that they can simply take what they want as I have no authority over them. I try and gauge what they actually want out of the situation, Scraps seems motivated by greed and Ordieth by a desire for respect, and try and negotiate and explain to them that we all need one another.

(And here we get the problem of an evil party. Nobody actually wants to form the party, even when it is in our mutual best interest to work together. We kept the argument in character, but after about an hour of this I saw we were boring / frustrating people, and I kind of broke character and said we should table the argument for later... or just hand-waive it.)

We see the townsfolk getting a posse together to find the missing druid, and Fritz suggests that we find him for them. Ordieth and Scraps are reluctant, but we explain that they will be rewarded with the town's people's respect and with food respectively.

We journey to the druid's hut, and find an orcish slaver squatting in it. He claims it was abandoned when he found it, and I tell him he is free to go, but he decides to pick a fight. I trip him and push him into the fire, and he moves to call his riding drake over to him, but scraps grabs him by the throat so he can't speak and chokes the life out of him. In the battle, his hunter ally takes a shot at Ordieth, but then when the orc dies decides to flee. We free the slaves and they take the drake with them. We offer them a position with our crew, but they instead decide to return to the circus they originally came from. We search the house and find a good bit of treasure, mostly herbs and potions, but no sign of the druid. There is a journal which predicts the unseasonable storm our ship was caught it and talks about how the forest spirits are misbehaving, but there is no sign of the druid.

Fritz is able to see that some of the trees appear to be bleeding to those with second sight, and we follow the trail of bleeding trees deeper into the woods. We are ambushed by a swarm of dog-sized spiders, and we drive them off, but not before their poison does a number on us.

(Remember how I said it was weird that everyone was focusing solely on will-saves? Well, yeah, this is why that's a bad idea. Low fort saves across the board meant that poison really kicked our asses.)

We eventually find a corrupted totem that is drawing all of the local animal spirits into it. When we move to interfere with it, it manifests a guardian, a composite animal made from all the spirits of the forest. It has the size of a moose, the strength of a bear, the shell of a turtle, the ferocity of a cougar, the speed of a deer, the senses of a wolf, and the leaping ability of a rabbit. We send the zombies after it, but it simply leaps away before it can be surrounded, and when half the zombies are killed Ordieth calls them off. Scraps and I approach it alone, and we make several attempts to trap it, Fritz creates a force field above it, Ordieth freezes the ground below it, and Scraps tries alternating tripping it and climbing onto its back, but the creature is simply too agile for any of these schemes to work. I do my best to keep its attention while Scraps flanks it. Eventually I go down, and Tiana uses the last of her magic to keep Scraps standing long enough for him to slay the beast by driving a sharpened anchor through its carapace.

(This was a frustrating fight. An enemy that is both super tough and super mobile isn't fun. But, I wanted a higher difficulty, so I suppose I can't complain.)

When the beast it killed, the totem is destroyed and a wave of unholy energy rolls out over the land. It is made of wicker and bones, and we return it to town.

We limp back to town, all of the caster's totally out of spells and both of the melee at negative HP.

The town's barber / surgeon is able to identify the bones as belonging to the druid based on a broken rib that was the result of a kick from a horse in his youth. We have no leads as to who killed the druid or created the totem, but with its destruction the spirits of nature are freed and fertility is returning to the region.

I visit the alchemist and by several potions of anti-venom, healing, and invisibility to undead. I also visit a naturalist and talk about starting a colony of scavenging crabs in our bilge, we have a lot of rotting bodies and I foresee a need for a lot of skeletons in the future.



So, that was the session. Not perfect, but perfectly adequate for a first outing, and if every session goes this well it will be a fine campaign and a nice break from GMing for me.

Any thoughts, questions, or suggestions?