Westvault Explorations: A 5e episodic dungeon-crawl campaign log

[J-H]

Intro
My players picked a more dungeon-crawly old-school campaign that’s more episodic (ie dungeons that aren’t necessarily linked). I asked them a bunch of questions and had them craft the setting and the reasoning for why there are so many dungeons, ruins, etc. lying around with riches in them waiting to be explored.
If you are playing in this game, stay out.

Setting info dump:

Spoiler: info dump

Show

The players do not know all of this.
History
Warforged Rebellion
Warforged originally created as sustainable servitors by the Illithid during the late stages of the Gith rebellion. A few spelljammers carrying the tooling and enchanting ended up crashed on the material plane. The Warforged creation tools were picked up by the Udibi Sky Empire, and they began producing Warforged as servitors and soldiers [think Cylons].

Eventually, the Warforged rebelled. After the Skyfall, most were killed. The remainder left for parts unknown.

Skyfall
At the height of the Udibi Sky Empire (populated primarily by humans and elves), the Warforged rebelled. The Empire’s archmages crafted a ritual that would wipe out all warforged across the world, and began to cast it. Horrified at this perversion of magic, Mystra and several other gods worked together, completely removing arcane magic for the world for an hour. During that hour, all of the flying cities crashed to the ground, pocket planes and extra-dimensional spaces imploded, and summons, conjured beings, and other unstable magical tools went wild.
The primary underground race, the dwarves, had previously made extensive use of extra-planar spaces and magical fields to structurally enhance their greatest and most beautiful cities. These also failed.

The destruction was immense, and much was lost.

Plague of Plagues
In the wake of the Skyfall, remnant populations began to rebuild, forging new, smaller kingdoms on the surface and underground. New forts were raised, and the Dark Elves, the Drow, rose in power, their mastery of the night and underground spaces less of a handicap now.

Two hundred years later, a plague of diseases and blights appeared. Surviving records indicate no fewer than 13 separate diseases and blights affecting crops, creatures, and humanoids. Nobody knows where they came from, but they spread rapidly across the world. Civilization was reduced to scattered pockets, squatting in some of the more secure cities and ruins, especially those whose wards survived Skyfall.

As a result of the major population drop, many gods were greatly weakened, and some may have even died off, due to lack of worship. One of the blights specifically impacted fey and druids, twisting their spirits and bodies alike, and shattering their population.

Species
Major races
Human – Adaptable, short lifespan.
Elves – Lifespan about 400 years. Definitely interested in recolonizing forest, but structures built/grown into trees take decades to develop under most circumstances. Rillifane very relevant to this.
Drow – Descended underground during the Plague Era. Resurfaced 500 years later with a pathological hatred of spiders. They do not talk about what happened underground. They typically wear cloaks with hoods to guard against the sun, and are rarely seen in public without their faces being covered by bone masks (think more like theater mask than “skull mask” in style). The masks are decorated in simple, elegant ways and carry a religious significance that they don’t share with outsiders. Not necessarily evil, although it’s hard to stamp out some of the cultural traditions regarding hoarding information and power, mild paranoia, etc.
Dwarves – Pretty much as normal. Not Scottish unless someone wants them to be.
Tortles – Slow to reproduce but also resistant to most diseases, the Tortles have a rich oral history and poetic tradition. I’d make them typically talk in verse, but I don’t think I can pull it off.

Minor races
Half-elves – Just like it says on the tin.
Warforged – Usually in a slave status, produced in limited numbers. Requires substantial resources to produce, and like droids from Star Wars, they usually only develop personality and individuality over time.
Firbolg – Nomadic herders. Can be long-lived, but usually aren’t in limited circumstances. Long lifespan ties to usually slow reproduction. They are strong and proficient with magic, and have been the main carriers of druidic tradition. They do not do well in confined environments (other species build too small for them) and are in the process of remaking/rediscovering traditions after centuries essentially stuck in small areas.

Deities
Partial list from Faerun.

Westvault
The Village
Newly established, sponsored and somewhat run by New Dawn (a company/organization sponsoring it). Permanent structures thus far include the temple, general store, tavern, smithy, several lodging houses, an alchemist’s workshop, and a warehouse. A brewery is under construction. The temple of Bane and the smithy are made of stone. The remaining structures are made of locally-harvested wood.
Everyone else is in tents. Substantial construction is underway.

The village is placed here due to a convergence of ley lines making the area more saturated with magic. The exact cause and effects of this are unknown. Strange or bad things may be drawn to this.

Major industries in the area:
-Dwarves are investigating/re-opening some mines.
-The firbolgs herders are in the area, possibly expanding to this area as a result of having more protection available.
-Lumber/forestry. Some of the wood is slightly magical:
• Duskwood is a nearly-black wood that weighs about half as much, but is just as strong as regular wood. Favored for tools, wagons, etc.
• Wood from the Serren tree is substantially easier to enchant, making it favored for magic item creation. Although some lore about magic item creation was preserved, the loss of most people who had hands on experience and talent with it has left the modern era very substantially behind when it comes to magic item crafting capabilities. Serrenwood is thus valuable for the less-skilled modern crafter.


Major NPCs
Kurhah Praxton Alchemist, not interested in risk: Kurhah, Tortle alchemist (9th level). Brews potion. Her shell is dyed an eye-searing rainbow of colors, and she has a complex smell of herbs and abrasives about her.

Wizard who quit New Dawn and may be trying to sabotage it: TBD.

Marik, the cleric in the temple, taking the company dime: Marik, 9th level warforged cleric of Bane. A metallic warforged with his body dyed jet-black. His green eyes glisten in his face with a slight glow. “Why am I not a slave? I developed faith. I called out for power in my spirit, and Bane answered. I proved my right to freedom, and my ability to rule. Regulations exist for reasons, to preserve order and stability. There is room within this for people to change their station, but only if they are worthy. The Warforged who work as slaves choose to do so. If they are so weak of spirit, why should I help them? Succor is for the worthy, or for those who can pay.” Order cleric, +1 AC from being warforged.
His stone temple is a hexagonal structure approximately 50’ across. A main hall occupies the center 1/3, while the other portions are bedrooms for healing, stores, a small library, etc.

Rauld Highsmith, blacksmith and father of Erik Highsmith. Human, Gruff, overbearing, not overly loving. Lived near port Ebonfras, got hired out here recently.

Buena Steiner, company representative AND store owner. Human, mid-40s, female. Black hair usually done up in a bun, wears well-made clothes and a golden Company badge. Worships Waukeen. Is a widow with two adult children who work safely back in Port Ebonfras. She views herself as providing goods and services nobody else can provide (win for customers) at a price that properly factors in risk and rarity (win for Company).
Her store is a large T-shaped building. Her counter is at the intersection of the T, with different wings devoted to different types of goods and products. There are large barn doors at each end of the T for bulk deliveries by wagon. Three workers work for her: Dva, a warforged with no personality, Duran, a young dwarf, and York, a drow who has an unspecified but very substantial debt to work off. York is also a 5th-level Shadow Sorcerer.

The Region
Westvault is about a week’s travel (overland) from Port Ebonfras, the nearest major city. The trip is not so much along a road as it is a roughly cut dirt track. An alternate route is to travel to the river (two days journey south), and then go downriver, which takes about 3 days. However, the river is hazardous for reasons [TBD] and not a favored route.

The general region is hilly blending into mountains, with a mix of grassland and forest.

Buying & Selling Items
Basic Healing potions 40gp
Other items:
Base XGTE pricing; increase or decrease some items one step (ie Broom);
+50% if ordered through New Dawn.
+0% if bought in Port, but if the party doesn't go there themselves, they'll have to pay travel costs.
XGTE base (halve for consumables)
Common 100
Uncommon 400
Rare 4,000
Very Rare 40,000
Legendary 200,000

Selling: New Dawn will buy at 50%. XGTE price.

There's totally a "Company Store" thing going on with New Dawn. I don't know how long it will take the party to figure out and try to do anything about it.

I have about a half-dozen long-term plots ready to roll in the background, ranging from Warforged status to a Kython infestation to some potential neighbors and saboteurs. I'll go with whatever ties in well and seems to grab their interest.

Players:
Leah the wood elf druid (brand new to D&D). Took Poison Spray as her only combat cantrip.
Eric the human fighter (played OD&D but not much since the ‘90s). Strength based with dueling fighting style and shield.
Hobin Wood, a human rogue on the run (brand new to D&D)
Ezer, a human evoker wizard (plays 5e extensively)

Session 1, 8/20/2021

I ask how their characters know each other, and they end up starting off in town with Buena Steiner telling them that they could go investigate some kind of creepy place found by the Starwalker firbolgs. They discuss getting some climbing gear but nobody actually does it, then go to the Alchemist and talk her into giving them two healing potions on credit.

They find the firbolgs a half-day’s travel away and get directed towards the entrance. I am running the Tomb of the Serpent Kings (from http://coinsandscrolls.blogspot.com). It’s an OSR module, but adapting it to 5e is pretty straightforward. I multiplied the gold amounts by 5x to 10x and swapped a few magic items in and out. I really like it.

They explore the entry area and only break one of the clay statues. The silver ring doesn’t look magic enough (I don’t describe it well) so nobody puts it on (it turns a finger into a dagger). They spot the big “lift the bar and the pegs go up, triggering a hammer on the ceiling” trap for what it is. They try to lift the pegs and jam them down. One Sleight of hand check rolls an 18. The other rolls a 3. “sproing!” They get to save with advantage, and only two of the party takes damage. After discussion, they leave the hammer trap partly jammed, where removing 2 daggers will make it go off.

They explore the fake king’s tomb, disturbing the 3 skeletons. A couple of people take some damage. Leah the druid uses most of her spell slots healing everyone up, and both healing potions are drunk. No short rest. Sigh

They go down into the real tomb complex and do some looting. After this, they reach the big room with the mummy pool. Poking the suspicious ugly pool with a halberd triggers the mummy hands (crawling claws). They fasten two halberds together with rope to make a long pole and probe along, determining that there’s something down there, and that it’s not too deep.

Eric the fighter ties a rope around his waist and dives down to feel along the bottom to find stuff. There’s a d4 list, and I roll on the d4. He keeps coming up between items and going back down. He successfully retrieves a gold chain, a silver ring (magic), and an amulet (magic). When the last item is head-sized, fleshy, and trying to bite him, he drops it and says he’s done going in there.

As they dry off, I ask for the Con save (DC 12). He fails. Mummy Rot as presented in 5e (lose d6s of max HP every 24 hours) is pretty unsuitable for 2nd level characters, so the version here is that he has to roll a DC 12 CON save any time he wants to regain hit points. On a failure, he regains no hit points. This is a curse, not a disease.

The magic ring is given to the wizard’s weasel familiar. One of its eyes turns to glass and pops out. The weasel can still see through the eye. They check under the one wooden door (there’s a gap) by have the weasel bowl its eye through the gap and then report. “Shiny!”

They work their way around the doors, bypassing the most ornate one for later. One of them leads to a tomb where the last ruler of the area was badly embalmed, leading his corpse to become a mummy/humanoid-like black pudding. I downscaled black pudding damage to 1d6+2 bludgeoning + 1d4 acid. Eric the fighter gets knocked to 0. Two other characters end up at 3 or fewer hit points. There’s a bunch of failed and successful medicine checks, and some frantic dragging of unconscious bodies by the rogue (cunning action = double drag speed).
A couple of highlights:
-They could have left the room and closed the door. They decided to keep shooting, and eventually ate their way through the 20 speed, AC 7, 85 HP monster.
-The druid said she’d put the magic amulet (unknown) on Eric if she failed her medicine check. The amulet was a Periapt of Wound Closure. I would have let it work… but someone else succeeded at stabilizing him before Eric’s turn came up.
-The group takes a short rest. I decide, especially given the circumstances (ie: What is Fun) that a stable/0hp character who’s being taken care of can regain HP on a short rest by expending hit dice. He makes his Con save and then rolls max, regaining all 16hp.

The wizard has like 2 spell slots left, the druid is out, and the rogue can go all day.

I really like this dungeon so far. It has a lot of exploration with danger and an old-school flavor to it.

We are playing every 2 weeks.

[J-H]

Session 2, 9/3/2021

After the short rest, the party continues exploring the rooms off the mummy-pool room.

One room has a blocked-off/caved in area. They could clear it, but send Archie the weasel through to take a peek first. Ultimately, they decide not to deal with the skeletal half-snake wielding a greataxe and wearing a helm.

The next door has a pressure plate in the hallway. They spot it, loot a scroll from the sarcophagus, and then tie a rope around the body and drag it down the hall to set off the pressure plate, triggering a one-time lightning bolt.
They smash all the clay statues in the statue room, revealing one designed to be move. They explore the secret passage, and listen at the door at the far end. The druid and Archie the weasel hear a chain rattling and something “huff” heavily. Dousing all lights, they ease the door open so the druid (the only one with Darkvision) can peek out. She sees an 8-legged big lizard and identifies it as a basilisk. They ease the door shut and decide to go the other way.

For reasons that are unclear to me, the druid leads the way down the stairs. She rolls a 1 on the pre-rolled Perception check, and sets off the pressure-activated 3rd stair, sliding down a ramp into some spikes that pop up at the bottom. She’s now 50’ down from the party in a big round room with a Large (ogre sized) animated statue). The party throws a rope down, and two of them use it to slide down safely to help. Hobin Rood the rogue takes a single hit from the statue as they escape, knocking him from 13hp to 0hp in one hit. The druid’s last spell slot heals him (she’d regained one from the Land druid feature). After the trap resets, they determine that there’s only one step to avoid, and then use the fact that the statue can’t fit in the stairwell to shoot it from range, blowing it apart slowly. I fast-forward once the outcome is clear.

They go out the other side and along a great chasm. There are two paths open. One is another door that’s barred from the outside (and has the same type of hammer trap as before), but they ignore this door. They explore through several rooms, successfully avoid being tempted to loot a pit full of noxious gas, and not being harmed much by a couple of pit traps.

Along the way, they open a door and find an entrance to the goblin warrens. A goblin tries to shove the PC in front (the wizard) back with a big broom, with moderate success. Ultimately, they take the broom away after failing to speak Goblin, and the goblinoid runs off screaming. They shut the door and try to wedge it closed, and leave the area.
There’s a locked door down here that they need a key for.

Then they go up to the basilisk area. There are no doors in this section, just an opening. They end up playing peek-a-boo with the basilisk (pop out from hiding, shoot it, run back behind an opening). The basilisk was dead last on initiative, so this goes OK for round 1. At the top of round 2, the first PC to pop out (Hobin) gets hit by a readied Basilisk glare and starts turning to stone.

The party sort of trapped themselves by crossing the hall away from their exit path. There’s a 3rd way out, a hallway, but Erik the fighter aced his Perception check (like a 22?) and got a really bad feeling about the trapped hallway.

There are a few rounds of peek-a-boo that end up with the rogue shaking off the first Petrification, then risking it again and failing this time. At the end of the battle, 2 PCs are statues (the fighter & rogue), the basilisk has 14hp left, and the fighter uses his last action to throw oil on the basilisk. Ezer the wizard then Firebolts it for 9 damage, leaving it at 5 hp. It turns out that burning oil on a creature does exactly 5hp…

They start talking about maybe taking body parts from the basilisk, and I consult the module. Two throat glands each can be used for one dose of Stone to Flesh. I call for Nature and Arcana checks and get a 22 (druid) and 25 (wizard), so they know what to do, saving their party members. They also get a key that was wedged in the basilisk’s collar, and two basilisk eyes worth 30gp each. The party takes a long rest in one of the rooms very nearby, and they level up to 3.

Normally, I would be rolling on the dungeon’s encounter table, but they picked the Terra Cotta/Clay statue room, and scattered clay bits along the one non-doored entrance to warn them of anything coming.

That said, the ooze mummy they fought last session was not burned and it’s been long enough that it’s now reanimated as a random encounter… so if they’re noisy or go that way back out, they’ll find it.

I think we’ll probably wrap up the dungeon next session.
The fighter is going Battlemaster. He's still mummy-cursed and lost 6 off his maximum HP during the long rest.
Rogue is unsure.
The wizard picked up Knock and Scorching Ray.
The druid is still picking I think, but her Circle spells gave her Spider Climb and Barkskin. Barkskin is currently an AC buff for everyone except the fighter.

[J-H]

Session 2, 9/17/2021

Everyone was basically on-time, hurray!

The rogue went Swashbuckler, and the CHA to Init meant his initiative rolls this session were like 23 and 28. The monsters always went last.

After the long rest, the party went back to the mummy pool room, where they found the ooze mummy and fought it the second time. This time, it only got one hit in as they used mobility better, and after it was “dead” they burned it. It won’t be coming back.

They explored pretty much the rest of the tomb.
Highlights: They met and spoke with the lich, correctly identifying him as VERY DANGEROUS and VERY OLD, and disengaging from conversation politely after not very long.
They unlocked the treasury door and got Spear+1, Verminward: Insect and spider-type beasts must make a DC 12 Wisdom save to come within 5’ of the spear, and the bearer is immune to bug-summoning type spells like Summon Swarm and Creeping Doom. There was also about 400 gold and 20 +1 arrows.

They successfully set off the Hallway of Doom, which runs as a trap for 3 rounds and then collapses due to old age. After this, they cleared off the debris pile blocking a room… and got attacked by a skeleton jelly, which is immune to all damage (per the module) but very weak. They really didn’t know how to handle an enemy they couldn’t damage. Like, worried with "I don't know what to do!" Erik the Smith (fighter)’s player asked if he could make a Survival check, and I gave him a “If it’s dumb, it probably can’t climb and there’s a pit trap near by” result. Once they plotted out how to shove it in, I fast-forwarded because there’s no way they could fail.

Then they open the blocked room to see an attractive but hungry and dirty-looking young woman chained to the floor. She claims to have been caught by goblins, and to be someone who was looking at trees (botanist). They spot a circle around her. The wizard analyzes the circle and gets a “It’s a circle of binding” type result. They don’t think “Oh, she’s blocked in by this pile that took us 30 minutes to move, how is she not dead?”

They also skipped the room where info about her was written on a scroll….

Yeah, they scraped the circle apart. Luckily, Baltoplat the succubus is written to be mostly interested in escaping. They saw through a couple of her lies and made some “I have a bad feeling about her” comments, but nobody actually attacked her or pushed her too hard. She tried to get alone with just one person a couple of times, but they didn’t split the party. Ultimately, they fed her and escorted her out of the tomb, giving her some food and a knife. I’ll probably have her recur as a character, but possibly in disguise. There may be a murder mystery attached.

They looted some more stuff with no major complications, and then went into the stinky gross goblin territory. They find a room with about 20 goblins in it. The druid casts Entangle, the Wizard casts Burning Hands, and the 1hp goblins are swiftly reduced in number. Leah the druid approaches the last living goblin peacefully and tries to persuade it to obey her. Considering the amount of damage the group did, it’s not hard, and the goblins are pretty welcoming of a new king (this is all based on how the module recommends running them).

That’s how the druid was briefly the king of a tribe of fungus goblins. They toured the goblin domain, and in every room, the number of goblins following them went up, from “a few” to “six” to “nine” to, by the time they left, “18 goblins following you.” I don’t know if they noticed that the number was increasing.

They found the fungus pits where the goblins respawn (failed lich experiment on immortality, you can go read the module) and decided to not burn it. The druid briefly tried to teach them how to garden, and that plants need light, but the goblins didn’t like being out in the sun when they showed the party the way out. She put the Goblin Crown on the head of the tallest goblin and gave him a gold coin, and the party left while the goblins dealt with the idea of having a new Goblin King that is one of their own.

They reported in to the Firbolgs, went back to mark the areas around the goblin exit, and then headed back to town, with Eric’s maximum HP dropping twice en route due to the mummy curse. He repays the alchemist, who refers him to Marik the Priest. Marik the Warforged Priest of Bane questions them, tries Remove Disease, and then does Remove Curse the next morning. Payment is mentioned, and they pull out a big silver idol of some snake-god worth about 200gp. A chance for a priest of Bane to crush the valuable idol of a mostly-dead old god? He was pretty happy with that as a form of payment.

I don’t think they remembered that Warforged are mostly slaves, yet here is one as the major priest in town. It’ll come up again at some point, I’m sure.

Other loot besides gold is a +1 dagger. They’re going to cash out the gold and gems and stuff between sessions, and do some shopping. At the very least, some upgrades from leather to studded leather armor will go on.

TotSK is an OSR module, so some of the mechanics won't be repeated in other modules I run for this campaign, but it sure was fun!

[J-H]

Session 3, 10/15/2021

Everyone’s AC goes up by 1 except Ezer the wizard thanks to armor purchases. Kurhah the alchemist mentions that there’s been some reports of odd plant activity to the east, the dwarven iron mine to the northwest has a problem (plot hook: Eric the fighter is friends with the dwarves), and there’s a bounty on monstrosities.

They decide to go east, and after about a day and a half of travel encounter the Overgrown Shrine, a short module. There are minor environmental hazards from plants, then a puzzle – which they solved by burning plants away to find hinges – then some spiders. They chased off the spiders (Control Flame to make a wall + Ray of Sickness) and then decided to leave the spiders alone… so the only extended combat encounter was with a plant-possessed suit of full plate armor.

Ezer the Wizard did the most damage with Tasha’s Caustic Brew. Animated armor-type foes aren’t likely to scrape themselves off or realize what’s going on… Anyway, they got a Mariner’s Full Plate out of it (Eric the Fighter now has AC 20) and a nice rare banner that gives an AOE Sanctuary-like effect that doesn’t impede the protected people’s attacking. The player for Eric is very curious about how Mariner’s Armor came to be in the tomb.

After a short rest, they proceeded east, and a good Survival roll helped them figure out what direction had the most hostile/unnatural plants. I transitioned into the Blighted Forest small module. They got attacked by two Noxious Mounds, and things didn’t go so well. The NMs are (per the module) CR 2, 60-something HP, and have 2 attacks at +3 for 1d8 bludge + 1d8 poison. If they hit, they can forgo the 2nd attack to try to grapple. Any time they take damage from any source except psychic, they deal 1d8 poison damage to everything in a 5’ radius. I de-tuned them a bit by reducing the poison damage to 1d4. Nobody liked that splash damage.

Ezer used Caustic Brew again, getting at least 50 points of damage over 2-3 rounds. The NMs had a hard time hitting, but they did land a critical hit, reducing the fighter to 0. Leah the druid came over to heal him, doing 12hp of healing. On his turn, Eric the fighter got up, disengaged, and moved to put the druid (AC 14) between himself (AC 20) and the two NMs, who had already demonstrated that they are dumb and go for the closest enemy.

Leah got hit hard and knocked to 0. Then the other NM tried to nom on her and did get one hit, giving her two failed death saves. It was her turn next, and she rolled a 7. This is why it’s better to split up enemy turns…but I didn’t think that would matter on a “small” encounter like this.
Ezer the wizard was staying at range and keeping Caustic Brew up, and Hobin the swashbuckler was doing his archery thing. I finally realized that I needed to tell him about Steady Aim from Tasha’s, which should cut down on the swingy “I did nothing” turns where he just misses.

Anyway, the party killed the Noxious Mounds, and carried the corpse and banner back to town. Marik the priest of Bane hassled them about needing the iron fist of leadership in battle to reduce chaos and make them more coordinated. They went to the general store, and the drow store worker there cast Identify on the banner (introducing the store worker NPCs briefly). Buena Steiner, the storekeeper & chief New Dawn representative, offered 1200 gold, which is undercutting the price substantially. I checked a Deception vs. Passive Insight and let two of the players know that they thought she was coming in lower. They tried to negotiate higher (no real reasons/arguments, just “let’s try”). 3 players all rolled (with modifiers) 9s on their Persuasion roll…. So anyway, they settled on 1300 gold and know that New Dawn tries to underpay at least some of the time. It’s a chance to nudge the “company store” issue storyline a bit further forward.

They get Leah raised the next morning, and now she’s afraid of plants (player’s response, don’t know if it’ll be a long term phobia she introduces or not). They decide to head to the iron mines to help the miners, and work on the plants later.
With the remaining 800gp after Raise Dead, the party invests in 9 healing potions (I have them at 80gp each).
Leah’s player may buy a shield and switch to using cantrips instead of her Dagger +1 and shortbow with Arrows +1. I tried to nudge her in that direction a bit, but not too much.

Next time we should get all the way through the Mines of Memory module.

[J-H]

Session 4, 10/29/2021

The entire session, we all failed to remember Leah the druid’s penalty to rolls as a result of death and resurrection. Oops.

In Mines of Memory, the party goes to a dwarven mine (which I placed about a day northwest of town) that has odd happenings going on. They go inside, and fight some animated plants, encounter some peaceful myconids, and then encounter some Vine Blights, Mud Mephits, etc. holding dwarven miners captive while shaped/posing as an Illithid head and claws, or a web over a stone drider replica, etc. After freeing all the trapped miners, they help protect a flumph afflicted with a psionic disease while a ritual is carried out to let it purge its negative memories and pass on in peace… the disease had been making it manifest bad (Underdark) memories and animate the rocks, mushrooms, vines, etc. to replicate them.

There was definitely a puzzle aspect as the party slowly figured out what was going on, thinking it was an illithid, or a repentant illithid, or whatever else they could try to make fit the evidence.

At the end, they help protect the flumph from a Psionic Horror and some mini-horrors (smoke mephits) that spawn. I changed it so that the mini-horrors would attack the flumph, giving the players an objective (protect and heal) beyond just “kill the enemy.” Eric the fighter had an unfortunate run of dice rolls, where he rolled a 3, 3, 4, 4, and 5 on attacks in the final fight. He does not have Precision Attack, so that was a lot of misses. The Psionic Horror also failed every single time it tried to use Telekinetic Thrust, so it evens out!
Hobin Rood the rogue has been spending every fight standing still and using Steady Aim to thunk sneak attack arrows home reliably. Good damage, but not much variability. He’s a newer player. I think he’s the only one to not grab a magic item yet (the druid has the +1 dagger for some reason). When he killed one of the psionic horrors (which I described as a ball of darkness that shows your nightmare) he said “Hah, take that, Sheriff!”

Basically all of the enemies were slow (vine blight speed is 10’) so the combats were static, which I consider a negative. The party now has a good supply of lanterns and lamp oil, a pair of Sending Stones, and a gem which, when attuned, lets a spellcaster cast Resistance and Mind Sliver.

I asked how they liked the adventure, and the druid’s player said she liked the happy ending and more positive note on it. Not much else on feedback. I personally felt it was good but not great, but I’m not sure what I would change or fix to help it flow better.

Leads for next time:
1) The existing plant quest
2) A creepy old tower off to the north of the mines
3) Two warforged mercenaries (not well equipped; they were actually porters who helped get the adventurers they were carrying baggage for killed, and are hoping to do it again and claim the loot) who claim to know the location of a wyvern nest. This has hooks to the tower adventure, although the party doesn’t know it yet. They’ll probably go for this lead.
Edit: The druid's player says her character hates plants now, which is bad because she's a wood elf and lives in a tree (her words). Having this adventure that used vines a lot after the previous one was good/bad timing for that! Everybody has at least one magic item except the rogue now.

[J-H]

Session 5, 11/19/2021

I expected them to go hunt a wyvern, but nope… they decided (by a 2.7 to 1.3 vote) to go finish the “plant quest.” That’s the “Blighted Forest” module with the overtuned Noxious Mounds. I rolled for random encounters and got 2. The first one was a displacer beast. I rolled 3 or 4 times on my little d20 table for the 2nd encounter, and got things that either made no sense for where they were, or would conflict with other metaplot points…so they just had the displacer beast encounter.
Both Eric (Battlemaster, on watch) and the displacer beast rolled poorly on perception/stealth, so I decided to let initiative decide who went first. The Displacer Beast rolled a 1. Eric was just near it, and took the Dodge action, so when it attacked, it missed him. Everyone else woke up, and the beast spent two rounds stuck in Entangle and got hit with magic missile and then Tasha’s caustic brew. As soon as it could, it ran off, and scraped off the acid before escaping with 8 hp left. I don’t think anyone even got damaged by it.

This is the first time any player in any of my games ever has taken the Dodge action. The battlemaster has Riposte, so it pairs well with that and his AC 20.

I retuned the Noxious Mounds to only deal 1d4 poison instead of 1d8, and to give a DC 11 Dexterity save to avoid the splash damage, instead of just auto-damaging everyone within 5’ every time someone damages them.

They fought one on the way in, and decided to use oil and Control Flames to burn their way through the vines in the entrance cave. The party fought 2 Noxious Mounds, with Eric reduced to 0hp (auto-stabilized by amulet) and Leah the druid grappled and nearly reduced to 0hp by another. She uses Wildshape for the first time ever and turns into a horse (Large) which gets her free and gives her a pool of about 13 more HP. Retreat, short rest.

This module (which is mediocre) doesn’t have a map at all, so I just made two exits to the other two rooms from the entrance cave. They explored the bedroom first; it’s the bedroom of an elven researcher who had a great idea for improving plants (ties into the blight history of the setting) and…well, something went wrong.

They spot a book floating near a bookcase. Hobin the rogue can see that it’s in some kind of cube thing, but he flubs the arcane check. Ezer the wizard sees the book – and his player is very experienced so was just doing the “my character is ADHD” thing – goes to grab it before getting schlubbed into a Gelatinous Cube. The module called for 2 in the room, but I knocked it down to one. Ezer takes 3d6 damage out of his 20hp getting pulled in, and would have taken 6d6 at the start of the cube’s next turn if he hadn’t managed to make the strength save to pull himself out. Eric the smith goes to attack it and has the same thing happen. After that, they stay >20’ away and just pelt it with ranged attacks until they melt.

Searching the room, they find a nice elven tome on organic transmutation, a set of Elven chain, a stone wand that gives +1 to spell save DCs for plant-based spells, a 50gp ruby, and a 50gp diamond. I know I wrote the gems in there as spell components, but I don’t remember what they’re for right now. Elven Chain is, per the DMG, a +1 chain shirt, so base AC 14 + dex (max 2), and you don’t have to be proficient with medium armor to wear it; there’s nothing about needing light armor proficiency. Hobin the rogue wasn’t interested – he’s taken basically no magic items at all, but he’s also the one getting the least damage taken and doing the most damage. Ezer the wizard took it, and his AC is now 16 and he has no need for mage armor.

They take another short rest. During this short rest and the last, there was some tactical discussion about how to handle these creatures better, including using entangle and pounding them at range, and being better about healing. Leah the druid’s player is new, and she’s starting to better understand bonus action healing word, and how it lets her both heal and do other stuff the same turn.

They are learning!

This is still kind of a blah module because all of the monsters are unintelligent, medium-to-slow, have no ranged attacks, have lots of HP, and do a lot of melee damage. It’s all very straightforward and samey.

The final boss is supposed to be a 100hp CR 5 plant with 30’ tremorsense and a pair of 30’ melee attacks in a 60’ room, with a single additional Noxious Mound guarding it. There are vines all over the room (difficult terrain). They use Control Flame to start torching it, and then start pounding the big vine creature at range. On the fly, I gave it a ranged attack of “break rock off from cave wall, hurl at foes.” Instead of an attack roll, it’s a Dexterity DC 14 to avoid taking 2d6+3 bludgeoning damage. That worked out pretty well. The one noxious mound attacked, passed its save against Entangle, and it was just HP damage from then out for the rest of the battle. Eric did charge into melee, but his AC protected him from all of the attacks.

Everyone levels to 4 and heads back to town. They have a free hand to do a complete or partial respect if they want. I think Leah the druid’s player is considering going Moon Druid for the shapeshifting. I’m not sure what Hobin (swashbuckler but archery based)’s player is going to do. Ezer’s player is happy with his Evoker blaster. Eric (battlemaster)’s player says he’s going to look around and consider, and could end up with the biggest respec.

Morning after edit:
Hobin Wood at one point thought about pulling out a net and using it on one of the noxious mound plants, but we read the text and it doesn't hinder amorphous creatures. Cool! I've never seen anybody use a net.

After they killed the boss plant monster and the plants started to wither, I realized what I could do as I was giving kind of a closing sentence, and ended my description with "And you're sure you've now dealt with the root of the problem." Ba-dum!
So far they haven't had to deal with any enemy casters, intelligent monsters, or highly mobile creatures. That shall soon change...

[KorvinStarmast]

.
They go down into the real tomb complex and do some looting. After this, they reach the big room with the mummy pool. Poking the suspicious ugly pool with a halberd triggers the mummy hands (crawling claws). They fasten two halberds together with rope to make a long pole and probe along, determining that there’s something down there, and that it’s not too deep.

The magic ring is given to the wizard’s weasel familiar. One of its eyes turns to glass and pops out. The weasel can still see through the eye. They check under the one wooden door (there’s a gap) by have the weasel bowl its eye through the gap and then report. “Shiny!”

I love your players.

After they killed the boss plant monster and the plants started to wither, I realized what I could do as I was giving kind of a closing sentence, and ended my description with "And you're sure you've now dealt with the root of the problem." Ba-dum!

DMs are required to pun. Really. It's a rule ... somewhere... I think.

[J-H]

Session 6, 12/3/2021

Leah the Druid has changed stats around a bit to bump her Constitution.
Hobin Rood the Swashbuckler has dropped his Charisma to 9 and increased his Constitution to 16 with his ASI, and reshuffled skills so he now has Expertise in Perception.
Eric the Smith (battlemaster) dropped his wisdom by 1 to get his Con up to 12.

Not any big respecs like I was expecting.

Between sessions I pointed out that druids have the 2nd level Darkvision spell as an option. It was used a couple of times this session (yay druid branching out).

In town, they met Bella, a diplomat-type who has recently arrived in Westvault. The caravan from Port Ebonfras was attacked in the Blightmaw Swamp by bullywugs. She was separated and lost for several days before making her way out of the swamp, and she’d really like some bullywugs dead. She is actually Baltoplat the succubus from session 2, having used her magic to get enough info to impersonate the dead diplomat. Given the role she’s playing it, will be a while before I can drop enough clues.

She mentions working on some negotiations with kobolds to the north, which will lead into Trap! Trap! which should be the next module I run. More urgently, some of the firbolg hunters and warriors went to fight bullywugs and aren’t back yet, leaving a nearby settlement without warriors while something weird is happening with their kids.

This is the Buried Dreams module on the DM’s Guild. The party travels to the town talks to people, and waits for night. At around 10pm, all the kids start sleepwalking to the edge of town and pointing towards a recently-discovered cave/buried tower that had ‘something’ in it, and where a teenage firbolg named Arden is presumed to be missing. This night, there’s also a horrendous screech, which really worries the village leader (Loren, a one-armed old Firbolg with a big club/walking stick).

The party gets the kids back into bed (for now) and then sets out to investigate. They have Archie, the wizard’s familiar, who is now an owl instead of a ferret, fly ahead. Archie sees some little glowing balls of light (characteristic of a little aberration creature the module invents) near the cave and comes back.
Hobin’s new Perception check, and the Darkvision spell cast on him, let him spot an ankheg and two little aberrations (called Dednolgs) in a clearing nearby.

The party fights with them, generally falling back and kiting the enemies. 2 of the 3 enemies die with Eric the fighter next to them but not scoring the killing blow. He also spent some time swapping to / from crossbow (he really needs a ranged throwing weapon). Leah uses Summon Beast and likes it pretty well. Hobin does most of the work for damage (3d6+4 damage with sneak attack) along with Ezer using some wizard spells.
They mark the Ankheg for later retrieval and use for making armor; it also is a monstrosity, and counts for the 100gp bounty.

Proceeding to the cave entrance, they fight and kill 4 more dednolgs, taking a bit of damage and expending a couple of more spell slots / healing potions. The way this module is written, there was enough urgency that nobody ever proposed stopping to rest.

They proceeded through a long tunnel and came out with a buried (or teleported underground?) tower, with them at the top. Archie the familiar flies down first as a scout. The top level includes two stone thrones. The lost firbolg is on one, but has seizures when they try to pull him off, and can’t be awakened.
The other throne contains a headless corpse with a nice cloak that they identify as magical (homebrew addition).
They search their way down the tower, finding 2 healing potions, a scroll of lightning bolt, an Anomalous Top I added (SCP inspired), and a mysterious key with a sun symbol and a tag in Elvish warning “danger”. The key is a red herring inserted by the module author, and I’ll probably use it like 10 sessions from now for something.
There’s also an area with some weird eggs and suspicious ooze. They leave it alone and come back for the eggs later.

Anyway, they get down to the bottom and the other headless corpse is down there and finishes a ritual as they approach. The corpse and altar are smashed into the ground by an emerging thing. The module writer used an Otyugh, which actually works really well as an alien aberration/abomination creature.

However, it would be yet another slow-moving melee monster that they would kite to death, so I came up with something different. Statblock below:
They defeated it with 1 character at 0hp and the others in single digits. The party did about 30 damage to themselves, including the druid Poison Spraying her own summon. It was a great fight with a lot of tension and interesting decision-making. “Do I stay in the acid or not?” “Do I risk taking the shot and maybe hurting an ally?”

They then left, rescued the now-awakened firbolg, and took the cloak. The village is safe.

Spoiler: items

Show

Cloak of Dark Dreams
Uncommon, requires attunement
This leather cloak appears black, but under light gives off an occasional glimmer of reflected blue, green, or purple. The glimmers always fade after a moment like dying stars. You’re not sure what kind of leather it’s made out of, but it is smooth, supple, and apparently waterproof.
The wearer of this cloak gains Darkvision 60’. As an action, the wearer may cast Dissonant Whispers, DC 13, once per long rest.

Anomalous Top
Uncommon
This seemingly innocuous wooden top has a blackened tip. Once per day, it can be spun and asked a single question, as the "Divination" spell. It then writes the answer to the question in ink on whatever surface it is on. Each time the top is used, roll 1d8. On a 1, the top is out of charges and becomes non-magical.

When the party found this, the wizard asked “What is this old map we found about?” I checked and the answer to that was not within the bounds of the Divination spell, so the top spun and wrote out:
Error: Question not within parameters.

Note: The party actually missed questioning people and didn't find out about the inscription on the altar, so they had no name to put to this...thing.

Spoiler: Herald of Gulnurh

Show

The air around you rushes towards the portal with a howl, and something pulls itself out, landing on and crushing the altar and the figure. What emerges from the portal doesn’t look like anything that belongs to this world. A matte, non-reflective sphere of black, about 6 feet across and coated in frost, lands heavily, then lifts itself up. The thing, whatever it is, has at least 10 joined appendages; each appears hard and inflexible like a spider’s leg, but ends in a hand eerily resembling that of a human. It blinks, opening eyes that shine with a hideous pinkish light that seems to draw you in. It hurts to even look at it.

Herald of Gulnurh
Large Aberration
AC 14 (Natural Armor)
Hit Points 105
Speed 35 ft., climb 35 ft.
Str Dex Con Int Wis Cha
16(+3) 12(+1) 17(+3) 10(0) 11(0) 12(+1)
Saves Con +6, Cha +4
Damage Resistances acid, fire, poison
Damage Immunities cold, psychic
Condition Immunities prone
Senses Darkvision 120’, passive Perception 12
CR 5 (PB +3)
Eldritch Glare Whenever a creature looks at the herald, such as to target it with a spell or attack, it must make a DC 12 Intelligence save. On a failed save, the creature cannot adequately distinguish friend from foe. Its spell or attack is targeted randomly at any creature within range. Once a creature has succeed on its save against this effect, it has advantage on future saving throws.
Actions
Multiattack. The Herald makes two attack each turn, combining melee attacks with spell attacks as it chooses. It may also forgo both attacks to cast Rime’s Binding Ice once.
Arm Whack. Melee weapon attack, +6 to hit, 5’, 2d4+3 bludgeoning damage.

Control Flames. The Herald extinguishes one flame-based light source within 60’.

Frostbite. 60’, 2d6 cold damage & disadvantage on next attack roll before end of target’s next turn. Con DC 12 negates.

Ray of Sickness. 60’, Ranged spell attack,+4 to hit, 2d8 poison damage; on failed Con save, poisoned until end of caster’s next turn.

() Rime’s Binding Ice (30’ cone), 3d8 cold damage & has its speed reduced to 0 by ice for 1 minute until the target or another creature uses an action to break away the ice. Con DC 12 halves the damage and negates speed reduction.

Lair Actions
On initiative count 20 (losing ties), the Herald can take a lair action to cause one of the following magical effects. The same effect may not used two rounds in a row.
• Psychic Screech. Every creature within 120’ of the Herald who can hear him takes 1d6+1 psychic damage.
• Acid Drool. Mouths open all over the herald, and it drools acid onto the ground in its space and in all adjoining spaces. Any creature who begins its turn in the acid or enters it for the first time on its turn takes 1d6 acid damage. The acid persists until the end of the battle.

I liked the module...just had to sub in something besides the otyugh to prevent it from turning into another kite-fest.

[J-H]

Session 7, 12/17/2021

Bella the Diplomat had the party come with her to a kobold “social event.” They are trying to get peaceful boundaries set up with some kobolds in the mountains; there are more resources than people to exploit them, so why risk a war? I was going to have her drop some kind of line about “there’s always more than meets the eye” or “bigger power” or whatever to help vaguely hint at her (succubus) nature, but I forgot. I did throw in a brief description of a kobold with ruby-red scales, but I don’t know if anyone picked up on the disguised Red Dragon boss.
If they deal with him later, he’ll recognize them as the people who almost got killed but made it through Teeko’s Trap Arena.

We pretty quickly got into it… this was the module Trap! Trap! from the DM’s Guild, targeted at about 4th level players. It’s a big trapmaking arena featuring, among other things:
-A sometimes hostile girallon
-A spectator-manned cannon that the party provides ammo for (to shoot at them) in return for fruit to pacify the girallon
-Kobolds in spiked hamster balls of doom
-Bungee-diving kobold showmen with swords harrying the party the ENTIRE fight but nearly never getting shot at.
-Puzzle-solving involving a rust monster, a piercer, and deliberately getting gold and adamantium eaten.

I'm not sure what to call out as high points because there were a lot of fun/interesting decisions and moments! I'm not sure how many combat rounds the whole thing lasted (plus some non-combat periods), but probably at least 15-20 rounds. It moved pretty fast. When pre-reading the module, it seemed like a lot to keep track of, but once the game was running I had no difficulty remembering everything important.

The first little bit started off slow because the party made some good decisions, but once things got rolling (ha ha ha) it got crazy. Darkmantles almost ate someone’s faces, 2 PCs were reduced to 0 at least once, everyone used up all their spell slots, and they all walked out of the arena with around single-digit HP and a satisfied and amused crowd of kobolds.

I found an hour-long arena crowd noise set on Youtube and looped it while we played.

I’m going to go give this module a 5* review on the DM’s Guild next.
It was a LOT of fun!

Loot:
About 1800 in gold from gambling on themselves, + 400 gold in prize money. Bella didn’t have to spend a penny on them! They entertained the kobolds and dragons, and let her do her diplomacy at no cost. Maybe I’ll have her pocket their “official” pay and potentially get caught later?
Magic Items: They got to pick from a short list suggested by the module, which I shortened a bit more, and chose:
Belt of Dwarvenkind (went to Erik the Smith)
Ring of the Ram (went to Ezer the wizard)
They could have picked Bracers of Archery or a 6-pack of Arrows of Monster Slaying, but decided that the Ring of the Ram for a clinch +7 for 6d10 + 15’ push would be worth having.

They now have enough gold to order a few uncommon items from Port Ebonfras (1+ week transit time). I’m being asked about a Cloak of Protection +1 and a Wand of the War Mage +1.

Up Next: Blightmaw Swamp, in which a Hag offers a Wand of Lightning Bolts in exchange for -4 to somebody's CON permanently. They're close to 5th level and "lightning bolt all day" is not something I want, so she'll offer a Staff of Thunder and Lightning instead. It's technically a more powerful item, being a +2 weapon with some nice 1/day properties usable by anyone.... but they won't know what it does unless they take the bargain. Will they or won't they? I'm leaning towards "probably not."

[J-H]

Session 8, 12/31/2021

Happy New Year! Ezer the wizard was not able to make it.

The group talked to Bella, then to Buena Steiner, and negotiated a discount (waiver of shipping/handling costs on items ordered from Port Ebonfras) if they deal with the Bullywugs who attacked the caravan Bella was on. There was a warning that if they “deal with” the problem, and then the attacks start back up, they’ll be responsible for fixing the issue.

They travel southeast for about 4 days to reach Blightmaw Swamp. An owlbear attacks one night, but Hobin hears it coming, and the party ultimately drives it off and then kills it while taking no damage thanks to Darkvision, mobility, and ranged attacks.

Reaching the edge of the swamp, they travel along the edge for a couple of days, and then search for the area where the caravan was attacked. They set up a large fire there and try to act as ‘bait’ but lack wagons, horses, etc. In the night, there’s heavy mist, and they hear a voice and see a distant light, and almost stumble into some quicksand, but Hobin spots it. They return to their campsite and make the fire bigger, and nothing bad happens.

Heading into the swamp, they reach a large river that’s an obstacle. Hobin shoots an arrow across it with a rope tied to it, and then Erik swims across in his Mariner’s Plate. As he’s tying the rope on the other side, four bullywugs jump out and attack him. The other two cross, and two more bullywugs pop out of the water (staying in the river) and do some croaking magical attacks.

Leah summons a bear (Summon Beast) and Hobin starts dual-wielding for more damage in melee. The two bullywugs in the river get attacked by the giant crocodile that had been hanging out in the area... they were the only ones left in the water, so they were its victims.

After 3 of the land-bound bullywugs are dead, the last one surrenders. The group turns and saves one of the two in the river; the crocodile dives and swims off with the body of the other.

They learn that the bullywugs follow the Great Grand King Glarbaz the first, wearer of the One True Hat and owner of the One True Fork, and that they also worship the One True Frog.

They find a clearing with some strange metal cylinders that they leave alone, and a hut that ultimately turns out to have a hag in it. She offers them a magic staff that she says will help, but they are unable to agree upon a price they can tolerate (her opening offer is 4 points of Constitution permanently lost/given to her). They leave, and she basically says “good luck.”

Escorted by their captives to the bullywug fort, they arrive the next day. It’s a 10’ high palisade wrapped around an abandoned and partly sunken shrine to Chauntea. They meet with GGK Glarbaz and diplomatic discussions ensue.
Important things learned, as I recall:
-Someone offered them magical items and captives if they attacked the caravan. It was a ‘she’ and a spellcasting bullywug, but she hasn’t been around for a while.
-If they stop attacking, they don’t get captives or magic items from the caravan, so they want a deal that gives them what they get now.
-If they let the party leave, what if the group just leads others back?
-They could bargain for and trade alchemical components from the swamp, but the return isn’t as good.

Ultimately there’s a possible acceptance of further negotiations, but GGK Glarbaz says that the One True Frog needs to approve. He calls for the sacrifice to be brought forth, and it’s a half-elven caravan guard. At that point I think everyone knew it was going to turn into a fight, as they weren’t going to stand there and let someone be sacrifice. They all approach the pond in the temple. Eric pulls his spear on the king and we roll initiative.

The captive gets shoved into the pond, and swallowed by the One True Frog… a CR 7 young Froghemoth (still huge). It starts attacking whoever’s nearest to it, and Leah gets swallowed by the king’s Giant Toad mount. The Froghemoth random-targets whoever is closest and ends up helping kill the toad. The king gets worried and has his troops form a line, containing the party so the One True Frog can show its power by killing them.

The fight goes poorly, and both Hobin and Eric are swallowed by the Froghemoth and at 0 but taking damage, but it’s low on hit points. At that point, with no closer targets and berserk from taking damage, it heaves itself out of the pool and charges the bullywugs.
The king, unable to retreat without losing his position, and unwilling to be eaten, calls for them to free the One True Frog from the corruption introduced by the outsiders, for it has clearly gone mad. Over half his troops run away; three stay by him, and bring down the froghemoth.

This leaves the party with 1 low-hp druid, one unconscious but stable battlemaster out of maneuvers, and a just-Healing-Worded swashbuckler. They’re functionally captives of bullywugs undergoing a sudden and severe religious and political crisis.
It was late so I called a halting point here so I can figure out what may happen next.


DM notes: This was almost a TPK. I should have fudged the dice on froghemoth gullet damage more! Hobin was chugging healing potions (2d4+2) to stay alive since he was having trouble hitting to do damage inside, and then I rolled 11 acid damage and he went down. I don’t mind killing one PC, but I didn’t want to kill half the party with this necessarily.
I should have toned the fight down some for a smaller group, but failed to realize that in time. I was able to recover by having it attack the bullywugs, but I'm still not happy with how it went. I wish the module had more support for the diplomacy/discussion part. Not going into it with a clear set of options from my part hurt.

The module (Blightmaw Swamp) is a bit railroady with the big fight, but otherwise there’s not really an opportunity for much resolution or loot, so that’s fine.
Once I have more sleep in me, I’ll have to figure out what the factions are in the bullywug camp now, and what they will do to the party. Their king just had their god killed so it’s going to be messy somehow.

[J-H]

Session 9, 1/28/2022

Badly battered and exhausted, the party watches as Blurtz, Slayer of the Froghemoth, turns on Glarbaz the king and accuses him of being an unfit leader, the One True Frog of being a hoax, etc. This is all in the Bullywug language, but they can tell that there are insults and challenges flying back and forth. With the other bullywugs watching, it turns into a spear duel.
Blurtz, having scored the killing blow on a CR 7 creatures, functionally had leveled up and is spinning his spear back and forth scoring hits with the blade and the butt, and kills the king. He addresses his people, and also tries on the One True Hat, a bronze cap decorated with leaves and branch carvings. He squints, the hat does nothing, and he takes it off and drops it (this was an attunement item in the module that gave Commune with Nature and Plant Growth once a day).

While this is going on, the players heal up (potions) and 2 of them covertly loot the pile of offerings they find themselves near. I had a table of 10 results, with a “roll Sleight of Hand” requirement to sneakily loot. Every 5 on the SoH result is worth +1 on the table, with 1 being a leather pouch containing lint and 10 being a Bag of Beans. Rolls were poor, so Eric the Smith got a 1gp candlestick and Hobin the rogue got a Charlatan’s Die.

Blurtz the new chief gets an interpreter and talks to the party briefly. He mentions the old king having maybe been charmed by the red-wearing female bullywug (missing; probably Baltoplat the succubus but they don’t know it), and that ways of kings and outsiders are stupid, and that they are going to the old ways. They end up getting him to confirm that they won’t be raiding caravans, and then leave, counting a success.

On the way out, they decide to revisit the “metal cylinders in the ground” area. They get attacked by a Giant Constrictor snake that never lands a hit, and then a flock of Stirges. Eric the smith (battlemaster) uses his Sweeping Attack maneuver to kill 2 stirges in one blow.

They explore the metal cylinders and eventually extract a Froghemoth tadpole in stasis, and take it back to town. That’s going to sell for about 2,000gp, but it will take a while to get bids in.

They also restock on healing potions, and sell the alchemist some plants they found last session.

After a few days resting, they head for the “creepy tower” north of the iron mines. Eric stops by to say hi to his dwarven friends and show off his new beard and belt (Dwarvenkind).

We then start The Mage Tower, a DM’s guild adventure. The first few levels are mostly puzzles (we did 3 floors tonight). The first floor puzzle was solved very quickly, by dint of Ezer the wizard being impulsive. “I feel the door” while sticking hand out at head height. “You find what feels like a door knocker.” I knock with it, bang bang bang… he specified 3 times which was the exact number needed to trigger the puzzle… then later put his hand on one of the hand symbols, which triggered the next puzzle quickly.

I followed an optional suggestion to have the statues on the 2nd level animate; I threw a quick few stats together for them (AC, HP, to hit, damage) and it made a nice cramped fight. Ezer the wizard had already stepped on the teleport pad to the next floor, so he spent the entire fight just having his familiar (still on floor 2) use the Help action to give advantage.

They solved the floor 3 encounter and are about to go onto floor 4, which involves ice cold and freezing gelatinous cubes.
Eric’s player asked to now take advantage of the respect and swap out Piercer for PAM. Hurray. That should help him a lot. Hobin the rogue has been consistently TWFing the last couple of sessions and landing reliable damage as a swashbuckler should.

I’m not sure yet if I’ll have them level at the end of this module, or partway through it. We’re getting into the higher XP cost curve and they haven’t quite earned it yet. Good session and a nice change of pace from last one. I think a few of the Mage’s Tower puzzles seem a bit over-complex, but so far they have all been solvable, so we’ll see.

[J-H]

Session 10, 3/11/2022

We’re back! Eric the Fighter was mysteriously quite silent this game (player out, character present).

The Mage Tower floor 4:
The party entered a very cold room with lots of ice, some levers, and a frozen (snow-covered/disguised) gelatinous cube in the middle. They played with the levers and buttons to find out what they do, which involved flinging a few people around the room with wind by accident. The floor was very slippery, so anyone who moved too far had to make a save or slide 1d4x5’ extra. I applied this to the gelatinous cubes and it got pretty fun!

Everything they needed was on top of icy cliffs, which was solved with Misty Step or Spider Climb. They could have done a few things more efficiently by using a familiar or wildshape, but it worked out.
One fun moment was that there were 4 pillars around the room with a lever at the base of each. When you pull a lever, the other 3 pillars all emit 5d6 cold damage, 10’ radius, while the pillar you’re pulling the lever at does not. Their first try at doing something with these was somebody at EVERY pillar and pulling ALL the levers at once! So everybody took 9 or 19 damage depending on saves.

Many gelatinous cubes died, and the party eventually moved on.

Floor 5:
This room was a puzzle room with no combat. It took them a few minutes to figure out. Rope was run through looping dimensional doors. Saying more would spoil it, but it wasn't hard.

Floor 6:
DM “Hey, how’s everyone’s HP doing? I’ll be back in a moment from a biobreak.”
The party rogue didn’t take the hint, and started off at like 12hp. The other two chugged healing potions.

The setup on this one is that it’s 300’ to the exit door, and you start near to the key. When you touch the key, a 4d10 fireball goes off and then a beholderkin (CR 6 with a stun central eye and 3 lesser eye rays that do 4d8ish damage each, save for half) shows up and starts blasting. In theory, the party can run away. In practice, they can’t, since the beholderkin has a speed of 30’ and an eye ray range of 120’.
I fudged this some by reducing the key fireball to 2d12, but then rolled 23 damage, so the encounter immediately started with the party wizard at 0hp.

Instead of having the beholder fire 3 rays per round, I just had it do one ray per round for the first 3 or so rounds of combat, plus it would try to use its gaze to stun anyone within 30’, although the stun ability as written expired when the target’s next turn started, so it was a very fleeting stun. Hobin the Rogue used his cloak for the first time to cast Dissonant Whispers. I went ahead and gave the beholderkin disadvantage to reward the fact that he actually used it! That gained some time. Ezer the wizard used his Ring of the Ram with 3 charges…then rolled a 1 on the to-hit.

The wizard went down a second time, the rogue went to 0 once, the druid ran out of spell slots and turned into a bear for faster movement speed while acting as the wizard’s mount…but then she got paralyzed by one of the eye rays.

Anyway, I started to have it shoot 2 rays a turn once it seemed like it wasn’t TPK territory. I gave it a few bonus HP to compensate for the rounds where I sandbagged its damage output, as the party’s strategy of shoot and run/dash/ride bear away was paying off in terms of damage. Then Ezer the wizard used his last spell slot on a chromatic orb and rolled a natural 20 for a total of 40 lightning damage, absolutely frying the beholderkin from the inside out. It crashed to the ground and caught on fire.

They proceeded on to floor 7, which features a log cabin setting and a bunch of rabbit-sized sheep of indeterminate number (maybe somebody needs to count them). Everybody failed the investigation checks to find the Z carved on the wall, but eventually someone decided to take a long rest anyway.

They have leveled up to 5. Ezer the wizard now has Fireball, and Leomund’s Tiny Hut, so who knows what will break now. Time for the big power spike.

I'm glad that I have learned to go easier on this party than on my other group; as written with 3 eye rays and possible stun per round, and starting 30' from the party instead of 90', the beholderkin could have TPK'd them through simple HP damage. The module's difficulty range treats 3rd-5th level as a single band, and there's a big difference between 3rd/4th and 5th level in terms of what characters can hit and handle.

This was only about a 2.5 hour session of playing time. 3 floors left... we may or may not get through it next time. The next two floors are a bit tougher, and then the final one is either a few stealth checks and some nailbiting, or it's a dragon fight.

[J-H]

Session 11, 3/25/2022

We continue with The Mage Tower! The big enemy of D&D for adults with jobs is time. We didn’t have everyone there and ready until about 8:30pm, so we only got about 2.5 hours of playing time in.

After departing the restful 7th floor of rest with a long rest, the party emerges onto the 8th floor, a hot room with narrow walls/catwalks over a 30’ drop to blazing hot rocks…. Stocked with four gibbering mouthers!

Gibbering Mouthers are very scary…if they can get within 20’ of you. They have a 10’ move speed, 20’ if dashing. Ezer the Wizard got a 23 on his Arcana check, so the party was aware of the threat. The first two mouthers got close enough to fire their blinding spittle attacks, but only one PC (Leah the druid) failed her save and was blinded. They focused the first two mouthers down (including a danger close fireball from the Evoker that he made the party immune to)… but did take some failed Wisdom saves against confusion. The dice were in their favor though, as the “d8 for what you do” rolls all resulted in “stand still and do nothing” rather than “attack a random nearby target” or “go in a random direction and fall 30’ onto flaming rocks.”

The second two mouthers were killed at range, unable to reach the faster-moving PCs.

There is a 5th level power spike, but I think everyone’s also really settled into their characters and how to use them efficiently. At no time during the combats did I go “They could have done this substantially better.” Hurray!
Eric the fighter is really liking attacking 3x/round with PAM.

The 9th floor has several different challenges. The first one is a simple “pick the correct door.” The wrong doors are Mimics! So of course Eric the Fighter decides to listen at one of the doors to hear what’s on the other side, and specifically describes taking his helmet off to put his ear against it. “Your head is stuck to the door. Also, it’s trying to eat you.” The mimic never actually landed a hit, because +4 or +5 vs AC 20 isn’t very effective.

The next room was a puzzle room involving colors and torches that they solved pretty quickly. The room after that involved water, trapped tiles, and some tiles that needed to be recolored, as well as two chests and two keys. It took a while, and they lost over 40 collective HP to a bad/”smart” idea of “what if we stand on some of the trapped colored tiles that make the stone skulls on the wall shoot necrotic damage beams at us?” The final solution came about with some intelligence checks…everyone failed except the Wizard’s familiar, who rolled a natural 19 and reminded them that they had moved colors around in the previous room with torches.
There was also a grell lurking in the water, but it missed with all its attacks and then got hit a lot, running away with 3hp left. There was a chest listed in the module with no loot, so I added a Javelin of Lightning. Finally, Eric has a ranged weapon that doesn’t involve a round of “I take off my shield and pull out my crossbow for next round” and I think the player has realized he needs to get some javelins or handaxes.

This room was a lot of fun, but also took me 10+ minutes to draw out on the battlemat before the session started. I had to handle the previous rooms and areas with theater of the mind and a piece of cardboard + sharpie. Color was important, and I only have a B&W printer, so I had to cross-reference the PDF on my computer a few times during implementation. This would not have worked if I was trying to draw it mid-session.

The final challenge involves moving a big (6’, 150#) helmet from the final room back to a giant skeleton in the first room, then fighting the giant it animates. The module description explicitly describes the giant’s bones glowing and clicking together and it slowly standing up… so they got a round of actions while it did its “cool slow stand-up entrance” and then a second round of actions because it rolled a 5 for initiative…with advantage on the init roll.
Entangle (druid): Save passed
Pyrotechnics (wizard): Save failed, blinded 1 round
Damage
Damage
It makes two attacks while blinded and misses
Heat metal (druid): On the helmet that’s animating it. No save, 2d8 damage, disadvantage on attack rolls.
Damage
Damage
Damage
Dead CR 5 giant skeleton, no damage to any PCs.

This gives them the key to the next floor. They find a locked door that needs a disc or medallion, and go down a dark hallway. At this point, everyone has Darkvision except Ezer the Wizard, who specifies he’s using his owl familiar’s 120’ Darkvision.
They emerge into a large room that’s pitch black and extends beyond the range of everyone’s Darkvision. Archie the Owl’s Darkvision, though, is just enough to see a pile of treasure, with a large dragon resting atop it, asleep… and with an 18 on his perception check, to identify that there’s a chain around the dragon’s neck holding what looks like they key to the locked door.

“Let’s just sacrifice the rogue.” Someone says…

We’ll pick up there next time. I deliberately stopped after the dragon reveal to make a bit of a cliffhanger.

[J-H]

Session 12, 4/8/2022

We picked back up with the party at the entrance of a large, pitch-black cave with a dragon sleeping in the middle of it (a black dragon, not that the wizard passed his arcane check to identify it). They knew it had the medallion needed to open the door on a chain around its neck.

Ezer the wizard had his familiar, Archie the owl (who started the campaign as a ferret) do a recon flight overhead to determine if the chain was big or something that could be removed. It’s small enough to work with. They planned, and planned, and my kids in the next room (supposed to be going to bed) also planned and passed a message along with their advise.

I put on some “tense sneaking music” from Youtube when they started planning. It ran for 40 minutes before they finished the encounter and I turned it off! Everybody was very engaged with this.

The druid, fighter, and wizard advance partway into the room, but still near the hall entrance, to act as backup. Hobin the rogue then sneaks across the room (Stealth roll: 27 vs DC 16 to not wake the dragon), up to the dragon, and removes the medallion from the chain (Thieves tool roll: 22 vs DC 17). I think he briefly contemplated attacking it while asleep for an auto-crit (we do big crits, so that’d be 32+4d6 damage, or over 1/3 of a young adult dragon’s 127 hit points, not that he knows the system well enough to do that detailed level of metagaming).

He then slips back across the room, appearing out of the darkness to the party’s vision while doing the “raise the roof” sign to celebrate. They then leave the dragon behind and go through the door. Huzzah!

The Mage Tower module has an “Observatory” at the top that’s a mini quest-hub / teleportation area. I liked the idea, but wrote up my own spin on it to fit this campaign, as I don’t want to deal with interplanar travel.

First, I’d like to say that the Mage Tower is a good module and I’m going to go give it a 5* review on the DM’s Guild. Write reviews people!

The party arrives in an 80’ diameter room with 10 door-openings spaced around it. I’m just going to paste 90% of my notes for it here, rather than re-write the description.

Spoiler: notes

Show

Mage Tower – The Room of Many Places
You step into a circular room about eighty feet in diameter with grey stone walls. The roof is shaped like a flattened dome, and completely transparent so you can see the sky outside. You notice, however, that the sky looks different, closer, as though the roof is functioning as a low-powered telescope.
Ten doorframes are spaced around the room evenly. Half appear to be a frame only, with stone behind it. One is the door you just came through. The other, next to it, is an iron door with a small window in the top center. Beside each doorframe is a set of iron pegs on the right, from which hang small bronze discs. On the left is a small stone circle, about the size of the discs.
Offset from the center of the room is a circle of magical runes. Not far from it is a folding camp table and stool made of wood and canvas, sitting next to a bedroll.
Floor Runes
Arcana DC 13: These are address runes for the Teleportation Circle spell. Anyone with knowledge of the code for this location and that spell may teleport here.

Camp
It appears someone was camping here. You find a bedroll, folding camp stool and table, and an iron Pot of Heating. The fabric items crackle when you touch them, indicating that they’ve grown brittle with age – at least a few decades, maybe more.
On the camp table lies a mostly-blank explorer’s journal. It’s marked Explorations of Belkar Bitterleaf, Volume III. It appears he’s an explorer who likes to dramatically log his own work.
“Having proven myself the master of this tower, I have now set about to explore it. It was immediately apparent that this is some sort of portal room. Each door has beside it a number of small round bronze tokens marked with a symbol unique to that door. Experimentation has revealed that the metal door leads to the ground outside, and that bearing one of these tokens allows re-entry. In fact, I was able to copy the token with some basic magical inks and produce the same effects, allowing me to potentially bring in others without worrying about the tokens being lost or stolen by those of inferior talents.
It appears that the other doors can be linked to a specific location, but the exact process is murky. I think it involves trekking to a location and bringing back something from it; I wouldn’t be surprised if it only works in locations with high ambient magic too, like temples or dragon lairs or wizard academies or whatnot… just the sort of place I’d want easy access too anyway! A couple of them that don’t seem to want to work have residual magic hanging about them. If I wanted to sit here for a year I could probably see if some of them open under a full moon or specific constellation or some other elven crap like that.
Most of whatever they connected to before seems to have been lost, but I was lucky and three doors yet remain linked. Door #2 goes to some sort of temple-like structure underground. I’m not sure what it is. Door #8 goes to an old castle. I don’t mess with ghosts, so I buggered off pretty quick from that one. Door #6 appears to be some kind of underground nest. There’s something there, something powerful and magic. I can sense it…it calls to me, some sort of precious thing. I’m not sure what lives in the nest yet, but it smells like there’s something there. I’m going to try sneaking in tomorrow, invisible.

Doors
The party will need to fill some of these in. When a disc is placed in the activation circle on the door, the stone fades out to display a murky portal. You can only see a few feet on the other side. The portal stays open from the other side until all discs have passed back through or moved more than ½ mile away. It closes 3 seconds after the disc is removed from the inside side, and/or until the other-side disc conditions have been met.
1 Looking through the window of the iron door shows a view of the ground outside. This door leads to the ground outside.
2 Not linked
3 Temple of Basakura
4 Not linked
5 TBD
6 In front of this door you find a rotted arm. It appears to have been cut off cleanly by the portal closing on the arm. The arm is partly contained in a bloodstained, ripped sleeve, and the gloved hand clutches a short sword, while a door token is attached to its wrist via short lanyard. Lying next to the arm are a couple of greenish triangular things.. Nature DC 12: It appears to be the tip of a greenish colored beak, cut off as well. It doesn’t resemble any creature you’re familiar with, but whatever it belonged to must have been medium-sized or maybe greater. ->Kython Nest Further examination: It’s very hard, but brittle to certain vibrations. You think force or thunder damage might be especially effective.
7 Not linked
8 Ancient Grudge
9 Not linked
10 This door goes back to the level with the dragon figment.

DM note: The Kythons are going to be a metaplot thing, showing up “randomly” in a few places in small numbers, and growing to a horde that threatens the whole village, probably with multiple nest sites. This will not be a pre-fab module. Also, the kython nest linked here will contain something similar to a Nazgul ring… or if we’re near the end of what I want to do in this one, a Deck of Many Things.

After exploring the area and identifying the shortsword as Guard +1, a +1 shortsword that gives +1 to AC when wielded and attuned to, they decide to take a short rest and then explore the Temple of Bakasura (not that they know that name).
I modify the beginning to suit the portal.
DM: “You step through the portal”
Hobin: “Most attractive person first, being me.”
DM: “Make a dexterity save.”

They fall 20’ into a pool of cold water.

This module is more of a classic dungeoncrawl. They’re basically finding an old 2-floor underground temple of a demon cult that was trying to summon a greater demon named Bakasura; the ritual was a partial success and partial failure, and then something happened and the temple was abandoned. Right now they’re 8 rooms in and have looted several chests, found a secret door, and picked up some potions and a +1 dagger.

There have been no fights, although they’re out of “safe” rooms now! They have a brass bowl on a marble block that they need to fill with 6 ingredients, and they’ve figured out over half from their explorations.

One room has a floor that’s cobblestone that turns into cobblestone hands that pull you into the ground… DC 20 Investigation check to spot. It only activates if the gem mounted 50’ up in the ceiling touches the floor. They figured they needed the gem, and solved that by having Archie the owl fly up and grab it (versus, you know, shooting it down with an arrow or something). Good planning and problem-solving!

So far, I like the module as it has clear, concise writing, good and consistent flavor, and a good amount of knowledge delivered through the exploration and discovery pillar. I guess I’ll see how the combat part is next time, but if it’s decent, I will definitely look for more modules by the author.

[Kol Korran]

The Journals of Belkar Bitterleaf? Was the ink... Reddish? That is a new take on him!

Anyway, the module does sound good and challenging. Did the original module have different portals at the top? And were any of those mapped out/ linked in any other way? Am I correct to understand you are using other modules for that (and your own content for the Kyton's nest?)

[J-H]

I needed a name. I think this Belkar was probably more of an Arcane Trickster or Wizard/Rogue type, though.

The original module suggested having the area at the top be capable of linking portals and planar travel, and yes, I substituted my own version and am using it to link to some modules. Given the setting the players helped come up with, there are too many modules that have some local village that points you to the local ruin/dungeon/problem/whatever, versus the amount of "wild" in the setting, and this bypasses some of that.

Spoiler: original

Show

The Observatory is the true prize awaiting those who conqueror all 10 floors of The Mage Tower. Just as the
interior of the tower itself is a place not bound to a single dimension, The Observatory is not limited to just
making observations within this dimension. It can observe select events and locations regardless of planet,
galaxy, plane, dimension, or perhaps even time!

As the dungeon master, the way you want The Observatory to work is up to you based on your group and
campaign. I like for The Observatory to be able to transcend dimensions, planes, galaxies, etc., but I limit it
to a certain number of locations based on how I want to run my campaign. I usually allow for The Mage Tower
to be connected to 10 different locations at a time; each of which I determine.


The Door of Many Places is arguably the greatest feature of The Observatory. It is an ancient magical relic
that allows one to instantly travel across galaxies, dimensions, and planes, as easily as turning a door handle.
The Door of Many Places is the roof The Mage Tower’s power and protecting it from those who might abuse
it is the primary reason for the 10 floors of defenses that guard it.

The Door of Many Places is an
interdimensional artifact that is
tethered to multiple points across
space and time. As stated previously,
there are 10 identical mage towers
including this one that exist in various
locations throughout the galaxy,
across other planes and dimensions.

The Door of Many Places is what
links these towers, and anyone who
commands The Mage Tower is able
to travel through it. They simply need
to select the location from the 10
registered options (as determined by
the DM) and pass through the door.
They will then find themselves just
outside the tower at that location.

Note: A commander of The Mage
Tower is anyone who has completed
all 10 trials and reached The
Observatory.

You can let your door take them
anywhere you choose. Perhaps it
links to all sorts of places. Some of
my personal favorite D&D locales
include: Waterdeep, Chult, Barovia,
Eberron, Neverwinter, Baldur’s Gate,
The Underdark, and Icewind Dale.

[J-H]

Session 13, 4/22/22

We completed the Bakasura's Temple module this session. The party was nearly done with the top floor and needed to gather six ingredients to open the way. One of the clues was “the final breath of a faded soul” and the player for Eric the Smith made a joke about it being from a Banshee.
Not 15 minutes later, yep, Banshee encounter. She wailed and knocked the druid and rogue to 0hp at the start of combat. They stayed at 0 until she was dead (could have been an oops moment, but the wizard and fighter killed her quickly). The druid used a couple of 3rd level Cure Wounds to top the two 0-hpers back up to around 30hp after potions were administered.

Exploring the other area yielded a darkness-wrapped (disadvantage on attacks) undead skeleton-thing. They opened the prison knowing something was there, missed, and then it opened with Black Tentacles. Unfortunately, Evard’s tentacles only take effect when a creature starts its turn in them, and Ezer the Evoker blasted the room (minus PCs) with a Fireball, and the Concentration check for Tentacles was failed. The creature, only a CR 4 (40-something HP, AC 15) didn’t last long after that.

Between these two encounters, nearly every 3rd level slot in the party was used up (they’re only 5th level).

They then open the way down, and descend a long spiral staircase to discover that the bottom floor of the temple is partly flooded. Eric (fighter) uses his Mariner’s armor to explore for quite a while, getting the general layout of the wet areas. They descend in a group to go to the next area with air, and Hobin the rogue notices a secret door. Eric kicks it open and swims in, with Ezer the wizard following. They open a chest and get attacked by an ooze-snake thing (CR-4ish again, it’s from Mord’s so I wasn’t too familiar with it). It misses every single attack and they pass all their saves, so it died without making much impact. Ezer the wizard actually stabbed it! He had no non-Verbal spells and was underwater, so no spellcasting. The chest contains money and a Luckstone, although they don’t Identify anything until the end of the session.

The other two PCs were outside holding onto a rope that Eric was pulling along. Hobin swam away when the fight started, and Leah the druid turned into a reef shark, which gave the others a surprise when they left the room. Leah explores some in shark form and finds another area that leads up to an air pocket.

They regroup and breathe again for a while, then swim back. Going to the area they knew had air, they find a room with a bunch of fire-trap tiles. They check another flooded room, containing a big rusty iron cage and some cult trappings, then check the area discovered by Shark Girl. It’s a bedroom atop what used to be a tunnel. Eric starts across the room, crosses over the rug on his way to the desk, and then vanishes with a pop of displaced air. Ezer finds a Glyph of Warding under the rug, modified with some sort of teleportation effect.
At this point, Eric is in the rusty cage in the flooded room, which was already specifically identified as easy to break. I just let it sit with him “missing” until a few minutes have passed, and then go “You hear footsteps squishing on the stairs outside” with Eric returning.

They check the desk and find what they later determine to be a map of the safe spaces in the fire trap room; there’s a lever that switches safe/unsafe spaces once you’re halfway across to create a path to the other side. They also identify that a creepy painting can swing out, but fail to notice the trap (fwoosh, 2d6 fire damage). The safe behind it contains a potion of greater healing, a scroll of Fly, and some gems worth money.

They then go back, Leah abandons shark form, and they cross the fire trap room, The next two areas were ritual prep areas that they explore with good atmosphere but no loot or traps. From there, it’s on to the final area, where the sacrifice/host of the failed summoning ritual sits dead but undisturbed as a black cloud eddies on the ceiling far overhead. They set up for the dead body to attack them, but when they disturb it, the cloud swirls down like a tornado and forms into a 12’ high orc/minotaur creature made of shadow – the Sliver of Bakasura from an incomplete summoning.

It demands that they serve it, die, finish the ritual, or whatever. Flippant responses from the party (Sorry, I’m on PTO tomorrow; union rules; you’re not going to get what you want) mean this goes where everybody knows where it will quickly. Some statues animate and join the fight; they have high AC (17) but low HP (19) and 2 moderately powerful attacks with a weak fear rider.

Leah the druid spends the encounter dealing with one of the statues. Heat metal and poison are both useless in this fight and cold isn’t much better.
Ezer lands Caustic Brew (2nd level), which sticks around for a couple of rounds.
Hobin does some stabbing at Bakasura but misses most of the time, douses Eric with a healing potion, and then lands the killing blow.
Eric goes toe to toe with the giant shadow demon lord fragment… he fails his save against Command (“Grovel”) the first round, but survives, then, even though disadvantaged from statue Fear, lands 3 hits in a row and only one miss (Extra attack + PAM + Battlemaster Riposte). The next round, he throws a pair of Trip attempts in, the second of which succeeds, then crits with his PAM attack. This set up the killing sneak attack by Hobin.

The body has a Ring of Mind Shielding, which goes to Leah the druid. Ezer and Hobin roll and Ezer gets the Luckstone.
Note to self: I think Leah’s player has forgotten about the stone she has that gives Mind Sliver as a cantrip known; that would have worked on Bakasura and would have been a non-poison/non-fire/cold damage option.

This was a good module with a nice mix of puzzles and moderate combat; the fights could have been a bit harder (the boss fight was just right) but there was also potential for them to be swingy, depending on banshee wail saves, or Black Tentacles successfully grabbing the whole party. The maps weren’t super detailed, but provided everything needed. There was good atmosphere, and also a good amount of information so that I as the DM knew the history of the place, even if they didn’t try to piece it all together.
I would be happy to run this again for a different party.

Unfortunately, it appears the author hasn't written any other D&D modules. I have one queued up for the party to do next but will need on-theme(ish) options soon for levels 7-8 from the DM's Guild. They won't be ready yet for the big kython dungeon, nor do I have it ready to go. I do have one module for around level 9, but I don't think they can handle above-level stuff.

[J-H]

Session 14, 5/6/2022

The party returned to the Mage Tower top and discussed where to go next. Settling on the haunted castle, we went into the From Ancient Grudge module on the DM’s Guild. A Red Wedding type event interfered with a Romeo and Juliet wedding. They explored about 2/3 of the castle, then triggered (by time passage) the ghosts.

They successfully fought off the first ghost attack, including dealing with one possessed PC by grappling him and moving him into the chapel, which is protected against ghosts. After this, they met the ghostly cleric of Sune who had helped set up the marriage. She let them into the crypt below, where they had to negotiate with a forgetful Door Gargoyle.

They successfully ignored the lure of spilled gold (it’s a tomb-robber trap that turns into a golem thing) and entered the part of the crypt where the bodies of the unlucky couple are buried. There’s a ghost there that’s a composite of all the soldiers who died in the centuries-long feud between the two families. It calmly tells them to just turn around and walk away, and when they persist in trying to get the rings off the bodies to complete the marriage, attacks. It has an ability to snuff out light sources, but the party had two, so it didn’t get to fight in total darkness.

Both battles have involved a number of weaker ghosts with a minor charisma drain aura; both times, Ezer the Evoker has done a Sculpted Fireball, and 13-hp ghosts just don’t hold up against that on a failed or passed save.

They now have the rings. Completing the wedding involves:
-dropping the protections on the chapel
-luring the Romeo & Juliet ghosts to possess two PCs
-the ghost cleric starting the Ceremony (part 1 of 2)
-The non-possessed party members slipping rings onto the possessed PC fingers with sleight of hand checks, while also being attacked by more ghosts
-The ghost cleric finishing the ceremony
-Then survive until the possessed PC/ghosts go again and say “I do.”

They are taking a short rest and are at full HP, so it’s doable, but could get hairy if the Evoker is out of Fireballs.

So far the only loot has been some silver icons and stuff taken out of the chapel. The ghost priestess asked (nicely) for them to put those back. There’s a magical sword somewhere else in the castle, but I have no idea if they will find it or not. The module also suggests a “boon of Sune” but it’s a one-time thing, which is hard to track. I’d rather give out something more meaningful, but I’m not sure what that would be. Maybe a gold bracelet that gives advantage on Persuasion checks? They definitely could use some help on that, as nobody has a good Cha score or good Cha skills. I’m open to ideas.

We stopped due to it getting late.
It’s a good 3-4 hour adventure. I’ll leave a good review after we finish it next time. No complaints or things to change. There’s plenty of clues left about, such that the players had pieced together ¾ of the puzzle by themselves before ever encountering a ghost.

[Havlock]

How about letting them keep the wedding rings which, once the ceremony is complete, reveal themselves to be something something magical yada yada yada.

A nice reminder of the adventure that they can carry forward. Maybe even role-playing opportunities for the two PCs (assuming they keep wearing the rings) to be mistaken as being actually married.

[KyleG]

Can you say who the mage tower module was from. I saw two. Thanks

[J-H]

It's this one by Jeremy Fair:

https://www.dmsguild.com/product/331904/The-Mage-Tower

[J-H]

Gladiatorial Diversion 1
Two of our players are out for a couple of months due to RL (job training all over the state for one of a couple, the other doesn't want to come solo).

The player who runs Ezer the wizard, and, in my other campaign, Teador the paladin, has stepped up to run a game for the two of us who remain.
We are in a big prison where participation in a gladiatorial arena is the only way out early. The setting is very vague, but it's one of several prisons in a very large empire. Tech level is steampunk/early modern, with revolvers, bolt action rifles, airships, and black and white TV cameras being in use in-setting.
We can either go up and out through the arena, or possibly try to escape. We get 2 uncommon magic items, but are stripped down to jumpsuits and no gear before leaving an anteroom near the arena. Magic detection is fairly widespread, and if you're a caster your prison collar includes an anti-casting/anti-SLA-ish ability.

The player for Eric the Smith is playing, for this, an human ex-gladiator named Grock, a totem(bear) Barbarian with PAM and Sentinel. He took a Glaive +1 as one of his two items, and Gauntlets of Ogre Power for the other. He doesn't really remember how he ended up in prison...it's all a blur.

My character is Taukin, a goliath thief. He's in prison for theft, grand theft, larceny, evading the police, deserting the military, theft of government property, etc. He is not in prison for aggravated assault, or for attempted murder, and certainly not for burglary of a temple where he disguised the theft of a highly valuable silvery liquid by simply chugging it, and he most certainly did not develop magical powers and a nagging angelic voice afterwards. Nope, he's just lucky and good.
(Fighter 1/Celestial Warlock (blade) 5).
I took Gloves of Thieving and a Luckstone for my magic items, with the intent to find something to swap in for one or both of them so that I can be equipped to pick locks, sneak around, and eventually find a way out. Simply disabling the antimagic collar would almost be enough, as a 5th level Warlock gets 2 3rd level slots, and Gaseous Form is good enough to get out of most prisons. The other player doesn't seem to be aiming for escape, so we'll see where it goes. With the Skilled feat, he's pretty good at Sleight of Hand, Deception, and a few other things.

We are paired up in a cell, one of about 500 cells in a prison block with a small arena in the common areas. We learn (later) that there are about 20 of these blocks (A1-A5, B1-B5, etc.) for a total of about 20,000 prisoners if the prison is at capacity. Apparently the imperial government uses prison as a "less severe" punishment a lot, and non-humans tend to end up there a lot too. We learn (later) that there are about 1,000 guards, plus some number of iron golems. I don't remember if the number was a few dozen or a hundred.

Starting with the first fight, Taukin makes a pattern of casting Disguise Self on himself, as himself, during the time when they get access to gear and magical items. At some point, if he gets something worth disguising, he can use that to cover it up. He also puts his Gloves of Thieving in a pouch in his armor, out of the way/out of sight. No point giving away that they go invisible. Additionally, he pretends to pull a Greataxe out of the weapons bucket while instead summoning his pact weapon to look like a common axe. Again, the goal is to hide his abilities so that the guards don't realize he can magic up his own weapon if the collar is down.

We have a couple of basic arena fights to become champions of our block. In one of them, the kobold who's one of the team opposing us takes a hit from Taukin's greataxe, then moves around and stabs at both of us, landing a 1-hit point damage on Taukin... and getting blasted by 15 points of Armor of Agathys in return, leaving him far in the negatives. A skill check later, and the other fighter, who hasn't landed a single hit, surrenders. I think the second fight went about the same as we were clearly the best in the block.

The next day, we get transferred to a central block, where we get to mill about in the cafeteria area. Grock suggests spotting the "cool kids table," which we do, and then sitting nearby so we can keep an eye on it. We don't discourage company, and end up chatting with a half-orc (in for blood magic) and kobold artificer (in for making cars, mecha, etc. without a license and against someone else's patent). This is where we learn more about the prison, the fact that there is a bracket system but we don't get to watch other matches, and that "Oddy" - a bounty hunter, in fact the very one that arrested Taukin not long ago - is here, in the prison, and competing in the arena as well.

We then go to our new cell, where we chat some with one of the guys next door, in for thieving. He says he knows a guy (Oddy) who can fly an airship if we can get out.

On to the main event, a match in the real public arena. There are spectators, a few hovering helicopter-bots with large primitive cameras and mics, etc. A camera flies over to interview us. Grock does his thing, and then it's Taukin's turn to totally fool people into thinking that he too is a barbarian with no magic, simple-minded and blunt - and he rolls a 1 on his Deception check. I toss the plan out the window as Taukin freezes up and gives a noncommital and partly truthful answer about why he's there, not playing to the crowd or anything.

We fight a (white) dragonborn paladin who somewhat counters my AoA, and some kind of bard. Every round on initiative 20, something happens. Over the course of the fight, we had a couple of random single-target magic effects, a "moon gravity" effect where we could jump extra distances, pit traps that catapult targets into the air (the only victim: the bard, who Feather Falled very quickly with her lute), and pop-up cylinders with whirling blades.

It's late and I don't recall the order of operations, but we both got knocked around a lot, the enemies did some pop-up healing, we both spent a couple of rounds Held (while they healed up), and the battle ended with Grock asleep and Taukin managing to down both enemies by not missing either attack in a round. It was pretty close. Armor of Agathys went down pretty fast to Paladin smites, and didn't do much damage - bad matchup. I had "Enemies Abound" and it would have been good about 3 rounds before I actually decided to use it. The only reason Taukin stayed above 0 was using 4/6 d6s of the healing pool plus Second Wind. The build is solid enough, even with the extra resources invested into trickery and escape that may or may not get used.

I need to come up with a "registers as magic-ish" substitute for the gloves of thievery and/or the luckstone to have much chance of getting out with them. Once that's done, my chances of getting the collar off go up. Once Disguise Self and Gaseous Form and Invisibility are on the table for several hours a night, I can make real progress on escape.
Or maybe we'll just hack and slash our way to the top? We heard that high level fights include mecha or golems of some sort on the opposing side.

[J-H]

Gladiatorial Diversions 2

We resume the next day, heading into the cafeteria area before the day's games. The losers from yesterday have cleared out, leaving only 20 of us - 10 teams of 2. We do the math and realize it won't take many rounds to have a winner.
The presence of Oddy, the bounty hunter who brought my character (Taukin) in, is very obvious now. Taukin fails the Wisdom save and goes over to talk. Oddy isn't happy about being there, mentioning trumped up charges. He says something, I don't recall what, about being good, and Taukin asks how big of a team Oddy had when they last met. Oddy gets a pained look on his face. He briefly introduces his partner, a big taciturn man named Don who has split knuckles, tattoos, and some big scars (We find out later that Don is a barbarian of some sort with the unarmed fighting style).

Taukin walks away after making some sort of comment about "flying out of here." Oddy understands, and we have a possible airship pilot sort of lined up.

A vaguely sleazy dude in a suit walks in with a magitech microphone and gets everyone's attention. He points out that there aren't as many gladiators as he'd like to keep the games going, and asks for volunteers to partake in some "challenges" against "monsters." There will be a "prize."
Taukin always feels lucky and goes for it. Oddy's team is the other one that volunteers quickly.

We are to work together in the arena against the monsters, and if one team goes down, both fail.

Updates from last time that the DM forgot or didn't have:
-There is now a magic-item sniffing dog at the exit to the locker rooms.
-There are now eight nozzle things positioned around the arena that Grock (the other PC) can identify as acid shooters that spray a jet of acid in a long straight line
-The arena now has a numbered grid (21x21) to make it much easier for the DM to remember where traps are and reference map locations. This helped him a lot.

Phase 1:
We fight 6? goblins who come out in 2 groups. They're small and weak and one or two of them explode in a small fire AOE when killed. Nobody gets hurt. Oddy is a Gunslinger who gets 3 shots per round. Don hulks out and punches stuff to death. One of the goblins runs over a concealed spring trap and gets launched 30' into the air, dying on impact.

Phase 2:
We fight another 10 or 12 goblins and get spread across the arena. Taukin has to use Stone's Endurance once or twice to keep his Armor of Agathys temp HP up... but the goblins keep missing! One goblin does hit him, and dies from 15 points of cold damage. I like the idea of AoA but it's not so good when the damage is only coming from nearby explosions, traps, etc.
Taukin, my character, disposes of two goblins by grappling them and tossing them into a nearby spring trap, where they get launched high into the air and die on impact with the ground. The crowd is pleased. He may be a Warlock, but he's still a Goliath with Athletics proficiency and 16 strength!

Oddy takes some damage from one or two trap hits and exploding goblins. Over the next couple of rounds, Taukin gives him 1d6 healing per round from his healing pool... parsimonious, but enough to help keep him up. Don the barbarian is fine.

Oddy starts a period where he spends 3-5 rounds missing every. single. shot. He also is the only person to get hit by an electricity trap near the end of the night. Bad rolls, lots of bad rolls. Side note: It'd be faster if our DM pre-rolled all the NPC rolls and just went down a list, or used a probability chart to go "2 hits and a miss" or something. Taukin's turns (2 attacks) take about 10 seconds each.

Phase 3:
We talk briefly while the DM is setting things up, and I make a comment about the next thing probably being like a Manticore or something. It's actually a mecha-Chimera, so I wasn't far off! It has an AC of 17 or 18 and we have a LOT of trouble hitting it. The fight goes on for 3 or 4 rounds. It hits Taukin and Grock with its breath for 30-something damage; Grock is resistant and passes his save. Taukin doesn't, but burns his last Stone's Endurance and his Second Wind to heal up. Taukin misses repeatedly while the others don't (except Oddy). The only time in the whole fight Taukin did any damage was when it finally landed a hit and he used Hellish Rebuke (save passed, but still 14 damage), which killed it.

Phase 4:
There's a short break, we all get about 10 points of healing, and the blood and bodies are cleaned up. We get a choice and choose to do one more fight for the prize, and get a pair of were-tigers - one on each side of the arena. Luckily, everyone has magic weapons (Don the Barb has a tattoo). Taukin is out of spell slots and only contributes some misses and a few minor hits from his Greataxe. 1d12+3 is only really good if you roll above a 3 on your d12. One were-tiger eats an acid blast from an arena trap for 15-ish damage. It then pounces on Grock, knocking him down and doing damage. He fails a CON save and may contract weretiger lycanthropy.
My comment: "Your character may get more awesome."

He gets up, and for the first time, combines GWM with Reckless Attack as he learns how to be a better barbarian. Natural 20. 51 damage (we use big crits). Second attack, hits, 24 damage. Weretiger dead. GWM bonus attack, run over to the other (damaged) weretiger. Natural 20. 49 damage. Second were-tiger is left with 3hp and killed shortly thereafter! 124 damage in 1 round at level 6.

We each get to level up and pick out an uncommon item, which will be stored in our lockers with the rest of the gear.

Operation Prison Break
Taukin does his usual distraction stuff, plus spends extra time making small talk in the locker room and moving around to be near different guards and in and out of view of others. Oddy the bounty hunter picks up on it. During the time-consuming process of removing full plate armor, Taukin uses Disguise Self again to make his magic suppression collar appear to have been already activated. Charisma (spellcasting) mod check called for, rolled a natural 20.
Someone comes over with the key to turn it back on. "That guy over there already got it" (points in general direction) "Want to check?" (turns so it's visible). Oddy Helps with a "Yeah, he did, let's get going." Deception check with advantage, 22. This is why I took Skilled instead of an ASI, and put Expertise in Deception.

Taukin is now in the prison all night, close to unsupervised, with functioning magic. He has Gaseous Form, which lasts an hour at a time, and gives flight and the ability to fit through small spaces. We will have to work out the details of his explorations, but a LOT of recon has now started for Operation Prison Break. Given his character, he's going to want to rob the place on the way out.

Now taking Warlock 6: Resistance to radiant damage, +2 damage from the Sacred Flame and Hellish Rebuke spells he rarely uses. Meh. +1d6 to the healing pool, which maxes out at 2d6 per use. 4-7 uses of "weak Healing Word" for free per day is kind of handy, although the cap means there's no healing burst ability.

I am really happy with how this character has turned out:
-Goliath synergizes well with keeping Armor of Agathys up, and a high AC (19) means he's hard to hit anyway.
-High strength (16) means that a Pact Weapon is viable even without Hexblade. Having the Athletics to shove and grapple is fun too.
-Good trickery/deception/utility skills
-Memorable and easy to use personality traits

The only real weakness is low-ish melee damage, at 1d12+3 x2 with no other bonuses. Spell save DCs are a tad low with a 15 Cha, but he's not really using spells with saves often. I could have improved at least one of these, but not without sacrificing the thieving skills that are going to get him out of jail one way or another.

[J-H]

Gladiatorial Diversions 3
That evening, Taukin makes a pile of blankets in his bed to fool the guard patrols, then triumphantly turns to a cloud of mist and sets off to explore.
5 minutes later, he fails a Stealth check and gets spotted as a cloud of mist poking out of a ventilation duct - against a guard who then rolls a natural 20 to identify that the mist is probably something moving around rather than just a random cloud of fog.

The alert is sounded! Guards start pulling prisoners out to stand in front of their rooms for counting. Taukin heads back through the ducts, but when he pokes out of a ventilation shaft near his room, he gets spotted again. One of the guards, a big fellow with rubber gloves and a tesla coil mounted on his backpack, shoots a bolt of lightning at him. Taukin heads towards the arena, poking out of vents twice to lead guards away, then doubles back. During this time, he uses Second Wind and the Celestial Warlock healing pool to remove the lightning damage (neither one is technically a spell).

Meanwhile, his cell-mate Grock has been noted as being short a person, and starts acting strangely, talking about a cloud of mist and a scream and yada yada. I don't think it's actually helpful. His Performance checks are poor and the excuse was not very logical.
Taukin finds a spot to pool out of in mist form, then turn back into a goliath without getting spotted (natural 20 on the stealth check). He turns Invisible, then moves back to the cell, hops on the bed, casts Disguise Self back on himself again, and emerges just as the prison warden zaps his distracting roommate in the rear for 10 damage with some kind of force gun thing.

Taukin bluffs it out, but isn't super convincing (18 Deception vs 19 Insight). The warden checks the collar, which appears fine, but sticks a key in it to activate it anyway.

Taukin sleeps the sleep of the innocent, and I know that I'll need to make improvements if I want to break out this way. The Empire's prison is pretty paranoid and they have some high end guards, not minimum-wage stiffs. It takes 1 spell slot to go gaseous to get out of the cell, 1 to go invisible, and then a 3rd to get back into the cell unless the doors are open. Damaging the doors only works if I don't intend to come back.
It may be easier to simply escape through victory.

The next morning in the cafeteria, Oddy asks what happened. Taukin plays innocent, not sure if it was believable or not.
Used Car Salesman comes back with another "special challenge." This time, it's play-testing some new military equipment, with 10,000gp to each participant if we win and survive and get released from the arena.

Naturally, we take the deal. Oddy and Don do as well.

We end up fighting a pair of Large sized metal war golems of some sort. Notable traits:
Resistant to B/P/S even if it's magic, as well as to fire
Heals from lightning damage
No resistance to cold or radiant
Minor shock aura (5', Dex DC around 15 to negate, somewhere around 1d8-2d6 damage)
Can slash with sword (10') and slam with a superiority dice option for sweeping attack or disarm; ranged attack at +4 for 10d8 electrical damage, recharges on a 6.
Not that we knew any of this at the start... we found it all out the hard way.

We focused on one golem from the outset, and did a pretty good job of using arena traps to keep the other one from closing in on anyone until golem#1 was down to under 30hp. The whole fight took like 10-12 rounds. Highlights:
Part of the time, there were tesla coil shock traps up. The golems healed from those. Not good.
A couple of times, the ceiling disco ball went off. One time an ally vamped a bit of healing from everything within 30'. Another time, one of the golems got +2 AC and immunity to Magic Missile for 1 minute. A few rounds after that, I got zapped by the disco ball and could immediately cast a 5th level Magic Missile. Unfortunately, only the golem with 1 minute immunity was left.
My initial casting of Armor of Agathys was good for 45 damage to the golem thanks to Stone's Endurance and Blade Ward. My Hellish Rebuke wasn't so great.
I ended up determining that hitting on a 14+ (35% chance) x 2 attacks per round for an average damage of (d12+3 halved by resistance= 4-5) was not as good as Sacred Flame (2d8+2 average 11 radiant damage). The golems, as it turned out, had a Dex of either 8 or 10, so Sacred Flame hit reliably but not ever for much damage.
Once we were down to Golem 2 I spent 2 rounds setting up by using a Pearl of Power and then casting AoA, and then started using Blade Ward... but the golem went down to gunfire from Oddy before I could get hit.
It was a long fight with a lot of missed attacks on all sides. Grock the barbarian had to disengage and spent the last round or 2 throwing javelins while at 6hp. I used up all of my self-heals and resistances.

At the end, I asked if Taukin though the 10,000gp reward was likely to be followed through on. I don't know what the DM rolled for me, but he said that Taukin knew that this prison was pretty secretive, that Oddy's circumstances getting here were suspicious, and that the Empire would have little motive to pay out 20,000gp just for a single fight.
So...no.
Prison break is still a go if I can figure out how.

New idea: Spy and listen for passwords and discussions, watch patrols, and then Gaseous Form out, Disguise Self as a guard, and try getting around that way. I think the guards have magic gear? Repercussions of being caught very serious... but my character's not one to wait more than a couple of days before trying something.

[J-H]

Gladiatorial Diversions 4
I'm exhausted, RL stress stuff.
We pick up where we left off...it's a week until the next match. We spend the downtime chatting with a few people and don't accomplish a ton. Grock tries to bluff the guy in the next cell over into thinking he was clueless about the escape. It didn't go well.

We get put up against 2 other prisoners. One is a Harengon ranger with a repeating rifle who spent half the match hiding out 20' up the wall with slippers of spider climbing, and the other is a hobgoblin paladin.
The ranger wins initiative and shoots at Grock the barbarian twice before Grock can rage. One of the shots is a critical hit, and Grock starts his first turn at about 20hp. I was able to tag the harengon with Enemies Abound, and he spent the next couple of rounds shooting at the paladin as much as us. Grock still got knocked to 0, healed, and then eventually knocked back to 0. He got all 7 dice in the Warlock healing pool, and I ran out of healing. The enemy paladin also went down once, but got pulled back up by Healing Spirit.

Random magic from the ceiling random magic disco ball summoned a pair of Flumphs for my character. He commanded them to attack the Harengon, and they actually hit (once for 7 damage) and knocked it off the wall once (shove).

Grock was at 2 failed death saves, and my character (Taukin) rolled a 19 on his medicine check to realize his partner was about to die, so Taukin had the Flumph give him Help and spent his turn stabilizing the downed barbarian. After standing, he pointed out that he didn't stop the ranger from healing his downed ally either.

There's a semi-truce that lasts about half a combat round, during which the paladin drops 5hp of healing on Grock. The announcer and crowds enjoy this sportsmanship. Grock ultimately knocks the Paladin out, and Taukin catches up with the low-AC ranger and whacks him for max damage with the greataxe.
We make sure they are stable and alive.

There's a discussion of trying to slip the Pearl of Power out of the locker room, but we're told that the magic sniffing dog is very precise, and it'd be hard to hide it.
We do get to level up to 8! This is Warlock 7 for my character, so no ASI, but 4th level spells/slots.

[J-H]

Gladiatorial Diversions 5
Grock the barbarian rolls high and spots a spider in the cell! He uses Beast Speech and Beast Sense (barbarian class features) to talk to the spider and asks it to go do some scouting. The DM rolls an INT check for the spider to understand what it's supposed to do. The net result was a -1, so Grock got to watch it catch, web up, and start eating a fly.

While we're waiting through the week for the next arena fight, Grock notices a cup in the cafeteria shaking while unattended. We suspect somebody trying something, but are unable to locate the source. My character (Taukin) leaves his cup next to it, but nothing comes of it.

We are down to 5 teams of prisoners. Used Car Salesman announces that we are to draw names out of a hat to see who will face a monstrosity instead of other prisoners. This is a general d20 luck check; Taukin tries to peek and draw the desired result (Sleight of Hand) but doesn't roll well. Then we roll badly on the luck check, and don't get to face a fire-breathing monstrosity.

Instead, we end up going up against a gnome wizard (evoker) and half-orc or full orc (idk) barbarian (zealot). Taukin does the usual pre-battle setup of Armor of Agathys and Disguise Self and the Pearl of Power. The wizard opens with a Fireball. Taukin rolls badly on the Dex save and takes 31 damage, and rolls badly on the Stone's Endurance (1 on a d12), completely blowing through all the AoA temp HP. I try Enemies Abound, but the wizard passes his save. 1/2 spell slots expended.

Only once do we briefly get Grock into melee with the wizard, but Grock does 20-30-something damage. The rest of the time, the wizard stays out of range, taking his damage from Hellish Rebuke (mine, 2/2 spell slots expended), javelins, and a Sacred Flame or two. Before the wizard goes down, we get hit with Vitriolic Sphere, Rime's Binding Ice (we both get stuck and don't get to move the rest of the battle), and Chromatic Orb. I burn through all of my damage mitigation pretty fast, as well as BA healing.

With the wizard down, it turns into a slugfest. Luckily, as a Celestial warlock, my character is resistant to the zealot's radiant damage. Things go OK but not great, as the barbarian has an AC around 18 (he has a probably magic cloak on) and we're rolling poorly all night. Suddenly, one of the random disco ball spells go off, and Grock is Held! This is bad; he goes to 0 and Taukin is left alone, a Warlock vs. a Barbarian. Two turns later, the disco ball randomly freezes the enemy barbarian instead, and we knock him out shortly thereafter before limping off the battlefield.

Taukin moves around a lot in the locker room to confuse the trail, and manages (barely) to succeed in Disguise Selfing himself to appear as though his antimagic collar was activated, and fools the guards into thinking "the guy over there" already got it.

He now has a week between arena battles to send 5 tiny spiders at a time out for up to an hour at a time as scouts using Flock of Familiars. I didn't see any 4th level spells worth taking in this context, but FoF gives me a lot of low-risk scouts.

Alternatively, if we can't stage a prison break, the next fight is a grand melee between us and the other 2 prisoner teams (Oddy the gunslinger and his buddy Don the barefisted barbarian, and Kane the half-orc blood mage and his buddy Tazgull the kobold artificer)... then after that, the final battle is against a solo ex-pirate who is apparently very tough and a champion gladiator. Win that, and we're free.

Or so they tell us.

[J-H]

Gladiatorial Diversions 5.5 and 6: Go Time
We had a scheduling mishap and ended up with a 1 on 1 session. Here's how I summarized it in Discord a couple of weeks ago when we did our planning:
we did resolve what my Flock of Familiars (5 tiny spiders that I can see through and direct for up to 1 mile) found throughout the prison. Here's a summary:

Barracks/Staff Quarters
To the south, I think.
Corridor, turn, then Right turn via vents - lands you in the Barracks in the core sector of the prison. There are two big rooms with many doors leading into barracks rooms.
Each barracks room has 4 bunks, with 4 lockers. They seem to be done mostly by squad as some rooms are fully occupied while others have all 4 out on duty. When they're off duty, their keyrings (including collar keys) are hung in their individual lockers. The keyring is too large to fit through the ventilation system. The vent system only extends to the big room; there are ventilation openings in each squad bedroom, but they only open to the big rooms.

This area also has the warden's office. He works late.

Arena
To the east. 4 locker rooms scattered around it, all reachable via the air ducts. Prisoner lockers are split between the east and west side, and labeled with prisoner number. The arena locker rooms are checked about once every 30 minutes by a roving patrol. I have spiders putting webs across the inside of the lockers to see if anyone checks or opens them. If not, then the next night, I'll have my spiders steal anything small enough to carry (about 1/2 lb or less, which includes my luckstone and pearl of power).
The north and south prep areas have monster housing. Some monster cages are occupied, but don't look like they can be opened by just spiders.

Cargo Hangar
Opens to the outside (up). Has several airships in it, and is pretty quiet at night.

Generator Room
The generator room is to the southeast, east (?) of the core hangar. When I scouted it, there were a couple of guys there in uniform, quietly discussing how to cut power to the prison. One of them seemed vaguely familiar from being arrested by Oddy. My spider did some pantomime communication, and we're pretty sure that they are going to do their power cut + raid in 2 days, and that they know someone's on the inside with magic ready to go.
(highlighted because this is the most important item.

We did some planning between sessions, in Discord with the DM able to see. I believe in letting DMs know what we're trying so that the DM can plan instead of having to totally improvise. Also, we leveled up to 9. That's Warlock 8 for my character, and Telekinetic (Cha) as he spent a lot of time practicing Mage Hand during downtime with the collar deactivated thanks to the earlier trick. Finally got Cha 16.

It's late, so here's a summary of what went down.

1) Taukin (my character) had spiders pre-steal his Luckstone and Pearl of Power.

2) Invisible mage hand pre-cast and at the ready near the guards. Around lights-out, we hear the power generator thud and thump and wind down, then the sounds of distant major gunfire. I filch the key from the distracted guards in the dark. The prison warden walks in and orders them to head to the north. Then the warden walks over to Oddy's cell and unlocks it, then walks to ours. It turns out there's a rogue of some sort (not sure of species?) pretending to be the warden, busting us out. We let out the other cell, so now the group is:
us (warlock & barbarian)
Oddy (gunslinger)
Don (unarmed barbarian)
Kur--- (blood hunter of some sort)
Tazgul (alchemist)
Fake Warden (insight rogue?)
Our DM has these all statted out as PCs and acting individually in combat. It slowed things down a tad but also gave us a lot of firepower.

3) We head to the arena and grab our stuff from our lockers, then cross the arena and grab gear for the 4 NPCs who are coming with us. Medium Armor takes 5 minutes to put on, so I just do basically the Breastplate from the full plate. We hear guards coming from the hall and head out to the arena, crossing it and going back to our original locker room. Kurgwhatever keeps watch and spots them starting to cross the arena. I peek through the crack in the door and try Enemies Abound, but it fails. We high-tail it back to our original cell block.

4) We do some mapping and planning, and decide not to try to exfiltrate immediately. Fake Warden's job is to free as many prisoners as possible, and he sure made things easier. We head west to Cell Block A (our old cell block). There are 7-10 guards there. It's still pitch black, but the guards have flashlights, so we can see them and they can see us some of the time. The two of us fight the 3 guards on the bottom floor, while the NPCs take care of the rest. Unfortunately (DM says random roll) the first guard we attack is the radioman. He doesn't quite go down in the surprise round (1 hp left!) and uses his action to radio in our position. After we kill the guards, I grab the radio and try to divert guards elsewhere with a false report, but the Warden replies on the radio and my insight says he probably wasn't fooled.
We start freeing prisoners (5 floors, about 1000 prisoners), handing out keys as fast as we can. I loot one of the guards of his stun sword, a longsword that does +1d6 lightning damage and causes a DC 10 save-or-stun-for-1 round effect. Much nicer than my +1 Pact weapon greataxe!

After a few minutes, the doors on the other side of the block open and a squad of about 12 soldiers with a mix of guns and spears roll in, with a couple of fast constructs. I drop Hypnotic Pattern on the whole group and find out that the guards' conditioning or gear or both renders them immune to charm as well as fear. One spell slot left. We depart the area, leaving the partly armed 1000 or so prisoners to fight it out. We don't have AOE firepower to help, and the prisoners have numbers.

5) We decide to find loot. My character, a thief, is pushing this. We run into ten guards barricaded outside the warden's office exchanging gunfire with someone down a hall. We take them by surprise from the side, but still eat quite a bit of damage in the process. The people they were shooting at were identified as belonging to one of several rebel groups against the empire. My character inquires about how well the resistance pays "(I'm here, aren't I?" is the response from Fake Warden). I loot 4 more Stun Sabers. They are a magic item (albeit with a power crystal that has to be replaced every so often) so they have to be worth something.

We stop here.

The plan:
6) Loot the warden's office, the paymaster's office, and anything else interesting. Kill the warden if we find him.

7) Depart via airship

I considered using Disguise Self several times, but it takes an action to drop it, and the friendly fire opportunities for being disguised as a guard in a pitch-black chaotic prison escape were too high.

We had also considered releasing the monsters to spread chaos, but decided against it on the spot due to
a) difficulty directing and controlling them
b) evading contact

Too bad, as the monster list my spiders found was, per the DM:
6 gnolls
6 harpies
2 weretigers
1 goliath lycanthrope of some sort
3 owlbears
1 giant constrictor snake
some constructs that we weren't going to touch
2 bugbear chieftans

and a few other things I don't recall.
I was most interested in the owlbears, but we don't have any good animal-talkers to help direct them.

[J-H]

Gladiatorial Diversions 7
Picking up where we left off, Taukin is at just over half HP, and Grock is a bit below half. We head into the Warden's office. There are lots of papers. Grock finds his file (good Investigation check). Grock, by the way, doesn't remember why he's in prison. His file says his crime was treason, and the timing means he was arrested about a month before he arrived in prison. Thinking back, his memories from that time don't make sense.... they must have been altered. Hmm...

The rest of the papers appear to be shipping manifests and personnel files.

Taukin checks the desk (bad investigation check) and pops open drawers to look for good stuff.

Meanwhile, Grock heads to the infirmary with the alchemist, where they pick up some chemicals and 4 healing potions (Grock chugs 2 right away). Oddy the bounty hunter checks the warden's office further, and finds a safe. It's one of the rotating lock types. I have no thieves tools, but a +12 in Sleight of Hand is enough to crack the safe open quickly...and to detect a slight resistance when pulling it open. The warden had scissors on his desk, and so my character uses those to cut the wire. Safe contents:
-Very nice magic gun: Goes to Oddy
-4 10lb bars of gold: Goes to Taukin. Not automatically shared out. The GP value hasn't been set, but I think it has to be at least 4000 gp using 100gp/lb.
-Papers.

Oddy looks through the papers and does some cross-referencing. People's "release" dates involve them getting shipped...somewhere. They aren't going free, for sure. Those papers are leaving with us.

We talk about burning the Warden's office, but I think we forgot to actually start the fire. We heard gunfire in the distance, and someone shouting the word Warden. I explicitly say "My character is going to want to hit the paymaster's office. This is your chance to talk him out of it." Success, so we skedaddle towards the hangar.

The Warden rounds a corner at the far end of a hall right before we do, and gets a single shot off that hits Oddy, causing him to bleed despite no physical damage (psychic damage). We run for it, and there's a long straight hall to the hangar. My character is in back and drops a Guardian of Faith at the corner. The Warden comes around and snaps off a shot at me, along with 3 elite guards. The guards take shots at Taukin, dropping him to 3hp (fire ray guns). Taukin then escapes into the hangar, but Grock didn't do so well with initiative and eats 20-something points of psychic damage.

There's a big blast gate we can close to block the door off. At this point it feels very much like escaping the Death Star. "OK, investigation check to figure out how to close it." Fail. Fail. I invoked the artificer who was with us, who rolled a 15 and had a high INT. The gate closes. We head towards a fast-looking ship as we hear pounding on the blast door.

Oddy gets it fired up while we cut any ropes, haul any anchors aboard, etc. The alchemist checks out the engine. Grock asks, and the ship does have a gatling gun mounted forward and one aft. We man the guns. Non-proficient, but hey...

The blast door starts to raise while the airbags on the ship are still inflating. We see the legs of a couple of big iron golems, and open fire. Double 19s, for 6d10 damage per volley. The golems lose a balance check and the door drops. We fly up and away, blasting a turret gun on our way out, leaving the floating prison against a backdrop of a major fleet battle between the empire and the more rag-tag fleet of the rebellion. They aren't doing so well, but that is Not Our Problem.

We have a fast ship, a competent pilot, and know where we can find some shady places to lie low, sell the ship, etc. Also, we get to level up to 10 (Warlock 9).

The guy who's been DMing this says he can continue on depending on what we want to do. We're checking to see if the other 2 players are ready to come back and will decide later.
It was a lot of fun.