The Session

It was finally time to bring Dorin back to his home. After a few days of carrying him around with them everywhere that they went, and trunk becoming more and more disgusting, they all decided to take him back. They rented a wagon for the trunk and hooked it up to Thrain’s donkey. Assendial, however, had questions to be answered and they decided to leave Kip, Karl, and Kraig behind, maybe to catch up with them later.

The travel started out pretty uneventfully as the group was just heading towards river that they’d have to cross. It was early in the year and the snows had just melted from the mountains. Their choice was to add a day or so to their journey in able to find a ferry to take them across the river instead of ford it. They figure if the water levels don’t look too bad, they can always follow the shorter route on the way back.

They reach a glade near a small brook where they decide to stop for the night. Barrai cleans out the clothes that Dorin had packed and cast mending on them, Bokken cleaned out the trunk down stream and Dorin was rinsing himself off. An owlbear with a rider on it charges out of the thicket and grabs at Thrain with it’s beak. A fierce battle ensues as Barrai tries to keep Thrain up, and Bokken charges in to stop the fight. Meanwhile Dorin rushes for his trunk and flips into it and starts floating down stream. The donkey spooks and runs back towards the town. Barrai heals Thrain and heals the owlbear which Bokken decides to keep as a pet, naming it Fukuro Kuma.

It takes them a while to realize where Dorin has gotten off to and knowing that it’s going to take some effort and that the ford is in the direction that Dorin will drift, they decide to go after the donkey. They take the owlbear with them, and they find the donkey a little ways down the road in a meadow where it’s headed more directly towards the town, but having pulled a wagon all day it has stopped to eat. As they get to it another group of goblins get there as well.

The party again faces off against goblins. This time Bokken and Barrai take the brunt of the attacks, which works out fairly well, though Barrai starts to get low on hit points. The two of them, mainly, manage to slash through everything and eventually, the time being around 10 PM decide to take their cart, donkey, and owlbear back to the road. Bokken keeps watch since he can just go into sentry mode, but comes out of it when he hears a siren off in the distance. He wakes the others but they aren’t sure if it’s a dragon siren off in the stance or maybe it’s the sire Kip has used before, but they decide to go back to sleep.

Behind the DM’s Screen

Honestly, not much for this time. I’m experimenting with something I normally don’t do. Since we’re not in the town, it’s less about social encounters and more about possible combat. So I wanted to see what stringing together a number of combats might be like. It’s interesting to do that and to see how quickly players spend resources.

How do you string combats together? Do you have a lot of little ones, a few medium ones, a little and a big one per day? Or do you do less combat encounters and more social encounters?

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The Session

We start with them finishing their search of the half-orcs room after the latest dragon attack. But people are starting to show up, so they realize that it’s a bit suspicious with what they are doing and they decide to pursue other means of investigating this latest dragon attack and not really where the missing scarab from the first attack is. It makes sense to them because this dragon attack was also caused by a scarab.

They talk quickly with a few towns folk seeing if they can figure out if this is something that’s happened before. A few of the old timers tell Thrain a tale about how there was, about 60 years ago, a large dragon that came out and it was killed. That is corrected on them though as it turns out unlike this ancient black dragon, that was a young dragon. So Thrain doesn’t really think that there’s much of a connection.

The rest of the first year students are now out of the cellar and are looking around as well. The group spots that both Addrus and Dorin are missing from the group. Considering how suspicious Dorin has been acting, they decide to check up on him and see where he might be off to. Barrai finds him in his barracks hurriedly packing a steamer trunk and talking to himself about how everyone is out to get him. He tells Barrai about the threatening and disturbing notes that he’s been finding. Barrai feels a bit bad about it as he watches Dorin climb into the steamer trunk and close it while giving Barrai instructions as to where to ship him so he gets home safely.

Barrai messages every basically saying that Dorin probably isn’t their guy. Bokken heads to the meeting location but everyone else goes to where Barrai is. They decide that they’ll help Dorin get sent where he wants to go later, but right now they need to continue their investigation. They give Dorin some more food so that he’ll be slightly more comfortable and then go down into the tunnels where they are hoping to catch someone after the fact. They consider going down the the the direction that leads to the tower, but Kip is able to investigate and figure out that no one has gone down there in a long time.

At this point in time, they start piecing together some of the odd things that have happened in the past with the tunnel. How Barrai tried to put Sanphire to sleep but got someone else in the tunnel instead the first day they’d found the tunnel. How there had been someone skulking around in the shadows by the tunnel. How Sanphire had told them that Addrus and Parag were the only two first years he’d seen the day before. The group splits up with Barrai and Kip going to find Castillia and Thrain and Bokken going to find Parrag in hopes that they will know where Addrus is. Neither of them do, but Parrag wants to ask Addrus some questions. In particular he wants to know why he borrowed his shirt, but also with both of them being spies, why it appears that Addrus did another mission. Parrag completed all four of his and had four keys from each mission, but Addrus had five keys. Castillia, on the other hand, doesn’t know anything about what’s going on or where Addrus is.

Grabbing the steamer trunk with Dorin in it, they set off into town to go to the bank. Kip tries to get information or access to Addrus’s account and find out information on the account. He learns that isn’t that easy to do, and casts friends in order to make it easier. He claims that he is a joint on the account and he needs to get access. He finds out about the documentation for a joint account and is disappointed that he likely won’t be able to forge it as there is a magical element to it and it requires blood from both people on the account. Kip does find out that Addrus was last there two days ago. They go to the bar again to get some late lunch and ask around if anyone has seen Addrus there. No one has seen him there recently as he hasn’t been in, in three days.

And at this point in time they decide to fill in Assendial on everything that they know. Instead of doing that this session, we’re giving them a little bit of time forget everything and see what they find as useful information for Assendial. Oh, and Bokken is still carrying around a steamer trunk with Dorin in it. They do feel slightly bad about making his life so hard.

Behind the DM Screen

***** PLAYERS DO NOT READ *****

So, I had plans for this session that generally went according to what they should have. I’ve been laying hints for quite a while that Addrus is up to more than previously thought. At the original dragon attack he was talking to someone in the shadows and then unseen by the players made it to the cellar before them. He also was in the second interrogation that Barrai was in for people who lied or misled in the Zone of Truth. The additional key also was called out before by Parrag when they accused him of being a spy and found the ring of keys in his stuff. And most recently, Addrus was back before everyone else was back from the Tower the day that the scarab went missing. Did he steal the Scarab, who knows, but the players should figure that out soon and definitely now realize that he’s been acting suspicious.

I had to give some prompts to the players to move them along in the right direction right now. They caught onto the fact that Addrus and Dorin were missing and hence suspicious, but they really like Dorin was someone who is trouble, whether or not that makes that much sense. They definitely should know that they have broken Dorin with everything that Barrai has done at this point in time, it’s certainly been implied enough times.

Do you like sessions without combat, we’ve had a few of those recently? If you’re the DM, how to you run investigations, do you just sit back and see where there players go, or do you have planned clues?

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