The Session

So, if you need a quick refresher, Barrai, Kip, and Bokken had all just come back from the 6th layer of hell. Narduk had been swapped out with Barrai’s sister who now looked like Narduk and was running her shop. This was all after Barrai the previous session had been killed, turned into a puddle and brought back as a gnome, a blue gnome.

Thrain joins the group quickly. He didn’t know where they’d gone but after his day of resting he figured they had likely gone to the tower. Of course, there was a bit of an issue as he came out in the courtyard through the trapdoor that Barrai had put a trap on. The group isn’t too worried about him, instead they are worried about what happened to Karl and the cloak that Bokken had previous and had traded for the sun sword, because, well, Karl was still in the cloak.

Kraig is sent up to scout and spots the cloak and someone talking to it. They look elf-like and have antlers or branches coming out of their head. Kip sneaks up and hears a conversation between Karl and this fey creature. He hears that Karl is basically telling the fey creature of his exploits, Karl’s not Kip’s, and that Karl wasn’t sure what had happened to Kip and the others.

Kip makes himself known to the fey who turns out to be The Oak Lord, third in command in the Summer Courts. Bokken soon steps out as well. They talk for a little bit and the topic of the tower, the sphere of annihilation and more comes up in the conversation.

The biggest thing is that the winter courts do not like the three ravens of the crescent moon. That is the organization that Addrus and Nahzir belong to. Mainly because Adanac, the nation that the Three Ravens of the Crescent Moon are based out of won’t work with the winter courts. The fey realm is being drained, slowly, of energy and the same with other realms. That energy is going into the tower. And the fey can’t go into the tower themselves which causes an issue with them trying to get rid of or figure out the tower.

The Oak Lord decides that the group of the four of them were fairly competent. And that since they have had dealt with the winter court, rainman, an arcane stalker and more. He offers them a 15 year contract at a gold a day, 5 silver while they are in school). They won’t be assassins upon graduation, so much, they’ll be adventurers of the tower in employment of the Summer Court. And that’s where we ended.

Behind the DM’s Screen

I’ve known that I wanted to tie in the fey somehow. Mainly because I have the Fey Monster book from Cawood publishing. It’s a really fun book. I normally don’t recommend third party books for players or GM’s because there is so much content. But as a big fan of the Dresden Files where the winter and summer courts play an important role, I wanted to give it a whirl in a game. It is a good book with a lot of different characters I like. I think you’d be able to play a Dresden Files-esque game with it. And while in this case the Tower is obviously the McGuffin for the game, I can still play around with it.

Do you have any third party D&D books that you like to use?

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The Session

We jumped into the game immediately after the battle and conversations from last time with Assendial, Castillia and Parrag about what had happened with Addrus and his group of friends. The party decides that their next, best, course of action is to try and find out what is in that extra bank lock box that Addrus had. In his stuff they had found the matching piece of paper they would need to get access to his bank account, minus the fact that none of them looked at all like Addrus. They are a Tiefling, Gnome, Dwarf, and Warforged, Addrus is a human.

But Kip, the gnome, does have the spell disguise self, granted, that won’t make him tall enough to look like a grown adult male. Bokken crudely fashions him some stilts and the following morning, they go out to put their plan into action. Kip leaving Karl the squirrel with Bokken and his new raven familiar Kraig with Barrai outside to watch what is going on, heads into the bank. Thrain conspicuously waits out in the front waiting area pretending to read a news paper.

Things actually go quite smoothly as Kip is able to, without any issue, get into the waiting room area and into where the lock box is. Bokken follows to the desk to meet with a banker about opening a lock box of his own. At this point in time, things start to go sideways for the group.

Outside the bank, Barrai spots the adult who had been with Addrus and his group and cast fireball on them all. However, he doesn’t seem to have noticed Barrai, so Barrai just drops back into the shadows using the spell message to give everyone a heads up that things might be getting dicy.

Inside, Kip fails a check for noticing something, but is able to get the lock box unlocked with their copy of the fifth key that Addrus had. Inside he finds a medallion on a string that basically looks like fishing wire. The medallion has three ravens on it with a crescent moon behind them. It looks vaguely familiar to him, but he can’t quite place it. There are also two notebooks, he grabs them and goes to ring the bell to let the banker know that he’s done and to put the lock box away. The reflection of the bell, however, shows Kip, not Addrus, and Kip realizes that there was a dispel magic spell cast on the whole room, probably for situations like this one.

Using his new familiar, Kraig, he warns Barrai that things have gone sideways and that he needs to a distraction to get out. Well, the bird really just mimics back what Barrai had said earlier, which was “red alert”. Thinking quickly Barrai messages both Bokken and Thrain to let them know and gives a merchant selling cabbages from a cart on the street 20 gold pieces and grabs the card and starts running pushing it through the bank doors, hopping onto the cart and blasting thunderwave out from the cart causing cabbage confetti to go flying everywhere.

With that, Bokken gets very upset that he’s having to wait to get his lock box, and Thrain follows Barrai who has ditched the scene outside. Kip discards his stilts and takes off running. Thrain and Barrai make it outside in time to get confronted by Addrus’s friend. They try and fight against him, but he blasts them with a chain lightning spell and then drops a fireball on them taking Barrai down before the man disappears.

Thrain casts spare the dying on Barrai and Bokken picks him up and they head towards Moody’s Bar. It’s not open yet, much to their dismay, it was about 8:45 in the morning, but they take the tunnel back to school. Karl along the way steals most of Barrai’s rations and drops out most of Barrai’s money onto the ground, but Thrain picks it up and gives it back. They make it back to the school and think about going to their barracks but spotting Castillia going back there, they hide out in the cellar beneath the cafeteria, which connects to the tunnels and while waiting for Barrai to come to start to look at the notebooks. Eventually cracking the cypher. Barrai also helps them identify that the three ravens and the crescent moon are a symbol of a secret organization from Carlsbekistan that Adanac, their country, has been at war with.

Behind the DM’s Screen

This was an episode where I basically decided to wing it. I thought there was a chance that they’d decide to deliver Dorin so I’d done minimal preparation on that. But it was still a blast of a session.

They cypher was interesting to do. They still don’t know what it says, because I hadn’t figured out what it said yet. This is mainly because the notebooks and cypher were created on the fly. One notebook has 10 pages with letters on them. The other has lots of pages with numbers on them. It wasn’t until they had gotten a few decent rolls in that they started to piece it together. Thrain noticed that the numbers would have breaks between them. Like it would go down half a page and then nothing until it started at the top of the next page. And that the last 18 numbers were the same between two of the chunks of numbers and then were at the start of a couple of others. They started to narrow it down finding a repeating 9 number chunk, eventually finding the most common three letter chunk. This was a nice puzzle for them to solve because it was blend of player knowledge on how cyphers might work and then rolls in character. This meant that I didn’t have to do anything before hand to come up with the cypher, which is good because I didn’t. Had I not given them rolls, this would have taken much longer. I think to note of how this worked is that it didn’t overstay it’s welcome, it maybe took them 20-30 minutes at most with the rolls to figure out what was going on. That seems like the right amount of time for a puzzle, unless they have their hands on it and can work it physically and it’s all about the player ability, even then, I think the rolls for hints are always a great thing for puzzles.

So that was the bank heist, what do you think of that session? Does it sound like something that’d be interesting to play in?

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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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