His name is Kippington Thumble Elf-Hater, Kentish Bughammer, Kip for short. He’s a gnome who upon coming out of the tower had been given the skills to become a rogue. However, at this other school, there was an unfortunate incident, all alleged, involving a cake he may or may not have made that may or may not have been poisoned. Oh, and he has an untrusty squirrel friend named Karl, who mainly hangs out for food.

Upon Kip being introduced by Assendial, Bokken goes up and introduces himself, to the squirrel. Assuming that Kip is the squirrel, it nibbles on Bokken’s finger but gets bored pretty quickly. Kip doesn’t bother correcting Bokken on anything. The group catches up Kip on what has happened at the school, including Bokken outing Addrus and Parrag as spies, much to the dismay of both of them as the group had promised to help keep their secret.

It comes time for their final and Parrag comes down with the mumps so Kip has to join them, and Karl. The groups are brought up to the 2nd floor of the tower one at a time with their start times staggered by 30 minutes. Assendial gives them directions, they have to get through a series of rooms and to the teachers. Each room resets after 5 minutes, so they have a limited amount of time. They get scored based off of damage to their group, how many times the room has reset, and if they have caught any other groups who were in there before them. If they do catch a group, they get to go ahead of them and that group has to wait for another time for the room to cycle.

The first room that they enter looks like a foyer to a house. There is a fire place that is lit with a couple of torches in sconces by it, a book shelf filled with a number of books, and a chair with a table and some books on it. There is no door, in or out, once Assendial closes the door they came in on them. Bokken looks around the room hoping to find some scotch and finds a hollowed out book with a bottle of scotch and some glasses in it. Bokken pours himself a drink and sits down in the chair. Barrai thinking that there must be a hidden door looks around the shelf to see if there is anything, like an out of place book or something that would open a hidden door. He finds an out of place book and pulled it out. It causes the chair that Bokken is sitting in, and a part of the wall to rotate around, so when they look there is just a skeleton of an elf that is there. After Kip and Thrain investigate the bones and determine that these are in fact real bones or a real elf, Barrai puts the books back and removes it several times, this causes the wall to spin again several times, but they end up with Bokken back on the side they want. Bokkens next idea is to try and remove the torches, but he just ends up with two torches in his hand. Thrain investigates the sconces realizes that they aren’t attached as they should be, so he pulls on one and door frame appears in the middle of the room with a door in it. Eventually, after some more investigating they go through it.

They find themselves balanced along a ledge in a room with floating stones and lava on the floor. it looks a bit like a grand hall as there are chandeliers above it. They try and figure out how to get across the rocks that are floating there. Barrai is able to use mage hand to move one over, but it takes about minute, and then, after spending a bunch of time in the first room, the rooms reset and the rock goes back to where it was. They decide instead to use a grappling hook that Thrain has an 250′ of rope that Bokken has and Barrai mage hands the grappling hook up around the first chandelier which was just in range, it was 32′ form the ledge where they were standing. Smartly, though, I don’t know if the players were thinking about it, they decide to run the rope between the chandeliers and completely avoid the rocks and lava, as compared to their plan to swing on the rope. With the lava 4′ down from the ledge, a swing from one towards the middle would have most likely dragged them through lava, or at least caught the rope on fire, neither which is ideal. They manage to make their way across after a bit of a scare from Kip who loses is grip mid way across the rope, but is pulled back to safety with Bokken’s help.

In the next room there are two imps guarding two doors. As they walk in, one imp says “Welcome to our room, sit, stay a while. One of us tells the truth and the other lies.” The other imp says “Both of us tell the truth.” Thrain, the dwarf, immediately asks both of them if he is a dwarf, and they both say “No”. Doing an insight check on both of them, he knows that the second imp for sure is lying, but the first one might actually believe what he is saying. They ask them more questions trying to figure out a pattern or if maybe one tells the truth some of the time, but they eventually decide to try and restrain one, which gets them into combat. They kill one and get the other restrained and they open the doors. They had previously been told by the imps that one door had a dragon behind it and one a pit of acid, but all they see are two empty rooms. They toss the imps, one alive and one dead, into both empty rooms and they both fall through the floor, but they don’t hear the crunching of a dragon or the splash of an imp hitting acid. Attaching a rope to Thrain, and with Bokken holding on, Thrain is lowered through the floor, below he sees what looks like a forest, with a lake in the middle and an island in the lake, which he recognizes as the first floor where they’d taken their previous mid-term. He gets pulled up and goes down through the other door and sees the same thing just form a few feet over. The room resets and there are two imps in there again. This time they forgo much of the talking, and after a little bit of fighting, as Bokken opens up one of the doors and an imp tries to push him through it, Barrai puts them to sleep with the sleep spell. They spot rings on the imps fingers, so they look at them, however, they just look they are school rings from an infernal school and it doesn’t change the rooms or add any doors. Kip wakes one up and asks them a question along the line of “What would you do to not leave this room through a secret door?” to which the imp answers, “Kill us”, so they kill the imps humanely and a door appears between the other two.

This leads them into a room that I had intentionally created for the players. I’m going to write it out briefly the description that I gave them, but there are five pillars that are shooting flame, one in each corner and one in the middle of the room. The one in the middle of the room starts shooting flame backwards, while the others start from front left shooting along the left wall, the front right shooting along the front of the room, the back left shooting along the back of the room, and the back right shooting at a diagonal into the middle of the room. From there I explained how they move, basic idea is that you need to follow the right side and then take a step to the left to let the back door open again. One of the players, paying attention to what I was saying, was able to figure it out just from hearing the description once, which was awesome, so they breezed through that room.

In the next room, and final room, there is a Bearded Devil sitting at a table that magically has four other chairs appear around it. He motions for them to sit and says, “Come sit and enjoy some tea.” They sit and he pulls out what amount to a tasting flight of four teas for each of them. The first is a red tea with a fruity nose, the next is black and smells bitter, the third is a herbal green tea, and the fourth has a yellow color and smells of citrus. The Bearded Devil tells them that they have to try them in the right order and that the order is important. The players think about it and they assign a tea to each season, black for winter, green for spring, yellow for summer, and red for winter. They start with green, and Barrai takes a bit of poison damage, Thrain tries yellow and then red, taking poison damage for both. They offer the Bearded Devil some scotch even though they don’t have some, because Kip thinks scotch solves most problems. The Bearded devil says that sounds great, but he prefers Bourbon before Scotch. Bokken drinks the black tea and isn’t poisoned. He then tries the yellow tea and takes some poison damage. The Bearded Devil tells them that they have one more try or they’ll be fighting him. They think about it and decide since bourbon is earlier in the alphabet than scotch, maybe they should try alphabetical, which works for them and they are allowed to pass into the next room.

In that room they find the teachers waiting for them and the group who had gone ahead of them fighting as Narius and Castillia are debating how yellow or orange that last tea was with Narius insisting it was orange. At that point the session ended and the players leveled up.

Behind the DM’s Screen

This one I actually planned a bit more for sometimes. And I actually had two ways to bring in the new player. They suggested that transferring in made sense, so we went with that route. Otherwise I was going to somehow have Parrag end up rotating behind the wall and into stasis with Kip being brought back out and joining the group.

I also really enjoyed the creative ways that they tried to solve the problems. Could they have just jumped between the rocks, probably, but I wanted to see what they would come up with, and the swinging, while a bad idea was an option, but even better was climbing along the chandeliers. So you can have a room that is very dangerous, fire bad, and just let players problem solve, you don’t need a perfect solution, just give them options.

The pillars and fire room, that one, like I said, i wanted the players to puzzle that one out themselves. It took the time of me explaining it for one of them to figure it out, but I’m glad that didn’t take too long. For a puzzle like that, just running through would have been possible, but it was dangerous, so I wanted to make sure there was a good away through that made sense.

How does that session sound, is it one that would be fun for you to play in?

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• Players take the test of the tower to become adventurers
• Players enroll in Strawgoh, a school of dark arts and assassination
• They find out that there are spies in their midst
• They run into issues with one of their classmates who was supposed to be part of their group
• Player start their mid term going through the first real floor of the tower competing against the other squads

So that catches us up quickly to where we our. The player characters, Barrai, Bokken, and Thrain, along with the fourth member of their group, Parrag, have burst through the tree line and see the island, covered in moss with three of the professors standing on it. About 60 feet away from them, Castillia, Narius, Addrus, and Cordin have also burst through the tree line. Thrain fires off an eldritch blast at them, but misses, and Castillia draws her bow on him.

The Bokken decides that while a fight on the shore could be fun, it might be smarter to try and get to the island first, since that is the objective of the test. Glancing at the water he notices that there are some monsters moving around in it but he takes off towards the shoreline anyways. The other group decides that is a better plan and Addrus gets to the water first and dives in and he is immediately grabbed and batted at by some giant purple tentacles.

Barrai, the next up, decides to take a little bit of time to figure out what is going on and sees that the island is not actually an island. Instead it’s a giant monster that has moss growing on the top of it that is sticking out above the water.

Things go sideways when Bokken decides to take a running jump onto one of the tentacles and is hanging off of there. Barrai seeing that decides to try something fancy of his own and uses a great acrobatics check and his whip swings most of the way to the water. Unfortunately Barrai is not good at swimming and starts to sink towards the bottom. Meanwhile Bokken, seeing how that has worked, tosses a rope to first Thrain and then Parrag and tries to whip them across some of the water with varying degrees of success, but eventually the whole party is in the water, some of them having been grappled by tentacles.

During this time, Narius has been taking pot shots at the party from the shore while Castillia, Cordin, and Addrus are dealing with tentacle issues in the water. Thrain getting fed up with that fires off an Eldritch Blast at Narius and drops him in one hit and Narius starts making saving throws to avoid death. Thrain gets dragged under water by a tentacle and being annoyed he can’t cast Eldritch Blast on the tentacle underwater, when he surfaces shoots the downed Narius again and takes him out. When they all finally reach the head of the monster they are able to get up without issue and are the first group from their class to get there as Castillia’s group was still in the water and Dorin and Domon’s group had just come out of the forest.

The teachers commend the group on doing a good job and they level up to level 2, which gives them some new fun toys to play around with, including Barrai getting Dissonant Whispers. After they level up a teach suggests that they could have tried animal handling on the squid which Bokken never would have thought of. They also go to poor Narius who has been lying there and a teach casts reincarnation on him, causing him to come back as a Hill Dwarf and we ended the session there with them going back to school.

So behind the DM’s screen:

This was an odd session to run because I was controlling eight tentacles and four NPC’s throughout the fight. In the future, I should have written up a basic HP, AC, Attacks for the four NPC’s and handed them off to the players, but I was able to keep it moving quickly. It just would have been less downtime.

With the eight tentacles, at least the player playing Bokken assumed you couldn’t destroy them, because it was a giant monster, which is a fine assumption, they couldn’t have taken down the monster proper had they tried. But each tentacle had an armor class of 14, 16 HP, and +6 to strengh. But they didn’t do a ton of damage. The monsters attack plan was always to drag someone under water and drown them, which wouldn’t have worked on Bokken, but knowing the monsters plan made it easy and fast for me to run eight tentacles.

Finally, when Narius was shot down by Thrain, I wasn’t sure if I’d bring him back or not. But since the class size is fairly small decided it’d probably be worth it to do. I was going to cast something like resurrect or revivify, but I stumbled across reincarnate first. And I thought that would be more entertaining. And I like that the school would use that as almost a punishment if someone dies in a test or during a class.

So thoughts on the session, it was a good time, lots of things going on, would you want to play in a session like this? How do you handle a lot of bad guys in a battle?

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A quick recap, Bokken, Barrai, and Thrain took the test of the Tower and ended up with new powers, and got into Strawgoh, a school of assassination and dark arts. There they were told that there were a couple of spies in their class that they could find and get extra credit if they properly identified them. After messing around with that, they came at odds with the fourth person in their group, Dorin, a halfling and fought to get him out of the group and another person in. That fight just went okay but they ended up with Dorin leaving the group.

That took us to the first half of the first semester, before midterms. They studied well with Barrai spending too much time with watching Dorin and struggling in classes but Bokken and Thrain focused pretty well and Domon was the top of the class. Barrai does find out that Dorin is really concerned about getting kicked out of school.

Thrain and Barrai worked together to scam over a few bars and their patrons taking money in staged fights as Thrain wants to save up to get plate armor and Barrai wants to get studded leather armor, they made some progress but it was slow. They also got kicked out of three bars and made an enemy, Zaphir. Barrai also goes to some fights, which are the entertainment in the area, and notices two of the top competitors, Esmelda Dean and Sanphire, whom he starts to think that he might right ballads about.

Bokken spends some of his time breaking into teachers offices and trying to track down who might be a spy, but doesn’t find out much information on them. Instead of finding out who the spies might be, he does find some information, that while the people who were spies did go through the tower just like and at the same time as everyone else, they were recruited ahead of time.

Then comes the first part of midterms. So midterms takes place in the Tower but not in kind of the training section, where they were before, but on the first floor, which doesn’t change, and where the monsters respawn every night. So after going through a couple of empty rooms with their class, they are brought to a larger circular center room. The three barracks are brought to spots around the center, equally as far away from each other and are given instructions. They are to race to an island at the center of the room, whichever team gets there first gets the best grade, but grades can go down, depending on how much the party is damaged.

At the sound of the horn all of the groups take off, and Thrain, Barrai, Bokken, and Parrag, the fourth in their group, take off into a dense forest that surrounds the lake. They decide to stealth their way through, but Parrag does horrible on his stealth and stumbles across a couple of giant rats and three smaller rats. They manage to just about take him down, but Barrai is able to cast a spell to heal him. Meanwhile, Bokken and Thrain are chopping the rats with an odachi and blasting them with Eldritch Blast. Thrain keeps backing up and stumbles across a swarm of rats. Just as Bokken finishes off the last of them by Parrag, Thrain gets swarmed over and goes down. Bokken and Barrai go to help with Parrag following behind. Then they get close, Bokken starts hacking away and Parrag fires off a healing spell bringing Thrain back to his feet and then helps finish off the swarm of rats.

To make up for lost time, the group starts booking it through the forest as fast as possible, and they are making good time, when a group of three flying snakes drops out of the trees and takes down Bokken. Parrag casts another spell getting Bokken back to his feet. Barrai casts a spell making the sound of a predatory bird and scares off one of the snakes. Thrain and Bokken then make quick work of the other two and they are off running again. This time stumbling across some elk who don’t want to tangle with them and take off running towards the lake as well. Bokken angles the barrack group slightly to avoid the elk and they make it to the shore without further incident.

When the hit the shore, they see an island about 40 feet out into the water with two teachers on it. Busting through the edge of the tree line as well is Castillia’s group with Narius in it as well. Thrain immediately takes a potshot with an Eldritch blast, but on the run, the blast goes wide, and Castillia notches an arrow on her bow and pulls it back aiming at Thrain.

That’s where we ended do to internet troubles. And that’s one of the downsides of playing on Zoom instead of in person, but it worked well for the most part and we got a lot in.

Behind the DM’s screen a little bit, I was actually using a website to just generate random encounters for me in the tower. I had one picked out ahead of time, but the rat swarm, flying snake, and elk were all randomly picked out. It worked well for the most part, and the party while having a couple of members go down, actually was in pretty decent health by the time they reached the shoreline.

Some of the stuff that we did at the beginning was just narrated. I had asked the players to send me things they wanted to do, so stuff like the money making venture that Thrain and Barrai did with staging fights for people to bet on was part of that.

Finally, the first floor of the Tower is the test basically for the midterm. So next session the players will be leveling up, so we’ve basically had one session at level 0, and now three plus part of one coming up, at level 1.

What do you think of the game thus far?

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Quick reminder of our characters:
Thrain the Hill Dwarf who became a Hexblade Warlock
Bokken the War Forged who was granted the ability to become a great Fighter (Samurai)
Barrai the Tiefling who now gets to use their musical and story telling skills as a Bard (sub-class to be determined)

At this point in time, they are all level 1.

Upon leaving the tower they were given what basically was an exit interview to gather what their powers they had been granted. A runner took all of their skills around to the various schools, but the characters (players) were given a free choice of what school they wanted to pick as a group.

There were eight different schools:
School of Spying and Espionage
School of War and Combat
School of Charm and Seduction
School of Wisdom
School of Business and Money
School of Order and Government
School of Nature and Raw Emotion
School of Dark Arts and Assassination

They went with the last one, though they did debate for a little while around some other the other ones, The School of War and Combat made sense and they were also interested in Nature and Raw Emotion. At that booth they spoke to Tormin, a recruiter and one of the teachers at the School of Dark Arts and Assassination and had to explain why they wanted to go and what skills they had that would be useful for the Strawhog – Ye Old School of Darkness and Magic. Tormin told them that they’d be in a barracks, bunk house, type set-up with another person who had gone through the trial of the Tower at the same time as them, a Gnome named Dorin.

Then I gave them two weeks of time to do whatever they wanted, Barrai practiced the harpsichord, Bokken picked up work at a warehouse and made a bunch of money moving boxes non-stop for that time. Thrain went to brush on his fighting and sparring at a local combat focused gym.

Showing up at the school, Strawgoh, they met Dorin. He was a pompous little gnome who clearly had a chip on his shoulder and was trying to be important. Barrai made friends with him by bribing him with a gold piece, but Bokken really didn’t acknowledge him, and Thrain constantly referred to him as a halfling, as a goof, though the best part was when the player, not the character, forgot that it wasn’t a halfling. They dropped their stuff off in the barracks and then joined the other nine students for their introduction to the school.

Head Mistress Assandial told them about the school, about how hard it was going to be, about how they still might die, even in the school and if anyone wanted to leave now they could. But everyone stuck it out. She then told them what became the focus of the rest of the session, there were two spies in their midst, two of the people had been recruited prior to the test of the Tower and already had some training. Those two would get extra credit if they could stay hidden for the year. But if someone correctly figured out who they were, they could get those extra credit points. But wrong guesses, there was a consequence for that.

Bokken immediately began investigating and looked for the people who stood out the most, the richest, the prettiest, whatever caught his eye. He spotted a halfling who looked rich and spoke to Narius. While Narius was a bit of a pompous jerk, Bokken didn’t get the feeling that Narius was likely a spy at that time and decided to offer to work for him if he had a job. Which, Narius said he would consider it once they graduate and he started his own assassin’s guild.

They talked to a bunch of other of their classmates, Domon a Tiefling Warlock who wasn’t that smart. Thrain interjected himself into a conversation between Cordin a Dragonborn Wizard and Sadran the Aasimar Wizard who Bokken had noticed earlier. Sadran was nice enough, but Cordin treated Thrain fairly rudely. They talked to Addruss a Human Fighter who had gone through the Trial of the Tower with Castilla a Wood Elf Rogue.

Barrai used his ability to cast the message spell to get information from Domon that he’d gone through the tower trial with the Aasimar, Sadran, and an Elf whom the players haven’t talked to yet.

At one point, Dorin, appointing himself, or trying to appoint himself, leader of the barracks decided to confront the party and see if they’d just tell them that they were spies. However, the party turned it on him pointing out that he was the only to survive the group of four, which seemed fairly suspicious to them.

Finally, the party talked to Edzial, a Dwarf whom they don’t know what class she has yet. However, she says that she went through the trial with Domon, Sadran, and the elf that they didn’t talk to. And the characters call her out on that. She gives a reason that they is investigating to see how much they know, but the players note that she, like Dorin, is the only one who didn’t have party survive the trial of the tower.

The players, since they decided that they could trust Castilla, spoke with her about their suspicions as to who might be the spies, but they really didn’t have all that much proof and they didn’t want a wrong accusation on their record. Barrai, since he is also a Tiefling and Domon had made a big deal out of that earlier, leveraged that friendship to convince Domon, not the brightest character, that he should go and accuse Dorin for them.

And that’s where I ended the session with Domon off to do that.

The DM Notes portion, if you don’t want to see behind the screen don’t read further.

There were only a handful of rolls in this session, once they started talking to people, they rolled for several insight checks but that was about it. I’ve run sessions like this before with little rolling but it wasn’t planned.

So about the planning itself, I had all 8 schools determined and I had the cast of characters, teachers and students whom they’d meet at whatever school they went to. Would they have always been paired with Dorin, no, Barrai asked early who they were going to be paired with, and I had him roll a D10 to determine which out of 11 students they’d be paired with, yes the math doesn’t work.

Also, for preparing for something like this, don’t come up with a new batch of teachers and students for each school, my four teachers (two of them met so far), and nine students were going to have the same names no matter what. Now, the fact that Dorin is a Gnome Rogue and Castilla is a Wood Elf Rogue, those things could have changed.

I was also potentially prepared for combat in this scenario. Only because they went to the school of Dark Arts and Assassination did they end up being a test and students. It was going to be a school who was going to send in some spies that the players would have had to have fought and figured out what they were after instead. But it worked well this way for the school.

Strawgoh is Hogwarts backwards and because of that Bokken now has a commanding officer, mentor named Rettop Yrrah as well, Harry Potter backwards.

This session went really well and I had a lot of fun with it, even though it wasn’t dice chucking combat or an epic set piece of massive story, it was a bunch of different smaller social interactions, some funny, some normal that the players had. Even with the funny ones probably being the most entertaining, the players have already gravitated and made Castilla someone who is going to be important later because they trust her, you never know who they will pick.

Feel free to steal ideas from this for your own game and let me know, what would you have picked for a school in the players shoes? Do you think they are right and Dorin is a spy (I should say, spies were set before they got Dorin as a bunk mate)?

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