Chronicles of the Adventurers Guild #14

Prepping and Running the Game

This week's report takes a slightly different format for a couple of reasons: 1. the PCs are unlikely to be truthful in their report to Guild Chronicler Jeras, and 2. we ended the game mid-delve, which we have not done before.

A brief recap of the session.

The PCs decided that they would go along with the tomb-robbers' plan to launch a co-ordinated attack on the Death cultists.

To accommodate the fact that 12 PCs were in on the scheme but only four players were at the table, we had the players who were present send their characters into the dungeon, while the rest stood guard at the known exits to cut off any retreat.

However, as Kelso's player was convinced that the strange woman on the island in the underground pool was the quarry the dragonkin are after, the PCs proposed a start time of 1pm, to allow them to try to find out her true nature. Unfortunately for them, the woman was just a "monster of the room", and cost the PCs a little resources.

Moving back to the main mission, the PCs moved through the door they had barricaded the last session, and managed to find the secret door that led into a room that would have led to the cultists' lair.

The room was guarded by ten zombies and an Idolic Deity, a monster from the Tome of Beast. The flying statuette had the power of casting an aura that eroded a divine caster's faith, and the two strongest members in the party were nerfed and fell back. Here the players fell back to OSR thinking and threw a fishing net over the statuette and wrestled it down and bashed it to bits, while keeping the zombies at bay with a area-control spell.

Since they did not clear the room of the zombies, however, they failed to find the secret door that would have led to the cultists' west flank. Already late for the attack, they had to rely on their map and execute a wide march to the south and then east, before finally coming upon the passage that led to the cultists' east flank by following the sound of battle.

As one of the players had to leave early, and as I had not expected this development, we ended the session about half an hour early, just as they PCs are running towards the fight.

This gives me a week to plan the fight that we will open the session with. I am still not sure how to do this: on the one hand the Death cultists are outnumbered and they have a clear route for retreat (something which I was worried about before this development), yet on the other hand I would hate to have ended a session early in anticipation of a big fight... and then make it an anti-climatic rout.

Well, I have a week to plan for this, so let's see what happens!