Exile Empire - Fire and Lightning
What's that? You think this LJ is becoming devoid of real content, and is just a space where I talk about nerd stuff that no-one else cares about?
...well, you're gonna hate this post, then, 'cos it's just me talking about yesterday's D&D session.
Details behind the cut.
As dusk falls on Stormreach, lights flicker around the twelve vision circles scattered around the town. These small rings of standing stones throw up silent images at irregular intervals - a strange phenomenon that the locals have come to accept and ignore over the decades. Tonight, though, they all come alive at once, showing an image of the Elemental Chaos. Then static cycles through the rings, faster and faster, the image coming back brighter and brighter as it passes, until suddenly a bolt of lightning erupts from a cloudless sky to strike the westernmost ring in the Oldgate district...
...and when the glare fades, the heroes who were lost in the Elemental Chaos (Rufus, Slaine, Kaddik and Caleb, along with the genasi Janda-Shen) are standing in the ring, back in the mortal world once again.
Splitting up, Kaddik and Caleb head back to their rooms at the Black Wrack, where Kaddik finds a note from Durgan'Torrn saying that he will come to the tavern to meet with them tomorrow. Caleb slips out to meet with Jaris Cantar, who berates him for letting the Key of Eleven be destroyed when the White Oubliette collapsed. Still, he pays him for his work, and tells Caleb to keep tabs on Janda-Shen, who may be key to accessing the power of the Elemental Chaos - and on Ballast, since the signet ring he's trying to sell is apparently connected to the Cantar family.
Meanwhile, Rufus heads off on his own, and Slaine and Janda-Shen go to Respite, after they obtain a hooded cloak to disguise the genasi and her crystalline hair. They tell Master Aedan what happened, and the monks consider the possibility of relocating to Dannel's Pride to protect the local Cyrans from the Storm Hammers. And while all this goes on, Spark - having lost Ballast, but witnessed the light display over the vision circles - attempts to find out what happened and where his allies have vanished to.
--
The next day, Kaddik goes to meet the gnome Valexa Von Ruthven, positing the idea of her sponsoring an expedition into the depths of Xen'drik - which is primarily a ploy to help him learn about the Tharashk outpost where his master is apparently being held. Valexa is dubious, and asks for more details about the expedition's purpose and destination, but does show him a map of the continent, where he finds the location of the prospector's supply outpost Zantashk, 1000 miles to the south-east. Meanwhile, Caleb investigates the vision circle in which they materialised the previous night, only to find it guarded by the Ninth Wands, an Aundairian military unit that has set itself up as one of Stormreach's ethnic/cultural militias. He doesn't, however, realise that the leader of the guards is Tyrnan Thiel, who rescued Spark from danger the previous day.
Eventually the team meets up at the Black Wrack, where they fill each other in on what's transpired and discuss what to do next. That conversation is cut short as the bomb explodes, the tavern erupts into flames, and a cadre of Liondrake's Roar mercenaries attack them while loudly claiming to be members of the Storm Hammers. The battle is dangerous and difficult, and the heroes barely manage to defeat the mercenaries and their armoured hobgoblin leader, before escaping the burning tavern by the skin of their teeth, and with a prisoner to question. The captured mercenary admits that he was hired to flesh out the Roar's ranks and told to talk about the Storm Hammers in earshot of witnesses - and that the note from Durgan'Torrn was a fake meant to lure the heroes to the tavern. As the Black Wrack collapses in flames, Ballast arrives on the scene, and the heroes contemplate what to do next...
--
After two sessions apart, the PCs are all back together again - well, other than Rufus and Ballast, whose players couldn't make it. This hopefully means that we can start picking on one specific plot line for a while and follow it to the end, rather than the day-to-day, plot-hook-to-plot-hook play we've been following for the last half-dozen sessions. Not that that's anyone's doing but mine, and not that that's a bad thing - but I think we need to gain some momentum and focus now, to let the narrative develop a bit more depth and to allow for some multi-encounter action scenes, rather than big spike encounters like this one. I also want to narrow things down so that there's a little more acting-as-a-group, at least for a while, rather than switching back and forth between characters - after all, the most interesting part of gaming is always the PC-PC interaction.
Everyone hit level 3 this session, although it was a near thing. I was trying to juggle encounter XP, which is straightforward, with drama-based XP, which has much squishier guidelines. I lowballed it at first, then recalculated and finally rounded it up to the point where everyone levelled. I genuinely wasn't trying to just give out an arbitrary 'enough' value, but I think that's how it came across. I'm not all that happy with the pace of progression right now - it took three sessions for the PCs to hit level 2, but 7 to hit level 3, and that's too uneven and too slow for my liking. Part of that is that I've been neglecting story-based experience, or giving out minor awards for story milestones, as the organic nature of the narrative hasn't lent itself too well to that - as a result, characters have been improving too slowly. I'm going to rethink story and roleplaying-based awards, try to codify some smaller-but meaningful story beats and milestones, and see whether we can drive progression a wee bit faster - and thus allow me to make more varied and unusual action scenes sooner.
The big fight in the Black Wrack was a little disappointing to me, as I didn't make the best possible use of the space and the options. As too often in the past, I didn't space the enemies out enough, and clustered the PCs both too close together and too close to the action, meaning there wasn't enough reason to move around. I also didn't put enough into describing the scene, so it felt a bit flat and static, despite being a room full of flames. Still, the stakes were high and the action was energetic, and the players all took the opportunity to grab spotlight time with cool moves and daily powers. I especially liked it when Kaddik shot the orc bombardier in the hand, causing his grenade to explode in his face, and pushing him to jump from a balcony and crash into the bar, setting it on fire - and when Caleb punched Kaddik in the face with a healing potion just in time to stop him from dying. And it can't be said that it wasn't a tough fight - we came damn close to a TPK, and most characters were down to single-digit HP totals at the end.
Next session - level 3! House Tharashk intrigue! Ballast being a bastard! And possibly some kind of chase scene. If I can find a reason for it.
...well, you're gonna hate this post, then, 'cos it's just me talking about yesterday's D&D session.
Details behind the cut.
As dusk falls on Stormreach, lights flicker around the twelve vision circles scattered around the town. These small rings of standing stones throw up silent images at irregular intervals - a strange phenomenon that the locals have come to accept and ignore over the decades. Tonight, though, they all come alive at once, showing an image of the Elemental Chaos. Then static cycles through the rings, faster and faster, the image coming back brighter and brighter as it passes, until suddenly a bolt of lightning erupts from a cloudless sky to strike the westernmost ring in the Oldgate district...
...and when the glare fades, the heroes who were lost in the Elemental Chaos (Rufus, Slaine, Kaddik and Caleb, along with the genasi Janda-Shen) are standing in the ring, back in the mortal world once again.
Splitting up, Kaddik and Caleb head back to their rooms at the Black Wrack, where Kaddik finds a note from Durgan'Torrn saying that he will come to the tavern to meet with them tomorrow. Caleb slips out to meet with Jaris Cantar, who berates him for letting the Key of Eleven be destroyed when the White Oubliette collapsed. Still, he pays him for his work, and tells Caleb to keep tabs on Janda-Shen, who may be key to accessing the power of the Elemental Chaos - and on Ballast, since the signet ring he's trying to sell is apparently connected to the Cantar family.
Meanwhile, Rufus heads off on his own, and Slaine and Janda-Shen go to Respite, after they obtain a hooded cloak to disguise the genasi and her crystalline hair. They tell Master Aedan what happened, and the monks consider the possibility of relocating to Dannel's Pride to protect the local Cyrans from the Storm Hammers. And while all this goes on, Spark - having lost Ballast, but witnessed the light display over the vision circles - attempts to find out what happened and where his allies have vanished to.
--
The next day, Kaddik goes to meet the gnome Valexa Von Ruthven, positing the idea of her sponsoring an expedition into the depths of Xen'drik - which is primarily a ploy to help him learn about the Tharashk outpost where his master is apparently being held. Valexa is dubious, and asks for more details about the expedition's purpose and destination, but does show him a map of the continent, where he finds the location of the prospector's supply outpost Zantashk, 1000 miles to the south-east. Meanwhile, Caleb investigates the vision circle in which they materialised the previous night, only to find it guarded by the Ninth Wands, an Aundairian military unit that has set itself up as one of Stormreach's ethnic/cultural militias. He doesn't, however, realise that the leader of the guards is Tyrnan Thiel, who rescued Spark from danger the previous day.
Eventually the team meets up at the Black Wrack, where they fill each other in on what's transpired and discuss what to do next. That conversation is cut short as the bomb explodes, the tavern erupts into flames, and a cadre of Liondrake's Roar mercenaries attack them while loudly claiming to be members of the Storm Hammers. The battle is dangerous and difficult, and the heroes barely manage to defeat the mercenaries and their armoured hobgoblin leader, before escaping the burning tavern by the skin of their teeth, and with a prisoner to question. The captured mercenary admits that he was hired to flesh out the Roar's ranks and told to talk about the Storm Hammers in earshot of witnesses - and that the note from Durgan'Torrn was a fake meant to lure the heroes to the tavern. As the Black Wrack collapses in flames, Ballast arrives on the scene, and the heroes contemplate what to do next...
--
After two sessions apart, the PCs are all back together again - well, other than Rufus and Ballast, whose players couldn't make it. This hopefully means that we can start picking on one specific plot line for a while and follow it to the end, rather than the day-to-day, plot-hook-to-plot-hook play we've been following for the last half-dozen sessions. Not that that's anyone's doing but mine, and not that that's a bad thing - but I think we need to gain some momentum and focus now, to let the narrative develop a bit more depth and to allow for some multi-encounter action scenes, rather than big spike encounters like this one. I also want to narrow things down so that there's a little more acting-as-a-group, at least for a while, rather than switching back and forth between characters - after all, the most interesting part of gaming is always the PC-PC interaction.
Everyone hit level 3 this session, although it was a near thing. I was trying to juggle encounter XP, which is straightforward, with drama-based XP, which has much squishier guidelines. I lowballed it at first, then recalculated and finally rounded it up to the point where everyone levelled. I genuinely wasn't trying to just give out an arbitrary 'enough' value, but I think that's how it came across. I'm not all that happy with the pace of progression right now - it took three sessions for the PCs to hit level 2, but 7 to hit level 3, and that's too uneven and too slow for my liking. Part of that is that I've been neglecting story-based experience, or giving out minor awards for story milestones, as the organic nature of the narrative hasn't lent itself too well to that - as a result, characters have been improving too slowly. I'm going to rethink story and roleplaying-based awards, try to codify some smaller-but meaningful story beats and milestones, and see whether we can drive progression a wee bit faster - and thus allow me to make more varied and unusual action scenes sooner.
The big fight in the Black Wrack was a little disappointing to me, as I didn't make the best possible use of the space and the options. As too often in the past, I didn't space the enemies out enough, and clustered the PCs both too close together and too close to the action, meaning there wasn't enough reason to move around. I also didn't put enough into describing the scene, so it felt a bit flat and static, despite being a room full of flames. Still, the stakes were high and the action was energetic, and the players all took the opportunity to grab spotlight time with cool moves and daily powers. I especially liked it when Kaddik shot the orc bombardier in the hand, causing his grenade to explode in his face, and pushing him to jump from a balcony and crash into the bar, setting it on fire - and when Caleb punched Kaddik in the face with a healing potion just in time to stop him from dying. And it can't be said that it wasn't a tough fight - we came damn close to a TPK, and most characters were down to single-digit HP totals at the end.
Next session - level 3! House Tharashk intrigue! Ballast being a bastard! And possibly some kind of chase scene. If I can find a reason for it.