Serpent's Skull session 4
This session say three of the four players. One guy was sick and so we decided to game by Skype but the sick player didn't even feel well enough to do that. I had been making the NPCs roles more transparent allowing the PCs to use them more and that worked out well. At the beginning of the session one PC and two NPCs went out for a few days of scouting. They killed some cannibals and got a good idea of what they were up against. Every session up till now had combat that turned out harder then I thought it would so I had made arrangements to still have good combats but not so difficult. Turned out that wasn't needed.
After the scouts came back the party started planning. They were ambushed that night by the Cannibal witch. In the book she is 4th level with a mostly used robe of bones. I made her 6th level and allowed her to repair the robe so she could make full use of it. Early in the session one player confused campaigns and started talking about the giants they had killed (that was like 4 years ago in a different system, gaming world, and campaign) so I made the ogre skeletons of the robe hill giant skeletons. One advantage of skype is that the players couldn't see that I was making huge changes on the fly.
It started with green mist that put some characters to sleep. I had the PC that wasn't there automatically fail his save, all the other PCs made theirs and half the NPCs failed. So, that combat interesting with 4 out of 10 out of the fight. The undead arrived in consecutive rounds as the witch could only animate one a round. I did that so the characters could investigate in the jungle, find the witch and maybe deal with her ahead of time. But they never did that so they fought the undead, had the witch threaten them. They threw a stone at her and she flew away.
They went an assaulted the cannibals the next day. This battle turned out a lot easier. They expended every charge of a staff of woodlands to summon creatures and animate trees. And the battle with the tribal leader and witch was cake as everyone made their saves.
They investigated under the lighthouse and fought some undead and found an ancient temple to an unknown god and pictures of serpent men. This is the first hints of what ties the campaign together. In the module it says at this point to have an event happen to remind the players that they are not to leave the island and there is more to investigate. My players for some reason never need that to happen. They are like a dog after bone when there is something unresolved they go right after it. I also had the NPCs express that they to want to know the reasons the bad woman crashed the ship on the reefs and left them to die here. What is so important on this island that she would do this? That gets answered this week.
This week should see the defeat of the chupacabra. I will make Venture Brother jokes that only one player will understand. Then we will randomly roll to see what is in this things liar. Could be something awesome or useless, only the dice can tell us. Then into the painfully short and easy final stage of the module. I'm not going to lengthen it, in fact I'm getting rid of some pointless rooms. But I am beefing it up. The first three sessions very little was changed. The session I'm writing about some things got improved. This next session things gets scaled up considerably. It will still be relevantly easy for them or should be. But it won't be the cake walk of the rest of the island.
That could take a short time and leave a good bit of the session for getting off the island. I've got that all planned out and I'm ready to introduce new NPCs and see what the PCs do when they finally get back to civilization.
After the scouts came back the party started planning. They were ambushed that night by the Cannibal witch. In the book she is 4th level with a mostly used robe of bones. I made her 6th level and allowed her to repair the robe so she could make full use of it. Early in the session one player confused campaigns and started talking about the giants they had killed (that was like 4 years ago in a different system, gaming world, and campaign) so I made the ogre skeletons of the robe hill giant skeletons. One advantage of skype is that the players couldn't see that I was making huge changes on the fly.
It started with green mist that put some characters to sleep. I had the PC that wasn't there automatically fail his save, all the other PCs made theirs and half the NPCs failed. So, that combat interesting with 4 out of 10 out of the fight. The undead arrived in consecutive rounds as the witch could only animate one a round. I did that so the characters could investigate in the jungle, find the witch and maybe deal with her ahead of time. But they never did that so they fought the undead, had the witch threaten them. They threw a stone at her and she flew away.
They went an assaulted the cannibals the next day. This battle turned out a lot easier. They expended every charge of a staff of woodlands to summon creatures and animate trees. And the battle with the tribal leader and witch was cake as everyone made their saves.
They investigated under the lighthouse and fought some undead and found an ancient temple to an unknown god and pictures of serpent men. This is the first hints of what ties the campaign together. In the module it says at this point to have an event happen to remind the players that they are not to leave the island and there is more to investigate. My players for some reason never need that to happen. They are like a dog after bone when there is something unresolved they go right after it. I also had the NPCs express that they to want to know the reasons the bad woman crashed the ship on the reefs and left them to die here. What is so important on this island that she would do this? That gets answered this week.
This week should see the defeat of the chupacabra. I will make Venture Brother jokes that only one player will understand. Then we will randomly roll to see what is in this things liar. Could be something awesome or useless, only the dice can tell us. Then into the painfully short and easy final stage of the module. I'm not going to lengthen it, in fact I'm getting rid of some pointless rooms. But I am beefing it up. The first three sessions very little was changed. The session I'm writing about some things got improved. This next session things gets scaled up considerably. It will still be relevantly easy for them or should be. But it won't be the cake walk of the rest of the island.
That could take a short time and leave a good bit of the session for getting off the island. I've got that all planned out and I'm ready to introduce new NPCs and see what the PCs do when they finally get back to civilization.