I run a 4th Edition D&D campaign set in Eberron, usually every other Sunday. I’ll be documenting the campaign here as we go forward—not (just) to feed my own hubristic impulses, but to break down what did and didn’t work in each session, what I’ll try to do to improve things next session, and a few teasers about the next session (assuming I can accurately predict anything a group of players will end up doing!)
The (Very Incomplete) Backstory:
Currently, the PCs are working as a group in the small town of Nowhere in Breland. Nowhere is a town of about 2,000 people, about half of whom live and work in the House Orien enclave there: Nowhere is situated at the lightning rail junction south of Hatheril and south-west of Vathirond, and its entire economy is based around the cargoes and passengers that pass through the town. They’ve come back to Nowhere at the behest of its guard captain, one Kaius Romani, who presented them with a problem: The captain has been the victim of an unusual blackmail scheme for about a month. The anonymous blackmailer has not demanded money—rather, he or she has demanded that Nowhere’s guards be assigned to particular ‘beats’ in the town.
After a day of investigation, the party’s suspicions came to rest on one Kolmar Hamholm, a vicious-looking dwarf with a bad reputation in town, and his employer Simeon ir’Bettarn, a wealthy merchant with widespread investments and who employs Kolmar as his ‘factor’ in Nowhere. Additionally, with the help of Captain Romani the PCs have picked out several guards whom they believe might be particularly susceptible to bribery or blackmail themselves, and who might be the reason the blackmailer wanted the guards moved about. Most of those guards patrol the southern section of Nowhere, colloquially called “Trackside”.
We pick up our story at dusk, as the party troops back to “The Blue Bull” (where their rooms in town are)…
Play Summary:
When the party arrives back at “The Blue Bull”, they find a distraught woman waiting for them. After the party agrees to a private audience with her, she introduces herself as Sariah Fatwick (third cousin to one of the guards the party attempted to interrogate.) Her problem is simple: Sariah believes that her husband, Himil Fatwick, is possessed. His behavior had been bizarre for two weeks prior, but the previous day he simply went to work and never came back. Being unable to convince the city watch that his disappearance is of any concern—their marriage is notorious for vehement arguments, and Himil had once previously abandoned her for another woman for a full week—she came to the PCs in the hope that they could find Himil.
The PCs quickly learn from Sariah that her husband works for Kolmar Hamholm (alarm bells started ringing in my players’ heads at this point, I think) as a porter, hauling goods between the lightning rail and a warehouse in Trackside. They also learn that her husband has been acting as if he were sleepwalking or dreaming, coming home later and later each evening, and in his stupor occasionally muttered something about a “new opportunity” that would “make them rich”. Two of the PCs—the warforged Koh’Rel and the changeling Dexter (in the guise of a rather plain human)—escort her home while the rest of the party makes plans. (“We’re here to ask a dwarf about a man.”)
To confirm their suspicions, they decide to surreptitiously question another guard who patrols Trackside, one Jasin Shackler. Shackler is a notorious womanizer and braggart, so Dexter shapeshifted into the form of a comely woman, tracked down Shackler, and let him buy her drinks and brag at her. None of his boasts were of much consequence, but Dexter did quickly notice that despite spending a month patrolling that section of town, he had no tales of Gryphon Street, the longest street in Trackside.
After returning to the rest of the party and turning back into a man, Dexter led the party into Trackside. They carefully watched Gryphon Street for over two hours, and determined that the night watch also carefully avoided a particular stretch of the road. The party split up at this point—Dexter, Koh’Rel and Guy (a human wizard) interrogated the night watch while Torrin, a dragonborn fighter, and Vance, a human artificer, took a closer look at the warehouse. Torrin helped Vance climb up the rough wall of the warehouse and peer through a window high up on the wall; from there, Vance noticed a very heavy contingent of guards inside—at least three for this single warehouse. After clambering back down (and managing to go up and down the wall quietly) Torrin and Vance went back for the other three.
Those three badgered and threatened the pair of night watchmen until they gave in and admitted that Kolmar Hamholm had asked them to avoid patrolling near the warehouse; one was being paid, and the other’s gambling debts were being held over him to elicit cooperation. After further recriminations and a warning that if their story didn’t check out they’d almost certainly be fired from their posts, they were sent scurrying off to finish their patrol.
At this point, the party quickly prepared for a fight. The warehouse had three locked doors (aside from a massive and barred pair of cargo doors), so the PCs split up: Vance unlocked the southern door and quietly slipped inside with Guy as Koh’Rel kicked in the northern door and Torrin kicked in the eastern one (Dexter followed Torrin inside.) The guards were surprised, and despite their moderate skill—and the assistance of a trained pair of guard drakes—they were quickly overcome. The last guard was more than willing to talk to save his own hide, and pointed the party to a hidden trapdoor under some crates. That trapdoor opened into a stone-lined tunnel that leads off into darkness…
What Worked
Introducing Sariah worked very well. She’s a fairly memorable NPC—she’s connected to another NPC the party spent some time talking to in the last session, and her sob story of “Of course the guards don’t believe me; they think my husband just ran out on me, like last time!” was an instant hook, being both humorous and pathetic. She also served to confirm the players’ suspicions while avoiding any sense of railroading: She didn’t know anything, but as she spoke several things “clicked” into place for the players. I was pretty proud of how that worked out, especially since Sariah originally was an emergency “get back to the plot” NPC in case the players got way off track. Goes to show that you needn’t stop developing NPCs in your head once you place them into your story.
The players’ use of social skills also worked well. There wasn’t really room for a skill challenge here, because frankly there wasn’t much of a challenge. The players—especially Vance’s player—had done a ton of legwork in the previous two sessions, and this was part of the payoff. They did a great job following up on the Gryphon Street hint with the three guards, and I think that did all right. I’d have liked to trim some of that down (see the “What Didn’t Work” section below), just because Dexter’s the party’s “face” and social scenes tend to grant him the spotlight, but everyone got some Intimidate checks in. Additionally, the two fighters had the opportunity to make Aid Another checks to help Dexter intimidate the night watchmen, which I think helped keep them involved.
Vance and Torrin working together to help Vance climb the wall and peer inside worked perfectly. It gave them intelligence about the upcoming combat and served to confirm their suspicions about the warehouse (which they took back to Dexter, and which Dexter then used to finally break the two night watchmen’s resistance to his questioning.) While it’s tempting to try to keep players in the dark about what’s coming up (most GMs love springing surprises on the party), there’s real value in developing a sense of anticipation, and in letting the players know limited information about what they’ll soon be facing.
The fight also went very well, though mostly for technical reasons. I’m using MapTools and Skype to run this campaign, and for this session I took the time to develop macros for all the enemies’ attacks and effects, for taking damage, and for rolling initiative. As a result, despite this fight lasting twice as many rounds as previous fights I ran them through, the actual time involved was nearly the same. Enemy attacks took much less time and the initiative tracker sped things along very nicely. I also tried to warn the next player that they were “on deck”, and that quick reminder made sure that everyone had their actions planned out. That meant a lot less time lost to decision-making and a lot more time having fun.
Also, a pair of guard drakes working in tandem are scary. A second-level monster who does 1d10+9 damage if there’s an ally within two squares? I dropped Vance (the artificer) to bloodied in the first round of combat, which made things a lot more exciting and got the fight off to a good start.
What Didn’t Work
I’m having a lot of trouble pulling everyone who isn’t playing the party face into social scenes. In particular, Guy’s and Torrin’s players don’t get involved much at all; Guy has a pretty solid Insight check but not much in the way of other social skills, and Torrin has practically none at all. Since I want this campaign to have a lot of intrigue, that’s a big problem—I can’t have two players sitting out half the time.
This also results in players getting bored and announcing that they’re doing some other crazy thing. This happened more last session but reared its head now and again this time around. I know I contribute to it a bit by periodically saying “Okay, what are you doing?”—quickly I’ve got the PCs splitting up, and suddenly I (and everyone else) are tracking multiple plotlines. Tricky, confusing and very hard to keep up with.
I also need become a better judge of combats. The fight in the warehouse involved three warehouse guards—3rd-level “Human Mercenary” creatures from the DDI Compendium, with a different outward appearance—and two 2nd-level guard drakes. Total XP value was 700; the “average” XP equivalent for a fight for five 2nd-level PCs is 625, but they’d blown through the previous fights with ease. This one took a lot longer, and I think it’s because I chose only brutes and soldiers—high HP monsters who were able to either do lots of damage (the drakes) or daze the PCs with a save-ends push effect (the guards). The Human Mercenary’s “Press the Advantage” attack recharges on a 5 or 6, pushes its target one square, and applies that “dazed (save ends)” effect, and that slowed the fight down a lot. If the fighters can’t close and attack in the same round their effectiveness is drastically reduced. It was a good fight, but it took a while and I frankly expected it to use up fewer of the PCs resources than it did.
Also I need to find some way to pre-load encounter maps through MapTools without revealing the map to the players ahead of time. We lost about ten minutes during the loading process. I’m not sure this was a bad thing, though, as it made us take a break and everyone came back refreshed.
Lastly, this recap process is really long, and I need to find some way to shorten it. I’m at nearly 2,000 words here!
Up Next: The PCs explore a secret tunnel that extends beneath House Orien’s enclave in Nowhere, on the trail of a dangerous dwarf and a missing man…
4 Comments until now
Nice work. I’d like to offer encouragement to keep it up.
A bit of player feedback (horrors!) from the “face’s” point of view:
The social encounters are probably about right, but I think that the huge gap in social skills between the characters makes it a bit tricky. A skill check for a level 2 character is DC 15 – 25. Dexter, the face, has at least a 10 in his social skills, and can get up to a 19 in Bluff with the beguiling tongue warlock utility power. Besides one of the fighters having trained intimidate, I don’t believe there is much else in the way of social skills over 5 – some may be at a 0 modifier. This huge difference in skill levels make it hard to plan for even difficulty levels across the board – either Dexter blows through everything or the others don’t stand a chance in a social setting, which could stall things out and make for a boring game. Guy’s player has shown that given the opportunity to role play an investigation encounter rather than roll play. Unfortunately, this can slow down the game significantly for otherwise fairly insignificant encounters with minor PC’s. There are times when a die roll could suffice to keep the story moving (though I will happily note that Guy’s player did an outstanding job of really milking the NPC for information in character).
It’s just boiling down to balancing the time input for each of the encounters in order to keep the game moving and interesting for everyone. Also, splitting the party isn’t just confusing for the DM. It’s really hard to follow for the players, too. Of course, keeping us from splitting up is easier said than done.
Also, about the combat – We tended to blast past the previous encounters by using the terrain to our advantage as much as possible. This last encounter, the setup was not our friend, and we had to split the party to prevent anyone escaping from the building. Three entrances meant we had to split 1/2/2, and that meant one group with two “squishies” was our only decent option. The artificer and wizard were immediately pounded by the guard drakes. Brutes in melee with an artificer and wizard is not exactly a good thing for the party. Something to consider when we have multiple entrances next time. We may need to risk a chase scene and not cover a door or two.
I think perhaps the push & daze attacks may have our fighters considering some ranged weapons for situations where they just can’t close with the enemy.
Oh, and those guard drakes are nasty buggers!
A bit of player feedback (horrors!) from the “face’s” point of view:
The social encounters are probably about right, but I think that the huge gap in social skills between the characters makes it a bit tricky. A skill check for a level 2 character is DC 15 – 25. Dexter, the face, has at least a 10 in his social skills, and can get up to a 19 in Bluff with the beguiling tongue warlock utility power. Besides one of the fighters having trained intimidate, I don’t believe there is much else in the way of social skills over 5 – some may be at a 0 modifier. This huge difference in skill levels make it hard to plan for even difficulty levels across the board – either Dexter blows through everything or the others don’t stand a chance in a social setting, which could stall things out and make for a boring game. Guy’s player has shown that given the opportunity to role play an investigation encounter rather than roll play. Unfortunately, this can slow down the game significantly for otherwise fairly insignificant encounters with minor PC’s. There are times when a die roll could suffice to keep the story moving (though I will happily note that Guy’s player did an outstanding job of really milking the NPC for information in character).
It’s just boiling down to balancing the time input for each of the encounters in order to keep the game moving and interesting for everyone. Also, splitting the party isn’t just confusing for the DM. It’s really hard to follow for the players, too. Of course, keeping us from splitting up is easier said than done.
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