Session three was something completely different

Session 2

The game begins with the party on the hill overlooking the burning town trying to decide what to do.  Their mission is to deliver a book to a monastery and then sit around for a month collecting their pay.  It has nothing to do with saving a town from a horde of flesh eating monsters.  They are in debate when 5 of the nasty zombies crest the hill they are on and attempt to eat their faces off.  The party wipes the floor with the creatures.  One oddity of the event was one of the creatures has a sword run through it from back to front.  This person appears to have once been a wizard of some sort and once they slay him again, Spitz the quick thinking filches a ring and a wand from the corpse.  Now the party can hear the screams from the Inn of those trapped inside.  They put caution to the wind and charge in to take the assailants from behind.  They quickly realize there are a large number of the creatures around the Inn.  What they do not realize is I assumed they would be more cautious and done at least a bit of reconnaissance around the building before charging in.  So I rolled to see if the group on the other side of the building would take interest in the noise and join the fray. Luckily for our heroes I rolled a 00 which I figured should be interpreted as the creatures wander away rather than join the attack.  What the party still had not come to grips with was these are not undead zombies and can not be turned nor affected by spells that affect only undead.  So much to Ryans disgust when he attempted to pass invisibility to undead he instead found himself quite visible and somewhat edible.  He was critically hit and knocked unconscious.  Two of the creatures piled on him and began what could only be considered a rip and tear fest on his entrails.  He had moments to live before Jims cleric of lathander saved the day with a cure spell.  During this time the barbarian attempted to crash through the barricaded door.  Now I really have no idea what he was going for but I told him it was obviously barricaded from behind and had been withstanding the barrage of the creatures quite nicely.  He charged in trying to bash through and rolled a crit failure.  I determined he would bounce off the door and needed to make a dex check to stay upright.  He failed this and was pounced on by our gnashing friends.  They bit him and he failed his save.

Ill let that sink in.

So the party finishes off the exterior and meets the guests that were barricaded in.  There are a few NPCs from the village along with the tavern keeper and his wife and a few children.  Two of the trapped NPCs are evil and see an opportunity to escape and just bail.  The rest of the trapped offer their help to the party but once they see that the barbarian is falling ill they decide it is better if the party kill their friend or they will have to do it for them.  The two wizards and the cleric put their heads together and attempt to combine all of their knowledge of healing into creating a cure for this plague.  I allow them to roll to see if they come up with anything and they roll well.  I considered the options and I decided to allow the barbarian another saving throw for his condition.  He rolls his d30 which we allow once per play session per character.  He rolls a 7 on the d30 which again means he fails.  He decides to raid the bar and end his time on earth in a drunken stupor.  The party knows now that he only has hours to live and wait for him to be quite drunk and then kill him.  It was a good effort on the part of the healers to try to save their mate but to no avail.

So Jef now had to come up with a new character which we just determined was one of the trapped NPCS in the Inn.  He rolled up a dwarven fighter and off we went. 

From the Inn keeper they learned there was an elf that came to town a few days earlier.  This elf met with the town elders over the course of a few days as well as wandered around the town freely.  When the outbreak occurred the elf had vanished but the townsfolk had too much to do trying to heal those that they saw as falling ill not realizing they had caught a much more deadly virus than the flu.  So the party realized from the description of the elf that they had seen this elf leaving town as they fought the creatures on the hill overlooking town.  

They decided to trail the elf.  The path lead them to an old abandoned keep that was horribly decayed by time and the elements.  They proceeded into the ruin and were promptly set upon by a squad of human troopers who were wearing a spider symbol on their gear.  The troop was attempting to hold off the party while one of their group jumped down a hole that led to the dungeon of the keep.  The party made short work of the troopers and moved down into the dungeon.  They found several passageways to explore.  

Upon going down a flight of stairs there was a heavy rumbling from the ceiling and an iron gate fell separating the party into two groups.  The grate made enough noise that it alerted the bugbear guards.  8 bugbears move from their lair and begin to assault the party.  

Through a judicious use of flaming oil and a cleric of lathander that leapt into the fray, the party made it through the bugbears mostly unscathed.  However the combat alerted the other guards, a troop of gnolls.  The gnolls were also quickly dispatched but what the party did not know was one of the gnolls went to find the priest and his minions to bring them the news of the incursion.  The party had only a few minutes before the cleric would arrive but they were unaware this was going to happen.  They slew the gnollls and begin to think they need to rest because they are out of spells and now have some wounds but the priest of the dungeon was not  going to let them heal up.  He led his troop of 5 soldiers into the party.  He began to chant and cast spells supporting his troops.  

The fighters had to carry the majority of this fight and I honestly thought it was going to turn very badly for the party. 

 One of the enemy warriors was 4^th level and specialized in long sword and he was wearing platemail.  The lower level fighters were wearing scale mail and as such were also very hard for the party to hit.  But a few natural 20s later the fighters were nearly dead and the cleric had to wade into the fight.  However, the party did notice there was a black-haired elven female that the cleric addressed as “my lady” and he told her to flee.  The evil cleric did lay into the party with his staff which was clearly magical and it sent our priest of lathander flying across the room nearly dead.  The party rushed to finish off the cleric and then chase after the female elf.  They find a temple dedicated to an unknown spidergod.  One of the tapestries has an image of the world completely shrouded in spiderwebs.  On a dias is a sealed cask which the paladin can clearly sense as evil and the wizards can tell it is magically sealed.  The female elf escaped apparently by going down a crack in the wall by magical means.  The dwarf can tell the crack leads to the underdark…

Here ended session two

This is sort of long...sorry.


Alrighty, I am going to attempt to chronicle my first dungeons and dragons campaign in over 20 years.  I am calling it Dies Irae or day of wrath.  We will be using AD&D second edition in a slimmed down form.  Many of the players wanted to bring in their favorite specialty books once they found out the format was going to be second edition.  For those of you that don't remember, there were MANY MANY supplements to 2nd edition.  So many that I felt a bit overloaded and decided to just have the players role play whatever specialty class they wanted to use and I figured after we got a few sessions under our belts I could transition characters over to those specialty classes.  We will see how that goes.

Player creation.  I wanted the characters to roll up something that would be playable.  I figure we are doing epic heroic fantasy so we should get some characters with good stats.  Roll playing an epic fighter with a strength of 8 may be humorous, epic it probably wont be.  So we rolled 4d6 discarding the lowest die seven times and discarding the lowest set and arrange to taste.  Further I allowed a 2 for 1 bump letting characters add 1 to a single stat if they removed 2 points from another stat with the assumption that you would roll play any deficiency that you created.  So if you made CHA a dump stat you would be expected to role play that stat.  All of this to say we ended up with some fairly good stats to be assigned.  We ended up with the following classes.
Gorson- Human cleric of lathander played by Jim
Orderor Tigersoul a human monk played by Dave
Ravan the Elf Ranger played by JJ
Carlos the Human Paladin of Tyr played by Justin
Tharquin the half elf cleric magicuser played by Ryan
Torn the Human fighter played by norm
Spitz the human wizard played by Marcus
Fjords Ulfson the human barbarian played by Jef

The setting in forgotten realms over 1000 years after the War of the Gods or the Time of troubles.  For those of you that don't know, the war of the gods had the gods of the realms walking the earth and waging a war of good vs evil.  Good triumphed but at a horrific cost.  What the players see around them are the temples of good falling into disrepair as fewer and fewer attendees worship at their temples.  The gods of neutrality are flourishing and the gods of evil are also seemingly absent.  The Paladin is a follower of Tyr which is a lawful good god but what he finds is that his "order of the sword" is really made of fighters who follow the old rituals of paladin hood but are not actually able to cast spells, detect evil or turn undead.  They know the rituals but the power from their Deity just doesn't seem to flow.  The town of waterdeep is falling into decay.  About half of the buildings are abandoned and those that are occupied are mostly run down and ill repaired.  The lords of waterdeep long ago were swept aside for a single lord who rules by decree.  Picture the soviet bloc during the cold war and you have an idea of what I was going for.

The party met in the Yawning Portal Inn.  This Inn was once an entrance into a vast dungeon beneath the city of waterdeep. That dungeon called the under halls was long ago swept clean and sealed up by an ancient archmage named Roland.  The Portal or well in the center of the inn is still there but a few meters below ground level there is a barrier of radiant energy that the party was warned to not try to touch.  Anything dropped into the barrier vanishes in a puff of smoke and vapor.

The party learns it is illegal to be homeless within 50 miles of the city and they will have to come up with about 1 gold piece per day to survive.  The Yawning portal inn is the home of the adventurers guild and as such they have access to many sources of work.  They could hire themselves out as caravan guards or perhaps as guards to any of the local merchants.  After a few days of getting their gear together they are approached by someone who identifies himself as Old Pete.  Pete has been told to get the party to come see Blackbart.  Bart is a merchant prince who lives in a mansion shaped like a sailing ship.  They are also approached by a hugely fat eunuch who is a servant of Hlethveg, another merchant prince in the city.  After a series of conversations with the two merchants they decide to take a job with Hlethveg.  He requires them to take a book to a distant monastery to be illuminated by the monks.

It was going to  take 10 days of travel to get to the monastery.  On the 7th day they were overrun with small animals they were fleeing from what could only be described as a zombified cougar.  Gorson bravely presented his holy symbol in an effort to turn the creature but nothing seemed to happen.  The cougar slammed into the warrior Torn and proceeded to chew on him..After a successful bite on the warrior I asked Norm to roll a saving throw which he failed.  The party dispatched the cougar and proceeded on the way to the monastery.  A few hours later Torn begins to get sick and feel generally ill.  Realizing he has been poisoned or diseased by the cougar the Paladin attempts to cure the disease.  Remember that the gods have seemingly turned away from their worshipers and no paladin has successfully cured anything for centuries but I allowed the attempt.  I rolled to see if his attempt was possible and I got a 00 on percentile dice.  I figured this should be a good omen and allowed the cure to go through but with some ailing side effects.  Torn lost a d4 from his constitution but he would now live to fight another day.

The party approaches a small village that is on their line of march to the monastery and they begin to smell smoke.  As they come out of the woods they see the village of Homily is burning.  There are shadowy figures moving around the burning buildings with a large cluster of them surrounding one of the few buildings that is not on fire.  They appear to be battering on the door and boarded up windows trying to get in.  At this moment rushing out of the darkness are 4 humans that appear to be wounded.  They are sliced and burned and badly mauled by something but they are charging the party at a frightening speed howling some inhuman wail.  The party wades in with the clerics both attempting to turn what they fear are zombies.  Now in AD&D zombies are the slow moving classic monsters.  If these creatures are zombies they are more of the 28days later version.  They clerics boldly presented their holy symbols expecting the flash of the power of their deities smiting the undead but nothing happened.  The 4 creatures crash into the party and begin to attack with tooth and claw.  On each successful bite hit the player has to make a saving throw versus poison.  Everyone that gets bit makes their saves this time.  The monsters once killed begin to regenerate and rise back up to continue the attack.  Orderor the Monk decides to use his sickle and slice open the head of one of the creatures and this time it does not rise after it falls.  Now they have decided these are some sort of 28 days later biological zombie rather than a magic creature of undeath.

The party makes their way around the town to a small hill that has an unfinished tower that looks like it was under construction but is now burning and collapsing.  Scattered around the hill are many slain humans that look like they were caught by surprise.  Some have only partial armour on and many have no armour at all but appear to be warriors.  There are scattered weapons around and as they search the tower area they are attacked by another wave of the blighted humans.  They dispatch this group quite easily and bash the brains of all but one in.  One of the creatures they take the head and stuff it in a bag.  It continues to snap and chew at anything it can get its teeth in even disembodied as it is.

Here ends the first play session.  The party is left discussing what to do about the Inn at the center of town that is besieged by the creatures.

Remembering twenty-one years

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The girls on a rock.