It’s been a while since we played, but we managed to sync up schedules this past Sunday and play. As is usual when we haven’t played for an extended period, the game was fairly scattered, as socializing took precedence over actual play.
But play we did.
Given how distracted everyone (including me) was, I tried to scale back the complexity of the encounters, with some success. The party was investigating the temple that they’d sheltered in after the battle with the dragon last session, trying to find the centre of the magical energy and device that was causing the island to slip through time. They used Arcana and Dungeoneering to navigate the Arkhosian construction towards the source of the power, and the control room they figure must be at the top of the temple. And, of course, they ran into some of the guardians.
I scavenged some of the encounters I had seeded elsewhere on the island to populate the temple, and the one they ran into was a collection of wights, battle wights, and a few glyphs of warding. To make things a little less complicated, I laid it out in a manner that meant the party would only have to face the wights and one of the glyphs initially, but if they went through one of the other doors, they would get hit with another glyph and possibly the battle wights. They managed to put down the wights in good time*, but the distracted players meant that no one was listening to each other, and managed to trigger another glyph when the rogue went through the doorway rather than checking it for traps, despite other players telling him to stop.
I let them take that action back, and they spent a fair bit of time disarming the glyph. Then they blew the disarm roll on the other glyph and froze a few of themselves, while the battle wights opened the doors from the far side and attacked, backed up by the dragon.
Well, my complete surprise kind of got derailed, because the ranger had rebuilt his character with an ability that lets a bunch of his allies just not get surprised. So the hit-and-run, shielded-by-brutes attack that I had planned for the dragon wasn’t nearly as great as I had expected. He got in a blast of breath weapon, but the dwarf fighter was right up in his face again*, smacking him around, so he ran sooner than I had planned.
This little attack accomplished two things: first, the party now knows that the dragon’s going to be stalking them through the temple, sniping at them and running away, which is going to make them pay attention to stuff. Second, they really hate that dragon, now.
That was where we left it. I’m looking at probably two more sessions to wrap up this adventure. And then we’ll have to see where the party wants to go from there. There is a chance that they’ll be trapped in some past era, so I can’t plan too far ahead, but I’ve got some ideas, and I know they do, too.
*Man, I like the mechanics on the wights. Draining healing surges and shifting after a hit. They’re skirmishers, and they really feel like skirmishers. Back
*Blue dragons, being artillery, are most effective at range. They can mix it up hand-to-hand, but it’s not their comfort zone. Back
That dragon must die.