Tag: D&D Encounters

After taking a bunch of short rests to maximize healing, the party continued following the stone markers deeper into the swampland in search of Benwick and the Black Dragons.

We played a double session last week so the party for this encounter remained unchanged at seven. There was Berrian, Hagen, Sola, a Dragonborn Sorcerer, a crossbow-firing Human Rogue, a Human Wizard and a Human Cavalier. With a party this large the DM had to add more monsters in order to keep things challenging. I think his modifications over the past two encounters were balanced and appropriate given the party’s composition.

Any time you have seven players in the party you know combat will take a long time. This week’s encounter took us over two hours to complete. We took a serious pounding, which I’ll describe below. In order to keep this write-up to a reasonable length I’m going to skip over some of the more routine actions and just focus on the most exciting, interesting, stupid or controversial things. So just because I don’t account for everyone’s actions every round don’t think they weren’t contributing.

The party approached a clearing as quietly as they could and most of the PCs made adequate Stealth checks. Sola and the Cavalier, both wearing heavy metal armor, stood apart from those hiding as they brazenly walked along the path in plain sight. When they entered the clearing they saw a giant lizardfolk Bruiser standing atop a ruined dais.

Never underestimate the how quickly you’ll get an audience with the Lord of the keep when you announce that dragons are going to attack. Of course, having a solid reputation for heroism and a couple of witnesses to corroborate your claims doesn’t hurt things either.

We began right where we left off last week. We’d just defeated Benwick’s men, killing Gorn and subduing the others. Upon learning the details of Benwick’s plan from his cronies, we marched our prisoners directly to the inner court where we demanded an immediate audience with Lord Drysdale. His guards were somewhat reluctant and even suspicious of us initially, but mention of two black dragons en route to level the castle had a way of getting them to grant us the audience we requested.

This week’s encounter picked up with the party still trekking through the dungeon. Our party was made up of the same five heroes that entered the dungeon last week: Berrian, Quinn, Sola, an Assassin and a Wizard. It looked like this encounter was going to be nothing more than straight up combat with minimal role-playing opportunities. That was until Sola decided to shake things up a bit.

Before the party opened and passed through the doors, Sola had two things she wanted to discuss with the party. Her first suggestion was to re-activate the statue before they left the room from last week’s encounter – that way if anyone tried to follow the party deeper into the dungeon they would have to deal with the trap. The party agreed that this was a good idea; unfortunately we were unable to re-activate the trap.

Sola’s second suggestion was about division of treasure. Splitting gold three ways seemed unfair. After all the party was doing all the dangerous work. She was also not convinced that Benwick was being 100% honest with the party. So if the PCs decided to keep all of the gold what could Benwick and Gorn do about it? After all, they wanted to keep things quiet. If silence was that important then they’d have no recourse against the party if we changed the deal. If Gorn’s true interest was in the Dwarven Ruins as he said then as long as we gave those to him he should be content, if not a bit irked. The rest of the party had misgivings about not standing by the arranged agreement, but they said they’d think about it and we’d figure it out before we left the dungeon.