Saturday, January 31, 2015

Campaign Journal 6 - The Valley of Castle Langborne

When we last left our heroes (a month ago), they had traveled through some of the halfling villages in the eastern Silver Hills in search of information on more Onorian ruins. They had found a halfling in Shadyvale who told them the tale of Alferith Langborne, and the party made their way to the location of Castle Langborne. They had arrived at a secluded valley, and saw ruins of a castle on the slopes of a hill perhaps half a mile away across the valley to the west...
Player's Map - Castle Langborne Valley

The characters began just west of the stream crossing on the players' map above. As they made their way down the trail heading westward toward the ruins, they came to a fork in the trail. Right around this time, they noticed wisps of smoke coming from their left, down in the stream valley to the south. They took the southwest fork of the trail, moving cautiously, and came upon a campsite on the banks of the stream (marked "C"on the map). The campsite had the smoking embers of a fire, two dead human warriors, and signs of a larger struggle.
Campsite

Searching the campsite, they found a bloody trail leading into a thicket to the north, signs that something heavy had been dragged westward down the trail, and signs of something having slid down the stream bank just east of the pool, into the stream. Some additional investigation by Malachy and Duncan found a similar slide mark (18 inches wide) on the far bank of the stream another 30-40 feet downstream, with signs of something moving off into the brush heading southeast.

Those back at the campsite following the blood trail into the thicket found the unconscious but alive body of a young human, who, when healed, proved to be a sage of Talengard named Eustace of Jasla. Eustace's tale was that he is studying the elder realm of Onoria, and hired a band of four adventurers to escort him from Linden to a site he had identified in his researches as Brin-Dendra, the "Hawks' Nest", a stronghold of the Tramantine family in Onorian times. Shortly after arriving in the valley the previous evening, they were set upon by a huge humanoid figure and two very large dogs. The adventurers (two warriors, a human spellcaster and a halfling rogue) were definitely taking the worst of things when Eustace was wounded and crawled into the thicket to fall unconscious.

There was no sign of a halfling or a human spellcaster in the camp.

The party decided to follow the signs near the slide marks on the stream banks first, and were easily able to follow the signs to a spot on the slopes of the hill to the southeast (marked "S" on the map) where they spotted a gigantic snake curled up and sunning itself on a rock ledge. Judging from the thickness of the snake, they estimated that it might be 25-30 feet long. After a brief discussion, they decided to leave it alone and headed back to the campsite.

Next they headed west down the trail, following the pronounced drag marks. After a little while the trail came to a "T", with the tracks leading south across the stream and into a patch of woods. Moving carefully through the woods, they came to a spot where they could see a ruined stone building up against a small cliff on the hillside above them (marked "T" on the map above). They spotted a large dog, which moved off to the southwest without detecting them.

Creeping forward, they made enough noise approaching the ruined building that another dog (a mastiff) heard them, and began barking while charging at them. They dispatched the mastiff easily enough, but as they were doing so, a horrific creature (which turned out to be a troll) burst out of the ruins and attacked.
Ruins with Troll

The ensuing combat, which included the reappearance of the other dog, was a close run affair. A single troll can deal a lot of damage, absorb plenty, and regenerate if not burned with fire. By the time the fight was over, Badric (the cleric) and Mordecai (the fighter) were unconscious. Everyone else but Duncan (the wizard) had taken very significant damage. Duncan has used all of his spells, Melior (the druid) had used all of his when adding in the post-battle healing, and Badric has used one of his.

They also learned the lesson of a troll being mostly dead versus really dead.

By the time the fight was over, it was late in the afternoon (of Friday April 12), and the characters would need to decide what to do next. We leave them in the immediate aftermath of the fight, standing over the body of a troll, outside of a ruined building as the sun begins to sink below the western hills...

The Sage's Commentary - It had been four weeks since we played last, and it was proving extremely difficult to get a quorum of three out of our four players. In order to move the story forward (and also because I was anxious to play), three of us got together for a brief two hour session. The short session was eventful, had one of our better combat encounters yet, and did accomplish the primary goal of moving the story forward. The players now have some additional options to consider, not the least of which is that the fight with the troll, a significant challenge for six 2nd level characters, granted them enough experience to reach third level. They will require some training back in town (or somewhere) to gain all of these benefits, but when they do choose to do that, several of the characters (notably the rogue, the barbarian, and the fighter), will gain significant class benefits. I'm excited because the level advancements make the characters more interesting (insofar as all six will now have made their primary "career path" or subclass choice), and more capable of dealing with a much wider range of challenges. More and more of the Monster Manual becomes accessible in a way other than "run for your lives!"

On another positive note, I finally bothered to figure out how to use the new(ish) wireless all-in-one printer/scanner/copier to scan some of the hand drawn maps and things that I have created for our campaign. Which beats taking a crappy photo of them to post here. Now if I could just figure out how to get the scanned images to appear larger when clicked on here, like real photos do...

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