July 13, Saturday (cont.) - The group finished exploring the small laboratory dungeon and comes upon a door with a glowing magical runes written on it. Duncan the wizard reads that they say "Dwarves say door." Thalmyr the dwarven paladin speaks the word "door" in dwarvish and the runes fade. They open the door and go into the chamber beyond. The part of the chamber near the door is a finished chamber, but the far side blends into a natural cavern.
A gray tarp is discovered to be hiding a small crawlway to a series of caves and passages. In the series of 7 or 8 caverns, the party kills a group of 6 gnolls in one encounter, kills a pair of gricks and a pair of grells in another, and finds the decaying dead body of a 7 foot tall lizard-like creature. They discover both a cave entrance to the surface (on the far side of a hill just west of the ruins), and a passage that seems to lead far down.
They camp on the surface near the cave entrance for one last night above ground.
July 14, Sunday - Into the Underdark. A full day's descent toward the location called Crystal Landing. Camp just short of Crystal Landing.
July 15, Monday - The group arrives at Crystal Landing and sees a group of gnolls below them, guessing that they are a different bunch of the same group that they killed in the caves near the surface two days earlier. They surprise the gnolls and are able to defeat them, Malachi and Thalmyr taking some damage in the process.
 |
| Crystal Landing and more gnolls |
As they are investigating the huge and wondrous cavern filled with giant rock crystal formations, they hear noises coming. They hide, and a small drow elf merchant pack train of giant lizards passes through the center of the cavern (heading east, the way the party needs to go). The party decides not to attack.
 |
| Fighting Gnolls |
After they let an hour or so go by, the party follows the drow group out the east passage, which is a wide and well-maintained road...
GM Commentary - I really enjoyed bringing out some of my new toys for this session. I wanted Crystal Landing to be an impactful visual moment as we began the Underdark story arc, and I think it went over well. It definitely as the "wow" moment I was hoping for.
[January 2017: I also think it is fair to say, looking back, that this was the first of a series of several sessions where I became so enamored of the terrain that I was crafting (and having a huge amount of fun doing it almost as a standalone hobby), that I lost track of certain other things that I could have been focusing a little bit more on. Also, spending time focusing on a few cool visual encounters per session (each of which take a while to play out) made it such that the journey to the Tombs probably took a session or two longer than it could have. It's easy to fall into the trap of wanting to use all of the cool stuff you are making and lose a bit of objectivity on some of the choices you are making. I'm trying to be mindful of this moving forward, and make sure that the crafting serves the game and not vice versa.
No comments:
Post a Comment