Our intrepid adventures continued to explore the ground floor of the house. Only to discover an alternative route down to the basement to a wine cellar.
It was in the wine cellar they found an armour clad corpse. Which Dotty searched and was attacked by a swarm of rot grubs. Luckily some quick thinking by Babs and her burning hands saw off the nasty litter critters.
With Dotty all clad in her newly acquired battered plate armour the party returned to the ground floor to explore the rest of the house.
Which saw them disturb a couple of swarms of spiders in one of the rooms before heading upstairs.
Upstairs they found some dirty laundry in the first couple of rooms they searched.
And it is here that we leave our party on the first floor looting what they can.
Post Mortem
Look I know this next bit is repetitive and boring as I included it in these posts. But I have to say it. It’s not here for the majority of those that read my ramblings and incoherent thoughts. It’s for that handful of people that are crazy enough to play D&D with me as their DM.
SPOILER ALERT TO MY ADVENTURERS! The following part of the post contains spoilers for the up and coming campaign. You may want to avoid this part of the post and join me in a future one.
I’d found out the night before our planned session about a football tournament taking place at the sports and community centre whilst we were going to play D&D.
So I warned the players that parking might be an issue. Plans were put in place to cater for this.
On the day despite the warning we didn’t have any problems parking close to the community centre.
However we did have two adventurers that couldn’t make the session in the end. Leaving us we two actual people there to play D&D.
With some last minute heroic actions Shane had got copies of the missing players character sheets. Which meant Shane and Anthony could play two characters. Well control the other one.
This seemed to work ok.
I did reduce the inspiration tokens to just two though.
The unexpected benefit of the football tournament was that there were burger and ice cream stands there catering to the crowd of supporters/parents and players. Which meant when we took a mid session break we could and did grab a burger.
In this session the players did encounter the swarm of rot grubs. This did have the potential to be a deadly encounter. If memory doesn’t fail me in the Ghosts of Saltmarsh there is no forewarning of what they are. Which for an adventure aiming at low level adventurers seems harsh. I had the party find maggot like corpses in the kitchen, some of which were burnt. Plus the party could see a mixture dead and burnt ones around and coming out of the corpse. Which might seem heavy handed, even clumsy sign posting. But it worked the players picked up on the clues how to kill them.
My prep for the session was very minimal. I didn’t get round to producing the list of items that could be found. I’ve found that the temporary change to my work shift has left me feeling a bit more knackered than expected. Luckily I could reuse my previous session notes. They were still very valid.
I am liking the Ghosts of Saltmarsh haunted house map. I have used a mixture of the included monster encounters (rot grubs, spiders) and ones I’ve added to it (shadows, mummy). I think it’s working well.
Our next session isn’t going to be for 4 weeks. Work has me doing nights for a couple of weeks. Which starts the Saturday of our next scheduled session. There are changes afoot at work that mean making enough money each month to pay bills isn’t a given. As you can imagine it’s a worrying time not just for me but a lot of people at work. So I have to take what hours I can get to make sure I can earn enough to keep a roof over my head.
On that cheery note I’ll see you in the next post
UPDATE 17/6/22: Since writing this post mortem one or two things have been mulling around in my head. The first is that once the party hits level 3 the rogue of the group might want to take the Soulknife feature in particularly the Psychic blades from Tasha’s. Will this be over powering, or become too over powering? Do I allow it?
The second thought I’ve been mulling is a character now with the plate armour having an AC of 20. Granted their AC was already 18. How does this change the balance of encounters now?
I obviously still have some more mulling on these two things to do before our next session.