In our fourth session our party of adventures joined up with a ships captain who had fallen on hard times and his dwarf ships wizard to help them gain a new boat. After defeating some pirates, raiding the warehouse, the party and their ‘new friends’ stole the boat. After hiding the boat the party returned to the tavern. Oh the boat belonged to Angrath the minotaur pirate.

Post-mortem

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.

We were once again a player down for this session. But we had some warning this time, and had the character in bed at the tavern suffering from a bout of sickness. A case of D&D reflecting real life! Plus it seemed the easiest way to handle the absence.

However we were also welcoming two new players to the group for their first session. So in reality numbers wise we were a player up this session.

I thought the role play of them meeting up at the tavern went fairly well. Once directing the characters to each other it was really out of my control.

The main encounter for the session was the stealing a boat caper.

For this I used the warehouse from the docks mini adventure from the Lazy DM’s Workbook. That was an A3 battle map, that I had stuck to some foamboard, and covered over the various rooms in the warehouse. Which only got removed when the players explored the room.

I used some of the D&D Tiles Reincarnated: City to recreate the jetty, accompanied by a keelboat made up of the 3D boat tiles I had.

As I explained to the new players I generally roll just once for the creatures for attacks and saving rolls to speed things up.

This was a very heavy combat session. For starters at the end of it, if successful they were getting a boat! So I couldn’t just give it to them easily. They had to earn it.

I hadn’t planned on treasure in the warehouse, so I generated that on the fly. I wanted to reward them, but not be over generous. After all they had just got a boat.

When it comes to the killing blow or when a player rolls a natural 1, I am still liking giving control over to the players to describe how the creature dies, or they do that epic fumble.

There was a point that I had to rule that a gnome could not just pick up and tie up a prison with a heavy chain as an action during combat. That 6 second time slice is just not long enough for them to do that.

I think I had the tactics about right for the pirates. Having them raise the alarm as quick as possible. Whether the numbers of pirates encountered was enough that’s another question. I think this was a challenging encounter at best. I don’t think it was even close to deadly.

When it came to the warehouse I didn’t use the notes from the room descriptions. But at that point of the session we were over running and needed to get to a point for stopping. But still the descriptions would not have added anything time wise. I must do better here.

Overall I thought the session went well, everyone had fun.

Now onto session 5 which will hopefully be in 2 weeks time.