With a free week the party spent the time on some self improvement, studying, practicing, and even some research.

Outside the streets of the lower reaches were a buzz with the news of a heroic party rescuing a family from a collapsed villa in the Second Reaches.

Outside on their way to Adele’s Emporium the party were approached by Esme a rival of Adele. Who tried to bribe the party to spy on Adele for her.

At the Emporium the party found a note on the door saying Adele was in the Second Reaches investigating the ruined villa.

So the party made their way to the Second Reaches looking for Adele.

Eventually they found Adele, but not before upsetting a few locals and attracting the attention of an officer of the Silver Talons.

At the ruined villa they met Adele coming out of a cave entrance that had been revealed when the villa collapsed. While talking to Adele Tantalos joined them. He’d been helping Adele.

Adele and Tantalos left to return to the emporium to research the newly revealed chambers.

The party entered the tunnel and immediately went up some steps into a chamber that they soon discovered had two young unkept, spooky looking children at the end of it.

We leave the party in the chamber having defeated the spooky children.

• 

• 

• 

Post Mortem

Yep it’s that part of the post where I share my thoughts on the session and ideas for future ones. So I need to say this.

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.

The session itself was about two hours of play, and about twenty minutes of finishing off character levelling up.

It would have been nice to have a longer session, but time constraints with my dog-sitter put a dampeners on that.

For this session I had used the Tome of Beasts 2 from Kobold Press for most of the potential monsters to use in the encounters.

I do like this book as an alternative to the Monster Manual. It really does make encounters feel fresh and mysterious. Especially for the players.

For the NPCs that the players encountered I used the newly arrived Monte Cook NPC cards plus my Pathfinder ones I had already been using.

I love the art on these cards, plus the extra info on the back of them.

That extra info on the back really does help during the session to help (however poorly) flesh out the NPC at the table. And I don’t have to make up a name either.

During this session I did feel like the DM who says no.

Like pointing out that a red Slaad is from a different plane and wouldn’t be known on this one.

I really like to say yes and see where we go with it. But it was hard today because the choices being made were based on information that the characters would not know.

This was a very heavy role play session. Something I’m not great at. So not sure this was a fun session for the players.

For me and I’m not sure if the players felt this way too, that they were being railroaded to the ruined villa and the mysterious chambers it revealed.

There was a hook to go after a wanted criminal they could have done instead.

For the map for the mysterious chambers I used the goblin caves map from the “old” D&D starter set. It seemed the right size to start exploring. Although in future I’d love to use larger more complex dungeons.

In the meantime with this repurposed map I have to populate it with appropriate monsters, which for this dungeon is using appropriate monsters from the tome of beasts 2. Well ones that look really cool.

This was also the first session that I used the DM Screen from the Dungeon Kit instead of the DM Screen Reincarnated. No one even noticed the switch!

Anyway now to start planning session 9.