Having successfully delivered the tribute to the Red Rage and a lengthy discussion about what to do next.

The party settled on hunting down a mysterious dwarven mine on the north side of the Mintarn island. Leaving Valdor heading towards the Whale Bone Islands as captive to some red robed wizards.

An unfruitful search of the northern Mintarn coastline meant the party were no closer to finding the mysterious dwarven mine.

They sailed back to Mintarn looking for information about the mysterious symbol that was on a scrap of paper that Kaibon (a dwarf wizard) had in his possession and clues to the mines location.

This excursion to Mintarn had an extra threat due to Angrath having been seen in the city.

Managing to avoid detection by Angrath or any of his agents the party managed to resupply and dig for information. Sadly the later did not prove fruitful.

Full stocked the party sailed off towards the northern side of the island once more.

We left the party of the west coast of Mintarn, making camp on a beach feasting on and preserving a giant swordfish that Khemed had caught.

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.

If the last session was all combat this one was the complete opposite. There was no combat encounter at all this session.

It was also a session where I had to make it up as events unfolded.

But first here are my hand written prep notes.

Where I had planned for the party to take one of the hooks presented to them during the first encounter of the session. They surprised me in deciding to do something I hadn’t expected!

I had discounted the Lost Ironstar Mine hook. Nothing had happened with it in the early sessions. Then Jonas hadn’t done anything with it when he and Jeff had joined the group.

During the groups discussion on what they would do having delivered the tribute I had expected them to pick one of the hooks seeded to them. It was completely unexpected when Jonas bought up the Lost Ironstar Mine.

Naturally it’s safe to assume from the above I had nothing planned for this. It would mean a lot of making it up as I went along, going with the flow. But I was confident that I could handle the session and whatever cropped up.

I think that’s the strength of the Lazy DM advice, and having a DM folder that not only has session and campaign notes in. But also (on the advice of Jim Murphy) dungeon maps used and unused that I’ve collected along the way. Plus with the Lazy DM Workbook also kept with my DM folder I had ten locations that could be used at a drop of the hat if needed. One of those locations was a dwarven mine.

Having that sort of stuff to hand did give me that feeling that if they located the mine and went in I had something I could use.

I felt that the players may have felt I was stonewalling them from finding the lost mine. There was no trace of it from the sea, no coastal paths, landing areas linked to it. When the party went to Mintarn they were unable to get any information about the mine from the local dwarf community. Why did the dwarves not know anything about it? I had the dwarfs on Mintarn as blacksmiths, they weren’t miners. They got the raw materials they needed from trading. It’s a port after all. The money for them was in making weapons for the mercenaries that the city was known for providing.

Besides the Ironstar Dwarves were not native to Mintarn but from the mainland. Plus it was a secret. So I felt that the Ironstar dwarves when on Mintarn would have hidden their identity, even from other clans when they came in contact with them.

Having no combat in the session was an odd feeling.

I was very hands off in this session when it came to the big discussion on what to do, and other group discussions. It didn’t mean I wasn’t listening, making mental notes, taking a pulse of what the group was thinking and had remembered. It was a useful thing to do.

Not happy with my role playing. It’s still pretty weak. The opening encounter particularly was poor.

I tried something new with this sessions start. We didn’t pick up immediately where we left off. But jumped forward a few hours to the delivery of the tribute. I think this worked well. I didn’t see a need for having to go through the whole travel bit.

Before we started the session I asked the players about how they felt about going to Avernus at some point during the campaign. It was a bit of a red herring. I wanted to gauged whether players would be happy with the subject matter, and all that would entail. If you remember I plan to use the diabolical contracts with one of the players. And I needed to know before progressing that twist if that was acceptable to all the players.

At the end of the session we discussed the duration of a session. Was everyone happy to keep it to two hours or would they like longer? The outcome of this brief discussion was we would move to a three hour session.

It thought both of the above was important to discuss with the group. I knew that certain subjects were off the table when Jonathan was playing. But now he had left I needed to know how the group felt about stuff I wanted to introduce.

Overall the session ended up being a social encounter focussed session and resupplying. Not entirely happy for it from my side of things. But hopefully the players enjoyed the change of pace.