This is intended to be a shorter read than the soon to be massive Scales of War thread. There will of course be spoilers for anyone who has not player the Scales of War adventure path previously. You have been warned.
Our adventurers are as follows:
Rah, halfling monk
Graven, warforged warden
Adis, human wizard
Karan, tiefling
avengerbarbarian
Norian, human cleric
The gang gets together at a summons. They get DM'd away from it an end up in an Inn in a city nearby. There they attempt a moment at Roleplay, and to figure out who each other are, when I kick the stools out from underneath them, slaying a Barmaid in the progress. Wake up, folks: This is DnD 4th Edition.
The first encounter isn't too difficult, though the monsters that are minions have surprisingly high AC. They manage to clear the encounter faster than intended (they come into the Inn in waves) due in no small part to dailys being blown left right and centre. An action point or two goes flying also. Well, always good to figure out how to play the game, I suppose. Props go to Adis for putting out the fire that the Goblins bring with them, and Rah for slaying one entire round of monsters. Both expend their dailys to do so.
After this encounter they start to clean up the Inn and put the fires out. Then they head outside to rest. They do manage to get a short rest while a local Guard tries to interrogate them. But all too soon the players learn that yes, indeed, this IS 4th edition when around the corner lumbers an Ogre and some Archers. Yes, that's right. A level 8 monster in the midst of five level 1 adventurers. Nice way to kick start a campaign.
The Guard dashes off after mentioning some sort of reinforcements. He also takes the summons of our local cleric, Norian. This isn't the best move on Norian's part as we learn later. I place the characters and monsters and realize much to my dismay that I placed them too close together. The Ogre is coming around the corner and the players don't even give him a chance to move. I get a bit dissapointed at how quickly the Ogre goes down to their stiking abilities, but at least he wallops Graven a good one. Graven is quite lucky in this respect that the Ogre was weaken when his daily was spent, or he would be into negative hitpoints and unconcious.
The party also learns a little bit about how features of the environment will be used later on (this is 4th edition after all) when the cart the Ogre is pulling happens to be laden with pitch casks. The Ogre doesn't get a chance to throw one (his attack with them is spectacular!) but the Archers do. This leads to a bit of firey pain in the party, as well as setting the cart on fire. It goes boom at the end of the round.
The party gains a little bit of lore about what's going on around here, and then goes to sleep. The next day begins the first of several skill challenges that face them. The first is a Challenge to actually get the quest to help the town. They succeed to convince Councilman Troyas - barely - and are directed to go across the street to the Hall of Great Valor and meet with a character who has been mentioned before to ask about some missing items.
Here I added in a character not mentioned in the campaign text, Javil. He's here to give the players a bit more direction about where to go and what's going on, because they're not asking a lot of questions at this point. I'm thinking they just want to keep going and kill kill kill. So I throw him in and let them know "Folks! There's more than just killing goblins here! People are kidnapped! Treasures stolen too!" They get a chance to learn a bit more about the treasures, and then go home and to bed, since the council is still deliberating. Really, I'm just trying to give the Goblins a bigger head start, but the players don't seem to protest and seem to think that where I want to point them is fine by them.
They wake up and are met by Troyas again, who gives them a lot more information about what's going on. They now have the names and brief descriptions of the professions (no, they don't ask for better descriptions) of who they are looking for. They still have limited ideas of what the treasures are, but there's a good reason for that. Karan finally starts sticking up for the party and asking "Well, where the hell do we go from here?! And how much do we get for this stupid side quest!?!" The party is then directed to either track the Goblins by hand, or try to get directions from one captured in the raid two nights ago.
Morrik is that Goblin, and is on their way anyhow, so they give it a go. Success in this encounter rewards you with a map and some information. Failure results in the same map, but it leads you on a longer route through some enemy territory. The party fails badly, but to throw them off the scent I give them a piddling amount of experience (all debts for good RP up to this point have now been well paid) and told them they succeeded. The Goblin draws a map, and asks them to leave unless they need anything else. They don't question him further for any of the valuable information he has. Apparently they're satisfied with getting a map to the place and don't need to know anything else. They'll learn...
One character goes back to the Hall of Great Valor and accidentally learns a bit about their destination, Rivenroar. Other than that, they decide that they're not prepared enough to go, and spend some time gathering things that I at least assumed they would be taking with them. Apparently the lives of these villagers aren't that important to them...
They set off and into their next skill challenge, getting to Rivenroar. This skill challenge is a bit different, as with their bad map, success will lead them into an encounter. Failure will lead them to a different encounter...and then into the first encounter. Which could be quite bad. Not to mention that failing certain skill rolls starts to spend their valuable healing surges. In the end they succeed and only lose 1 healing surge per person. Now on to the
next encounter...
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Topic: Scales of War: the TLDR version (Read 3378 times)