Castle Attack, Part I

When we last left our heroes, we had convinced Snapjaw that we were willing help him and his tribe throw off the oppression of the cultists. However, Snapjaw was only able to convince half of his compatriots that we were capable of the feat. They proposed a test of strength: there was a "plant that shambles" plaguing them, so we had to go and kill it.

After short rest, the lizardfolk led us to the lair of the shambling mound in an old ruin. Thok decided to light a fire in front of its lair, mostly for the sake of showmanship. The creature emerged from its lair, only to promptly find itself the target of offensive spells, arrows, and hammer smashes. In our first turn we managed to deliver 58 points of damage! It's good to be fifth level. Ultimately, we were victorious without taking a single point of damage.

Snapjaw and his tribe spread the word about our heroics while we settled in for a long rest. After we woke up, we point on tiger-striped headbands and had tiger-stripe face paint put on to mark us as allies of the lizardfolk tribes, then made our way to lizardfolk camp deeper in the Mere to discuss the plan.

The lizardfolk let us know about the grounds around castle Naerytar, including the location of bullywug huts, the location of lizardfolk huts, and a pen for "trained" giant lizards we were told to avoid. They explained that the barbican was guarded by bullywugs and giant frogs, and that they kept a drum on the second floor to sound the alarm. We also learned that about half of the lizardfolk at the castle would actively help us, while the rest would stay out of our way and keep silent if questioned. Once we worked out a plan to attack the barbican, we canoed through the swamp to the castle.

D.J. tried another interesting option, splitting up 15 lizardfolk NPCs up between us (only Alek, Censura, Sandi and Thok were present) and controlled directly in battle. Time will tell how this works out. In the initial attack, it added lots of extra participants, but they ended up serving mostly as a distraction.

Censura successfully bluffed his way past the initial bullywug guards, so we had a surprise round to take out the 10 bullywugs and 2 giant frogs on the ground floor and 9 bullywugs on the second floor and silence the signal drum. It turns out fireball is useful for dropping masses of enemies. Censura dropped most of the ground floor guards in one turn. In the meantime, Alek managed to silence the drum, and then Thok was able to destroy it outright. Once the remaining enemies on the ground floor were taken care of by the lizardfolk and Sandi, Censura came upstairs and used another fireball to clear them.

Ultimately, only Thok took damage in that second battle, and that was mostly due to incredibly lucky rolls on the DM's part.

We regrouped in the barbican and planned our next course of action: allowing the lizardfolk to subdue the bullywugs while we tried to gain the help of a member of the Cult more friendly to the lizardfolk. We opted to allow the bullywug and lizardfolk conflict to occur "of screen" to save time.

We'll delve further into the castle, which is truly the largest and most complex dungeon this adventure has offered so far.