Starting Out

Ah, that new campaign smell!

This time, I'm on the other side of the screen. Now I'm not having to keep track of 50 things at once. So I can take better session notes and pay more attention to my fellow players. In this case it meant helping Hillary with spells. More on that later.

First, let's meet some new party members.

Ladies first:

Hillary actually decided to play a spellcaster this go around: a chaotic good wood elf druid she named Pusheen. I'm guessing she was planning on taking Circle of the Moon and turning into totes adorbs cats for killing. One of these days we'll see if we can get Hillary to play something other than a wood elf, though.

Kyla rolled up Temerity Corvidae, a chaotic neutral tiefling bard that grew up on the streets of Waterdeep. She stole (or is wanted for steeling) a valuable Lute and using the proceeds to buy her way into New Olamn, a bardic college in Waterdeep. This is the first time Kyla's playing an actually greedy character.

We have a new player: Lazaro, and he rolled up, a neutral good human fighter with the soldier background and who took two-weapon fighting for his initial attack style. He named his character Grom (he's already been warned no to give him the last name Hellscream).

Blake rolled up Ghesh, another chaotic neutral character. Ghesh is a dragonborn of black ancestry and a sorcerer with the (surprise!) draconic ancestry sorcerous origin.

Alec created Jethro Gobblenuts, a ghostwise halfling pet ranger using the new build wizards released. He apparently only has 15 teeth (all the left side), is missing a finger, and plays the banjo. And he contributed a wonderful gem of a quote: "Make the Chondalwood great again, we say!" Yeah...

Joseph actually decided NOT to play a caster. His character, Grim Buckman. He's a lawful evil human rogue with the urban bounty hunter background that's he's planning on advancing down the assassin archetype. He really liked to climb up things and survey.

Last but not least, I created Artor Garland, a lawful neutral half-elf paladin of Helm with the city watch background. I'm imagining him as a sort of cross between Nicholas Angel and Inspector Zenigata. He is, of course, obsessed with solving the crime Temerity is wanted for.

It started with the group departing Waterdeep for the town of Nightstone. As we approached, we heard the church bell ringing. And just ringing and not stopping.

Nightstone, it turns out, is built on a pair of islands in the middle of a river, one island occupied by a motte and bailey castle, the other occupied by the town itself. From the approach we saw that the bridge linking the town and the motte had been broken.

However, the bridge into the town itself was down and just fine. Temerity and Grim stealthily approached the guard towers and found them abandoned. Jehtro even used one of his features: Silent Speech, to communicate telepathically with our scouts. Grim climbed to the top of the tower and found the town, as far as he could see, deserted, and filled with boulders, apparently hurled by some kind of siege weapon.

We advaced further into the town and found a temple dedicated to Lathander and Mielikki. Hillary had a little squee moment when she found out that Mielikki's holy symbol is a unicorn. We found the source of the ringing bell: a pair of goblins apparently having the time of their lives swinging from the bell ropes. Grim and Temerity found them, and settled on a sometimes sound plan: lie to them. She tried to convince them that she was a threat and to hand over their treasure. For some reason Will decided that in his world, goblins have Jamaican accents.

This didn't work, unfortunately. The two goblins left the bell ropes and drew their scimitars to attack.

So, the opening encounters in Tyranny of Dragons involve six or more kobolds against a party of five to eight players. This opening encounter was two goblins against a party of seven. We won. And now I'm wondering if we're starting to see balance issues but in the opposite direction.

Granted, our rewards were a trickle of treasure and mundane items. At this point we became very aware of a pair of large, dog-like bests in the town square, apparently eating the remains of a cow. Ghesh used a minor illusion of a cow mooing to lure them away from their meal, allowing us to get a better look at them, and we discovered they were worgs, large wolf-like beasts often used as steeds by goblins. Temerity tried to lure them out of a square for an ambush, also with minor illusion of a cow, but that trick didn't work twice and only made the highly intelligence beasts suspicious, but they went back to eating.

However, it seems we had distracted them enough to earn a surprise round of ranged attacks. The opening volley, featuring everyone but poor Hillary, dropped the first worg. The second let out a warning howl and accused us murder before attacking. It did manage to summon three goblins, but it and those goblins didn't last long and did minimal damage to us.

We did examine one object of interest: a large, five-foot deep hole in the ground, where something had apparently been sitting.

We had a choice of places to visit next: the local branch of Lionshield Coster or the Nightstone Inn. Deciding we all needed a drink, we visited the inn. While Artor had a mug of ale and Temerity pinched a bottle of wine, Jethro snuck into the kitchen a killed a looting goblin. In this case, as Will described it, ten pounds of stuff in a five pound bag. We added more minor treasure to our pile, including some food. Because one of them was a block of cheese, Artor called dibs. Of course, Temerity wanted some for her pet mouse, Squeaks, so Artor graciously shared half the block.

At this point, cunning and sharp-witted investigator that I am, I suggested (both OOC and IC) that we maybe NOT kill the next goblin we came across and try to interrogate it.

Then Grim, Temerity, and Jethro climbed to the second floor, finding a hallway linking four rooms. Only two contained anything of interest, and both were hit by the boulder volley. Jethro found the first one, containing a human woman named Kella Darkhope pinned under some debris. After pulling her out and getting her to more secure footing, we asked her what she knew.

It turns out, not much. She was staying at the inn, waiting for a "business contact" (she was blushing when she mentioned this) to arrive. Apparently some giants swooped in on a big flying cloud and started pelting the down with boulders from above, stopping to rip, the "Nightstone" from its place in the village square. The goblins apparently arrived after the giants to loot the ruined, now abandoned town.

The other ruined room contained a chest in a now precarious corner of the room. Designers that write "X amount of weight triggers the floor to collapse" don't always account for halflings or gnomes. Jethro hopped on over to the chest, tied a rope around it, and Artor pulled it over to a safe spot (not sure if he kissed his biceps or not afterwards). Inside we found some armor sized for a dwarf and a bunch of gems. Ghesh called dibs on one worth 50gp as a focus for chromatic orb.

Next we visited the Lionshield Coster building. The door was open, and we heard some noise inside. It turned out to be (surprise!) another goblin busy looting. Temerity decided on a different tactic: she cast charm person. No word yet on whether this goblin, Jilk, will end up like Bupu, but fingers crossed. None-the-less, he told his new best friend a similar story: the giants attacked the town, flew away, and the goblins took the inhabitants to a nearby cave system. He even offered to show it to us, provided we help him move a table. The coster's inventory was otherwise mostly mundane items, up 10gp in value on Adventuring Gear table in the PHB.

We next decided to visit the motte. But as we started in on that, someone decided to look up the duration of charm person: concentration, up to an hour. So instead of missing the opportunity to have the goblin show us the caves, we had him draw a crude map and give us directions. He just wanted to make sure we brought that table.

I rolled my first natural 20 of the campaign trying to jump the gap between the village and the motte. I should have shouted "Parkour, bitch!" After that we set up a rope bridge to allow everyone to cross.The windows were barred, but the gates were open. Grim climbed the walls of the gatehouse, while Artor just kind of walked in. We found some guard barracks, and our first casualties from the giants' bombardment: the guards. As we explored the keep, we got the sense that it had been hit extra hard by giants.

When we went into the keep, we found four surviving guards standing over the body of Lady Belrosa Nandar, High Steward of Nightstone. She had been hit by a falling boulder. The guards confirmed what we already knew: the giants attacked by dropping rocks and then made off in the Nightstone. However, they contradicted Jilk. They said the towns' inhabitants had fled to the caves, and that the goblins followed. They did confirm, however, that the giants were in a flying castle rather than on a magic cloud. They also said they saw the castle heading east.

At this point, we decided to gear up and prepare to search for the caves and the townsfolk. We suggested the guards stay with Kella. During the conversation, we learned that the merchant caravan Kella was waiting on was not on the guards' agenda. She suggested that the merchant was on "unofficial" business. At this point, several of us noted that Kella had a winged snake for a pet or a familiar, a symbol of the Zhentarim. We hadn't really decided on factions yet, but Joseph had decided that Grim was a member of the Zhentarim. He talked to Kella in Thieves' Cant and confirmed that yes, their visit was related to the Zhentarim.

We glossed over the remainder of the supplies we found in the dark: 5 riding horses and 5 draft horses. We opted to hitch the draft horses to a cart we found just outside the town. Will also told us we would find a goblin sleeping in a hayloft, and encounter he didn't bother to roll. He also mentioned that in the graveyard of the temple, the Nandar family kept a crypt.

We found that only one cottage hadn't been ransacked. It was locked and happened to be covered in Infernal runes. Temerity was kind enough to translate: Anyone entering without the permission of the cottage's owner would be sent to Hell. Charming.

We settled in for a long rest, and Will awarded us our first milestone.

The Catacombs of Ravenloft, Highlights

Since bad puns on crypts and tombstones are a storied tradition, the designers of Ravenloft provided a few for the doors in the crypts of the castle.

The party bypassed them.

But here are a few of the highlights:

Artista DeSlop--Court Ceiling Painter

Lady Isolde Yunk (Isolde the Incredible): Purveyor of antiques and imports. *This one you might need to say out loud.*

Prince Ariel du Plumette (Ariel the Heavy). *The back story you learn in the encounter with his ghost is that he built a set of artificial wings. They didn't work.*

Artank Swilovich: Friend and member of the Barovian Wine Distiller's Guild

King Katsky (Katsky the Bright): Ruler, inventor, and self-proclaimed time traveler. *You find a powder horn, musket, musket balls, and an ornithopter-like glider inside his tomb.*

Stahbal Indi-Bhak: A truer friend no ruler ever had. Here lies his family in honor. *Again, you might need to say this one aloud.*

Elsa Fallona von Twitterberg (Beloved Actor): She had many followers. *Yes, they did indeed update the references, anyone who's played previous Ravenlofts!*

Sir Sedrick Spinwitovich (Admiral Spinwitovich): Confused though he was, he built the greatest naval force ever assembled in a landlocked country. *There's an actual boat inside his tomb.*

Sir Erik Vonderbucks *His corpse was dipped in molten gold.*

We knew him only by his wealth *This is a schmuck bait trap. The walls are painted to resemble gold coins and there is a pit trap in the floor.*

Sir Klutz Tripalotsky: He fell on his own sword.

Gralmore Nimblenobs--Wizard Ordinaire.

Hope you enjoy. When we return, we'll be starting Storm King's Thunder, and maybe some character backstories.

Final Showdown, Part 2

So remember how yesterday, I talked about the 8 different paths, one of which would sequence break the next part of the dungeon?

Yeah. They took that path.

Unfortunately Alec couldn't make it, so Cugel was out for the final battle. But his wife was awesome enough to bring Blake and Hillary and trusting enough that Kyla, Joseph, Will, and myself were responsible enough adults that we could watch them. Fortunately she fell for our ruse, so Sarra and Amrus got to contribute (in a huge way) to that final fight.

They climbed up out of the torture room onto an observation balcony (because what else are the kind and queen going to do for entertainment?), passed through a heavy curtain, and into the next room.

In the center of the room was a brazier with a white flame emitting no heat. Around the base were seven indentations containing seven gems of the prismatic colors. Over the brazier was a giant hourglass with a verse written on it in common. In two alcoves flanking this brazier were giant metal statues of knights on horses. Aside from the door they came in through, there were three other doors out on the opposite wall.

The verse on the hour glass read:
Cast a stone into the fire:
Violet leads to the mountain spire
Orange to the castle's peak
Red if lore is what you seek
Green to where the coffins hide
Indigo to the master's bride
Blue to ancient magic's womb
Yellow to the master's tomb

The party took a little bit longer pondering this than I originally expected. While right away the realized that the yellow stone ought to lead to Strahd's Tomb, but then started second guessing that maybe it was green. Since the session is over, I'll spill the beans: that green one would have taken them to the basement of the coffin maker's shop in Vallaki. I DID NOT want the party back-tracked that far.

I did what any good GM would do when you don't want to seem like you're railroading, but you still want to convey your desires to the players in a subtle way: I had them make "Idiot" checks. Or what WoD players might call a "Common Sense" check. I set it as a DC 15 Intelligence check, and Kyla made it (over Lop, which surprised me), so I told her outright: the yellow one will take you to Strahd's Tomb.

They through the stone into the fire, and over the course of 5 rounds (the timer on the hourglass), stepped through. Lop, who still had locate creature going, knew Strahd was in the coffin in the center of the room. They had Sarra approach first, hoping to have her impale the poor bastard with her sun sword.

Of course it wasn't that easy!

Strahd's bride's, Anastrasya Karelova, Ludmilla Vilisevic, and Volenta Popofsky, emerged from the earth in three alcoves on the south end of the chamber. I'm re-reading the encounter know and they should have come out of the east wall. Oh well. C'est La Vie. They rolled well on their initiatives. Strahd and most of the party, however, did not.

Still, Ap opened strongly: dropping a storm sphere to keep the ladies hemmed in and damage them. Kasimir, being controlled by Joseph, also used a cone of cold to get an early strong hit in. Ludmilla and Volenta put the bite on Amrus, while Anastrasya went for the already anemic-looking Tathora. She even rolled a critical! (I beginning to think Kyla is right: the dice ARE trying to kill her character.)

Of course the party had a good counter offensive: Lop used that staff of frost to create a wall of ice to pull the brides off their victims and isolate them. Then on her turn, Tathora turned on the sunlight feature of the holy symbol of Ravenkind. She also cast spiritual weapon because that spell really is awesome.

When Strahd emerged, he found old Damian Martikov in his face. But more importantly, Amrus and Sarra were there. Amrus managed to get a sneak attack in before retreating. Then Hillary used Action surge to hit four times with that sun sword. Strahd spent most of his time trying to put the bite on Sarra to recover from that. He rolled three 9s in a row. His attack modifier was +6, and Sarra's AC was 16.

Ap actually scored the killing blow: if reduced to zero hit points while in sunlight, Strahd dies. While Ludmilla and Volenta expired that same turn, Anastrasya got lucky with her saving throws and had enough hp to stand up to the sunlight for two more turns.

She wasn't going to break through the wall of ice that quickly, so I called it.

The book kind of calls for Rahadin, Strahd's major domo to put in an appearance at that point to avenge his master. I wanted the team to have a clean victory, so we cut to the ending montage:

Kasimir eventually did find his sister and resurrect her. But she seemed awful interested in the Amber Temple and the secrets he and the party found there...

Ezmerelda offered to lead the PCs back through the Mist to Faerun. She did as the first truly sunny day in centuries dawned on Barovia. However, she found that she was unable to get back...

What's next? Storm King's Thunder, of course! Will shall be running that, and I will get to play.

Since the party skipped the catacombs, they missed all the nifty puns. I'll put them in a future post. I'll also put up some information about the party we're creating for the next adventure. It looks like it's going to be fun!

Preparation 101

I've decided to give some DM advice.

First, Kyla and I finally got play another session of Delta Green: Check it out.

Since some new DMs might have stumbled onto this blog looking for advice, here's a cool YouTube video I found that expertly summarizes advice for new DMs: Check it out.

Today I'm going to talk about prep. Or at least how I do prep.

The first step is don't over-prepare. PCs will zig when you expect them to zag. Dungeons are helpful for this because they are basically a physical in-game embodiment of a decision map. So when using a pre-generated dungeon or using one of your own, you'll want to focus on two things. First, what route(s) CAN the PCs take. Second, what route(s) are the they LIKELY to take.

That first part is easy if you're using a simple dungeon with mostly left, right, or forward type decision options. Castle Ravenloft is not a simple dungeon. From their current position, they can back track, move forward to a room with approximately 8 options for potentially moving forward or bogging down the session in a deadly, deadly combat. One of the options for moving forward is protected by a trap that, while not deadly, can significantly set back their progress.

Now the second part requires knowing your players. For the most part Will and Joseph and the most active players when it comes to decision-making. Kyla is catching up rapidly, but she still has a little distance to cover. Alec is a little more interested in role-playing his character than taking the lead. And Blake and Hillary, while definitely interested in driving the party's decisions more, tend to not get as much acknowledgement. Mostly because they're kids, which is unfortunate.

So what do I know about Joseph, Will, and Kyla as players? Most importantly, they're non-linear thinkers. When Lop and Ap were trapped in a cell, they decided to use the laws of thermodynamics to weaken the bars of their cell (casting ray of frost and firebolt on them in rapid succession). So they're going to look for an indirect approach to advancing. Kyla is a puzzle solver. She takes notes and can figure things out from handouts and pictures. This means that one of those 8 paths forward I was talking about is a very real possibility. Since it's going to sequence break everything, I can definitely put it on the list of likely outcomes.

Of course, I have to remember that Blake is what the 4e DMG called an Instigator. When he sees a big red button, he has to press it. Ravenloft being an old school adventure, this means that if he pushes the wrong big red button, it could lead to deadly, deadly combat.

Of course, they could always just follow a straight forward path. If so, I have to account for that trap. The real problem is that Amrus isn't very good with traps. Tathora is certainly amazing at spotting secret doors and traps, but Amrus is not good at disarming them. However, I'm also pretty confident that Lop, Ap, or Cugel might find a way to bypass the trap with a spell.

And of course, there's the catacombs: a huge sandboxy area of the Castle they are likely to reach. There's a lot to find and do, and some of it involves combat. One of them even involves one of the party's sidequests.

Once I have a rough idea of what encounters are likely to happen, I mark off the stat blocks in the Monster Manual or the adventure book. I use 3x5 cards and use them to keep track of monsters' hit points. DJ, the previous DM, actually used a spreadsheet for this. It was probably faster, but I'm fine with my method. Rob, who runs a Pathfinder game I play in, actually would mark damage dealt totals to NPCs and monsters directly on the map. Not a bad idea, but I prefer to save space on the map.

Next comes special rules I might need to review. Most of those are in the DMG, which I keep at the store. However, as a DM I arrive early, so I use some of that time to review rules. I also use it to chitchat with my fellow DMs, the employees at the store, and any other early arriving players.

For tomorrow, there are no rules I'm going to need to review. However, I have noted a situation which might split the party. Since the effects need to be somewhat secretive, I prepared a 3x5 card for a description for a disappearing character, while using another description for the rest of the party.

Finally, I have to take into account that sidequest. Having marked the stat block of combat likely to ensue, I have to also ponder what the reward should be. Since the adventure provides no real monetary award, and the story-based reward for it is moot at this point, I might have to settle for a milestone or some other non-concrete reward. One I certainly could provide is allowing the party to gain the benefits of a long rest. That would be a boon to them as they are likely to be low on resources and very close to the final showdown, but it wouldn't involve the updating a bookkeeping a milestone would.

A few other tips when prepping and running: game sessions are only so long, do decide ahead of time what you want to focus on. If you want combat, put a lot of energy into planning out that battlefield and determining the monsters' or NPCs' tactics. If you want exploration, focus on re-reading descriptions so you aren't always looking down at the book and reading verbatim (I'm guilty of this, I know!). Especially if you have a target in mind, do as much as you can to make it easier for the PCs to reach that target.

If I really wanted (and I kinda want to) just have the campaign end tomorrow, I'd remove all obstacles between the PCs and Strahd's Tomb and just do some glossy and creepy narration to get them there, ignoring traps and hostile creatures in favor of the story. But we still have one more session in October, so I'm not super desperate. Let's enjoy having the party wander around a spooky, vampire-haunted castle while the season is still right.

This Castle is a Creature of Chaos

...It may take many incarnations.

I'm actually going to pause a moment, to talk about a technique I've been using to keep track of the group's movement through the castle.

Curse of Strahd comes with an beautiful full color poster map. On one side is Barovia. On the other is a map of Castle Ravenloft, still in full isometric glory. Now with full color. It seemed a waste to keep that map on my side of the screen, plus, I didn't want to constantly re-draw maps on board every few minutes as the party moved around. So I cut some pieces of construction paper, laid the whole map out of the table, and used the construction paper as a "fog of war," covering up areas of the castle they had yet to visit, and removing it as they visited new areas.

And they visited new areas.

Alec's friend Ron was able to return, and he once again played Simon. Since he's a character named Simon with a flail, fighting vampires, we decided that his weakness should be that he can't swim.

First they took a short rest inside a rope trick. It was good that they did, since some flying swords were called for on the random encounter table. Instead they entered the room, found no one there to attack, and left.

The characters followed the swords down main stairs leading down from the throne room to a landing decorated with a pair of suits of armor in alcoves. The party were wisely wary of the armor and avoided a minor trap attached to them, then went down the grand staircase leading down from the landing back to the great entry hall. There, they found that the gargoyles decorating the arches were more than just statues: the animated and attacked.

Since their thoughts were still on Strahd (whom Lop was tracking with locate creature), they avoided using spell slots. Gargoyles are resistant to non-magical damage and have plenty of hit points. They don't hit very hard, but when there are 8 of them, they can swarm and cause a problem. At one point Damien Martikov was on the front lines and drew several attacks. We all had a case of the "derp" and forgot that as a wereraven Damien is immune to non-magical damage from non-silver weapons, and gargoyles' attacks do no count as magic. We caught it quick enough, and the crusty old wereraven lived to fight another day. Here's the key to high level parties: even if their casters are conserving resources, fights merely last longer than they might otherwise. The only one who did use spell slots was Tathora and Van Richten, casting cure wounds on squishier team members that had taken too many hits.

Since Lop knew Strahd was below them and to the southeast, they took the spiral stairs across from the entry to the dining hall down. The stopped at one ten-foot wide, ten-foot tall corridor, but opted not to go down it, because Strahd was still below them.

They arrived in the dungeons, where they were more or less even with Strahd. Lop and Cugel were discussing a plan to get over Strahd's location and then use stone shape to open their own passage. I pointed out that there was 50 feet of stone, well beyond the spell's reach.

Ravenloft's dungeons are flooded with cold, dark water. Blake was scared of alligators. It turns out he should have been scared of something else.

A voice called out for help. Tathora, being lawful good, decided to call back. The speaker identified himself as Emil Toranescu, a citizen of Vallaki chased into the castle by a pack of dire wolves. Since Kyla bothered to take notes, she recognized this character as a quest goal. Specifically for Zuleika Toranescu, the werewolf they made a truce with. After revealing that Zuleika had sent them, Emil said he'd be grateful for the help. Tathora moved towards the sound of his voice, then disappeared in a fountain of rushing water in air. She had been teleported by a deviously hidden trap into a cell to the north.

The corridor is laced with these teleport traps. They teleport whoever steps onto it into one of the northern cells of the dungeon. There, the water is about five feet deep. Eventually Lop, riding on Ap's shoulders, and Sarra got teleported into cells. Lop and Ap tried using thermodynamics to weaken the bars of their cell, granting Simon advantage on a Strength check to pry them off. He still failed.

At this point Emil pointed out that his confidence in the party was somewhat lessened. Because spending an entire night rolling the same check over and over would have been boring, I rolled a d20 and had Amrus successfully pick all the locks in that many minutes. It was 16, so Lop had burned through about a half hour of his hour duration on locate creature.

In the process, Amrus found a glowing +1 shortsword that also happened to be sentient. It quickly attuned to any lawful good creature and provided added benefits to such a wielder. Unfortunately, the only lawful good party member was Tathora, who isn't proficient with shortswords. They ended up giving it to Amrus, who could still benefit from the +1 without attunement.

They freed Emil, who was mostly interested in leaving the castle and returning to his mate. Since the PCs didn't want to stop him, he left.

Next they found themselves in a torture chamber being overlooked by a balcony. They moved toward the balcony to climb up, when six Strahd Zombies emerged from the water and attacked.

Strahd zombies are bit different from garden variety zombies. First, they have one more hit die and commensurately more hit points. They also have a claw and bite attack and the multi-attack feature, as opposed to the basic zombie's slam.

Those of you who remember way back in the day to Elemental Evil, will recall that zombies have a feature called Undead Fortitude, making them remarkably hard to put down. Strahd zombies have a different feature: Loathsome Limbs, that causes a random limb to separate after the zombie is hit with a slashing or bludgeoning weapon. This changes the way the zombie can fight, sort of. Of course, all the limbs die as soon as the main torso dies. Simon managed to sever an arm, a leg, and head. Still, the zombies were an easy encounter, but it was time to call it a night.

Next time they'll be reaching the Crypts. That should be fun.

Update

A new Tale of Trismegistus just got posted.

Also, apparently today the mayor of Sierra Vista, AZ is declaring October Ostomy Awareness Month in that city, for everyone who read my post about that last week.

Final Confrontation, Part One

You know what having a secret finding machine in the party does? It enables sequence breaking. Okay, in this case, the sequence could have been broken without Tathora, but when I was preparing I realized that what could happen would happen.

Castle Ravenloft is filled with random encounters. While exploring the first floor guard corridor and turret, the party met one: a pair of wights. Wights are soul-devouring undead warriors. These particular wights were once the guards of Castle Ravenloft.

The fight was short. The party barely used many resources to take out the wights.

Then they chose to take the stairs at the end of the corridor up to the second floor, and met four more wights. Once again there was a short battle that ended with a minimal expenditure of resources. Both Cugel and Ap burned lightning bolts on this fight.

At this point, Tathora spotted a secret door leading into the Audience Chamber. In other words, the throne room. Right where the reading said Strahd would be. They found him on his throne, drinking a wine glass filled with blood (because some cliches become cliches because they're awesome). After some exchanging of insults, Strahd threw down the glass and said, "Enough talk! Have at you!"

Feel free to play this while reading the rest of the post. I couldn't play it for the group like I wanted. As much as I love the FLGS and the game space, it was just too loud.

I'm wondering about those dry runs I allowed the players. They opened with their big guns, because Boss Battle. Strahd, like most legendary creatures in 5e, has three stacks of "Legendary Resistance," a feature that allows him to just succeed on a saving throw even if he fails. They burned through all three of those in turn 1. Second, Lop saved his spells slots for counterspell, shutting down Strahd's opening fireball and later a hail Mary blight.

Most notably, they made use of Damian Martikov's feature as Strahd's enemy to ensure that Amrus always had inspiration. And since 5e rogues can sneak attack undead, he helped keep the damage pressure up.

Poor Tathora, though. She tried to use the Hold Undead power of the holy symbol of Ravenkind. Unfortunately Strahd made his save, and, recognizing the danger the item represented, he targeted her first. Using legendary actions, 5e powers some monsters and NPCs have to take actions outside of their turn, he grappled her and put the bite on. This had the combined effect of reducing Tathora's maximum hit points and healing Strahd.

After a few turns of this, it was an allied NPC to the rescue: Van Richten casting freedom of movement to get her out of the grapple when she had 10! hp left. She then dropped a 5th level cure wounds to get her back to her (now reduced) maximum.

After that, Strahd spared a vengeance attack on Van Richten, then tried to blight Sarra, who was also racking up the damage with her sunsword.

Finally, they "misted" Strahd, forcing him into mist form and retreating to his coffin.

Now they'll have to find that coffin and end it.

This being October, I'd say we picked the perfect time for the conclusion, Internet.

Finishing the Amber Temple & Starting Castle Ravenloft

Unforunately Will couldn't make it, so Lop faded into the background.

The team traveled north, finding a room brightly lit by torches and set with a sumptuous feast. Because players assume that everything will kill them, they tested the feast and found it to be an illusion. Since the testing was Ap using mage hand, the missed something on the table that would have made that room a lot more interesting. I rolled to randomly determine if Ap's flailing discovered it, but he did not.

Moving on, the party found a crumbling balcony over the main temple with a pair of double doors beyond. Assuming (correctly) it might collapse, Ap once again used mage hand to rig up a rope bridge crossing the balcony and minimizing the weight put on it. As I'm looking back on it, with all the elves (or half-elf in Tathora's case), and skinny wizards, they probably couldn't have put enough weight on balcony to make it crumble (250 lbs was the threshold) unless more than one of them tried to cross at once.

Amrus got to do the rogue thing and scout ahead. He came to a shrine dedicated to a faceless god. It also happened to be a trap. The statue of that faceless god radiated a sympathy effect from the antipathy/sympathy spell. Unfortunately, Amrus failed his saving throw and moved closer to the statue and stood there. That spell makes a doozy of trap: the target makes a new saving throw every 24 hours and only has a 1 minute grace period after succeeding on a save.

Fortunately for Amrus, unlike the two corpses next to the statue, he had friends nearby. Tathora crossed into the room next and made her save against the statue's effect. So it was up to her to break the effect on Amrus. She tried smacking him upside the head. Although it did maximum damage, it didn't break the effect. (Yes, I was recalling that scene from The Gamers at that moment.) Eventually she just put her bedroll over his head and dragged him into an empty adjoining room. He got to make more saves, and eventually succeeded.

Aside from a dispel magic or Mordenkainen's disjunction, there wasn't a way to stop the statue. But if the spell allowed a save if the target could no longer see the source, it seemed logical enough that rendering the source no longer visible ought to work. So that's what the group did. And since I prefer player plans that at least make sense within the game world's logic, I let it work.

While they were messing around, Tathora noticed a secret door. They opened it up a whole wave of skulls just fell onto them. And there were still some left over. The party cleared the skulls out of the room, They found an iron chest on the ceiling.

That damn chest pretty much became the focus of the evening. Cugel cast levitate on Amrus, who found the chest locked a possibly trapped. The chest was sealed with sovereign glue and arcane lock. Eventually, they managed to rig a rope up to allow the whole party to cooperate and pull the chest off the ceiling. Eventually, Tathora used dispel magic on the arcane lock, to Sarra was able to (finally!) pry open the chest with a crowbar.

Of course, the chest was empty and opening it caused the floor of the room it was in to disappear. This was a problem because, once again, while they were messing around with the chest Tathora spotted another secret door. Once again, mage hand and a make-shift rope bridge allowed the party to continue.

They found themselves in the lair of animated, desiccated corpse dressed in fine wizards robes: a lich. This lich had lost its memories and some of it's powers over the centuries, and was a little coocoo for Cocoa Puffs, but not actively malicious. Blake actually decided to role-play the encounter. It was probably also good that Will wasn't there, he probably would have asked the lich to play joust. It wanted to know if anyone in the party could restore its memories. Tathora didn't have greater restoration prepared, but the lich didn't mind them taking a long rest in its chamber so she could. With his memory restored, the lich, Exethanter, decided to grant the party a boon. He told them more about the purpose of the temple and how to use some of its features. At that point they let Kasimir Velikov request the secret of restoring his sister to life.

Exethanter led them through a hidden door, into a secret library filled with books containing Thing Man Was Not Meant to Know. He then led them down into a chamber containing three large amber sarcophagi. One held the secret to vampiricism, one held the secret of lichdom, and the third held the secret of restoring the ancient dead to life. Kasimir used the third one. After some debate, the party managed to dissuade Cugel and Amrus from using either of the others. Although, Cugel was tempted to try the third one after seeing what happened to Kasimir: he took on the appearance of a corpse.

They returned to Exethanter's chamber and the lich returned to his studies. They emerged from the temple and earned another milestone. Once everyone had leveled up, they took stock of their allies and headed to Castle Ravenloft.

Although I could have used the Black Carriage, a classic Ravenloft element, I opted to leave it out, considering something like 11 people were approaching the castle. However, the storm did pick up as they approached the castle, encouraging them to take shelter in the entry hall. There, they met Rahadin, a dusk elf that betrayed his kind and served Strahd. He lead them to the dining hall, where Strahd was playing a massive organ (let's face it, some horror cliches are just too cool). After exchanging some taunts, the illusion of Strahd disappeared, the wind howled through castle, and doors closed (but didn't lock) behind the PCs. Amrus actually tried some of the food and wine on the table. He found it tasty.

At this point, Tathora (because she is a secret finding machine!) noticed some scratches on the floor in front of the organ. Using mage hand, Ap found that pressing one of the pedals caused the organ to swing open, revealing a secret door into a room that used to be an archer post, but was now filled with mirrors. They grabbed a few small ones for the party to use, but it was time to break for the evening.

Next time, deeper into Castle Ravenloft. Feel free to cue up the Castlevania SOTN soundtrack for those.

Ostomy Awareness Day

Today's entry won't be about D&D. Instead, it'll be a little more personal and a little less nerdy.

Today, the first Saturday in October, is UOAA's Ostomy Awareness Day.

What is an Ostomy? Click Here.

My surgery last year was to remove my colon after I had suffered from ulcerative colitis for nearly 20 years. Unfortunately, due to genetic lottery, my small intestine was too short to have a j-pouch applied, so the surgery I had earlier this year was to make the ostomy permanent.

As I've shared before, the first surgery and it's recovery were rocky. But I do have to say, my life has turned a corner.

Before, I was living in near constant pain, though I had become so used to it I had ceased to notice it. I was also organizing my life around bathroom breaks. Those combined put me in a near constant state of depression. I wasn't willing to take risks in my personal or professional life.

My first serious, intimate, romantic relationship happened after the ostomy placement. That relationship has since ended, but I can say with confidence that the ostomy had nothing to do with it. I finally got the courage to quit the dead end job that was holding me back late this summer.

Is my life perfect now? No. But whose is? I dodged the cancer bullet, so that's worth something. And even the backward steps I've had to take: quitting that job, losing that relationship, have felt like challenges to overcome rather than reasons to just give up like they would have before. I'm closer with my friends. I'm more willing to just go out there and tell people, "Hey, I can write that for you!"

So today, remember that you may know someone with an ostomy. You've already read the blog of one!