If you are a member of this campaign, you should not read this.

Session 3 Judge’s Notes

    At the start of the session, the group still had four days of downtime in Gosterwick. I created some new downtime activities for the group, including speaking to scholars about the Halls, doing research, listening for rumors, and finding and hiring hirelings. Much to my disappointment, instead of doing any of the above activites, the group basically spent every action on praying to a diety to try to get a 1-in-6 chance of getting a +1 to a roll of the player’s choice over the next week. Waldorf got one. I didn’t like this because I view it to be a suboptimal choice, and also boring. I was playing Pif’s character, and had him scout for a few hirelings, just to show them how it would work, and that was the only reason why they were able to hire the ill-fated Anaximander. Oh well, they are free to choose their path.

    Everet joined and rolled absolute rocks to get to 17 max HP. Incredible. I think this will really help the party, as they can just have him soak damage in the front and heal him if he goes down. Monsters in OSRIC (which is the game Arden Vul was written for) do not do that much damage, and when I convert monsters to DCC NPC-sheets, I typically don’t modify the damage. I may need to revisit this, but I also don’t want to be too heavy-handed of a DM. Also, it is still pretty early in the campaign, and I do think some deaths will happen soon.

    Attendance was the best the campaign has had so far, with Bill, Brad, and Earl all there initially, and Mark joining about half an hour late. Jake was out sick.

    The party was very unlucky with random encounter rolls today. Out of eight random encounter rolls (requiring a 1 out of 6 to trigger one) during the journey to the ruins, I rolled three, which has about a 10% chance of occurring. Pif got his arm permanently crippled by a swarm of stirges. Hopefully Jake won’t be mad about that (I doubt it).

    After the party reached the falls, they again had poor luck with random encounters, with three random encounters that occurred in the 2 hours and 50 minutes (so, 8 rolls total) they spent in the area after they arrived.

    In the encounter with Grimblegrom of the kobolds, I decided to just “yes, and” Battista’s negotiations. He told them he would return with gold in exchange for information, which led to the kobolds (very reasonable) worry that they wouldn’t return. At that point, Mark just improved a “blood brother” ceremony, and I didn’t require a roll for it to succeed, because I thought it was cool and creative. After the session, Mark wrote to the group in discord with a suggestion that they ally the kobolds and use their tower in the thicket as a base of operations, possibly even shipping in supplies from town. I think I’m going to stick to my houserule that the group can only heal through rest in a town, so this wouldn’t include the kobold settlement. Still, I believe an alliance and setting up a resupply point is a good idea. Their exact numbers weren’t included in the book, so I decided that their base would support 20 combatants, 2 captains, 1 chief, and 20 non-combatant young and old (this roughly lines up with their entry in the OSRIC rules book). The lack of strong numbers makes the kobolds one of the weakest groups in the area, but the PC’s have exactly zero allies now, and so more at this point certainly wouldn’t hurt.

    Because the group decided to take an hour-long detour to butcher the mountain lion (this only saved them about 1sp each, so I’m not sure it was worth it), they missed the Canaii patrol’s (my name for the Dog-men) retreat into their secret entrance. The group seems to be laser-focused on the priestess of Mitra rumor/rescue quest, so I believe they would’ve followed the Canaii in if they had the chance to. This may have been a bit dicey for me, as I don’t have that section of Level 3 mapped out yet in Foundry VTT. I rolled ahead of time to see if they would find that secret door on their next few passes, and they failed, so that should buy me at least a few more weeks to get it finished.

    As seems to be tradition so far, after the session I realized that there were several rules I was either forgetting or mis-applying. Those are:

  1. Lay on Hands only heals a maximum of HD equal to the injured person’s level
  2. I may have forgotten to apply the houseruled weapon-type properties bonus effects
  3. At level 0, dropping to 0 hp means that person is dead. This means Anaximander would have died in the first combat (this doesn’t seem like a big deal, so I won’t retconn it unless the players protest to get their ~6gp back)
  4. I need to remember that each combat takes one turn
  5. I also need to remember to tell Pif that someone else needs to push the hand-cart on account of his injury
  6. In DCC, Clerics reset their disapproval back to 1 each morning. This seems really good to me, and I might need to houserule it to only occur in town. We’ll see.

    All in all, it was a really fun session for me, and I think the others as well. The group, at one point, considered returning to town and calling this expedition a bust due to the relentless random encounters. However, they were able to get a lot of heals out due to my mistake concerning Lay on Hands, so they decided to march on (I believe correctly).