The party, having defeated all of the baddies in the keep, proceeded to perform those actions familiar to all dungeon-delving crews - loot the bodies, look for shinies and magic. They found plenty of both (the original adventure creators admit this is a bit of a Monty Haul windfall, as the rest of the adventure is a bit light on the treasure), lots of coin, nice shiny baubles, and even a few magic items. Oh, and the deed to the keep. Just icing on the cake, really, as the keep is quite a ways away from the fortified manor they are still building in the minor border province to the south, but the adventure tossed it in and I figured it would give the players a chuckle. Which it did, the paladin's player (the paladin being the only one of "noble birth" and thought it automatically became his) chortling about it the rest of the game and into our after game discussion. What is more interesting (to me as the DM, at least) is if the party is going to realize the deed is better used as some collateral on their current campaign than they are trying to keep it and make something of it from a distance.
The ranger's player has decided he wants to be the trickster of the group and the rogue, the original prankster, has decided it's just as interesting to let the ranger play the pranks and catch heat from the rest of the party. The ranger, having decided he doesn't like the paladin or his new squire, has targeted them specifically, first putting poison ivy oil in the back of the squire's pants a game session or so back, and then putting tiger balm (which he used to kill an aged halfling way back in the first session... that one needs further explanation, gimme a second) on the rungs of the ladder into the keep's secret treasure room. The paladin and the squire, having had quite enough, decided to chop down the tree the ranger was "meditating" in (remember, whatever you can do, elves can do better), and when the ranger started running, the squire who is an archer specc'd fighter planted a crossbow bolt into the ranger's spine with a devastating natural 20 critical hit. The paladin healed him back into life, but I doubt the ranger is going to let it go.
Yes, I am totally letting the ranger's player make the ranger as unpopular with the rest of the party as he wants. This game is about friends having fun together, and if you ain't having fun except by making your friends miserable, maybe it's time to move on to another group. But the players have to decide it on their own. I'm here to referee the game and tell a story, not make the players get along if they don't want to. It's a tough love, but it's fair. Besides, if they mess around enough, I get to run over a small collection of villages with 20,000 angry, violent humanoids. It's the small things in life that bring a DM pleasure.
Oh yeah, the tiger balm story. The first session, I tasked the party with escorting an old halfling to another country to act as ambassador there. The night they arrived was cold and snowy, and the old halfling showed like he was coming down with a cold. The ranger (a druid at the time) tries to help the ambassador by rubbing him down with tiger balm, who turns up dead the next day. He was going to die anyway, he was just a plot point to get the party to the other country to start up that arc of the campaign, but the party still believes to this day that the tiger balm killed the old halfling. Sad really, that old halfling (Master Teagallow) was this crotchety old grump who kept sending the party off on side explorations the entire trip, kinda hoping to kill the party off and kinda just to get them out of his hair. Still my most memorable NPC to date.
Anyway, the party found some more history about the keep and the surrounding area along with the treasures in the keep's basement. Namely they found bits of history that point towards the clan of giants that were driven to destroy the keep and kill the last lord. Having confirmation from the local guide, the party decides (after their long rest and almost-fratricide of the ranger) to go talk to the giants and see if they can get some help from them, as the hobgoblin army had not used any giants in their warbands to this point. And if nothing else, maybe they can convince the giants to stay neutral in the coming invasion. They trekked north while the ranger grumped that he had not run into any dire wolves. He stated he wanted one as a mount, but in reality he was trying to get a message to his long lost sister. I had explained that the party hadn't seen much in the way of any non-monstrosity animals since leaving the last vestiges of civilization - large numbers of hungry, blood-thirsty raiders tend to drive away animals as well as locals - but he still grumped.
I relented and let him run into a lone mated pair of dire wolves not fair off their path to the giants. "Dire wolves always travel in packs!" "Leave off, bud, you're lucky these two are too stubborn to leave their den with the rest of the pack. Roll your animal handling checks." Natural one, and natural one. Oh yeah, not an attack roll, so those aren't an automatic failure, but when you can't even meet a DC10 skill check with all your bonuses, it's not tragic, that's comedy gold right there. Fortunately (for him, I think at this point even I was ready for the ranger to be turned into dire wolf poop), the druid had accompanied the ranger and he intervened and the ranger eventually convinced the wolves to deliver a message down the "wolf chain" towards where his long lost sister was rumored to be. One wolf left with the message, and the other followed along, stating she wanted to watch the giant step on the party.
And that's where we ended. We already had one player step out two hours early, and another (who didn't show up until two hours after start because he forgot we were playing, even with my weekly reminder text) left an hour early, so I said this was a good place to stop.
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