So Broon Dakata, a tiefling warlord, is now riding along with the four. Armed with a very large Goblin Smashin’ Warhammer he leads the fight from the rear. 
On the way to the ruins of Rivenroar they’re attacked by a swarm of bug creatures, some as large as a house. It took a few turns before the bugs figured out they needed to get on both sides of the Fantastic Five to get their aura damage working but eventually they realized it. [DM: I get hammered a lot because my mobs fight intelligently. So I made these dumb for a few rounds even though I would bet that if such a thing as a Kruthik existed it would have evolved swarm tactics by now and be using them right off the bat. I also tossed the 4 hatchlings and added two more Young to this fight.]
The Five did well against the new, to them, opponents and slaughtered them down to the last crunchy carapace. It was during this fight that Eric do Deric, the human cleric, was noticed to have acquired a new +1 Holy Mace of Healing and that the package they were supposed to deliver back to their guild masters was looking a little flat. Darta has her suspicions about where the cleric’s mace has come from but is willing to let it let it slide as it does help the groups survival rate.
After the fight the group definitely felt more powerful and each had come up with a new trick to try and they moved on all the more confident in their abilities. [DM: Leveled to 3]
[DM: These fights over the last few times bring up an interesting issue. Because healing is spread throughout the group with Second Wind and the occasional Healing Potion and fewer ways for the classic healers to heal with two words each and the occasional other option, classes that have historically hung back are as a result are not contributing their share of darmage sinks/healing. Darta and Layla take very little damage compared to Garrawk and Eric (and Broon now). So they rarely if ever use their Second Wind or a healing potion or allow their own health pool to bleed off some of the damage from the front line. I'm not sure if that's ever really given consideration but there's a certain level of "Hmm..." when at every extended rest, Darta and Layla have expended virtually no surges and Eric and Garrawk (and Broon now) have virtually none. My thought is that if the two 'back of the lines' characters were up front for a little while then let the others 'taunt' whatever is on them off using marks, it could extend their 'work day' so to speak.]
Our group moved on and came to the old ruins of Rivenroar. Broon, being local, had heard enough stories of the place to know where the old catacombs were and led the group there. Layla saw many tracks of goblins and hobgoblins and “even larger creatures” moving around the area but on the way in they didn’t spot anyone.
[DM: Too bad really, this would have been a perfect place to have an 'evade or take out the patrols' set up but the module as published didn't have them and I've been too busy to add something like that in.]
The Famous Five moved down the steep stairs toward the opening chamber only to have Garrawk trip, stumble down several steps before he caught himself, axe and armour clattering against the walls. [DM: Stealth roll of 1] Oddly enough the hobgoblins and goblins below were ready and waiting for them. [DM: Again I boosted this encounter as it was a bit low in XP for a group of 5 level 3's by adding 2 more Hobgoblins.]
The four hobgoblins formed a phalanx in the center of the room using their huge shields to guard themselves and each other from attack while the goblins ran to the corners of the room and used stealth to continually potshot the characters as they stood at the base of the stairs. Realizing the hobgoblins weren’t going to enter the choke point Broon and Garrawk ran into the mix while Eric moved up to the midway point and Layla and Darta hid out on the stairs taking potshots. The high AC of the hobgoblins made this a tough fight while they were grouped up and shielding each other but eventually the party wore them down, split them up and got them separated. The entire time the two goblins were nailing poor Broon with crossbow bolts, usually with the extra damage from ‘precision shots aka combat advantage’. Â Poor Broon was turned into a literaly pincushion this session. He took probably 8-10 bolts from the goblin sharpshooters and another 3 or 4 from the gnome skulk they ran into in the next room.
As the Five slowly and dramatically wore down the hobgoblins it became obvious to the goblins that things were going bad so each one of them ran away as the last hobgoblin dropped and the next to last ran through the open door to the north streaming a trail of blood from multiple wounds. [DM: I totally dropped the ball here as one of the goblins ran into the Drake Swarm room and I should have had a description ready of his stripped to the bone corpse laying somewhere in the room. As it was the sharpshooter just kind of vanished into that gray area where things the DM forgets about goes.]
The Five recovered and then did the ‘follow the right hand wall’ trick. This lead them to the drake swarm room where they found out the awesomeness that is the Drake Swarm [DM: By general consensus on the forums at least the drake swarm is the most overpowered for its level monster in existence. It also was great fun that I was rolling way more than my fair share of 15+'s and many many 20's this entire session]. Broon was pulled down several times and Garrawk a few. By the end of the battle Broon was shaking dead drakes out of every orifice of his armour and had lost several layers of skin and more than a few chunks of flesh. The gnome skulk in the room was able to nail him several times with a crossbow bolt from stealth and when they finally killed the last of the pirahna drakes Broon and Garrawk went looking for him. The gnome leaped out of one of the body alcoves he was hiding in and made a break for it. Broon nailed him in passing and the gnome faded out of sight and with Darta, Eric and Layla all filling the way out, he had to go deeper.
It was in the next room that the “Floor Anus” (TM) made its inadvertently hilarious appearance. I drew the fountain as it’s described in the description. Well my attempt was when looked at in one way by Garrawk more of an anus than a fountain with water flowing out of it. I suppose dragonborn see a lot of anus if you know what I mean… This ended up being a pretty hilarious moment. Especially after I said, “And you hear splashing noises…” and then when I could take it again, “And moaning…” Maybe you had to be there but it was damn funny for like 10 minutes straight.
As the party entered this room they heard a voice from midair, “Over by the fountain or I gut him right now.” from by the figure chained to the wall which Broon recognized as one of the kidnap victims, an alchemist. So the Five moved over the fountain and waited. Then a crossbow bolt nailed the alchemist from the exit and mocking laughter echoed into the chamber along with the sound of running feet. Eric do Deric, the human cleric, shouted out his Healing Word as Garrawk yoinked the bolt free after running over. The others moved into position to guard against further attack but the gnome was gone.
And that’s where we ended the night. So, so far they’ve rescued one kidnappee, killed some hobgoblins and bugs and drakes and allowed goblins, hobgoblins and gnomes to escape them.
Afterword: I think I’m going to start handing out poker chips for surges and action points. The players may not be keeping as close track of these as perhaps they should and they rarely if ever use an action point. I also really REALLY wish that the printout of the character builder application had a 2×2 power card printout per sheet. Some of the fonts on those cards is just really gd small and really hard to realize all the ramifications of the power. Â Also a player new to 4th edition or for that matter a particular class can really slow down a session. No complaints, just an observation there. The game is just really new in the way it works and even long time PnP players (like Broon) take some time to get up to speed with what they can do and etc.
I’m also hoping to add at least one player via Web Conferencing, an old friend in Georgia occasionally. I have a logitech 9000, arguably one of the top web cams but my craptop has a tough time pumping out a HD feed and on top of that my outbound bandwidth is only 600kb and a HD feed is 1mb or so which results in some lag. So I may rather than a continuous feed go with a 1 second snapshot and dump that up to one of my web sites and just open a VoIP bridge of some kind either through vent, I have a vent server somewhere that’s paid up for a few months still or maybe a Skype conference call or something like that.
I’m not sure what’s going to come of our Four/Five and their task back in their starting home. There’s nothing really there drawing them to go back other than a place to stay and learn and they’re all earning and learning a lot more on the road than they ever did in the classrooms and sacred chambers. The food is better, they have gold jingling in their pockets and if they occasionally, okay frequently, have brushes with death then that makes the living all the more special doesn’t it. So while they may return there, I doubt they’ll be returning to their original pursuits. Of course some of the things they’ve set in motion may come back to haunt them in more ways than one if it gets that far. <– That’s called foreshadowing.
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