Session 77: Drain that Swamp

 Session 77: Drain that Swamp

7/15/24-7/24/24, rest 7/25, active 7/26

PC: Valda, Zektel, Cracaryn, Brumdor, Rock

Hench: Nicky, Bazam, Taco, Zero, Crom 

#ACKS

This week Team B coordinated the arrival of all the donations from various parties interested in relocating the perpetual pest Meowster Mittens the Magnificent and his pride of sphinxes from the swamps near Lord Issac’s domain. After some bookkeeping, they pocketed their healthy profit and moved on a hook from Issac to finish clearing those hexes of lairs.

Rock the Bard was a new addition to the team, a grifter and con artist who was granted membership to the team by Zektel after an encounter at the foot fetish tent of the Shaman’s religious ceremony for the Friendship Hills. Some deal was made to cure his god-awfully ugly feet or something. I missed the details but everyone was laughing so I’m sure it was hilarious.

The group met with Meowster when the sphinx arrived as scheduled to pick up his treasure. They paid him and Lockleaf the elf hench of Teutch made further plans to negotiate the battle against Simba, a rival sphinx known to plague the lands near the Friendship Hills.

With business handled, the adventurers turned their attention to Issac’s swamp. Overland travel was wildly uneventful, the only notable encounter with a patrol out of Talston with a positive reaction that let them pass without incident. It helped that Zektel had a bunch of cavalry riding escort.

In Newbridge, Zektel picked up the rest of his hired guns, ending up with a not unimpressive army. The swamp itself was as dangerous as one might expect, but all in all the group performed well. The swamp to ACKS II has them a little off-kilter with which monsters do what, so there’s some mystery and suspense in each encounter that’s pretty fun. Most of the lairs were straightforward so I’ll summarize here:

• Lair of Stymphs, monstrous giant cranes that shoot their feathers from overhead.

• Lair of Strix, classic stirges of old, easily dispatched with Brumdor’s flamethrower automaton.

• Giant Tarantula ambush, killed a hench but Zektel makes death by poison basically irrelevant with 3 ranks of healing and high level divine magic.

• Another Giant Tarantula lair, pretty easily dispatched

• Couple of King Cobras which Cracaryn and Zektel teamed up to subdue

The only lair that gave them any pause at all was a stand of mangrove trees with strange runes on them in some characters reminiscent of kanji. A lot of effort was put in to determine where the portal was going to take them should they trip it. I think I might use too many portals? There was no portal, just some dryads hiding in their trees. Eventually the party coaxed them out to talk. It’s a unique scenario in that dryads are tethered to their host trees, they literally cannot relocate. Cracaryn, the Lawful ranger following the goddess of nature Ehlonna, was not willing to let them just be slaughtered. The party put a pin in that and kept on keeping on.

The only fight that was a challenge at all was a random encounter with some bronze bulls. Because they had enough units to actually constitute an army, they were deployed in vanguard, main, and rearguard dispositions marching through the swamp. If a random encounter hit, I randomly determined which deployment and allowed them to choose whether to engage with those troops or heroic foray as the party or both.

The group took on one bull in a foray, thinking it was a gorgon of old and very scared of being turned to stone. These were another new creature, firebreathing magical constructs that were quite tough. It killed a few of them, including the new guy Rock (welcome to the table) before the party destroyed it, then the army killed the other one.

Back to town with some loot from the lairs and more work to do. Party is primed to pick up where they left off when they get out of downtime jail.

Musings:

We had some complications getting rolling due to some growing pains. New players are moving into that Conqueror tier of the game and are still a little clumsy with setting up orders of battle and such. I handled it for them today but will not be doing so in the future. Sessions where they intend to use their mercs need to be prepared for on their end.

A lot of live random generation for this session, which was the primary bottleneck. I’m getting more efficient with the new tables and such but found that I’d really really like physical books in these scenarios. I find the energy spent trying to parse the random generation takes away from my creativity in what is actually happening. Makes for less interesting encounters.