lederhosen

Revived my D&D campaign yesterday after nine months' hiatus. We'd agreed that three of the players would drop out of my game, because it's easier for them to come to half our games (i.e. Rey's sessions) than all, and added one new player (workmate of Rey's) so we now have four players, which is a nice manageable number. One monk, one cleric, one ranger, one fighter/sorcerer, all second-level at the start of this session.

The PCs were recruited for an important task requiring stealth and discretion. No, really. The crown is currently at war against Duke Alain of Benford, who's attempting to secede from what remains of the kingdom. (When the quarantine borders were drawn up, most of Alain's lands were on the wrong side of them, hence his unhappiness...)

Recently, a powerful force of NPCs loyal to the crown killed a big green dragon in the Tryllon Forest, which is nominally in Alain's territory, although neither side has much of a presence there (most of the action is in the plains and fields to the east and south). Close inspection revealed that the dragon was gravid, and may well have laid some of her eggs in the forest before she died. Obviously it would be bad if Alain got hold of dragon eggs, so somebody needs to go look for them; the glory-boys who killed the dragon are fond of flying around on gryphons doing daring deeds of derring-do, not tromping around on foot looking under rocks for eggs that might not even be there, so this is where the PCs come in.

Getting to the forest involved travelling about twenty miles through open terrain patrolled by the secessionists, so the PCs decided to get hold of some enemy uniforms. Asking around their own camp got them the location of a burnt-out village that had recently been the site of battle, and they decided to go visit that after dark.

There weren't any living soldiers left in the village, but they weren't the first to think of scavenging there; about a dozen elves had shown up to scavenge what little they could from the bodies of the dead, since it was effectively no-man's land and neither side had had the opportunity to bury them. When the PCs arrived the scavengers were resting, holed up in a couple of the buildings that had survived, but four of them noticed the PCs' approach and snuck around and behind them in the long grass while Our Heroes were standing outside the village discussing their approach. When they were within thirty-feet, all four of them let fly; only one or two of them hit, but the amount of damage involved gave the players a nasty scare. After the first round it got a lot easier for the PCs, because the bad guys were no longer getting sneak-attack bonuses, and when the PCs finally started scoring hits on them they discovered the scavengers only had 3HP each. They managed to get a couple of prisoners... at which point they discovered that nobody in the party had brought along any rope. They eventually improvised with torn clothes, and holed up in a large stone building on the near side of town.

During the night, one of the PCs' sentries spotted another scavenger sneaking towards the building. They scared him off but didn't manage to kill him, and while the PCs were looking in that direction their captives escaped. The PCs, expecting an imminent attack, decided to relocate to a church with a sturdily-built stone tower. (In fact, the scavengers were more scared of the PCs, and as soon as the scout saw the PCs meant business that group decided to lie low in the barn and wait for them to go away.)

The PCs had been seriously injured in the initial fight and decided to stay out of sight during the day. About 11 am four the scavengers - who were hoping the PCs had left town by now - started moving around in two pairs. The PCs lost sight of one pair, and decided to sneak up on the other pair, which they did just as the missing pair spotted them and opened fire, so both sides managed to get ambushed at once. The PCs won that fight, though, taking two more prisoners, and the remaining scavengers fled. The prisoners made rather unconvincing promises to mend their ways, and having collected the uniforms they needed, the PCs reluctantly let the prisoners live, leaving them tied up in one of the buildings so they couldn't see which way the party left.

They then headed out across abandoned farmland towards the forest. Several miles from the edge of the woods, a horseman wearing the rebels' uniform rode up to them. The PCs had done their homework on this plan - they'd even looked up the name of a local nobleman on the rebels' side to mention as their sponsor. Unfortunately, they hadn't realised the Alain's men used a sign/countersign system, and when the horseman said "The wind is warm at our backs" out of nowhere there wasn't much they could do but watch him gallop away to get reinforcements.

The PCs ran for the forest and managed to get under cover just before the cavalry showed up. It was getting dark, so they set up camp some way into the forest and set off again in the morning.

As they got deeper into the forest it got quieter and quieter; they realised something was up, but weren't sure exactly what. One of them decided to climb a tree to get a better view, and I reached for one of the sneaky GM's favourite weapons: misdirection.

I spent about five minutes setting up scenery for the local area: a few small hills, lots of small trees and undergrowth, a couple of large trees on top of the hills, and a few fallen logs (one of them spanning a gap between two hillocks). The players were getting *extremely* suspicious at this point - I don't go to that sort of trouble unless combat's about to break out - and the other three were looking all around, trying to figure out where on the map the attack would be coming from, while the monk climbed the tree. None of them were expecting trouble to come from the top of the tree, until the monk put his hand in something very very sticky, and a biggish spider started biting him.

Then things got messy. The ranger started climbing the tree to help, failed his Spot check, and got himself stuck in a patch of web; with great difficulty the two of them managed to kill the spider, but it took them a long time and a lot of poison damage. Meanwhile, the two on the ground had backed towards the log-bridge - under which was lurking an ettercap and a swarm of smaller spiders. The fighter/sorcerer, who could easily have killed the swarm with a first-level spell or two, didn't realise it would work and didn't try; instead the two of them got mauled by the ettercap and the swarm. The fighter/sorcerer was knocked out (it didn't help that he'd stopped wearing armour because it interferes with the spells he hasn't been using), and Edward the cleric died while the other two - having finally gotten out of the tree - got beaten up. They'd brought the ettercap close to death, but we were left with one barely-conscious PC who didn't have enough HP left to survive the swarm or kill the ettercap.

I was afraid we might be headed for a total party kill - I hadn't expected the encounter to cause them this much trouble, but they'd made a couple of serious tactical mistakes - and eventually one of them took a strongly-worded hint and spent a Shiny Brain for a stroke of luck. A dryad came to the rescue - the ettercap was badly enough hurt that it only took one good longbow hit to finish it off, whereupon the swarm scuttled away - and although the healer had died, they managed to stabilise the ranger before he bled to death. The dryad sheltered the sorry remains of the party, and pointed them towards an elder who agreed to bring the cleric back in exchange for his service.

I had fun with the resurrection bit. I didn't want them to feel like it was an easy option, so... the elder - basically a giant talking tree - commanded them to drag the cleric to her feet (in itself a difficult task, since the 'healthy' member of the party was severely weakened by venom and the other two were bedridden) and bury him there. Then they waited... and waited... and waited.

Over the next week, a fruit grew from one of the branches of the tree, getting bigger and bigger until it had pulled the branch down to the ground. When it was more than six feet long, the elder told them to open it up; it had a hard rind, a bit like a watermelon, and inside was Edward, alive, stark naked and covered in sticky fruit juice. They decided to retrieve his clothes, and dug where they'd buried him. I think they were a little disconcerted when they found his clothes, and his skeleton still inside them, all twined through with tree roots :-)