The Chronicles of a DM: Part VI

The last session was... interesting... While Alrick was around, none of the other ongoing characters were, but we had a step in from an old player who was in town, so we added in a human Monk named Yang. While I was planning to skip a bunch of encounters, I decided to back up and run a mini-boss fight.

Alrick and Yang entered further into the Teeth (a situation they didn't fully understand until I showed them a picture only the GM sees... this is a badly written adventure), and the air got colder. Very cold. One might say, magically cold. As if ice creatures were ahead. They arrived at a door frozen shut, which they shatter open to discover... ice archons! Chimeras! Fun!

[I'm lazy. And that is expressed in this case as when faced with two players, I don't bother changing the encounter (although I did that one time last time). As such, the party is half the size it needs to be to face this battle.

That said, Alrick's new power of Evard's Black Tentacles proved very useful in tying down most of the combatants at almost the first turn, giving the two of them time to deal damage to one or two opponents. Which, by and large, they did effectively. Unfortunately, due to low rolls, they weren't able to deal that huge an amount of damage, and so the fight wore on, and wore them down. This is one of the most expensive, in terms of healing resources, that they've faced, mainly because there were only two, and only one could give out healings. (It didn't help that I didn't run the monsters entirely correctly, but I also forgot about their powers, and the Chimera's sucked on attacking and had crap defenses, so all in all the badness evened out.)

We very nearly had a TPK (as far as two players could be called a P to TK). It was only due to final rolls of 1s and a 4 from me that Alrick survived long enough to kill the last opponents. However, the Monk fell, and due to the Relic's whispering in his ear that Alrick didn't step up to help (and Alrick is evil, and Yang won't be back anyway).]

It was a long fight, and at the end Alrick decided that getting some rest was the better part of not dying. [Should be back to full complement of players next week.]

[END]