Tobold's Blog
Friday, January 30, 2015
 
The Favorites of Selune - Skin Deep - Session 9

In the previous session we ended the year in the middle of a combat, which we now continued. The Favorites of Selune had investigated a murder and their transformation into svirfneblin, found evidence that the assassin was a certain Honrak who lived in a boarding house nearby, and had then decided to not yet act on that information. That gave Honrak the opportunity to react, and the assassin attacked them at night in their sleep in the tavern.

Now Honrak is a high-level assassin, but as he had so easily transformed them into svirfneblin earlier, Honrak wasn't aware that the group was also nearly as high level as him. That, plus the fact that this night the group had put up a guard, made the assassination less easy than he had thought. He did do some serious damage, especially in the first rounds when the group was still scrambling to get into their armor. But as the Favorites of Selune only had a single opponent in this fight, their concentrated fire was too much for Honrak, who went down after a few rounds of combat, not having killed a single group member. Honrak had used a flaming dagger, which the rogue of the group happily recovered.

Having learned that inactivity wasn't a good option, the Favorites of Selune then tackled their second clue in the morning, going the alchemist's guild. They had by then searched Honrak's room at the boarding house and found two poison darts, one apparently used to kill Belina, with instructions signed "Y.". That fit with their information that there was an alchemist named Yengo doing necromantic alchemy in the basement of the alchemist's guild. As they had talked to the head of the guild at the state dinner and gotten an invitation to visit, they now were able to take a tour of the guild. In the basement Yengo was behind a locked door and told the guildmaster to go away, but the guildmaster had the master key and opened the door. To everybody's surprise Yengo had created a flesh golem, and sicced it on the adventurers. The guildmaster fled, and the group was in their second fight of the day against Yengo and his golem.

The golem was doing serious damage with a rampage attack. That was an attack with a recharge dice roll, and due to luck the golem could use that twice in a row. Meanwhile Yengo was throwing various bottles with alchemical attacks. The priest was caught in the crossfire and went down, but the druid revived him. The Favorites of Selune cleverly concentrated their fire on the alchemist, basically ignoring the golem. That worked out well, as the golem stopped functioning when his master was dead.

Meanwhile the guildmaster had alerted the authorities and Prince Ular came with a squadron of guards. Searching the room the prince found an unsigned letter to Yengo instructing Yengo to provide Honrak with the transformation powder to get rid of the Favorites of Selune. The prince recognized the handwriting as that of his sister, Princess Taidra. But as the letter wasn't signed, he didn't think that to be proof enough to persuade his father, Duke Ruwan. That left the players to decide what exactly they wanted to do to conclude this adventure in the next session.

Comments:
Tobold,

I'm intrigued by whether the lack of definitive proof was by design or whether the Favourites missed something. I can see the pros and cons of both sides.

A pro of the lack of proof is it enables some good role-play opportunities, while a con is it might engender a "did we screw up somehow?" feeling among the players.

Care to comment or would that be like a magician revealing his tricks?
 
I wanted an open end to this adventure, having the players choose how this will end.
 
Nice one. So is the next session the last one of this campaign? Then with your new one?
 
For reasons of player availability I had to add another adventure to this campaign, so I can start the new campaign later this year with all players present.
 
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