Tweaking The Night Below continues

As I mentioned in previous posts, I decided that in this second year of our 1st ed. Campaign I would send the characters down into the epic Night Below setting.

With the campaign on hiatus during the holidays, it was nice to get back to it. But I am a bit nervous having committed to this. It’s a big adventure. Besides all the wandering monsters and natural dangers, there are a lot of set encounters on the way to the Sunless Sea of book three. Warring Quaggoths and Hook Horrors, Temple of Jubilex area, Derro colonies, and then the assault on the City of The Glass Pool itself. I rarely run city assaults in my D&D. It’s usually pretty small scale.

Tweaking things in the books is going to continue for two reasons. One, I don’t want this to take another two years of game time. I want to finish this by some time in Summer. Two, these characters are not going to be the suggested level several games from now when they have to assault the Aboleth city in the Sunless Sea. The books recommend being somewhere between 11-15th by the final battles, and the highest characters are around 8th right now. They’ll hit 9th or 10th by then no problem, but that’s about it. So the importance of allies, treasure, etc. will need to be tweaked.

I haven’t exactly memorized the stuff to come (especially in the 3rd book), so I am taking it “one day at a time” as they say, with a bit of an eye on the future. I have completely eliminated the Rockseer Elves, and I am putting more importance in the help from the Deep Gnomes. Though they don’t offer a ton of help in the books, I am making them a little more open to being a safe place during the players adventures. The gnome city has a flux point, so that when the players get to deeper areas they can come back for a rest if necessary, plus have access to the surface if they need an extended rest.

One problem in this last week’s game was that the guy running a gnome character has had to leave our game group, and his character was a lot of the inspiration for taking this direction in the campaign. Carmeneran, the deep gnome queen, was going to give him the Gnome Champion weapon and everything. Now that is a no-go. So here are the characters remaining to carry on the quest.

Krysantha: female drow fighter/druid raised by the druids of the Northern Forest. Self-righteous with a vengeful sense of justice.
Vaidno: half-elf Bard from Tanmoor. A city boy who seems at home in dungeons and dangerous places. Never met a girl he didn’t try to “nail.”
Helena: young girl fighter, raised by her soldier brothers in River City. Sword and shield is her passon. Recently fallen in love with local soldier, who is tagging along on the adventure.
Lumarin: Grey elf magic-user from far north.
Lily: a local girl, magic-user and thief. Reputation as a ho’.
Dia: NPC and teenager ranger girl. Some characters recently discovered she is the daughter of famous Woodlord Arcturus Grimm, though have not told her yet.

So in this week’s game the group enjoyed a party thrown by the gnome they saved in the caves above, before being sent to destroy some local trolls (lead by an Ettin) by queen Carmeneran. Just as in book 2, she wants to test them and their power before agreeing to be more help in their quest.

Mind you, the troll caves are way more complex and populated in book 2 than what I am doing with that section. Instead of two or three actual tribes of trolls, I just have a band of a half dozen of them, lead by an Ettin named “Two Mug.”

By the time they got to the first large cave, we had less than an hour of game time left, so we only did a fight with the first three trolls, who were hanging around that first cave. They had actually planned to use a bunch of oil to burn any trolls who they found, but they cave was way to damp to actually try Molotov action with the oil flasks (which I always resist anyway), so it was more or less a straight up fight. The party was more than a match, as Lumarin cast enlarge spells on Helena and Dia (making for a pair of 10 foot tall broadsword girls), and Krystantha managed to catch one troll in a Snare spell, basically making it helpless for slaughterin’.

They killed the trolls, and managed to get enough oil lit to stop the regeneration. We ended right there. I will pretty much start the next game with the Ettin and the rest of the trolls charging in from the adjacent cavern. With little time for player advance strategy, that should be a pretty decent fight. By the end of that game, the group should be on the “road” to The City of the Glass Pool.