It’s Monday, so let’s review the weekend…
Mostly because today has been awful!
I woke up with a sore throat, so I think I’m getting sick…
I then tried to syringe the wax from my ears and threw myself back into having BPPV (Benign paroxysmal positional vertigo.)
So yeah… today sucked.
But it was a good weekend, so let’s look back on that!
Sunday was fairly standard, we watched Critical Role, which was an amazing episode, and that’s about it!
But on Saturday I had D&D with my wife and friends at our place.
This is a fortnightly gathering, so it’s always something I look forward to.
Plus I’m a player in this game, so there’s a lot less pressure on me!
We are playing the D&D 5th Edition Start Set adventure “The Lost Mine of Phandelver.”
As this is the first time our DM has actually DM’d for D&D (So many D’s in that sentence!) it’s the logical place to start…
Which just proves who illogical I am because I didn’t.
Anyway, this was our 5th session of the campaign.
We all just hit level 3 at the end of session 4, so it’s the first time most of the group has their archetype abilities… and holy moly did they help this session!
So the group of adventurers this time are:
- Erak: A Variant Human Brute Fighter,
- Cadence: A Half-Elf College of Glamour Bard,
- Navillus: A Variant Human Swashbuckling Rogue, (Played by me!) and
- Ulfgar: A Hill Dwarf Circle of the Moon Druid.
In Session 1:
We made our way south from Neverwinter to the town of Phandalin.
On the way we discovered our boss and his guard were ambushed and kidnapped.
We followed the trail to a cave full of goblins.
Navillus scouted ahead and just stumbled over trap after trap, managing to barely set them off and continue on without noticing. (He has a Wisdom of 8, what did you expect?!)
In the cave we killed errythang… though in the main fight Ulfgar was knocked unconscious, and then so was Navillus as he stood over him defending him and blocking the door.
Eventually they both regained consciousness and a full nights rest of was had while the leader of the goblins planned in another room.
He didn’t plan too well because we burst in and murdered the lot of them, rescuing Sildar, the guard of our boss Gundren.
We fought a little over 20 creatures and Navillus managed to kill 17 of them.
I already knew how crazy Rogues could be, but to also have the dice gods on my side by giving me a bunch of critical hits was crazy!
We also levelled up to level 2!
In Session 2:
We made it to Phandalin and got paid, then we got a whole bunch of quests from a whole bunch of people.
We discovered the town was being controlled by a band of thugs calling themselves the Redbrands.
We got ambushed by 4 of them, and had a tough time handling them.
So after we hid the bodies we decided to go back to the goblin cave and get the supplies of the merchant who helped us hide them.
It doesn’t sound like we did a lot, but there was a lot of role playing in this session.
In Session 3:
We headed off back to the goblin cave like we said we would.
We got ambushed by some Hobgoblins who had a “wanted” poster of Navillus, except they never get the nose right!
The wanted poster was signed with a symbol of a black spider… a name we’d heard of before.
We then made it back to the cave to find it repopulated by some goblins and another hobgoblin.
We murdered them all and took the supplies back to town.
When we went back to the Inn we stayed at we found that the Redbrands had roughed up the owner because of us.
There we made plans on how we would take out the Redbrands.
But decided that, since 4 of them caused us a decent amount of trouble, maybe we should finish another quest first!
We laid out rumours with the townsfolk that we were leaving and heading to Thundertree a town to the east of Neverwinter, and quite a few days away.
Instead we were planning on heading to Conyberry and asking a question to a Banshee.
In Session 4:
We headed east along the Triboar Trail towards Conyberry.
It turns out the Triboar is a really dangerous road!
We fought Stirges, more Stirges, Orcs, even more Stirges, and even an OWLBEAR!
And finally made our way to Conyberry.
This got us enough XP to reach level 3!
Both the DM and Ulfgar were sick with a cold for that session.
So it was mostly just travel and combat to make it a little easier.
The hope was that we’d level up on this quest, as it would really help with the Redbrands.
Too bad you’re meant to clear them out at level 2!
In Session 5:
Having gotten to level 3 we were confident.
We made it to Conyberry and discovered it was basically a ghost town, overgrown and with no living residents.
It was, however, full of Twigblights that wouldn’t stop nipping at our ankles.
None of us were perceptive enough to realise what they were, but a few of us were so annoyed at the grass stabbing us that we up rooted some weeds.
We eventually got the Banshee and had a plan.
We had a gift to give in return for a question.
We gave the gift and asked the question, getting the answer, and run the heck out of there!
Ulfgar got so annoyed at the grass biting our ankles that he used Flaming Sphere to burn them all to death.
After a “less uneventful*” journey along the Triboar trial, we made it back to Phandalin.
We snuck into town, bypassing 2 Redbrands, and finished the quest.
This got us 3 potions of healing, with a 4th on the way, because it was tooootally promised to us.
We then rested at the Inn early so we could sneak into the hidden back entrance to the Redbrands hideout.
Which Navillus had discovered earlier in another session, which we had scouted out with Ulfgar as a normal spider.
We made our way in, knowing the entrance area was guarded by some weird spikey dog thing.
Which turned out to be a Nothic!
We did a Vax** to the Nothic and continued to explore the cave.
Crossing a bridge Erak and Cadence fall through it, discovering a chest.
Navillus checks it out and finds some awesome things.
They then keep going around, with Erak as a Giant Spider, much to Navillus’ chagrin.
We encounter some Redbrands, some traps, some skeletons, some more Redbrands, some Bugbears, and some more Redbrands.
We kill them all and saved the prisoners they were holding.
We also “befriended” a goblin the Bugbears were tormenting.
Discovered the Redbrands were in league with the Black Spider, and that Glassstaff, the leader of the Redbrands, was actually a missing member of the Lords Alliance we had been tasked with finding and rescuing.
With the only unexplored place to go being up into the Manor above the cave, we ended the session.
This was a super long session, we had a break for dinner during it because the DM and their partner are going on holidays when the next session would have happened.
The whole thing has been great fun, and I’ve learned a lot by being a player!
The adventure has been pretty fun too, and I can’t wait to see what happens next!
I’m also planning on recapping the sessions on here too, so that’s why I went through everything a little quicker than the Ghosts of Saltmarsh stuff.
* Our DM has a way with words sometimes, she meant to say “less eventful” or “more uneventful” but kinda combined them. It happens to the best of us.
** In Critical Role Campaign 1 Episode 110 Matt is describing a weird creature eating something, Vox Machina are on the final ascent of a dungeon on a walking undead Titan on their way to confront Veckna who had just become a God. Vax, being the Rogue, was scouting ahead and saw it the same way Bilbo sees Gollum for the first time… so he throws his dagger at it and kills it one hit. So Matt tears up the NPC sheet he had for the Nothic.