Drink Talk Roll Extended #12: The Brave and the Kobold

I really hope that new Batman movie doesn’t change its name. Otherwise, there goes the streak of movie title references.

Session Recap

After Ulrich activated his magical necklace at the end of the last session, the party found themselves transported to an unknown location. And when the rest of the party turned around to look at Amra, they found him petrified by unknown magic, the eyes of the creature they fought at the end of last session falling out of his hand. The rest of the party started exploring the new location hoping to find someone or something that could restore Amra.

Just outside their arrival area, the party found a mazelike cavern guarded by two Minotaurs. Without their combo tank/healer, the party had to avoid getting into melee as much as possible but luckily with a string of lucky crits, they were table to take out both of them.  

Continuing through the passage the Minotaurs had guarded, the party found it long and dark with only the light of the occasional glowing crystal and the sound of rock grinding on rock. This went on for what seemed like hours until the tunnel gave way to a giant cavern. In the distance, they could see a giant city carved out from the stone and illuminated by giant glowing crystals.  

The party separated in the city. Jedah went looking for armor and Ulrich went looking for information about their current predicament. He couldn’t find anything entirely in a language he could read but he could understand the occasional word and pictures were universal. One of those pictures was a diagram of circles: Four with characters he recognized as the elements in a circle around two circles. One marked with the character from “Material” and another surrounding that one marked with the character “Void”.

After spending enough time studying, one of the workers told him that Lady Demi, the leader of the city, wished to speak with him. He was led to her office where he found a woman with skin that looked like brown stone with red swirls. Like most people they had met in this area, she expressed surprise at seeing outsiders. Apparently, they hadn’t seen one for what they assumed to be thousands of years. It’s hard telling time when you don’t have a sun or maybe that’s just me. Ulrich asked her for help in healing Amra and she offered to make him a trade: He and the party would do a job for her and in return, she would heal Amra. She was even generous enough to offer them lodgings so they could rest before departing on the mission.  

The party reunited and rested up before the mission into the mines. One of Demi’s workers led them to the entrance but his orders were to wait for them on the outside and report back should they never return. The party took the torch from him and ventured into the mines. It wasn’t long before Jedah started noticing that they were being watched by something and that something turned out to be a pack of Kobolds. While the party preferred to do ranged combat, the Kobolds numbers let them move in quickly and even though the party was able to defeat them, the Kobolds were able to overwhelm Khorr who nearly died until Ulrich and Jedah were able to stabilize him.  

With the Kobolds taken care of, the party had one question left: Do they venture further into the mines or do they leave hoping that they’ve taken care of the problem? 

Splitting the Part (Again)

So, we had another party member out this week. This time it was Manuel / Amra. Like I mentioned in the previous section, this meant the party was without the person who is both their frontliner and their only person with free healing. Most of the time players build their parties to spread those out but this loveable(?) band decided to go with one point of failure. Therefore, for this session, I had to make sure I didn’t accidentally kill one of them because what would have been an easy encounter with Amra is deadly without him.

I intentionally choice things with Challenge Ratings that weren’t that high and played them with a very simple strategy of generally shooting the closest party member. Though, one thing you do need to consider is the power of groups in 5E’s action economy. The more actions the enemies can take, the more likely they are to hit your players and given the low HP a Rogue can have, my mistake in accounting for that with the Kobolds nearly killed Khorr. (It probably doesn’t help that I’m not sure Pleiades knows all of Khorr’s abilities more than six months in and completely sober but that’s beside the point for now.)

I probably should have also taken a look into Ulrich’s spells to see what Area of Effect (AoE) options he had other than faerie fire which doesn’t do damage. I think I was expecting him to just be able to zap a couple of the Kobolds with a quick spell and be done with them. I could have also factored in that Warlocks don’t get that many spell slots because they refresh on a short rest instead of a long rest. Well, if they press decide to go further, I can only assume it will be after taking a rest of some sort so Ulrich will be at full power and the other two shouldn’t be that far behind.

Another option I will have to remember for next time is to have Talliyah or another NPC companion take some of the hits. She wouldn’t have really gotten hurt but the location the party is currently in is surging with Earth (the element) power and she could have used her powers to bring up some rock or something to stop arrows or block advancement for a turn or two.  

Well, that’s it for this week. There are a bunch of other different ways I could have rebalanced these encounters and a bunch of other things I could have kept in mind. I’ll do my best to remember all that next time and I hope you all found this to be helpful for you own future encounters.  Until next time, keep on rolling.

-J.D.