First Report from The Isle of Darastrix...

First Report from The Isle of Darastrix...

Well work continues on fluffing out the lore and character backgrounds, but I've been really feeling the itch to just start playing so I decided to set up a little starter dungeon for my characters as a sort of test run. One of my character backgrounds is just a few loose ideas floating around in my head but the other two are pretty fleshed out.

So for just a little bit of backstory on how everyone got to where they are, a human sorcerer named Krieger and two dragonborn rangers named Ssedt and Zeffira were all part of the same mercenary group. Their group had fallen on hard times and Scaeda, the dragon queen, had become dissatisfied with their annual tributes so she decided to make an example out of them by wiping almost all of them out.

The three managed to escape but were left homeless and destitute so they're stuck wandering the countryside in the rain when they come across an abandoned fortress. So they managed to get inside to get out of the rain and that's pretty much where the adventure begins.

The entrance room is kind of a mess, with busted furniture in the corners and tattered, moldy carpet on the floor. The first thing I have them do is use the busted furniture to start a camp fire in the middle of the room so they could dry off. Then I had my most skilled character, Ssedt, start going around to all the doors and looking around.

I should note that every time I have a character perform some kind of action I roll what I call a danger die, which in this case is a d6. If I roll a 6 then that means that what they're doing is placing them in a dangerous situation. This generally results in triggering a trap or having monsters appear but could cause other things depending on the situation. I try to use common sense but sometimes I'll query the dice to keep things interesting. Also I have a table that's letting me generate the rooms semi-randomly.

Anyway, Ssedt checks out the first room that has the door already opened, finds a bunch of crates and a couple of barrels. Doesn't find anything useful in the crates but the barrels were full of flammable oil, probably used to fend of sieges. He moves on to the next room which was a dining room with more busted up furniture.

There's two more doors in the main room so he checks them out. Doesn't sense any danger from the other side so he opens the first door and finds a large prison room with several cells lining the walls. They go in and Krieger finds some manacles that he figures he could use later. They find another door further into the room.

Ssedt's been doing pretty good searching for traps and actually finds one on this door. He disarms it pretty easily but discovers that it's locked and while he's proficient in thieves tools, nobody is carrying any. So he whips out his crowbar and pries it open, somehow managing to not attract anything with the noise.

The door opens and they find yet another large prison. This one has some more busted up furniture along one of the walls. Ssedt grabs his torch and goes to check it out. He rolls really good on his investigation and finds...GOBLINS! Yep, three of them leap out and we have a nice little combat encounter. Now Ssedt is pretty stealthy but these guys have dark vision so I don't even bother rolling when they see his torchlight coming right up to them.

It's a tougher fight than I expected. Krieger gets a firebolt off but misses and a goblin rushes up and takes him down in one hit. Ssedt and Zeffira manage to take them out and Krieger somehow makes two death saving throws before he can get stabilized. Krieger came to after only one hour and they decided to rest for another so he got most of his health back.

Given the difficulty of that encounter I decided to have them head back to the entrance and get a long rest in so they could be back to full strength before venturing further. Of course backtracking through two rooms after leaving them alone for a couple of hours meant I needed to roll my danger die a couple more times. I rolled a 6 on the last one.

Given the circumstances I wasn't quite sure having more goblins waiting for them would have been likely, so I rolled to see if it was more goblins or something else. Well it wasn't goblins so I started trying to figure out what might be wrong.

Then I looked at my map and saw the campfire in the middle of the room...the campfire that had been unattended for over two hours...sitting on rotting carpet...in a room full of busted furniture. I rolled and yes, the entire room was ablaze and the fortress was filling up with smoke.

Well, I saw only one option. They could all get to and through the front door in one turn but they would have to go through the fire. I had them all roll constitution saves. Krieger and Zeffira failed. They made it out but Krieger took enough damage to bring him down to one hitpoint and Zeffira is now at half. And of course there's those two barrels of flammable oil sitting in the next room.

So that's where I left off. Three half dead adventurers running away in the rain, a goblin infested fortress behind them going up in flames just moments away from a fairly sizable explosion.

Who says lonewolfing isn't fun!?