The First Session

February 24, 2018, Campaign: Wildfire

1. The story starts

In which the Party is kidnapped, and breaks out of a dungeon.

Our characters:

• Ship the half-elf Revised Ranger, a camp counselor (androgynous, "overprepared astronaut lesbian")
• Theren Galamodel, the half-elf hexblade warlock, a noble (male)
• Belmac Oakbeard, the dwarf fighter (male)
• Marnoc, the human cleric. Lost at sea, the ship went down, everyone died but him. he grasped a single piece of the figurehead: the sea god saw him break the pinky off, and in turn broke off Marnoc's off. And thus Marnoc decided to follow Nodiesop, god of the sea. (male)
• Zoltar, the Aasimar Sorcerer and fortuneteller (female)

The story starts

The party was part of a caravan hired to convey an artefact to Honeyhand, setting out from the town of Tallfield. Very quickly, we were overcome by hyena-like creatures, howling and laughing, and we found ourselves knocked out.

The session begins with the Party in a dungeon, at full hit points but missing all our gear. The Party in a crudely-lit chamber, manacled upright to the walls of two-person cells in a dungeon. Forming the bars of each cell are thick wooden brambles, which are thorny and possibly dangerous. Theren and Ship are in a chamber together, Marnoc and Belmac are in a chamber together, and Zoltar is in a chamber alone. There're six daggars.

Ship is the first to come to conscousness. Ship tries to break out of the manacles banding them, but nope, not succeeding in breaking the rusty manacles. Made a bunch of noise. Theren wakes up.

Theren uses Eldritch Blast on his manacles, with a 16 to hit and a 2 for damage: the chains break and Theren is free. The rest of the party is awakend by the noise. Ship still struggles at their chains. Everyone except for Theren are still chained up.

"This reminds me of … I don't remember," says Belmac.

"This reminds me of my first wife," says Marnoc.

Belmac tears himself off the wall, and tears the manacles off the walls. It's quite loud.

Ship is just barely able to tear the chains from the wall, but remains manacled.

Belmac and Marnoc spend some time struggling.

Theren removes Ship's manacles.

Zoltar screams for help, with a bonus for persuasion for attracting someone. 25 persuasion. She sounds in dire need of help.

Belmac tries to rip the thorny bars off his cell, driven by the persuasion of Zoltar, and succeeds with 19, and takes 1 point piercing damage. Theren and I watch Belmac tear the thorny vines from the wall, and he finds Zoltar. With a running start he bashes the cell wall into submission, taking another 1 point of piercing damage, and tries to pull Zoltar from the wall.

Theren uses magic to destroy the cell wall on our cage, and fails.

Ship makes their way through the thorn wall, and takes 1 point piercing.

Belmac succeeds in ripping Zoltar out of the wall, and Zoltar uses her best fainting maiden voice to thank Belmac. Marnoc begs for help, and Belmac and Zoltar join to rip him from the wall.

The cages open onto a vestibule, and in the one wall not occupied by cages, there's a door.

Theren blasts open his cell.

Ship suspects we're underground; the walls are bricks and mortar, the door is wood. Marnoc uses the Light spell on a manacle to see better, because he is the only one who doesn't have Darkvision. Ship listens to the other side of the door, natural 25, and there's faint noises down a corridor that are an echoing of creaking, like crunching of branches. There's nothing nearby. The remining space in the dungeon was a spare set of manacles next to Zoltar, but nothing was there.

Zoltar reveals that he is racist against half-orcs, because while orcs can't control themselves, half-orcs have humanity that they're ignoring.

Theren turns the doorknob, and the door opens.

We sneak down the hallway. Belmac guides Marnoc, but the rest of us being stealthy range ahead. Ship stays within line of sight, but there's not really much to see.

We come into a room with a bunch of doors and a bunch of coffins. The coffins are recently moved, maybe in the last couple hours. In the first coffin, there's Zoltar's clothing. Ship listens under the doors, and the creaks are louder, but there's nothing really unsafe. Belmac opens a coffin and puts on all of his gear. Marnoc cracks all the coffins, and we all don all our shit. Half an hour passes. We don't know why we're here, but now we're ready.

We've got doors directly next to us, and the doors back down by the jail cell. Balmac kicks down the door, and there's a bunch of twigblights and an enormous dead tree. We all roll history, with a 19 Theren knows that the Agofias Tree is a lost or forgotten tree, which created child palnts to corrupt the land. We know it's evil, and maybe it's sentient.

It stands black and charred, and sways lightly. There are a set of double doors to one side, which are encrusted. Belmac lights a torch. It's at least aware of things. Does it mean us harm? Belmac keeps the torch lit.

Belmac, Marnoc, and Ship light torches. Zoltar prepares Fireball.

Marnoc advocates for setting it on fire from close up. With a 22 wisdom, Ship wonders if burning it down is a good idea. Balmac throws his torch, Marnoc and Ship join in. Ship misses; everyone else hits, and Zoltar's firebolt does too.

With all the fire flying, Belmac sees naught but fire. As fire engulfs the room, things begin to pop up from the brambles. These creakig vines and branches begin to animate, and start creaking towards us.

Rounds:

1. Zoltar firebolts some brambles, misses. Some branches singe
2. Ship lights a torch an prepare to throw it.
3. Theren Hexblade Curses the tree with Eldritch Blast, on 22 to hit, and does 12 damage to it.
4. Marnoc closes to a twig thing and whacks it with a warhammer, and succeeds in pissing it off.
5. Belmac misses with the first swing and uses two-weapon fighting to 16 to hit, and cleaves it in half.
6. The tree swings it s branches, flinging off a ball of branches which forms in front of Zoltar. The tree also stars fligning branches at Ship, who takes 3 piercing, bringing hp to 7
7. The twig blights move towards the party.
8. Zoltar fireballs the twig ball that is directly in front of it, and at melee range (the twig blight is directly in front of Zoltar) she just barely hits it.
9. Ship lights one torche and throws the other. With a 10 dex, it falls just short of the evil tree, into the brush in front of the tree, and starts that smoldering.
10. Theren casts Hex on the tree; the spell goes just wide but was very close to hitting it.
11. Marnoc casts Thunder Wave, a 15 fit cube, and the two twig blights within range explode into fragments. There's a thunderous boom in the chamber. "Praise be to Nodiesop!" he shouts. The tree is still flailing around. He casts Shield of Faith on himself, +2 AC.
12. Belmac with a 17 to hit, slashes the twig blight next to him, cuts through it. Uses his move to move all the way to the twig blight in front of Zoltar, and cuts it in half.
13. The tree does not get its special ability back, but it flings more branches towards Belmac, and hits for 4 damage.
14. Zoltar uses Magic Missile.
15. Ship throws two burning torches, and they miss.
16. Theren uses Eldritch Blast on the tree again, and crits on a 19, to do 21 damage. The tree explodes.

Ship reclaims 2 torches. The tree looks not particularly useful for magical purposes. Around us, the brambles are relaxing, losing life as the tree dies.

Marnoc peeks out the door, and sees a stairwell leading up and out. Marnoc stands guard at the door while the rest of the party goes back into the dungeon to explore.

Inside the other door, back by the cells, there are pews on either side of an aisle leading up to an altar with a wooden bowl. Belmac sees that there's money in the bowl. Ship does a religion check: this might be a temple to the god Golthia, an altar to the tree. Belmac sees 60 gp. Everyone takes 12 gp. In the back of one of the pews, there's a musty old pamphlet in Druidic that might have teachings of Golthia. With a 17 on religion, Ship remembers old tales of cultists and evil druids that might follow Golthia.

Marnoc hollers, "You coming?" and we all leave the dungeon.

In the bright sunlight above, approaching evening, we see a copse of trees. There's a path that leads forward beyond. We set up camp nearby, 5-10 minutes away, where we conceal all but our fire.

We spend the night with watches. Marnoc doesn't have a race feature that allows him to sleep less.

1. Belmac rolls a 3, hears only the chirping of crickets. Maybe he nodded off.
2. Zoltar rolls a 3, also very quiet, also nodding off a bit.
3. Ship, with a 13, hears cackling in the distance, and keeps his eye out, there's nothing showing up.
4. Theren's perception check shows that we were successfully alone during the night.

End of session:

• Can we head towards the town of Tallplace? It was a small town.
• What is the solution for the issue of finding the item we were meant to convey?