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Shackled City: Session One
Just finished up the first session in the Shackled City - spoilers follow.
The adventure is set in the city of Cauldron, a city inside of the dead caldron of a dead volcano. I went over some background information with the players, including that there had been a number of kidnappings recently - people disappearing from their homes, with no signs of a break-in, and usually valuables stolen as well.
It was a dark and stormy night, and the various PCs were heading through town - Nixie, a human knife-thrower with the circus, Sash, an elven rogue, Shan, a martial artist with strange abilities, Aroniella, an elven warlock, and Rose, and elven druid. (People really were fond of the +2 Dex.) And then a cry was heard - an obligatory thug encounter was happening in a nearby alleyway, where three thugs with the distinctive clown makeup of the 'Last Laugh' were beating up on a cleric of St. Cuthbert. Aroniella climbed up the wall and started sniping at the thugs from the roof with her eldrich blasts as the rest of them made short work of the attackers, with a little healing help from the victim. Once they wrapped that up, the cleric talked them into accompanying them to the temple where he worked.
Once there they talked with the high priestess, who convinced them to help her with finding four missing orphans who had been kidnapped a few days ago. The all agreed fairly quickly, and were given various details about the crimes, as well as a strange riddle that the priestess had gotten from a diviniation. After talking some more during the night, they went to sleep at the temple.
In the morning they got up and went to the orphanage, looking around. They discovered that the rooms the kids were in - the children are locked into their rooms overnight - didn't seem to have been picked, forced, or otherwise opened. They paid attention for a short while to Patch, the half-orc janitor, but soon after that decided to look at the locks, trying to figure if the key had been copied. After not being able to work out that, they decided to go see the man who had made the locks.
Arriving at his showroom, they noticed the curtains in the room, which I was careful to describe last - they were mentioned in said riddle, so the characters were expecting them. After talking to the gnome for a bit, they got him to go through the gnome, Aroniella using her magic climbing ability to stick to the ceiling over the curtains. As the gnome returned through the curtain, she slipped through as well without him noticing. Once through she found a strange, chamelion-like humanoid hidden upstairs, who immediately attacked her.
General melee ensued, and after some confused attempts to attack someone they could barely see, they defeated what turned out to be a naked, grey-skinned sexless humanoid. The lockmaker then confessed that he'd been forced to help the strange humanoids who'd come up into his shop - apparently there's an old hidden underground gnome city under Cauldron, which had been abandoned after a magical plague called the Vanishing had started causing the inhabitants to disappear. He was also able to give the adventurers an old map of the city to help them.
It went well. There was some roleplaying, and the players started settling into their characters. Sash has a truely abysmal Charisma (6), and his player is doing a good job of playing a teenager who tends to say the wrong thing all the time. (Of course, being an elf, he's a 125 year old teenager. :)
Yay adventure! I'm really looking forward to next week.
The adventure is set in the city of Cauldron, a city inside of the dead caldron of a dead volcano. I went over some background information with the players, including that there had been a number of kidnappings recently - people disappearing from their homes, with no signs of a break-in, and usually valuables stolen as well.
It was a dark and stormy night, and the various PCs were heading through town - Nixie, a human knife-thrower with the circus, Sash, an elven rogue, Shan, a martial artist with strange abilities, Aroniella, an elven warlock, and Rose, and elven druid. (People really were fond of the +2 Dex.) And then a cry was heard - an obligatory thug encounter was happening in a nearby alleyway, where three thugs with the distinctive clown makeup of the 'Last Laugh' were beating up on a cleric of St. Cuthbert. Aroniella climbed up the wall and started sniping at the thugs from the roof with her eldrich blasts as the rest of them made short work of the attackers, with a little healing help from the victim. Once they wrapped that up, the cleric talked them into accompanying them to the temple where he worked.
Once there they talked with the high priestess, who convinced them to help her with finding four missing orphans who had been kidnapped a few days ago. The all agreed fairly quickly, and were given various details about the crimes, as well as a strange riddle that the priestess had gotten from a diviniation. After talking some more during the night, they went to sleep at the temple.
In the morning they got up and went to the orphanage, looking around. They discovered that the rooms the kids were in - the children are locked into their rooms overnight - didn't seem to have been picked, forced, or otherwise opened. They paid attention for a short while to Patch, the half-orc janitor, but soon after that decided to look at the locks, trying to figure if the key had been copied. After not being able to work out that, they decided to go see the man who had made the locks.
Arriving at his showroom, they noticed the curtains in the room, which I was careful to describe last - they were mentioned in said riddle, so the characters were expecting them. After talking to the gnome for a bit, they got him to go through the gnome, Aroniella using her magic climbing ability to stick to the ceiling over the curtains. As the gnome returned through the curtain, she slipped through as well without him noticing. Once through she found a strange, chamelion-like humanoid hidden upstairs, who immediately attacked her.
General melee ensued, and after some confused attempts to attack someone they could barely see, they defeated what turned out to be a naked, grey-skinned sexless humanoid. The lockmaker then confessed that he'd been forced to help the strange humanoids who'd come up into his shop - apparently there's an old hidden underground gnome city under Cauldron, which had been abandoned after a magical plague called the Vanishing had started causing the inhabitants to disappear. He was also able to give the adventurers an old map of the city to help them.
It went well. There was some roleplaying, and the players started settling into their characters. Sash has a truely abysmal Charisma (6), and his player is doing a good job of playing a teenager who tends to say the wrong thing all the time. (Of course, being an elf, he's a 125 year old teenager. :)
Yay adventure! I'm really looking forward to next week.