Previously in this World of Warcraft: the RPG campaign:
- My preparations, and summary of the first few chapters
- Chapter six: Trigger-Happy Ogre
- Chapter seven: Everyone Hates Elves, Apparently
This week, our trio of intrepid adventurers sat down with Njall Bashboulder, the dwarven owner of the Bashboulder Mine, to discuss his labour problems. He explained that the mine seemed to be haunted, and that his employees were most cravenly letting a little thing like horrific spectres from beyond the veil of Death stand between them and his profit margin. The players managed to notice that he was being a bit shifty about it… and then completely ignored it in favour of negotiating a share in the mine’s profits, in perpetuity, in return for busting the ghost.
The last part was the players’ own idea, but it actually suits me just fine. For one thing, getting a regular income means that they’ll have some incentive to actually settle in and have some downtime, which I have been trying to figure out how to encourage. And secondly, now every time something goes wrong with that mine, they’ll have to run over and deal with it to protect their investment. Which means that while they might have ignored the deeper currents of the situation this time… well, let’s just say that I’m going to get some use out of that entire plotline, if not right now then further down the road! Mua haha!
Anyway, they were excited to do their very first dungeon crawl in however many years (I am not prone to serving them up; for one thing, I’m all about the True Roleplaying, yo, and for another, I can’t be arsed to draw all those maps! But as you may have noticed from what I’ve been talking about here recently, I’m trying to dip my toe in it a little at the moment). They immediately set out, flickering lamps in hand, and ran straight into a quintette of kobolds who attacked them with cries of “YOU NO TAKE CANDLE!”
Those kobolds were actually an experiment for me. In theory, five kobolds are more than three third-level adventurers are supposed to handle, but I was betting that I knew better, especially since the players have a decent amount of area-of-effect attacks and kobolds have very few HP. Well, it turned out that I was right, though I probably should have considered that kobolds also have very high AC, so there was a lot of swinging and missing before they finally resorted to Burning Hands. Still, that took almost the whole gang down, and of course it helped that the tunnel was too narrow for all five to get at the players at once. Again I note that encounter balance in this system is extremely circumstantial and dependent on a lot of things that it’s hard to come up with hard and fast rules to estimate. Still, it looks like I’m getting a better feel for it.
With only one kobold left standing, I unveiled a ghostly apparition of a tragically beautiful woman moaning and wailing up near the ceiling. The kobold screamed in terror and fled. I had actually been keeping the “ghost” in store for if the battle went too heavily against the players, to have an excuse for the kobolds running away. As it was, it served as a nice way of hinting that the kobolds, while trespassers in the mine, weren’t actually the source of the haunting – wouldn’t want the players to decide that they’d fixed the problem and head back out prematurely, after all.
All in all, a pretty decent session. The system is really nice when you have the right prep for it, and of course it’s always rewarding when the players take initiatives and integrate themselves in the setting. Who knows, this campaign might be the story of how they became the unrivaled business tycoons of Duskwood… For next time, I need to flesh out some of the other locations and encounter I have sketched out for the mine, and decide what sort of loot four kobolds might be carrying – the players might have a steady income now, but they’re still going to need a little extra to pay for all those modification to the steampunk auto-porter that the Tinker is planning on making…