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
- Chapter eight: Rats and Revenants
When we last left our heroes, they had fought a bunch of kobolds in a tin mine and witnessed the appearance of what seemed like a ghost. This time, they set about exploring the rest of the mine with admirably methodical zeal. It’s just a shame that the dice were once again not on their side.
It started out okay. I had puzzled over what to have them discover on the kobolds that would keep their GP-to-XP ratio within recommended levels, and I’d decided on a miner’s helmet with a glowing yellow crystal in it that also protected the wearer from fear effects – a sort of exaggeration of the way that Warcraft kobolds feel braver as long as the candles in their helmets are burning. The Tinker put it to good use, being the only one with a kobold-sized head to wear it on. He’s a bit worried that it’s cursed, though, so maybe I should make some ominous references to how it feels like it’s dampening his emotions or something, hee hee hee…
Anyway, after that they ran into a trap baited with some fairly crappy treasure. And to their credit, they actually looked it over carefully and noticed that it was a trap. But then the Tinker tried to dismantle it and rolled another one of those really inconvenient failures, so parts of the ceiling fell on them. The Mage’s rat familiar needed urgent healing to avoid expiring.
After some inventory management to find room on the steampunk autodrudge for the treasure, they pressed on, only to be ambushed by a grenade-flinging goblin. The Mage’s rat familiar needed urgent healing to avoid expiring again. That’s the third time this campaign. That rat is just plain death-prone. Mind you, the fact that I keep throwing in area-of-effect attacks probably has something to do with it – no one is going to bother to specifically attack a rat, but whenever the Mage is in a blast radius, the rat is in the blast radius with her.
The goblin made a run for it while the Druid was frantically applying some magical CPR (the rat wasn’t the only one who was in bad shape), but her wolf companion chased him down and killed him. He was just a level 1 Rogue, which makes the fact that he almost knocked out the whole party kind of funny – again we see that technology is a great equaliser! Not to mention playing merry havoc with Challenge Ratings.
Somewhat annoyingly, I had to backtrack a little since I realised I’d forgotten that the Mage had Mana Shield up, so she should have gotten the chance to burn spell slots to mitigate the damage. That meant that she was up and awake when the goblin made a dash for it, but she declared that she was just going to let him go rather than get stuck in a fight, so it didn’t change the outcome. There’s a lot of different bits and pieces to keep track of in this system, especially with two casters in the party.
So that was that, mostly. The players poked around a little more and recalled that Njall Bashboulder, the owner of the mine, had mentioned that the only other tin mine in the hills was owned by the Venture Company, so finding a goblin with expensive high-tech weapons sneaking around in there was suspicious. Still, the mystery with the ghost remains unsolved, so the players are going to have to go back in next time, after spending the night resting and refreshing their spell slots.
This of course means that I’m duty-bound to come up with ways that the denizens of the mine are preparing for the players’ return. Only I should probably try to avoid having them lay any more area-of-effect damage traps… I’m starting to feel sorry for that damn rat…