The Wolves of Winter

[torstan]

So we ran a game with a load of maps I've been playing around with recently. This was my players first shot at 4e, as well as my own. We've got on pretty well with it and we're now running much faster combats than we were before.

I'll keep it pretty short but here's the gist. The town of Dreeston has come under attack from a couple of wolves. The players slay the wolves and find goblin made collars on them. Deciding that they need to investigate before a storm arrives, they set out into the heightening winds to track the wolves back to their lair. With some nifty tracking they find the wolf lair at the base of a cliff that used to be the entrance to an old mine. The land fell away in a landslide around the time that the mine was closed. Everyone has believed the mine to be deserted since then.

Unsurprisingly the mine is far from deserted. The ranger attempts to scale the more difficult overhang that will keep him hidden from eyes on the top of the cliff. He almost makes it but fails at the last. While hanging from the rope he sees a goblin head over the ridge and the goblin starts shooting at the rope. With few options remaining he drops into the darkness in a controlled fall and the goblin leaves him be, assuming him dead.

The rest of the party then scale the easier slope and kill the two goblin guards in short order. They hare into the tunnels to take on the goblins before they can get organised. However the initiative soon turns against them as they run straight into a couple of falling rock traps. This stops them in their tracks and alerts the resident goblins. In the small twisting tunnels the goblins are supremely dangerous - darting in and out of sight and raining javelins and hexes upon the hapless characters. The party is pulled out of formation and separated deep into the maze of mine tunnels until it is clear they can take little more punishment. At this point the cleric stumbles into the goblin great hall and a hornets nest of trouble erupts. Swamped by hordes of goblins and running low on healing, the party concedes defeat and is captured. They bargain with the goblin chieftain that in return for their short term survival they will fight a monster that has occupied the deeper levels of the mine on the following day. For the night, they are dropped unceremoniously into a pit, to recover their strength. Two characters don't fall in, and after being prodded, are forced to jump into their own prison.

Unsurprisingly the characters and their players were more than a little miffed about being pwned by goblins. That's just one of the learning experiences every new 4e party needs to have it seems. However it was not all bad. The ranger heard the sounds of a non-goblin set of feet over their prison and managed to climb to the ceiling to get a good look. They saw a strange figure visiting the chieftain and even managed to sneak a glance at what looked to be a battle map on the wall. After a good nights sleep they used a silence spell to cover the sound of their escape from their confinement and through a judicious use of action points they were able to kill the chieftain and his lackeys in their sleep. They then managed to take on a room of guards before once again getting embroiled in tunnel fighting. This time they were older and wiser and refused to be drawn out into the tunnels by the goblins, instead using readied actions to wait for them to show their faces and hitting them when they did.

The end of the most recent session finds them victorious over the goblins of the mines. However they can hear the howling of the dread beast they were meant to face today, and the screams of terrified human slaves. They are also troubled by the mysterious midnight visitor and his plans for an invasion of the off-guard town of Dreeston....

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Maptool issues - b40

We're playing with b40 with some basic macros - attack, healing, initiative and damage. We ran into the bug that editing macros in the impersonate window through right-click doesn't work and clears the text. I believe that is/will soon be fixed. We also had a couple of random disconnects, but no problems with people reconnecting. There ere also issues with the windows saying they were visible and not being. I had to get two players to use restore default layout to get the windows back.

With all the goblins I didn't want the players to be able to precisely track which goblin was which. The twisting tunnels made for a great location in which 3 or 4 goblins could look like many more. However the current macro system just doesn't work if two tokens have the same player name so I was forced to make their names distinct. This immediately broke the spell and players tracked goblins between rounds and were able to get a feel for what faced them. This was a real shame.

We had a weird issue on a separate map where the players saw the map (in this case an image set to be on the background on a map with a black background) up and to the left of where I had placed it. This meant that when they pointed at something, I saw their pointer in a completely different place from where they saw it. Note that in this session I was GMing, but someone else was hosting the server. Once I moved the background image and moved it back again, all was fine.

Otherwise the game ran smoothly. The macros that allow you to get and set health are brilliant and make the game so much easier to run. Maptool is definitely maturing nicely.