One of God's own prototypes. A high-powered mutant of some kind never even considered for mass production. Too weird to live, and too rare to die.” -Hunter S. Thompson


Tuesday, March 21, 2017

Tyranny of Dragons: Actual Play Session 6

Session 6: Welcome to Undermountain Bitches!

Zibo, Undermountain's goblin guide.
The Tyranny of Dragons campaign continues. This Monday night the campaign continues after last week’s cliffhanger. You can read about sessions 4-5 here. Now onto the latest events in the campaign!

Last week the characters while exploring the “Dragon Hatchery” found a room with a room that had an archway and arcane runes chiseled into it. On touching the wall, the members of the group disappeared and found themselves transported into a another dungeon type environment.

Here they encountered a lone goblin decked out in armor made of pots and pans and armed with a spatula who introduced himself as Zibo. He explained that they must have been sent here via a one-way portal, because there was no return portal that they could find.

The group spent the night in Zibo’s hidden lair and the next morning he sent the off with a rough guide of how to make their way to the Yawing Portal, which was the nearest exit to the surface that Zibo knew of. He warned them to be careful in the dungeon region they needed to pass through because a pair of wereboars named Tooth and Nailz had been terrorizing the area and looting treasure.

Unfortunately, the characters were unable to sneak past the lair of the wereboars without alerting them and a chase ensued. Raven dropped some ball bearings causing Nails to slip and fall and Godric tried to buy the group some time to make their escape facing off with them in combat. This lead to a band of goblins being attracted to the fight. Variel managed to cast hold person on Tooth keeping him out of the fight.

Eventually the group managed in a running battle to defeat the lycanthropes and the goblins with some well placed spells and hit and run combat tactics. The group decided to loot the bodies and drag the wereboars back to their lair. In the lair, hidden behind a curtain of magical darkness the group has holed up for the time being. Far from being safe they’ve regrouped as they make plans on how to escape from the dangerous depths of Undermountain…

Tooth and Nailz, when wereboars attack.


DM Notes
So I took things off the rails. Undermountain is not featured at all in the Tyranny of Dragons campaign. But I was ready to flex my DM muscles and make this campaign mine. I do plan on continuing the battle against Tiamat, but I’m going to do it my way and use the rest of the campaign books as inspiration.

Because I'm the DM thats why!
For this session I used the stuff from the first Undermountain boxed set as inspiration. The stuff with the wereboars came from an encounter in that book and eventually the group should make it to the Yawning Portal were I plan to launch other expeditions in the infamous dungeon as well as in Waterdeep.

The other thing I tried to do this session was use the chase rules from the 5e DM’s Guide. Things didn’t work out exactly as I planned, and as one of my players suggested, it probably would have worked better if I had had them chase something, instead of the other way around. In addition, I made the mistake of trying to coerce them into running instead of letting it happen naturally.

Otherwise the session went great. Everyone seemed to have fun and I’m glad I made the decision about switching things up in the campaign the way I did. And as I said, the party has not seen the last of the Cult of the Dragon, Tiamat and of course that blue Dragon Lennithon that they made a deal with not so long ago…






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