A long time ago, I was in a D&D group (3.0) with a real problem; we were great friends. We loved to just hang out and talk and chit chat. This meant that, even though game was supposed to start at 2pm (it was a Sunday afternoon game), it would almost never get started until at least 3:30. It was as frustrating as it was enjoyable, both for different reasons. We would false start a dozen times, and always get dragged back out of the game to continue our friendly banter.
That group never real got over it, but it was a concern I’d always have stick in the back of my mind. How do I make sure that, when the game is supposed to start, the game can start?
I read an article, I think it was by Monte Cook (though I could be remembering wrong) was that one thing he tried to do to get everyone into the game right away was always have a reason to get them rolling dice as soon as possible. Give them a skill to make, or something. He said that dice rolling usually gets people paying attention and in the right mindset.
So, from that moment onward, I have strived to always end sessions right when a fight was about to happen, so I could say at the start of the next session “roll initiative.”
And that’s what I did.
“Roll Initiative.”
This was a pretty straight forward fight, to be honest. The characters had to face off against the Cleric from last game. As soon as the table got turned over, people started scattering, so there were no bystanders in the bar at the time that the lightning started to fly.
One interesting thing started to happen as they attacked the Cleric. When he attacked, and when he was attacked by certain members of the party (Ari, at the time, was an Ardent, so she did Psychic damage), his appearance would change. He appeared to have thick black hair with darker spots, and a face that was a bad mix between a mut dog and a hyena. Those of you familiar with D&D monsters should recognize a Gnoll.
When they’d finally overcome the Cleric, he was the black furred dog-man, and did not change back.
I should add at this point that this was a 4th Edition game (the last one we did), with a player who’d never played Dungeons and Dragons before playing a controller. Combat in 4th Edition is, by and large, a lot longer of a process than combat in any other edition, and add to that the fact that we were training a new player how to do it, and combat took up a huge portion of the time we have to play.
So, with a dead gnoll at their feet, and not having a clue what a gnoll is (and thinking this is horribly weird, because it is), the party scrambled. They felt the need to hide the body, thinking that they’d be accused of something (not sure what) if someone found this dead dog-man that they’d killed.
Ari and Tami took the initiative here and took to the streets, making a ruckus a block or so away to draw people’s attention. I think the term used was “a general high-grade spectacle of annoying.”
While their women-folk were playing distraction, the men folk got around to the hard labor of doing something with the body. They found a barrel that was mostly empty in the back of the bar and proceeded to try to shove the body into the barrel.
And promptly failed miserably.
They failed so hard that they broke the barrel and had to find another. Luckily, it was just before delivery (in my mind, like with the water bottles at work, the delivery man for the wine takes the casks that are empty and replaces them with the full ones, keeping the barman at the approved of levels of wine at all times), so they found a few more barrels.
I imagine the three of them standing around a dead gnoll in the middle of a bar, one scratching his chin, the other scratching his head, and the third shrugging as he knelt and began hacking the gnoll’s limbs off.
Yeah, Adam, and I quote here, “quartered the gnoll,” so it would fit into the barrel more easily. The rest of the menfolk shrugged right along with him and helped.
Meanwhile, Tami and Ari’s distraction was doing its job, but there’s only so much one can do with “general high-grade annoying” before people just move on. And move on they did.
By the time Adam and Morgan rolled the gnoll parts-filled barrels to the canal just outside the bar, people were already milling about again.
With a kick, the gnoll’s body was disposed of (for now…), and the group was left with the question of “what next?”
It was generally accepted that wearing the clothing they had donned in order to avoid attention was, in fact, going to do just the opposite, so they all set out to get themselves clothing.
Adam and Tami went shopping. This is when Adam, from somewhere deep in his soul, decided that he wasn’t going to wear rags. Oh no, he was used to, and wanted, fine clothing. Higher the quality the better. He wasn’t sure why this was important to him, but it was. At the same time, Tami started to feel pretty claustrophobic. She was feeling like there were too many people in this damned city, and all of the buildings were too close together. She just wanted to be able to see a tree and the sky.
This was the first inkling of a hint of what they may have been before they became the PC’s. Adam later discovered a tattoo, matching the downward arrow, on his left hip.
Through a little charade, Adam was able to convince a shop owner to sell him tailored clothing of a particularly high quality, on the promise of payment upon delivery. Tami, as well, was given a pair of clothing that much upgraded her current armor/tabard ensemble, though she accepted it only reluctantly.
Morgan took things into his own hands rather than trust the hands of others. With a little scrounging, he managed to get his hands on some thread and a needle. Discovering a skill that he perhaps used prior to his time as… whatever he is now, Morgan used the scraps of clothing left from the armor and the tabards to make himself a new set of clothing that is less conspicuous than it was. He turned out to be quite good at sewing as well.
Chris and Ari took off in a different direction, since the two of them had never worn the tabards and didn’t feel the need to make themselves less conspicuous. They did, however, feel the need to arm themselves. Chris bought himself a whole battery of daggers while Ari bought herself a pair of maces.
Ari also put a bit more effort into exploring than anyone else at that point. With a little detective work, she found a temple, appearing to be a nine-sided building, atop a fairly large hill closer to the center of the city. As she got closer to the building she started to come to the conclusion that it was some sort of temple.
Atop the building were nine statues, each different but in roughly the same Our Christ the Redeemer pose, carved out of some sort of black material. Each statue wore shackles about their wrists that chained them together and to the building. The shackles were clearly crafted later, and to the scale of the statues (the afor-mentioned Our Christ the Redeemer comes to mind…). Around the building were black shrouds of cloth covering something that couldn’t be seen.
With the sun setting, Ari broke off exploration with the intent of heading to the temple on the hill the next day. When she shared her observations with the rest of the group, they pretty much agreed that, following a night of rest, they should investigate.
And this is when the session ended. It’s also the end of the game’s existence in 4th edition. After this game we had a session of character recreation for Pathfinder, and incidentally added Otis to the party. So next post will begin with Otis’ introduction to the Ennead Hill.
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