Dragon Slayers

This is part of a series. Click here to go to part 1.

Calendar Start Date: January 19

Calendar End Date: March 3

Nizan - Human Mystic

Malger Zoilus, Human Thief

Bollo Bobilla - Human Fighter

Shandar Oathbringer - Elven Nightblade

Hirelings:

Aldo the human Fighter

Lambo, man at arms

Finn, man at arms

Ralen the Elf

Lots to talk about in this session. I feel like planning has gone from being something we do before we begin to a valid and productive use of player time. Every session seems to begin with players taking care of shopping, following up with NPCs and checking on their future plans. Last time, the players took out a 10-year mortgage on some property in Adamas, and begun construction of a townhouse that will later become their guild hideout. I have started using spreadsheets to track this info (not because I have a hundred data points, but because it makes entering data easy breezy).

Nizan’s letter-writing campaign paid off, as he received a response from the local wizard in Helios, a town build in a swamp a hundred miles west of Adamas. Nizan desires an enchanted dagger that magically reappears in the hand of the person who threw it. He plans to travel to Helios and purchase the dagger at a later time.

A few sessions ago, Malgor made contact with a corrupt official named Baron Dario Dauss and has been supplying heavy bribes of 1000gp per month to ensure official government expeditions don’t begin in Dwimmermount, but as the players will soon learn, there’s only so much one official can do.

The main goal of this session was to find the treasure described on the map found in the dungeon, worth 16,000gp. This tidy sum was tempting enough for the party to spend nearly all of their money to get it. First, they wanted to scout the area with the treasure. They soon realized they had no idea where it might actually be, other than the vague "in the woods" description from the map. Shandar had the bright idea to do some research but found that all of the best documents were behind bars in the Royal Library. One 1000gp donation later, he was able to peruse the tomes and found listings on old Thulian forts that used to overlook the borderlands. With this fresh info, the party purchased horses and went gallivanting off into the woods.

Because it's winter, everything is frozen and covered in snow. No random encounters this time, and the horses meant it was only a two-and-a-half-day journey into the wilderness. They discovered an old military camp surrounded by a high stone wall. It was now overgrown with a few hundred years of pine trees. In the center of the fort was a massive hole, about forty feet in diameter, going deep underground. It had undermined the central building, which had mostly collapsed. There were no recent tracks in the snow, so nothing had been in or out in some time. Cautiously, the party lit their torches and headed into the dark.

Inside, after several minutes of walking, the hole leveled out. They were able to make out glistening scales in the torchlight and concluded that it was a dragon. They ran out of the burrow and returned to town post-haste.

Back in Adamas, the party concocted their plan: Nizan had the idea to hire a bunch of ballistae and simply draw the animal from its hole and surprise it. Shandar spent a few weeks in the royal library researching dragons and was able to learn its AC and approximate hit point value. The party paid a brigade of 11 ballistae operators a very handsome wage of about 272gp for a week of work (a huge raise on their typical weekly wage of 75gp/month).

The dragon was lured out of its cave by a young priestess who volunteered to walk two cows inside, but she was unable to escape, and the dragon didn’t come out. Nizan rode his horse inside, fired his wand of magic missiles and ran like hell. When the dragon emerged, it was surprised and ambushed by an army of ballistae. Despite the preparations, this still wasn’t enough. The players took their turns and barely managed to kill the dragon before it got its turn. Two smaller dragons flew out. One was killed, and the other turned invisible and flew away. They recovered the 16,000gp of treasure from the cave (just collecting it all took three days). They recovered a magical shield and two magical leather armors. They paid two of the ballistae operators for their wagons, which hauled the goods.

Between the treasure and the experience for the kill, the party each gained a level. It was the most productive and dangerous adventure yet.

Behind the Screen

This was the first time I actually had to prep any content for the game that didn’t come straight out of the book. All I did was ask myself some logical questions and tried to provide logical answers. Here was my process:

The players found a map leading to the middle of a forest. A treasure worth 16,000gp is hidden there. Here are my questions:

1. Who created this map?
2. How does 16,000gp worth of gold get hidden anywhere?
3. Why has no one recovered it yet?

The answer to the last two questions is the same: Dragons.

Answering the first is a little tricker. The game world takes place in a time similar to 476 A.D. after the Roman Empire had completely fallen apart. There is no central governmental power; there are a bunch of ex-Roman governors who are now the despots of their own city-states, play-acting as Roman officials. This game takes place about three hundred years after. If there is a 200-year old map locked in a sealed vault, why would people just leave a map to a fat pile of treasure and forget about it?

My solution was that it wasn't a map so much as a manifest or inventory of supplies and goods that were being stored in an old Thulian tower. The player characters would be able to read the manifest and conclude there was a lot of valuable stuff there and make plans to go get it. So it's not literally a treasure map, but it is effectively one.

Because ACKS gives the Judge a lot of leeway when designing dragons, I had the opportunity to sit down and think about what kinds of spells a very old dragon would have. It's survivor, and it's no dummy, so I gave it invisibility and protection from normal missiles.

The players were very careful when planning their attack, and that's a good thing. They took the dragon and lived; if it had won initiative or even gotten a single turn, it would have cast Protection from Normal Missiles, making it immune to all ranged attacks, and it would have annihilated the party. I'm extremely relieved that it didn't happen.

 

Continued in part 9.