Session 5; Many Puns, One Could Almost Call it Trolling!

 Session; Played out on October 15th 2023 for 3 days.  

My friends were back at it and there was a party of five.  The three characters from the night before leveled up with their too easily gathered valuables, though the town of Punishment is too small to sell them (I think that is how a Level VI town works?)

Juventas Clodianus (Bard) 2nd level
Philippus Gurges (Priest) 2nd level. (He picked Purify Food and Water, without even reading Walker’s article on the topic!)

Rudolphus Rutilus (Explorer)

***** (Blade Dancer) 1st level.

*****(Fighter) 1st level. (One of these characters has a Trained Hawk)

And followed by two mules and a cart. 

There were quite a few jokes at the expense of the player running a blade dancer.

After a false start and a lot of out of game talking about the absolute danger of the ACKS random encounter table, retconned trolls and a few successful evasions, the party began doing close to the city patrols.  They missed most of the encounter checks, until they were attacked by a swarm of bats.  This is just kind of weird really.  Worse as bat swarms, especially those uncontrolled by dark powers are supposed to run away very easily, but I forgot to do the morale checks.  The party’s hawk did really good at the beginning, then I and the players forgot about him until after the fight had ended.  The bats then swarmed the blade dancer, and we all laughed at the image of the serene warrior priestess losing her composure after bat’s landed in her hair.  We are very mature.

Despite the erroneously high morale bats, the party eventually killed them all and content not to be eaten by trolls or crushed by the wandering Cyclops, they returned to the city.  We are tentatively planning to reconvene on Thursday. 

Overall Feel, Lore and the Like. 

On paper I would not think that an unsupported bat swarm would really be the highlight of the evening, but it really was.  Emergent game play is really fun, even if the Judge is making mistakes.  Still, we will do better next time.  #elitelevel play is within our grasp and we will get there eventually.  Looking forward to see where the players decide to go next.