Gnomish Meadery

[MrMorden]

Here’s the setup:
The characters tracked a crime wave to wererats operating out of the city’s sewers. It became apparent that the wererats had some shadowy connection to a local meadery in the foothills northwest of the city. Coincidentally, this is the same brewer that was providing free mead for the upcoming harvest festival..

The characters traveled there, and found Gnomes who had owned the meadery had been recently bought out by two brothers, who then immediately fired the Gnomish workers and brought in their own people, and closed the place to any visitors.

The party traveled to the meadery, built into the side of a rocky hill. Outside the doors they encountered hostile sentries in the form of two displacer beasts, which provided a tough fight for the four level 5 characters...



Once past the locked doors (the ex-criminal Half-Orc Cleric rolled a natural 20 to pick the lock!), they found three more wererats working the brewing equipment. A Human man fled through a barred door as the fight ensued..



The wererats defeated, it was discovered the equipment in the room included some kimd of alchemical distiller putting a purified and concentrated “secret ingredient” into the mead. Not waiting to figure out more, they found the release for the barred door and went in pursuit of the escaped man. Down a curving set of stone steps,they found an empty store room, with no other apparent exits and nobody in sight.



The cleric and barbarian worked together to locate a secret doorway concealed behind some crates, and down more stairs. They reached the bottom, which opened into a natural cavern. They entered just as a boat piloted by wererats and carrying casks disappeared down a dark subterranean river. The escaped man and his brother remained in the cavern, shouting “you’re too late!” As they transformed into vicious wereboars!



That’s where we broke for the evening, so they will roll initiatuve first thing next time. Also in the chamber is a strange altar to a half-woman/half-beast entity, an icon of which they found in the sewers with the wererats also. They don’t know it yet, but this is Ferinea, The Beast Mother, cursed fallen priestess of the goddess Selune and the first Lycanthrope. The weres have distilled some of her blood into a reagent added to the mead, via which they hope to transform the entire City into were-beasties! Will they succeed? TBD.

I got to use one of the big elevation boxes and two terrain trays for this. Both are very nice, but the box is pretty slick and pieces slide off without a terrain tray between for magnets to stick to. I wish the bottom of the box was metalized as well as the lid.

[Runeweaver]

Cool pics. Very cool. Fighting all those lycanthropes! So much fun, and so dangerous! Battles like that can get very edgy as no one wants to get scratched for obvious reasons.

[MrMorden]

Cool pics. Very cool. Fighting all those lycanthropes! So much fun, and so dangerous! Battles like that can get very edgy as no one wants to get scratched for obvious reasons.

Yeah, I had this whole thing about how they could go after a cure, and all that jazz...two of them already failed their saves in the sewers and were infected. Then they hit fifth level and the Cleric was like "oh yeah, remove curse.".

I said "oh yeah, I guess that works too."

[AnimeSensei]

Sigh... that's why I love low levels in campaigns. My players disagree with me, but it's so much more satisfying to have things that require effort and work to solve a problem instead of being fixed with a simple spell.

Heck, I even hate the spell Mending, as it's been used sometimes where I'm torn between story and rules on something like a half-burned document with important info burned out. (Story usually wins)

Awesome job, btw!

[zenako]

But mending is easy to deal with. It mends the paper, but that does not mean it does anything about the ink or pencil markings on that paper. That is the way we generally handle the spell. Allows stuff to be fixed, but not reconstituted from the ashes. It could for example join together a bunch of ripped portions of a document, but not recreate notes that had been erased or otherwise destroyed.

[MrMorden]

Sigh... that's why I love low levels in campaigns. My players disagree with me, but it's so much more satisfying to have things that require effort and work to solve a problem instead of being fixed with a simple spell.

I think we're hitting the sweet spot now. Level 4-8 is high enough that every wrong step isn't potentially fatal and there are cool monsters to fight, but low enough that a lot of situations still need effort to solve. I'm still waiting for the first character to die so they can go on a long side quest to try to get them raised.

[kitenerd]

plus when you get past 7th 8th level every melee round takes like an hour

at least thats how it works in Pathfinder

[Rabbit Burner]

Great stuff MrM.

Liking the narration and crisp pictures the post is a nice balance of text and pictures - good Job.

Half hoping the party don't succeed in stopping the entire city becoming a were den