Xak Tsaroth! (with the Kids)

Finally got in another game with the kids – and this time we had new players join us! Yay! Bruce, C., and V.

C. took over Goldmoon, V. took Caramon and Tanis, Bruce took Raistlin and Riverwind, Finnegan kept Sturm Brightblade and Flint, and Keira kept Tasslehoff… I decided the blue crystal staff was a bit “weak” and so healed a couple wounds of those injured in the last session; making Tasslehoff all better again and Caramon slightly less... well... dead…

Picking up from where we left off in the swamp, the group found a fairly well-worn path – with lots of Draconian footprints. Flint figured the Draconians were there looking for the same thing they were. They decided to follow the path to see where it led. Not too far along they came across a second, less traveled path branching off fro the main one. Discussing it a moment it was decided a less traveled path would likely mean running into less Draconians, so they followed that one.

This lead them across a few more slippery woven vine bridges – which burned a few bennies in attempts to not fall in the swamp! The path led tehm by an evil-looking black water pool. On the edge of the pool they found what looked like a number of leathery egg shells from what must have been and enormous reptile of some sort (Dragons? Pffft! Nobody’s ever seen a Dragons – that’s kids scary stories and legend…).

One more woven vine bridge brought them to an open plaza in what seemed to be the center of the ruined city. The group explored the only standing building and (with a couple of insanely lucky common knowledge rolls!?) determined it to be a temple of Mishakel.

Entering the temple they discovered what probably came out of those eggs – three enormous black reptilian creatures were waiting in the entrance hall and attacked. After dispatching the creatures they had a really good look at them and determined they looked like miniature versions of the dragons they’d all heard about in the legends of old. They figured they must have been hatchlings…

Further into the temple they found the statue of Mishakel which came to life and charged them with recovering the Disks of Mishakel from the dragon horde in the caverns below that they may bring knowledge of the True Gods of Krynn to the people and lead them out of darkness… So they set of in search of some stairs.

They eventually found some that lead down into some catacombs – with some very unstable floors. After searching around a bit they heard a strange noise – a distant gong… followed by a whip cracking and the shuffling of feet… followed by a loud mechanical clanking noise…!?

Following the noise lead them to a chamber where they saw two great dark holes in the floor with a chain coming up out of one, trough a series of wheels suspended from the ceiling, and plunging back down into the darkness of the other hole. Also in the room were a pair of draconians!?


And that’s where we had to leave off!!

The kids are super excited to carry on, hopefully we’ll be able to meet up with our fellow adventurers and bash on soon!

Marcus Cabot

Marcus Cabot - Wildcard Ranger - Jackson
Ag d10, Sm d6, Sp d6, St d8, Vg d8,
Pace 6, Parry 6, Toughness 6
Skills: Fighting d8, Shooting d10, Notice d6, Stealth d6, Survival d8, Tracking d8
Edges: Woodsman, Quick, Quickdraw
Hindrances: Code of Honour, Loyal
Gear: Bow (Range: 12/24/48, ROF1, Damage: 2d6), short sword (Str+d6)

Marcus was born in to a small woodland village. Out of necessity he learned to hunt and gather at a young age like all woods people must. He had no brothers or sisters and not many friends, he found joy practicing archery training to become a masterful hunter like his father.

Although he liked hunting, is true calling was adventure and the thrill of the unknown. Eventually his curiosity got the best of him and he decided to leave the village in search of a suitable quest. His perseverance paid of and over time he accumulated a group of fellow adventurers. These were his first real friends and he quickly developed a brotherly bond with them.

They set up the home base of Solace. Whenever they went there separate ways they always knew to meet back there for their next adventure.

He recently got a letter telling him to meet there but when he got there he found that they had already left with two plains people. He began the long tedious job of tracking them. With the help of some footprints and some lucky pegasus feces (he believed to be dropped from very high up) he eventually caught up with them at a ruined city in a swamp next to the sea....... thus the adventure continues.

Escape from Xak Tsaroth!

The Sixth Session of the Saturday Night Savages DragonLance Campaign…. (Finishing off DL01 Dragons of Despair). This post is a couple weeks late – we played this session on 22 November 2011, The following week I was at the opera, and this past weekend we Played Hordes of the Things since I wasn’t quite ready to move on to the next adventure and half the players were absent….


Rick took over playing Riverwind (since Curly met an untimely end last session).

So we started in the remains of the Dragon’s Lair with the cavern beginning to collapse around them – Larana severely wounded. Magnus had spotted the Disks of Mishakel at the end of the last episode so he went and picked them up…

Now I was curious, and had thought about trying to figure this out before (but didn’t get to it before…) about how much these disks are supposed to weigh… the disks are 18” in diameter and 1/16” thick… and there’s 160 of them all bolted together!? The game doesn’t even list the gold-piece-weight of them… but Dave quickly figured out for us that a cylindrical block of platinum 18” in diameter and 10” tall would be 894kg (or about 1900lbs) I think that exceeds the load limit of the entire party!? Now they were supposed to “quickly” escape this collapsing cavern with this?! I wonder if Mr. Hickman thought of this…? Actually, the more I read through these adventures the more I have to stretch the limits of my suspension of disbelief! Ah well.. it’s fantasy…

I said for anyone of “good alignment” (which in our game is anyone with Code of Honour or Heroic hindrances) it would “magically” be the weight of a heavy book… for anyone else it would be the full weight… (much in the same way that anyone of evil or neutral alignment would get zapped for 4d6 damage if they tried to touch or read the discs). Of course that would have caused some other conundrums a little later on if I’d been thinking about it…

They made their way out of the Dragons’ lair to the underground plaza as the whole subterranean city and cavern began to collapse around them. There they thought of the great chain they’d seen. Norfindel finally saw it in action and figured if they could get to it maybe it’d be a way out. They found the giant pot at the bottom of the chain, climbed in and rang the gong. Gully Dwarves jumped into the other pot a couple hundred meters above them and up they went.

Of course half way up they realized that the Gully Dwarf that acted as the counter weight were riding to certain doom – so as they passed by the dwarves going down they shouted at them to stay in the pot – thinking they might be able to find something else to fill the pot with to bring up the gully dwarves… Unfortunately, just as they got to the top and bailed out of the pot the whole apparatus crumbled and fell away into the cavern.

The gang pulled themselves together and scrambled up and out of the hall of the dead. In the upper part of the temple they found Goldmoon by the statue of Mishakel.

As they left the temple…


…there was a group of Draconians just rushing up the steps!

They were beat down and the group scrambled away back into the swamp. Behind them they could hear the crash of rock collapsing and falling into the great void, and and sound of rushing water – the water level in the swamp was noticeably lowering and as they stumbled through he swamp…


They ran into another band of Draconians!

It’s been a couple weeks now so I’m not sure where everyone was wounded, but in my notes Lorena currently has three wounds (I’m pretty sure those were from the dragon), Magnus has three wounds (I think that was from the last encounter), and Roscoe has one wound…

And that’s where we’ll pick up – hopefully this (Savage) Saturday!!

Flight of the Peagasi and Into the Swamp

In our last session the kids had met the forest master who had suggested that they go to Xak Tsaroth and find the “greatest gift”. He provided them with Pegasi (Pegasuses?) to swiften their journey.

In the game I ran for the other group I had the Pegasi land them near the Que Shu village (much as they did in the novel) and they had to hoof it over the Forsaken Mountains – I decided to skip that with these guys and had the Pegasuses fly them over the forsaken mountains and drop them off at the edge of the swamp.

So into the swamp they went!!

At the fallen Ironwood tree they were ambushed!



There was only three Draconian warriors and one Wildcard Draconian sorcerer… but because of the order they were in and the Draconicans ambushed them – most of the heroes warriors were stuck on the far side of the water.


The sorcerer menaced them with a few fireballs. Both times Caramon took two wounds and was unable to soak them. The second time, Raistlin, who was also in the blast template, took no damage so we said Caramon had leapt in front of his brother to shield him from the blast and took the brunt of it.

Tasslehoff, who had been frightful in the very first game first game we played, took a pretty severe beating at the hands of a pair of Draconian warriors.

When the battle was over no amount of healing, mundane or divine, was able to help Tasslehoff or Caramon. So Tasslehoff is severely wounded and Caraman has perished…. Yikes!

Next time: Further into the swampy ruins!

The Black Dragon!

The Fifth Session of the Saturday Night Savages DragonLance Campaign….

Picking up where we left off last week, the group wandered out of the building they were in and down a “street” (the city had sunk underground during the Cataclysm – the buildings on this street toppled together to form sort of a hall). The kinder insisted on searching EVERY building along the street, and when they got to the square at the end of the street they found a torrent of water gushing through it and on the other side another building with great steel doors.

Some decided to checkout where the water went and discovered it opened into a great cavern. The Kender (Roscoe Thorngage), however, had to check out the steel doors…

He somehow waded across the river without trouble – with a rope tied to him (just in case). He tied off the rope andLorena (“The Light Source”) crossed as well. The made their way in only to discover spectra minions waiting for someone to deliver their taxes – not having the taxes they minions attacked.

Now I’m not entirely sure how anyone was supposed to deal with these – the spectral minions could not be harmed by any normal weapons… and I don’t think any of the original members of the party had magical weapons… Perhaps Raistlin was meant to deal with these… So I let Lorena try to cast “Slumber” on them. A couple of them fell asleep as did the Kender.

Laurana continued to try and make the other minions sleep – so she could retrieve the sleeping Kender and retire. She just couldn’t get them all to sleep and the remaining ones attacked. Now on their own this wasn’t much of a problem because I’d given them a d6 fighting….

Curly decided something was amiss so he decided to cross the water and see if he could help out. Making it, he took a swing at one of the minions – SWISH – right through it making a loud klanging noise as it solidly hit the stone floor. Everyone woke up.

Curly then decided there was no use fighting them and beat a hasty retreat heading for the water… We’ll get back to him in a moment… This unfortunately left Laurana facing four spectral minion guards again. She tried “Slumber” again – it only worked on the Kender… So four spectral minions ganged up no her and had her down, slowly dying, in a round…

Back to Curly: Curly slipped trying to cross the torrent and was washed over the falls plummeting to his death 150m below… (Here’s how that worked” failed Agility check – slipped and let go of rope, failed strength test to just wade across on his own, failed second strength test, bennied it, failed again, last ditch agility test a -2 to grab slipper vine as he was thrown over the precipice – I think he might have even failed and bennied THAT and succeeded on the second attempt – but only because Magnus, who was standing there looking down aided him adding a +1… when I told Rick he was saved but lost his axe, he insisted that Curly would not have let go of the axe under any circumstances… I told him he would have needed a raise to grab the vine – which he had not done – so Rick said he went over the falls…. I mentioned that it was ~150m drop, right…? So I had to look up falling damage… 2d6+5 per 10m…. I decided to add a bit of chance in there and made it 2d6+d6 per 10m – my maths weren’t working at that time of night – trying to convert form feet in game book to tabletop inches… anyway I rolled 14d6 instead of 17 as I probably should have. the first mittful of dice I chucked came up all ones and twos and we, for a brief moment, thought curly might survive the drop… the second mittful of dice was less forgiving and curly took 30-some damage causing 6 wounds… no bennies left… Exit Crullen “Curly” Balckstone…)

Back up at the top everyone else was realizing the situation was becoming dire. The rest of the group bludgeoned their way across the torrent and, in an attempt to prevent a TPK I said that as soon as Goldmoon entered with the staff the Spectral Minions backed off (this staff keeps getting better and better – Oh, and I miust have been glowing, because the only light sources, up until now had been Laurana’s magic staff, which would have been snuffed out when she was, and Curly’s lantern – which just went over the falls…)


The end of the first encounter – water and rocks seem to be more deadly than any other adversary in this quest so far…

They dragged Laurana and the sleeping Kender out of there and patched them up as best they could – Norfindel working his near magical first aid and the staff helping out too…. They managed to heal three of Laurana’s six wounds.

After that they attempted to talk to some Gully Dwarves that had just climbed up the vines hanging down the inside of the great cavern. The group climbed down the vines – but luckily had tied off Laurana and Goldmoon – who were both seriously injured at this point (Goldmoon still having two wounds from hertumble down the sewer pipe last game, and Laurana now having three wounds from her encounter with the Spectral Minions…)

Crreping around they came to the Grand Plaza and spotted the Dragon giving it’s (not-so-spectral) minions to begin some sort of search, before retiring to her den.

Making their way across the less deep, less fast moving water they followed into the subterranean courtyard. Presented with a hall and a pair of massive double doors they chose the hall – because how could a dragon possibly open doors? They followed the hall and wandered down a few passageways and encountered some more Draconians:

Beating down the Draconians

After the encounter with the Draconians they decided to head back to the double doors – because the last hall they entered was clearly too small for a Dragon to have fit through…. And couldn’t possibly lead to a sneaky backdoor entrance to the Dragon’s Lair or anything…).

Throwing the doors open they strode down the great hall – stepping on pressure plates, sounding alarms… The dragon popped it’s head through the doors and the far end and filled the passage with acidic spray…. The players wondered if the staff might cast barrier? I decided it could to avoid a TPK before I finished the first module… So the mighty staff of Mishakel saved them from certain death (considering half of them had no bennies left at all…).

The continued striding to the end of the hall and entered the dragon’s lair:

Entering the Dragon’s Lair

Henry FitzArnulf charged in and Norfindel let fly with the arrows…

They battled the dragon for a few rounds

Eventually goldmooon was able to stagger up to the beastie and smashed the Blue Crystal Staff on it and they both disappeared in a brilliant explosion of blue-ish white light… then the cavern started to crumble and cave in…. and that’s where we left it as it was after midnight.

Next Week: Escape from Xak Tsaroth! (and Who Will Rick Play Now!?)

Lorena Whiteswan

Lorena Whiteswan - Wildcard Wizard - Amanda
Ag d6, Sm d10, Sp d8, St d8, Vg d8,
Pace 6, Parry 5 (6 ), Toughness 6
Skills: Fighting d6, Notice d6, Stealth d4, Spellcasting d10, Throwing d4, Knowledge: Arcana d10, Survival d4, Riding d4, Swimming d4, Persuasion d4, Healing d4, Investigation d4, Climbing d4,
Edges: Arcane Background (Magic), Alertness, Luck, Wizard
Hindrances: loyal, pacifist, Code of Honour
Spells: Detect/Conceal ARcana, Light, Armour, Slumber
Gear: Robes, Staff (Str+d4, Parry +1, Reach 1), Dagger (Str+d4), Backpack, Bedroll, etc.

Lorena was born in Solace just after her parents moved there. Her father, John Whiteswan, a master carpenter, was invited to move there by his cousins who’d lived in the town for a couple generations.

Her older brother (by three years), Arnulf, had been born in Solamnia. When he was 14, he was apprenticed to another Master Carpenter, who moved to Solamnia in search of work and Arnulf went with him. No one has heard from him since.

Lorena had four younger siblings that were born in Solace. Isador, her younger sister (by just a year) has always been a rival – and a bit of a brute – bullying her constantly. She still lives at home – exasperating her parents.

Gwenyth and Gyles, twins (four years younger than Lorena) get along with her quite well. Both are recently married. Gyles is a carpenter and works with his dad, and Gwenyth is married to one of her fathers other apprentices Morgan Hammermann.

A Third sister was born a couple years after the twins but died when she was only one in a housefire.

Lorena’s youngest brother Quinlan (10 years younger) is also apprenticing to be a carpenter under her father, but longs to travel and go adventuring like his older sister.

Lorena, showing an aptitude for magic, was apprenticed to a Wizard at the age of thirteen. The wizard, Rowena Lablanca, traveled a lot and maintained a number of households across western Ansalon in Solamnia, Ergoth and Abanasinnia. Every couple years Lorena would return with Rowena to Solace – sometimes for a month, sometimes a whole year, but eventually they would be moving on. After twenty years Lorena’s apprenticeship has come to an end – passing the tests at the Tower of High sorcery. She has traveled home to Solace to decide what to do next…

Magnus Blackburn

Magnus Blackburn – Wildcard Preacher - Curtis
Ag d6, Sm d8, Sp d10, St d6, Vg d6,
Pace 6, Parry 5, Toughness 5
Skills: Fighting d6, Notice d6, Stealth d4, Persuasion d10, Investigation d8, Streetwise d8, Knowledge (history) d8, Knowledge (the Good Book) d8, healing d6
Edges: Healer, Charismatic, Alertness
Hindrances: Quirk (Loves Beer), Loyal, Heroic
Gear: Robes, Large leather and metal bound Book of the Seekers (Improvised Weapon, Str+d4, -1 to hit), 2 Daggers (Str+d4), Backpack, Bedroll, etc, etc…

Magnus Blackburn was born a short 32 years ago. Orphaned at the age of five when both parents died of illness he was raised by family friends in Solace. He had a decent enough childhood but never felt as if he really belonged. These feelings only got stronger in his teenage years and as young boys sometimes tend to do he ran away from home. He expected great adventure but was barely managing to survive after his small supply of food ran out. This is generally the way of things. Nearly dead, Magnus was found by a group of out of work mercenaries. Instead of leaving him to die they gave him food and water ( very odd considering they were mercenaries) and let him travel with them. Magnus proved an able travelling companion as long as he didn't have to worry about trying to survive. He was quick of wit and had a knack for understanding people and getting them to do what he wanted. Eventually, he joined their company and spent many years taking one job after another from whoever was willing to pay. It was during this time that Magnus did many things he wasn't proud of. Lieing, cheating, stealing, killing, these were not things that he had any interest in but he was accepted and because of that he stayed. Eventually his shame grew to be too great and he ran away once again. You would think that during his time as a mercenary he would have learned a little about survival but all he really gained was a love of good beer. On his own Magnus quickly found himself in trouble once again, lost without food or water. This time he was found by some priests travelling from Haven. Once again helped by strangers, Magnus found himself in a temple of the new gods. Here he learned of the Word and the true Way. Thinking he might have at last found a place to belong he joined the order and became a priest himself. Now he travels, preaching to all who will listen about the way of the new gods. This has allowed him to travel back to Solace and use it as a home base. There, he has met old friends and made some new ones.

Magnus isn't much of a fighter but can if he has to. He would much prefer to talk his way out of most of the situations he finds himself in and he's actually quite good at it. He is incredibly loyal to those he considers friends to the point of being foolhardy. Trying to make up for past misdeeds he has a heroic streak that is bound to get him into a great deal of trouble someday. Of course if he happens to find a good ale house he may never make it on to another adventure.