Shard Saga – Dry spell in Eldeen Reaches

A friend wanted to be the DM for an Eberron campaign, since the guide book for that world just came out, and it looks interesting. So here’s the back-story:

The background story is that a village in the Eldeen Reaches has been experiencing a particularly hot and dry summer. It seems to be a localized phenomenon as the other villages nearby have had fairly good weather so far. A raincaller from House Lyrandar has been hired to perform a ritual that will bring rain to the village.

Your character is present at the ceremony and should have an interest compatible with the successful completion of the ritual. To start with a bonus 1st-level magic item, state what that interest is, and why you are at the ceremony.

And I created Kepler, the halfling sorcerer.

He had 3 house rules.

House Rule #1: No Repeats
No duplicate races, classes, feats or magic items, excluding consumable items, but including properties (e.g. frost weapon, dwarven armor, cloak of resistance), apart from vanilla +1 magic weapons, implements and armor, and amulets of protection.

This one was hard to coordinate. As we progress in levels, there will be more chances of us possibly choosing the same feats and magic items. To reduce the amount of headaches I would have, I decided to choose halfling-specific and sorcerer-specific feats and magic items. That way, I don’t have to worry about denying another friend of getting something good. I mean, some people might take a +1 to damage very seriously…

House Rule #2: Additive Treasure Gaining Convention
When characters gain a level, they gain one magic item of new level +1, and gold equal to one-fifth of the value of a magic item of new level -1. For example, a second-level character gains a 3rd-level magic item and 72 gp (one-fifth the value of a 1st-level magic item).

We had a previous house rule we played under on treasure. Suppose we leveled up to 10. Then we get a magic item of level 11, 10, 9 and gold equivalent to a magic item of level 9.

This always gave me problems because I always have to rechoose my entire equipment set.

This new rule takes away my equipment choosing headache, but it takes away some of my freedom to choose items with … weird effects.

House Rule #3: Combat Escalation
After the first round of combat, everyone gains a +1 bonus to damage rolls. This increases by +1 at the start of each subsequent round.
After the bonus to damage rolls increases to +2 or more, everyone gains a bonus to attack rolls equal to half the bonus to damage rolls.
After the bonus to attack rolls increases to +2 or more, everyone’s crit range increases by half the bonus to attack rolls.

This was to reduce grind. Personally, I think it added too much overhead to my friend DM’s load…

The gameplay

We have Titanator the warforged fighter, Malkoenen the goliath barbarian, a kalashtar bard, a human invoker, and my halfling sorcerer Kepler. Why didn’t the bard and invoker have names? Well, they do. Let’s just say it’s unwise for me to write them here…

So the characters travelled to that village with the dry spell. It’s unfortunate, because I forgot to take pictures of the first encounter. Let me try to summarise from memory then.

It was in fairly open terrain. The land was supposed to be parched from the dry spell, but my friend didn’t have parched land tiles, so he used some that stretches the definition between parched and verdant. There was a big monster. A small monster took down the Lyrander raincaller. The invoker ignored the raincaller and blasted her with spells to injure the big and small monster. A dust devil appeared from a small ruin-like opening and wrecked havoc by blinding us. Yeah, that’s about it…

After the encounter, we went down that ruin-like opening, and were greeted by bugs.

Our barbarian was first in initiative. Lucky too, because he took out the right-most bug, which was a DANGEROUS FIRESPITTING BUG!! Being packed like sardines while being roasted is not fun.

However, the barbarian wasn’t so lucky for the rest of the fight. He was perpetually in half-dead mode (which would be awesome if you’re Squall Leonhart in FFVIII). It was the “Avalanche Strike” that undid him, due to the +4 bonus to hit granted to enemies.

We got rid of the bugs, and moved to the next encounter. Which was basically a trapped room.

This entire encounter was a skill challenge. The yellow dotted line represents a moving wall that’s gonna squish us into pancakes in 2 more rounds. We failed the skill checks like half the time, landing us in this dangerous predicament.

None of the other party members were in more danger than my halfling though, since the lecherous bard was just adjacent… never mind, in-house joke…

I wonder what would have happened if we failed completely? I think the DM was getting ready to pull a Deus ex machina on us. He didn’t have to, and we went on to the next chamber, where we met some skeletons and… a dust devil.

There was a dust devil (all the fights that day had one), 4 minion skeletons and 1 tougher skeleton.

Not a particularly hard fight, but did you see the gigantuan d20?

I rolled an 18 for initiative for the last encounter. That was awesome fast. I also wasted it trying to talk to the stupid winged reptile. Which apparently didn’t understand me. And then I stayed put (despite being uncomfortably close to the lecherous bard…). Big mistake.

Because the sand drake trotted over and blasted us and blinded us. The invoker was the only one who got away. One thing I’ve learned: If you see a reptile with wings, spread like peanut butter.

Yes, the dust devil is back! (extreme left) The sand drake blasted us with a sandstorm, then sucked it back into its mouth, and then spat out a dust devil. Eeww… talk about hairballs…

We finished the sand drake and the dust devil, and were rewarded with a brown shard. The DM said if we attach it to a weapon, it does +1 more damage. If attached to an armour piece, it resists 2 1 untyped damage.

[Update: My DM corrected me on the amount of untyped damage resisted. And I forgot to tell you, the barbarian took the brown shard.]

The dry spell disappeared from the village, and normal weather returned. Oh, the name of this village was revealed in another gameplay session. I know you’re absolutely dying to know the name, so I’ll tell you now… it’s Honeybeech.

I know, I know, I’ll write on the significance of the name some other time.