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Hi Everyone! I just got back from a game with people at Gen Con. It was great. Way different than I expected, but great.

There are two more games with the same initial set-up. This one veered far off-course, but if you're playing in Friday or Saturday's game, I don't think you have to worry about spoilers.

We had seven players (supposed to be six but there was a guy's friend just sitting there, so we let him play). Two warriors, two rogues, a noble, and two wizards. Actually, there weren't supposed to be any wizards in this game according to what I had planned, but the folks really wanted to play them, so I said sure.

The adventure starts off in a castle in Thyre. The night smells like mashed cherries, and the tinlking laughter of courtesans and courtiers comes up from the peasant-fanned wave pool. The PCs are all present in order to participate in a tournament. They dueled each other, putting on a show for the gathered nobles. This let everyone learn the combat rules.

We did all the combats simultaneously, with me going around the room answering questions. Some of them chose some tricky styles like Dagger-and-wine, but it went pretty smoothly. The noble's Twin Weapon vs. the rogue's Dagger-and-wine was a bit of a pillow fight, but the Dramba wizard vs. the Prince of Wolves monk was an awesome fight.

After everyone had the combat rules down, the party made some fantastic rolls (two separate dice exploded two times each!!!) to notice the nobles clearing out. So instead of being blindsided by the earthquake and the zeppelins, the party actually had a chance to chase down the nobles! I wasn't planning for a chase scene at this point at all. But it turned out to be a lot of fun and the real heart of the session. The PCs were chasing Asa Denthe, the perfumed emotional eunuch who was their "handler" for the tournament. He was supposed to be the last one to make it to the zeppelins. The party chased him out of the tournament grounds, through the baths, down the hall of mirrors. There were all kinds of narrative craziness: the noble was throwing his cane and howling at servants, the princess of wolves was leaping off walls, the rogues threw daggers that knocked down mirrors on top of Asa, and eventually the dramba wizard got a clean view of him and burned a dedicated doll, dropping the eunuch to the floor under cracked glass. This meant the party actually had a shot at catching the nobles' fleeing zeppelins, but the rogue who was closest rolled a 2 (doom was 4). I'm wondering where the adventure would have gone if he had jumped onto the zeppelin!

So then a social encounter ensued. The noble threatened Asa with the dramba wizard's spells unless the eunuch told them what was going on. At first Asa resisted, and he fired back with some quips of his own. But the noble threatened to tell Asa's mom that the missing corpses (these had been mentioned before as foreshadowing for what's coming up) were due to Asa's necrophilia. Asa caved at that and spilled: the nobles were all fleeing on zeppelins because they wanted plausible deniability for an upcoming raid on Thyre by a Death Lore archmage in Dunlor. In other words, the nobles had a Maelstrom mage create the earthquake on their own city, so that the nobles could flee(the leaders have to be safe in a time of crisis!). Under cover of the earthquake's chaos, with the nobles avoiding responsibility because they were away fleeing the earthquake, three skeleton brigades, a zombie brigade, and a skeleton children's brigade were going to raid the city and steal slaves. All of this was negotiated, Asa said, by the nobles in exchange for the Death Lore archmage's goodwill and possible future support in an assault on Dunlor.

So now the party ran to the parapets, and sure enough, there were undead hordes on the horizon! As they looked out, a giant undead colossus rose up right in front of them on the parapet. He had several normal sized zombies with him. We ran this as a regular combat. It was super! The nail in the coffin was the dramba wizard's Switch Body spell. He used it to run the undead giant smashing through the Hall of Mirrors and down the cliff off of Thyre's castle (you can see it in the map in the game). Then the princess of wolves jumped down and hacked, and the archer shot twice, finishing the giant as he stood up and got ready to swing (by the way, the giant came in with a huge flying leap before and dropped the noble, who only survived because of his love for a scullery maid).

We were almost out of time, so we ran a quick mass combat. The Thyran forces made light work of the skeletons (brittle combat unit!) and avoided the wail from the children's brigade.

Hm, somehow in there I forgot to mention how the rogue at one point used the common environment trick "Use Bystander as Marionette" to attack a zombie with the eunuch. It was classic... too bad he missed!

The common environment chart got a workout, actually. Glass wall, bystander, hostage, fall down cliff... I think there were some other ones too.

I thought it was going to be a lot of people from here or rpg.net or something. But I guess not!