Session #33 - the Drow civil war

The party emerged from teleporting through the stone ring back at the field where they had fought the giant spiders just days earlier.  To their surprise, the spiders were gone.  Instead they found the young drow Jartrin there. 

Jartrin told them the drow caves had erupted into chaos.  Forces loyal to Nathnitra had taken over the central fortress.  Forces loyal to Belarcice were forces out into the surrounding caves.  War is about to begin to see who replaces Gausafey as baroness, and head of the house of Mezrylornyl.  Jartrin's father (Vuzatlab) told him to leave the caves and live in the woods until things have settled down. (BTW, Jartrin's mother is named Lymmur'ss.  Both Jartrin's parents take the Belarcice side in the conflict.)

This presents problem for the party.  They have in hand from their meeting with the arbiter a decree binding the Baronness of the house of Mezrylornyl to provide troops to battle the Bahumati.  But at present there is no Baronness. 

They have a similar decree for the Eladrin. 

The party decided to try to sort out the Drow mess first, and save delivering the decree to the Eladrin later. 

The party entered the drow caves.  After a long journey through winding caves they came to a deep chasm, with a bridge over it.  At this chasm they were ambushed by a group of drow, along with a giant spider and two ogres. 

The battle was a difficult one, with the ogres landing many powerful blows on multiple characters.  The party ultimately won, managing to push many of their foes into the chasm. 

One drow riding a giant spider escaped. 

The party recovered a gray bag of tricks (allotted to Yosh).

also 3 potions of healing, 3 100 GP geams , and 250 GP.

XP
2 drow spell-spinners (200 each)
1 phase spider (350)
4 drow underlings (75 each)
1 drow controller (200)
2 umbral savage ogres (200 each)

That's 330 XP each.

The party continued there journey down to a large open cavern.  They could see in the distance two towers at the front of the main drow fortress.

Game adjustments

Several weeks ago I sent out an email with a house rule and some other adjustments to improve the game a little.   I think that these things have worked.

I wanted to make sure I posted them to the blog so we can refer back to them when needed:

Here they are:

• Extended rest now takes a full 24-hours. You won’t get the full re-set of daily powers and healing surges as often. You’ll be at full strength less often. Relatively weaker encounters will be challenging. More complex daily powers will be used less often. 
• A 6 hour rest will grant recovery of 1 daily power and 1 healing surge.
• Action points will accumulate until a full extended rest. 
•    A missed to-hit roll on a daily power will grant an action point. 
•  2 action points can be spent to recovery a single daily power. 
• -         
•            If you follow discussion forums about D&D you might have read about “broken” monster math in the Monster Manual 1 and Monster Manual 2. The formula that they used to assign HP, AC, and damage values to monsters in those early publications gave high HP, and defensive scores to monsters, and low damage values. So you tend to have combat sessions that drag on against foes that really don’t have a chance to hurt you. In MM3, and the “Essentials” books they corrected this problem. When I use monsters from the older books, I’ll be adjusting their stats some to correct for this problem.
•             Expect monsters to surrender or run away more often. I’m not going to play it out to the bitter end so much anymore 
•            On your part, please make an effort to decide what action you’re going to take before your turn comes up.