I haven’t looked much at my party’s composition in this blog yet, though I have mentioned that there are seven players. We have, at level 8: a dirge singer bard/cleric, a forge cleric/paladin, a gloom stalker ranger/battlemaster fighter, a battlemaster fighter/kensei monk, an artillerist artificer/evocation wizard, an echo knight, and an alchemist artificer. This, as you can see, is a Lot.
The last few adventures haven’t been combat heavy, but now that they are down in a “dungeon” again, we’re back to it. I have often mentioned the skill of my players, and their ability to strategize when they know what is coming and how I’ve dealt with that. This week was a good example of both.
The group diplomacied their way out of two fights, as expected, to start the night. Then I threw a whole bunch of small, creepy scuttling serpentmaws at them. The book suggested four, so I threw twelve. I was originally going to do two waves of them, six at a time, but I was a bit flustered for having misidentified them in my initial description, so I just threw the whole bunch, in three separate groups around the room. This split up the area-effect debuff spells of my party decently well. They were a serious threat, and the party had to really focus on taking them down one at a time, instead of spreading damage out. Pack tactics really helped my poor rolling skills to actually hit the party. I did, however, forget to have the players recount a memory on death saving throws, though there were only a couple that got that far. All in all, it was a good fight that lasted 8 rounds – this is what all our long fights have taken, in an interesting twist.
The party then ran away from the next, possibly battle, encounter I had planned to rest. It had been a long day for them and these crabs were their third battle since they long rested. But the final battle of the night, was a masterpiece of player tactics. And only made me a little sad for my big bad monster. The party crept up quietly, and I honored that choice by letting the door to the encounter cracked open enough for them to see the visage of the Death’s Embrace. This scared them enough that they quickly formed an alpha strike plan.
In both of these fights, the casters coordinated their faerie fire, bless, bane, and bardic inspiration to spectacular affect. However, in this second fight, the monk had a single dangerous target to focus on, and stunning strike. Due to bane from the bard/cleric, my deadly jellyfish was stun-locked the entire fight, while the party whittled down his (very inflated) hit points, and dealt with the sorrowfish swarms harrying them once the threat was gone. It was the frogs all over again.
I had originally planned on having two of these creatures in the villa, since the book had called for one, but I upped the sorrowfish instead. Fortunately, the book calls for at least one more encounter with these, so I’ll have another chance, and there will be two in that encounter. The party will have another level by then, but it will also be a more dangerous secondary set of creatures, as well.
Happy Gaming!