Yet Another (5e) Red Hand of Doom Campaign Journal

[msully4321]

This is all super late.

I got busy right after the Battle of Brindol and never wrote up posts for it, which I feel bad about. I'll try to summarize here.

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There was a bunch of prep work. I don't remember exactly all what was involved.
Zehra arrived triumphantly back in Brindol with a small army from Dennovar to much rejoicing.

There was a last minute war council maybe?

The party's job was to fight fires wherever they happened, and Hoss was given a telepathic link to help coordinate.

The opening salvos of the battle of brindol were two squads of hill giants bombarding walls with boulders, and the party was dispatched to deal with one of them. The party flew straight at them on owls, and unfortunately drew the fire of the giants. Aideen's owl was killed, causing her to crash down to the earth, but otherwise the party managed to clear the giants just in the nick of time before charging hobgoblins overwhelmed their positions.

While they succeeded, Hoss got informed over the telepathic link that the cavalry unit that Lord Jarmaath had sent had been driven off and a breach was in danger of being opened. The party started racing over to deal with this, but before they could get there, a bigger problem materialized: the red dragon Abithriax had flown into the city and was laying waste. The Blue Hand Group immediately raced to stop him.

This fight was mostly anticlimactic. I should have had more support for Abby, but had him alone, and so he went down pretty quick. Some bad attack rolls on his part and lucky saves on the party made him honestly pretty forgettable---which was a big difference from kjones's game where he nearly wiped the party!

The one memorable bit of this fight came at the end. Abithraix was clearly badly wounded, and Aideen was up but wanted to conserve spells and had only Fire Bolt as an attack cantrip. But Aideen had spent much of the downtime in Brindol having Hoss train her to shoot a bow, which I had ruled gave her proficiency. So Aideen the sorcerer drew her bow, rolled exactly enough to hit, and killed a dragon.

That was unfortunately the last session with the whole crew available. Cora's player was moving away, and Aideen's player was on vacation, so I ran the last parts of the battle without Aideen so that we could keep Cora's player in it.

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The next part of the battle was a series of street defense fights, where the party set up on some barricades and helped soldiers repel waves of enemies.The first wave was a bunch of hobgoblins supported by two manticores. The second wave was a bunch of bugbear barbarians and Wyrmlord Koth (a sorcerer), and the third wave was goblin warg riders on Bluespawn Thunderlizards, which could do crazy things with lightning attacks. (As a bonus action, they could shoot an arc of lightning to another thunderlizard, damaging anything in between.)

I don't remember too much of the blow-by-blow details here, but this was one of the best fights of the campaign. It was tough and exciting and the party was relieved to get a breather at the end of it---and extra relieved when I remarked out of character that there would be extra waves if they hadn't destroyed the greenspawn razorfiend hatchery and gotten the Ghostlord out of the fight!

After a quick short rest---I decided to say that for the battle, short rests took 5-10 minutes, since it felt important to let them take short rests but an hour wouldn't make sense---the party was asked to regroup with Lord Jarmaath, only for Jarmaath's message to be cut off as he was hit by a sniper's arrow! The party went to investigate, and found the shots coming from the second story of a coffinmaker's shop.

Coming in the ground floor, they were ambushed by some invisible wizards who blasted them with fireballs or lightning bolts and then died quick. On the top floor waited Skathar, a dragonborn (or something?) ninja assassin. I don't remember the exact blow-by-blow of this fight, but it was hilarious. When the came upstairs (up caltrops covered stairs), he shot someone with a poisoned arrow, then ran around a corner and jumped out a window. When everyone followed back downstairs, he shot someone again, then ran upstairs ignoring the caltrops. Variations of this repeated several times, with me using Skathar's superior mobility and as much cleverness as I could muster to hurt the party while avoiding damage himself. I think PCs dropped twice during this, but he never managed to get a killing blow.

Eventually Skathar decided that it was time to escape, but wanted to get one last attack in. Unfortunately, I miscalculated his positioning, and Zehra was able to---using all of her movement---catch Skathar and deal a killing blow.

Then there was a final battle in the Cathedral Square, as Wyrmlord Kharn and his entourage (including Wyrmlord Ulwai Stormcaller) attempted to crush the center of resistance. Ulwai caused a lot of grief by casting greater invisibility and messing with people, which the party had difficulty countering. She actually even escaped at the end! I don't remember many details of this fight, except that I forgot to have Immerstahl the Red act for like 4 or 5 turns in a row and eventually gave the somewhat lame excuse that he had been busy helping hold the left flank against an offscreen band of attackers :P.

It looked a little dicey for a moment, but in the end they killed Wyrmlord Kharn and the horde shattered and retreated. I added up the victory points the party had gained---including many for things not in the module, like bringing an army from Dennovar---and the party had solidly routed the horde. Mop-up operations would be simple and quick. The Vale was safe.

For now.

Observations:

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The Skathar fight was my favorite fight in the campaign to play, and I remember kjones saying the same thing. It's a lot of fun to get to use all my cleverness with a character who can take advantage of it and no need to hold anything back.

The final battle was fun, but honestly not as cool as the fights that preceded it.

I decided to push on to an (abbreviated) Act V of the campaign, partially because I wanted Aideen's player, who missed the second half of the Battle of Brindol, to be able to participate in a finale. I'll post about that shortly, and then hopefully some conclusions.