The Third and Fourth Sesions · 4:12am Jul 2nd, 2018
Two short sessions leads to two short chapter updates. Well, short for me. My first story (The Mask of Despair and the Face of Hope) I had intended to be only 50k-60k. It ballooned up to double that. Even my short story (What do you Think?) was supposed to be under 5k words, and ended up being 7k. I also never intended the first and second session stories to bloat the way they did to nearly 13k each. I can’t do short. It boggles my mind that an entire story can be told in under 2k words, I can barely manage individual scenes that short!
Tacticians might note that the Naga made some seriously dumb choices here. It sent its only way out of the Ethereal plane down to the material, stranding it there. It then also jumped down to join the fight once the fight was essentially over and it was doomed to lose. It had survived Red’s scorching ray with a grand total of 4 hp left. On the other hand, it knows its got resurrective immortality, and it had already lost its other two Nightmares. From its perspective it didn’t have much to lose except a few days time. It did not know that Red knew about its immortality, which is the only reason they knew to take the body with them. (That’s what you get when you roll a natural 20 on your knowledge check) What do they plan to do about this ability? Well, they have a plan. It’s a sensible one too. Unfortunately you’ll have to wait until I post the 5th session to find out.
Frankly, the only reason I had the Naga join the fight is that this was supposed to be just a one shot adventure, not a massive multi-session campaign. If I had wanted to kill the party, a Naga with a trio of Nightmares would be basically impossible to beat. They would start the fight in the Ethereal Plane, then jump into the material, shot off a readied spell from the Naga and a single attack from one Nightmare, then use the last Nightmare to jump everyone back into the Ethereal Plane. Rinse, repeat, roll new characters. Even if the players know to use readied actions they can only get oh-so-much output out like that, and if any of the nightmares start to get low, the Naga could just leave the fight. Safely in the Ethereal Plane it could simply follow them around until they rest, then ambush them and jump the one on watch. With that one down it would be easy to take out the others. Even if they ran back to town it wouldn’t go any better. The Naga has enough mind control to deal with a bunch of low level soldiers and commoners. It could just hide in the Ethereal plane and pick off stragglers to its heart’s content. Without the means to block inter-planar travel or enough firepower to down the Naga in one round, its largely unstoppable. Worse yet, Nagas don’t need to sleep, so it could follow them around and prevent them from resting. Time means nothing to Nagas, if it takes a week to kill off the town or the players, so be it.
I wasn’t out to outright slaughter my party. That said, they still had to actually win those fights fairly. The only reason Red survived was because the player forgot that they get +1 hp/level from being a dragon-bloodline sorcerer, they thought they only got a measly +1 total, and we were trying to figure out why my recorded HP for Red was higher than theirs. I also had to remind the yak player that he had the ability to reduce the damage of an incoming hit by 1d12+CON, or the Nightmare would have downed him too. There was no way Tiny and Eclipse, both low on health and spells, could have taken the remaining Nightmares on their own. Especially because I have the horrifying tendency to crit fairly often. At one point everyone in the fight, on both sides, was down to single digit health. And I’ve discovered that none of the characters have more than a +2 to will saves, which makes the group particularly vulnerable to mind control and charms. Red got hit by Hold Person right off the bat, and spent the entire fight… not in the fight, not that she would have been able to help much. All Red’s damage spells are fire-based, and Nightmares are immune to fire.
One last note: I had the spell clash thing with Eclipse and the Naga in the story finish off the last Nightmare. Anyone who knows d&d would note this is not how counterspell works. But I felt like this was a more cinematic way to finish off the last Nightmare, as once the Naga was down it was all of two more hits to take it out, and it didn’t get another turn anyway.
