Welcome to the ninth set of game notes of our The Rime of Frost Maiden campaign from a player’s perspective. We’ll discuss the pre-game, the session itself, the post-game and what I’m taking into the next session in each of these posts. The aim is to provide a diary of the experience from a player’s perspective.
Disclaimer
These posts are written from the perspective of a player who has purposefully not looked up spoilers. I am enjoying the game. These thoughts are my own and I can’t speak for my fellow players.
These reports are written close to the session but may not be released immediately after.
The sections
The pre-game
When was the last session again? Yes, it was one of those moments as we experienced the inevitable challenges of August. We’d not played in a month or so. This wasn’t so much a problem in remembering what had happened but was certainly a challenge in remembering how to play!
I’d forgotten where all the buttons were. I had doubled my spell slots so I had all new flexibility in terms of distributing spells across divine smite, smite spells and other spells which meant a more varied set of spells got used.
I think I started to get back into the routine by the end of the session.
Key points
The session had the following key points: –
- Some Deurger walked into our camp and presumed to attack us
- We raided a cavern of gnolls to help a player activate his magic sword
Yep, this session was pretty direct.
The session
It was a pretty simple objective in this session. Raid the gnoll lair because it had something inside, though I don’t think we knew exactly what would allow one of the players to learn more about their ancestral sword.
What was funny and great about the session is we didn’t really get to slowly explore the gnoll lair because one of the first things we did was cast Thunderwave on a small group of gnolls which mean a booming sound with a 300m range echoed around the cavern.
This created a small-scale Khazad-dum effect, just swapping a smaller, but sizeable, gnoll horde for the goblins. They came baying through the complex to meet us at the very first cave! This was very atmospheric and a suitable ‘hoh shit’ moment without feeling like we were inevitably doomed. This also meant we got to pull out some of the AOE madness which we’ve not done as much. The Spike Growth and Thunderwave spells kicked off big style. I even got to use my new funky Misty Step to avoid being surrounded and attacked by three enemies two of them with serious multiple attacks.
It was a really good encounter. Probably one of the best ones so far. I like a good horde.
The post-game
I think that was one of the last sessions of the first phase. We now enter the second phase which features a sort of next-tier experience. Everything just gets a bit bigger. Less dealing with small problems in the towns and more going to big, bold adventure locations. It may even involve ‘dungeon environments’ which don’t complete in 2-3 hours!
This will be interesting as it will shake things up a bit!
It’s a bit weird playing this and Crown of Solastra at the same time as this session as they represent two implementations of the D&D experience. They are surprisingly similar. Opening information, maybe an encounter on the way (albeit it Solastra does it via a travel montage with a chance of an encounter) and then a location with an encounter or two to battle.
The difference primarily being I control one character and not four.
Stars and Wishes
At the end of each session, we can list stars (things to keep doing) and wishes (things we want to see).
I think we did it this week, but I’m not sure we said anything truly insightful. I did advocate for how good the swarming gnoll horde was.
Plans for the next session
No plans. I’m just going with the flow and not seeking to radically influence the experience.