Adventure 3: GM Notes:


Basic plot
It has been read in the stars that the town of Orsiana is doomed.  The PCs know this.  Uknown to them is that the doom is the arrival of the Spindly Man, a powerful and feared Witch.

2 phases 
- try to evacuate town & ready force to respond
- deal with the threat

 
 I thought about starting this one in media res, with the PCs responding to an already in progress disaster, but ultimately went with reading this disaster in the stars since it would give our star-druid something to do.  Maybe will use that encounter-with-disaster later.
 
 
 Given travel times, the PCs have about 10 days to prepare.
 
 
 Relevant border towns: 
 Orsiana - 400 people - larger market town
 Bellil - 200 people
 Florien - 200 people
 
 Each has town leadership, garrison, farmers that need to be convinced. Almost entirely agricultural.  Persuasion rolls, bribes needed
 
 
 Relevant 2nd-tier towns: 
 Terracina - 1000 people - small dye industry
 Potensa - 800 people
 Tricario - 800 people
 
 
 Relevant 3rd-tier towns: 
 Casselacaraco - 3000 people
 Nova Tursi - 3000 people
 Armantea - 3000 people
 
 
 
 Martial forces available
 - garrisons - town tier size * 10
 - the falling fire, red mage
 - 
 
 
 Mercenary forces available
 - halfing slingers & pike company
 - mixed martial company - 20 man army, swords and shield and some crossbows - silver snakes
 - house forteo caravan guards - 18 
 - demobbed lumber jacks; 30 
 - demobbed guards for lumberjacking operation; 30
 - witch hammer group - The Grinnel brothers, 5 mangy rogues, cleaning daggers, drinking vodka. specialize in traps, poisons, ambushes
 - fire mage - Sage of the fallings Fires, bon vivant
 - Brannaghast the beige - light mage. boring Gandalf
 
 
 
 

Locations at Terracina:
- town palisade - 8 ft, decent repairt
- orphanage
- dye works - workshops where dyes and pigments are made
- cemetary
- grain warehouses
- town church
 
 
 
Encounters at Terracina :
- brief fight with skeleton scouting patrol
- absolute horde of tier 1s
- defend from blood wyrms and ghosts
- defend from ghost-skeleton elites
- blood ghost assault on the walls, screened by skeletons and ghosts
 
  
 
 
 
What actually happened
 So, this did not at all go as expected.  I told them that the town was doomed. Doomed doomed doomed.  100% doomed, as foretold by the stars above. I expected that the inital challenge would be to evacuate the town, and convincing people to evacuate.  Instead the PCs made no effort to do that, and hung out and investigated there.  Which, ok, fine, the investigation was not a bad idea at all, they don't have the same knowledge I do about the actual threat. In any case they were at the town when the Spindly Man attacked, leading to an extended battle.  The PCs chopped through the Tier 1 monsters, made me bring out the Tier 2 monsters, and then defeated the Tier2's with only moderate fudging.  It was a bit of a game of chicken, I wanted them to retreat in the face of overwhelming odds, but I didn't actually want to kill any PCs and I think they can tell.  Anyway!  Twitch had a brief run in with the Spindly Man and his triple cleaver, before retreating with the party.   
 
      For the second run in things went slightly more according to plan, as they gathered allies.  They were also more pro-active, and met the Spindly Man as he was out on the road and tried to kill him.  The Spindly Man has to burrow during the daylight hours, so they used that time to bring their gathered guard forces to try and make a bonfire over him, forcing a fight under better terms than if had made it to a town.  So smart on their part, but also less dramatic of a fight than if they had to defend multiple positions in an ongoing town battle.  This was (ever so slightly, kinda) something that Iris Murdoch wrote about in her evaluations of her own work, the tension between "crystalline" (railroady) stories where there is structure, foreshadowing, counterpoints, direct meaning, etc. and "organic" stories where she gives her characters room to live and grow and be messy. So, this time around I did better about letting the players shape the adventure more, but I'm still having trouble combining that with, you know, interesting and challenging battles.