Midgard: Session 7

Dragon Zombie taken from the Dark Souls games

Picking back up with the undead drake, one PC attempted to speak to it but it did not seem to recognize his existence. Infuriated, he polymorphed into a giant ape (just like in Caverns), and began to assault it. It attempted to fly away before being grappled by the ape, which then held it in place for the other PCs to hack it apart. With the drake dead and mysterious armor in hand (and a few spare coins found within the inn), the party continued their "carriage-ride from hell", as one coined it.

After arguing for a while upon what percentage of travelers to murder, the party settled on 85% and I fast-forwarded through a few days of travel. They murdered many miscellaneous groups of travelers, earning a few white souls in the process and learning that every so often an individual might contain two souls, possibly of different colors. The party continued this for a few days travel before arriving at the Fireside Inn, a much larger and much nicer inn located two hours north of a town named Wagenstein.

The party decided to sleep in the inn, with the bard playing some songs on the stage and earning his keep, while the paladin attempted multiple times to get the innkeeper to tell him who was lawful good around here. The entropy wizard took a few hands of cards while the sorcerer and rogue, members of an assassin's guild, attempted to glean some information from some suspicious characters in a corner of the inn. After a bit of persuasion, they learned these hooded figures were in search of a party, headed in the same direction as the PCs, who had "caused some trouble" for their mistress.

The group was watched with suspicion until leaving some time later, moving north-east up the road toward where the PCs had came from. With that group seemingly out of the picture, the PCs decided they would settle down for the night. The PCs attempted to persuade the innkeeper to give them rooms on the same floor, to no avail. After a bit of failed arguing, intimidating, and bribery, one PC used his Dhampir racial ability, Predatory Charm, to gain advantage on his persuasion check (still failing). With that, the PCs accepted their fate and went to their two shared rooms, on the second and third floors.

After just a few hours, the PCs inhabiting the second floor room heard pounding at their door, and a voice commanding them to "open up!" One PC hid under his Cloak of Invisibility and the other two, both Dhampirs, were put under arrest by a large group of town guards. They were lead outside and loaded into a large wagon, into which the total of 16 guards climbed with them. The rest of the party watched from their third floor windows, and decided to stealthily chase in their own wagon after a few minutes.

Eventually catching up, the party's wagon was spotted and the town guard stopped and prepared to fight. The fight ended relatively quickly when the sorcerer polymorphed another PC into a Giant Ape, and the wizard caught the guard's horses and drivers in Evard's Black Tentacles. Cleaning up a few of the guards, the party dragged the captain and bodies a couple miles off road, buried the corpses, burned the wagon, armor, and other remains. Attempting to interrogate the captain with miscellaneous death threats, the party learned the guards were sent from Wagenstein, directly because of one player's actions.

One simple sentence in Predatory Charm's description the PCs missed:

"When the effect ends, the target feels repulsed by you and becomes hostile toward you until the next dawn, during which time it becomes immune to this effect."

An hour after the PC used the ability, the innkeeper sent a runner for the town guard as he realized they were evil Dhampirs.

Upon learning this, the PCs swiftly returned to the inn and took out their anger by burning the place to the ground, and killing every single civilian inside. With that, they continued down the road, deciding to lay low as long as possible. They stopped momentarily at Wagenstein with plans to besiege the town, but found the town was the headquarters for a faction of knights and paladins called the Order of the Undying Sun.

The session ended with the party landing in the city of Brescia, a large fort-turned-city a few hours away from the closest of the Seven Cities, Melana.

With that, we ended the session and I asked the players if we wanted to implement a rule for downtime. From here on out, we will have downtime between each session (unless we end in a time-sensitive spot, which we will try to avoid), from two weeks up to a month. This will allow players to complete some downtime activities, ranging from getting a legitimate job to going on crime sprees to crafting mundane or magic items, as well as allow for additional plot hooks and information to be found, which is needed since we are playing and open-world game.