Spoilers for the adventure...
On 22 February I had my latest session in my ongoing Dragonlance campaign. The adventurers just completed Dragons of Stormwreck Isle as an intro adventure and in the last session traveled to Vogler using the rules from Uncharted Journeys from Cubicle7. The characters are Fallon Youngblossom, a College of Glamour bard, Asterius, the first and only minotaur to become an Oath of the Crown paladin member of the Solamnic knights, Gringle Graggle, a goblin thief rogue who styles himself a Duke but can't ever pass a deception check, and Davgin Appledew, a kender wizard.
In Vogler the party enjoyed some fish pies and banter with the proprietor of the Fishbowl tavern. Then they went to the funeral for their friend Ispin Greenshield (if I ran this adventure again I would definitely have run a prologue set years prior featuring Ispin as an NPC to give the party some form of emotional investment). They told a few stories about Ispin at the reception in the Brass Crab afterwards, and met Cudgel Ironsmile, the leader of the Ironclad Regiment. They also met the mysterious elf Leedara, and the obnoxious Bakaris the Younger (I told them to imagine him as Draco Malfoy--the parallels are too strong to ignore).
Then they retired for the evening. Asterius requested to sleep at the keep with Darrett and Becklin. The others bunked at the Brass Crab. Then all met at Thornhill keep with Asterius to have breakfast with the NPCs. Becklin gave them the famed green shield (+1 shield) of Ispin Greenshield. Asterius takes it because he's the only character who can survive in melee.
Next they jumped into the festivities of the Kingfisher festival. I've decided to make Darrett a follower of the characters for the campaign instead of making an awkward transition from young squire to their patron, so I had him hanging out with them in a comically large paper-mache hat in the shape of a kingfisher. Give the players their agency back and break the linear adventure man!
They fished in the competition, competing against Mayor Raven. Gringle managed to win! Asterius didn't catch anything. Bakaris the Elder was also drinking and harassing the other participants, so Gringle and Asterius played a classic high school prank, with Gringle tying his boot and Asterius shoving the inebriated Bakaris over him. They sent him tripping off the wharf into the water. Hugely satisfying!
Next suddenly off to the recreation of the Battle of High Hill. I didn't buy the accompanying board game (and the reviews I've read about it didn't impress me) but I still wanted to give my players the chance to impact the mass combat scenarios throughout the adventure. So I took this opportunity to break out the warfare rules from Kingdoms & Warfare. The going was a bit rocky as I remembered the rules and taught the players, but this battle is the perfect tutorial scenario to do this. I used just the regular tier I human units that are actually available in the free Kingdoms & Warfare Resources product. We played without martial advantages, but I showed them those rules in passing so we can add them in later. I also briefly introduced the heroic organization rules to them and let them know that because of the campaign themes they would be forming a martial regiment organization later.
The battle was fun, and ran faster as we figured it out.
My biggest critique of this chapter having now run half of it is that there is an almost overwhelming amount of content occuring at breakneck pace and the information is presented linearly without any real effort to provide summary descriptions of each scene. For instance, the reception provides an overview of that scene, but doesn't mention the three NPCs that are fairly important to the narrative until further subsections below that are easy to skip over or treat as separate sections. Additionally in that case, it's nice to have the NPC motivation write-up, but a call out box on the side would have been better than including all the description in the main body of the text.
Next session the characters will play through the encounter of the Battle of High Hill and then participate in the defense of Vogler. I'm looking forward to seeing how the adventure unfolds.
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