PREVIOUS

The Doubley-Doos have finally reunited with the Rockmore tribe in the southern halfling village of Farlo. The traveling goblin tribe had stopped to help the town rebuild after it was devastated and ransacked by Klaas’s troops.

While helping the Rockmores repair the village, trouble arose when the mayor’s wife reported that a young boy from the village had gone missing. Everyone mounted a search party and spread across the countryside to cover more ground. Dormin found the tracks of small halfling feet leading toward a tree. The tree was otherwise nondescript, but had a strange knot on it that Dormin and Shump recognized as a fey symbol meaning either “Enter” or “Do not Enter.” While investigating the knot, the Doubley-Doos soon found themselves transported to the feywild where they followed booted footprints through the strange and dangerous woods. 

After tracking the booted footprints for hours and eventually losing the trail, the trio found themselves set upon by a roiling shapeless mass covered in babbling whispering mouths. Shump became stupefied and wandered into the doughy soil surrounding the creature. Dormin and Shelby were able to shake off the voices and attacked, Shelby eventually dealing the killing blow. 

A fog rolled in, and with it a sleight, mysterious elvish woman with elvish features. She approached Dormin, asking for help and reaching out to him. She wrapped her arms around Dormin’s body and drew him in for a hug, soon crushing him against her chest. Her body, in spite of looking small and frail, felt large and rough. With the illusion shattered, and Dormin saw her true form: a hulking figure covered in armor made of with stringy dark hair and gray, corpse-like skin. One of her arms was replaced with a crab-like pincer, and one of her eyes was replaced with something large and cat-like. She appeared to be entirely constructed of random discarded body parts.

Everyone attacked, and in the aftermath of the battle, the trio considered shelter in the hag’s shack — a ramshackle building made of sticks. Scattered around her property were various corpses, all missing random body parts. The group wondered if the missing boy might be held captive in there. They stood outside and contemplated their next steps.

____________________________________________

This was the first time I’d run a combat encounter without using a grid or map of some kind. I attempted to do it all by theater of the mind. It went okay, but I was trying to encourage them to use fictional positioning and description which didn’t work as well as I’d hoped.

The combat itself was fine, but I wasn’t able to utilize the hag’s and mouther’s abilities as well as I’d hoped. I was hoping to use them as sort of a combo, but it mostly just seemed to repeat itself. We’ve been playing again, which is nice, but not regularly, so it’s been really hard to get a rhythm going with DMing. Everyone seems distracted when we sit down to play, and coupled with the kinks we’re still working out playing online, it feels like we don’t actually settle down to play for a while.

It used to be that I could use the music to cue when we were starting, but our current set up, we can’t use the music because it’s too hard to share the music over the meeting — Skype could do that, but it was so goddamned buggy that we tried Zoom instead. Zoom could do it, but we were limited to 40 minute meetings, and I’m not paying for it. Google Meet can do it, but only through a Chrome tab, and if I share that, they can’t see me, and I can’t share anything except the Spotify tab. And Discord just can’t do it from what I can see. Discord is the most successful we’ve been with streams so far, but it’s far from ideal and still pretty buggy. I’m honestly tempted to try Skype again…but it was really buggy last time. But since it comes with my Office 365 subscription…maybe it’s worth another shot. I don’t know.

The game feels a bit on the verge of breaking down since we meet so rarely. I was hoping to at least finish this storyline, and then we can re-assess whether we want to keep playing, but getting folks interested in continuing has been tough. I hope we can though. I’d rather not rush the ending or time jump again or something like that until after they encounter Klaas and either win or lose, ha ha.

Oh well. We’ll see how these sessions continue going. ‘Til next time.

NEXT