Editing User:Bill/Thunderspire Mountain Enhanced (section)

===Session 9 - August 3, 2011===
This week had only one new player in attendance, Will. He elected to play Volistis. The other players were Bruce, Dylan, Jason, Rachel, and the young man from last week who's name continues to escape me. A couple more would have been highly desirable. 

The text of the adventure indicated that any Deurgar surviving the encounter at the Grimmerzhul trading post would retreat to the horned hold and appear in the second encounter. I followed those instructions, even though I had upgraded all of the duergar in question; which resulted in the players facing off against two duergar spell-casters, four duergar warriors, two duergar scouts, and another orc bloodrager. It was a tremendous encounter that would have been suitable for the final battle of the adventure. It made for a memorable conclusion.

The layout of the gatehouse was such that, even though the players opted to approach the workshop where the monsters had ensconced themselves, I was easily able to pin them down with the spell-casters. Both were 5th level characters, though one was a named character from the module that I had applied the Devastator (DMGI, p178) template to to upgrade him to an elite. This was my first time using the templates, but I don't think it will be my last. Assuming that I'm called to run another D&D game, I'll probably use them a lot for fast upgrades to basic monsters.

The party approached the skirmish with a great deal of team work and skilled application of their individual characters' powers. If I hadn't been able to pin them down for a couple turns and whack them pretty hard with spell damage, I think they would have been able to mop up the duergar pretty quickly. However, because they were all injured pretty badly in the first couple rounds, the fight went against them. The duergar managed to drop all but two members of the party, who fled, by the end of the night. I will say that the though the duergar warrior's power to grow to large size is impressive, the creature doesn't have enough hit points to really be dangerous once it gets there. In half of the cases for this game, the monsters went from bloodied to dead within a round.

It was a good finale in my opinion. That the party was almost wiped out doesn't actually bother me. I think it makes for a better end to the game than finishing the encounter and moving on to next season's adventure. It gave me more closure anyway. These characters, played by another group will be returning to the Thunderspire Labyrinth in a few weeks to start over. Sadly, I won't be able to make my notes for that game public due to confidentiality issues.