Editing User:Bill/Thunderspire Mountain Enhanced (section)

===Session 5 - June 29, 2011===
This week I felt especially well prepared. The players had two options available to them to proceed through the Chamber of Eyes and I prepared maps for both. Naturally this meant that the players would find a third option that would make me look totally unprepared and utterly incompetent. I exaggerate a little. What actually happened is that the players picked this week to finally get smart about how they approached the encounter, and a large portion of the fight actually took place in the hall outside of the mapped areas I had prepared.

I'm getting a little ahead of myself. The group elected to take a five minute rest before proceeding on from the previous week's area. It was a wise decision. I allowed for the possibility of the group being discovered by a monster, but the players got lucky. Had the dice come up differently, they would have been split up and down to at-will powers in most cases. This week featured seven players; David, Dylan, Jason, Maria, Matt, Paul, and Rachel. Due to a small paperwork snafu, Maria ended up playing Croesus. I had Matt continue playing Cleitemnestra; Paul elected to play Auden. David, who has extensive experience with AD&D but little experience with subsequent editions, chose to play Luthor.

This week was a straight-up fight with little modification from the source material. I figured after the beating that they took the previous week, they couldn't handle too much more. I was correct in this assumption. Up against two hobgoblin archers, two hobgoblin soldiers, two human slavers, and a hobgoblin warcaster, the party was mostly challenged by the chokepoint of the door and just how little they had left resource wise. Working with unfamiliar characters put David, Maria and Paul at further disadvantage. 

The party initially staged itself in a chamber that featured a sort of reflecting pool that the adventure text describes as a source of fresh water. Helfyn and Luthor began scouting the three doors available to them. Luthor examined the center door while Helfyn took the one to the left. Luthor determined that there were monsters behind the door and took no further action, while Helfyn opened the south door a crack to peek inside. This revealed several monsters engaged in some sort of gambling activity at a table in the center of the room with a few more keeping to themselves further away. This may have been useful information had Dylan not blown his stealth check and the latch on the door snapped loudly shut as it closed; which immediately precipitated initiative checks.

The next three or so turns revolved around the monsters attempting to enter the corridor and the player characters tripping over themselves to get at the monsters. It was awkward and several of the players were effectively left out of the action because they lacked ranged attacks that would have enabled them to engage the monsters. When the players finally did make a push to assault the room, they quickly dominated the fight and put the monsters down. Even so, Helfyn and Cleitemnestra came under heavy attack while they were occupying the door. Helfyn was severely injured, but able to recover, while Cleitemnestra was killed. Since this is a hand-out character, I have decided that she will not be available for the remainder of the Chamber of Eyes and that Matt will be unable to select her in any sessions that he participates in going forward. The character will be available to anyone else that wishes to use her, once the final portion of the area has been cleared.

Once the action had concluded, I handed out the treasure indicated in the adventure text. By rights, I probably ought to be beefing this up a bit. However, I don't particularly care to load the players down with loot and, since this is Encounters, the continuity of the game isn't terribly high; which reduces the overall value of it anyway. I think the players get a lot more out of just playing than they do out of adding a couple more numbers that don't have an in-game impact to the sheet.

I am rating this as another successful session. David expressed great interest in learning more about how Luthor's powers function and I expect he will return. He is also eager to recruit players for his own game, which I approve of. Encounters is a very good way to meet other players and get a sense of how they play. Next session, I will make sure that I have a bit of the corridor mapped out in advance. I will be out of town for the July 13th session, so next time I will see if anyone is interested in running one of my random encounters or the interlude from the book while I'm gone. Last time Dylan did his own thing, and that would be cool, but I'm happy to share my work since we only have another five weeks before the next season of Encounters is scheduled to begin.