My friendly local game store has set things up so that DMs are alternating weeks of running D&D Encounters this season, rather than having the same DM run the game every single week. That’s fine by me, although since I think I’ll probably want to run this adventure again someday, I’m preparing all of the encounters in MapTool. I’ll be ready to go any week. As of this writing, I’m prepared through week 5.
But for week 2, I was a player rather than a DM. I threw together a character at the last minute – a dwarf warpriest named Gronk (I know that the table only had one leader last week and I thought a second might help). When I got to the table, we initially had a party of three leaders and three controllers. Okay…
Given that I’m not passionately invested in D&D Encounters as a player, I agreed to run a pre-generated character of a different role, so I ended up playing Brandis the paladin. One of the people who had brought a controller had a striker in reserve, so he switched to that, and off we went.
Week 2 of Dark Legacy of Evard was cool in that the players had a choice – they could either chase after a suspicious halfling who had tried to kill the captain of the guard, or they could try to get monsters out of the town armory so that the townsfolk could equip themselves against the evil onslaught of badness. Our group went with the armory.
The encounter itself turned out to be a fight against some spider swarms, deathjump spiders and shadow minions. I’m really enjoying the “meld with the target” ability of these shadow creatures – very spooky and flavorful. My paladin got the snot beat out of him, as was his job, but the two leaders in the party kept him coming back for more, and we ultimately defeated the enemies.
The new player from week 1 who was running a Hunter and who had only two healing surges after the first week’s combat managed to stay out of the melee and shoot things from afar this time, sustaining no damage. The party worked well as a group, and victory was achieved.
Even though I didn’t end up using the maps I had created for this encounter in MapTool (since I wasn’t DMing), I thought I’d share them here anyway, just in case anyone else would like to use them. There are two different maps – one for the armory and one for chasing the halfling through the woods. Each map is presented both with and without a grid and is formatted to a 50-pixel grid.