D&D Encounters Web of the Spider Queen – Weeks 7 and 8

Previous session: Week 6 / Next session: Week 10

Since our Friendly Local Game Store closed early on Wednesday, July 4, for Independence Day, we did not have D&D Encounters that night. Instead, we ran two sessions back to back on Wednesday, July 11. Yeah, this was a little bit nuts. In retrospect, it would have been great to run sessions 6 and 7 on the same night, since session 6 wasn’t an actual combat and didn’t take very long.

But a DM’s gotta do what a DM’s gotta do.

Week 7 – Jaelre Elite

After the Tests of Lolth, the party found itself in a cavern full of elite drow from the house of Valan Jaelre (the apparent big bad of the adventure). Not a lot of story here; the drow demanded surrender, and when they didn’t get it, combat began. The only real story element was that the drow priestess leading the group mentioned that the human girl and her elf pet hadn’t put up much of a fight; a reference to Khara and Tharinel that the party pretty much ignored.

The fight itself was a pretty cool one. We had the priestess, who liked to shoot venom from long range, a two-blade ranger with a sewn-shut mouth and a spider companion, a burly drow male with a maul and a sneaky female assassin who climbed the walls and threw daggers tied to spidersilk rope.

Jaelre Elite cave map – gridded

Jaelre Elite cave map – no grid

With seven PCs at the table and a limited time for the fight, I didn’t scale anything up. Aside from our dwarf fighter getting totally beat on and knocked unconscious in the first round (he got better), the fight wasn’t too much trouble for the gang. It did take more than half of our two-hour time period, though, so I moved on quickly.

Week 8 – The Demonspur

The party found a secret passage out of the Jaelre Elite’s chamber, which ultimately led them to a huge cavern. They were entering via a tunnel high on one wall of this chamber, which had a massive stalactite hanging down from the ceiling with rope bridges connecting it to various side tunnels (including the one the PCs were coming from). The stalactite was basically an inverted tower of several floors, and red lights could be seen glowing inside of it.

Walking along one of the other rope bridges going into the stalactite (known as the Demonspur) were several drow leading a bunch of goblin captives.

The party did an excellent job of sneaking along the rope bridge to the top floor of the Demonspur and surprising the drow within. Since we had three goblins PCs and there were goblin captives in the Demonspur, the party agreed not to attack any goblins that didn’t attack first.

This fight was pretty quick, and confined to the top floor (we were short on time, so I didn’t do anything fancy). The goblin PCs worked hard to persuade the goblin captives to fight the drow, with pretty good success. The bugbear captive (“Big Eddie,” the goblins called him) didn’t get the memo, though, and had to be fought along with the drow. Not a problem for our intrepid band of heroes, however, especially with goblin help.

Demonspur map with spiderweb – gridded

Demonspur map with spiderweb – no grid

Unfortunately, I’m going to be out of town for Week 9, so I’ll resume my recaps with Week 10 in two weeks’ time.
sadf

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