First Party, First Session

Well, today was the first session, and it went moderately well. It was a little slow starting up, but once everyone not playing had gone we got some decent work done. We started off with brainstorming how the group would come together, and we decided on an old classic, they're in a guild together. Though the guild they have is pretty crappy, with their party being the only members. After that they decided to go looking for quests, and I told them about the bounties that I had created.

The party consists of:

Laxus Dreyar, Human Druid 2 with his trusty horse companion Buttercup
Fyiad, Half-Orc Dragonborn Red Dragon Shaman 2 with 6 intelligence
Lia Galanodel, Elf Ranger 2 with archery style
Bistechrn, Lesser Aasimar Bard 2 with 20 charisma

They started off by splitting up, always a bad idea, one half of the party going to find a thug hanging around in an alley, and the other half to go investigate some thievery. I had a little difficulty here as I tried to switch between the parties, allowing both to be doing stuff at the same time, which never really seems to work. So here we had the first real combat of the game, the dragon shaman and druid with heavy horse companion fighting a group of 4 orcs.

The battle was littered with misses and a spectacular critical fail on the part of the orc leader, which resulted in him knocking himself out and all the way down to -9, then failing his stabilization and bleeding out. The three basic orcs proved to be about the threat I thought they would, though an early lucky crit brought the druid down to -8, where the dragon shaman's aura kept him from dying. After dispatching the orcs, and a little bit of looting the rest of the party arrived from their investigations, they had decided to go to a upper class elf party in the hopes of catching the thief.

I'm not sure quite where this idea came from, but I let it slide, because I didn't really want them to waste their time. So I had the thief arrive at the party, acting shifty and the like, but a few failed sense motive checks later and I really had to tell them nothing was amiss. After the ranger decided to go and get the less stealthy of the party, the dragon shaman and druid, the party had come to a close, I had the thief try to run, and they of course decided to run after him, resulting in a chase scene which really could have been better. It ended with the druid, who got there first and alone, being stabbed to unconsciousness, again, and the dragon shaman coming to the rescue. After a lucky hit from the thief the dragon shaman was down to 0 health, though his aura granting fast healing 1 he was not doing too bad, especially after a series of 5s and 6s from me, and finally the ranger comes in, and finishes him with a couple of well aimed shots, with a little courage from the bard, and he was captured for next session.

And that was where we left off, the thief in chains and interrogation and presumably torture and murder soon to follow. Tomorrows group may take a completely different turn.