Tomb of Annihilation: An adventure continued
So it's been about 3 weeks since we met up, but we managed to hop right back into things last night, and it was a pretty good session.
I've got a group of new players, so I've been messing around with some of the mechanics in ToA. Overworld travel is a big part of this adventure to get the players the info and XP that they need to venture into the tomb itself.
That being said, many players aren't super into managing rations. Despite that being pretty integral, along with managing water and diseases, we've managed to do pretty well without it. It does this weird thing to our game though that causes the days in game to sort of blur together, since camping doesn't have as big of an impact on things either.
Our Druid has pretty high survival, so they've been doing very well with their navigation and they were pretty frustrated to find out that they had somehow found their way toward the mountains. After some neat beast sense on a brontosaurus, they were able to find their way back in the right direction, but being lost made the players pretty frustrated and we got to talk out of character about the game mechanics.
This was good because it made me think on the spot about some pretty big game changing mechanics to offer them. I explained the purpose that overworld travel has, reminded them that they don't really know anything about the death curse yet, but I offered an option. I suggested that if they wanted to skip the day to day stuff, we could "quick travel" them to their destination, and estimate the days spent and XP earned throughout that time. I was ecstatic when they all quickly said that they actually enjoyed what they were working through currently. It seems like they were just really feeling their characters' frustration!
As for actual in game events, they were on their way to Vorn, and stumbled into Yellyark. Our rogue is pretty stealthy and managed to sneak in and drag the rest of the crew with her eventually. They saw the mechanic in Yellyark (which if you don't know, launches the entire village about 100 yards away in case of danger), and they immediately knew they wanted to do it to just avoid all these Goblins. They managed to draw out the Goblin chieftain, and they saw that she was wearing some sort of amulet, but they weren't able to identify it before launching the village. This amulet controls Vorn, the shield guardian, and man am I sad for them and their loss. Basically unless they try to track down the remains of the village, I find it pretty unlikely that it would have fallen off her neck at any point. This may be an adventure without Vorn...
So we had a pretty good night last night. I was going to upload another dungeon, but I've got a pad of isometric paper on the way, so I'm just going to wait on that first. Some dudes I follow on twitter, #dungeondrawingdudes, are doing a fantasty drawing challenge for February that I think I'm going to try. I'll post my drawings, crappy or not, here!