If you missed last weeks wrap up, you can check it out here.

At the Table - This session started off with a pep talk from Brother Splintershield. He had gotten wind that some people in the caravan were worried about the frequency of “trouble” and how it seemed some people were keeping things close to the vest. He hoped to convey that each and every one of the people on this journey are important to the new town of Inverness and that they all faced the dangers there together.

The journey continued to late in the day. Nearly at sunset the caravan crested the last hill and saw the ruins of The Ghost Tower of Inverness. Someone would have to go down and be a scouting team and root out any trouble .

Our intrepid heroes suited up and headed to investigate their new home.  Keira and Belgos scouted the area first and found nothing troubling in the first half of the ruins. When the rest of the group entered the ruins, the ones that did so through the main gate were filled with a feeling of dread which luckily only lasted for a few moments. Nevius could tell they were from very old residual magic left on the archway.

They found some markings in a language they could not read on the base of the central tower. They also noticed there seemed to be no ground floor to the tower, this they found odd.

Next they headed towards the fountain at the rear of the ruins. They found it strange that there was no plant life growing in and around the fountain like it was at everywhere else in the ruins. Keira who moved closer to investigate why found out quickly. Two Ochre Jellies oozed and slithered from the fountain and hungrily attacked the party.

Once again, their power and bravery made this a fight they handled with the slightest bit of problem.

After the battle they decided to investigate the graveyard, after all they were ordered down here to make sure the area was clear of trouble. The graveyard seems to be tended to on a regular enough basis that the area is clear of the choking underbrush common in other areas of the ruins. Only one of the gravestones was still legible, that of Oldivya Vladistone.

The group returned to the caravan to lead them safely to their new home.

Behind the Screen – Roleplaying was replaced by exploration and investigation this week. The characters had a lot of leeway into how they were going to try and clear the area. Thankfully someone online provided a color map of the ruins at large from the insert in the module. This let the players look over the entire landscape and come up with a good plan.

Since they had information of what could be found at each location the DM had less work to do to make this feel like an “old school” exploration.

I was glad to see a third, very different, type of opponent this week. But once again the creatures were no match for a team of 5 essentials characters. Don’t get me wrong, I realize that each encounter is not supposed to put down the party. Instead over the course of four encounters the party should use up all its resources and need to rest.

Most of the characters don’t have dailies to burn up so the only way to gauge is by healing surges . I’m pretty sure the only character that is close to having only four surges left is the Virtue of Sacrifice Cavalier I managed to put down this week.  This was the first character I have been able to reduce to 0 hit points, I would have expected that to have happened by now.

To toughen up the encounter I added several things. First up was the “minion spawned if you do more than 15 points of damage to a large jelly” mechanic. I also added in a nucleus jelly that was left behind  when you reduced a child of the first jelly to zero hit points. The nuclei  only had a handful of hit points and reduced attacks. I also had to throw in a d4 acid damage spray when a child jelly was killed.

Although this week is the chapter climax, I think I’m going to have to throw in a bunch more creatures to toughen it up and make a challenge