I drove out to Set's for a game of Frostgrave today - and right into a storm! I knew rain was in the forecast and we were supposed to get about 2 inches of rain over the course of the day, but it was dry and the sun shining when I left my house. I forgot, of course, that Lewiston is its own micro-climate unlike a half-hour south where I live. Halfway there, I started thinking, "Wow, the sky's sure looking dark..." and then got hit with rain coming down harder than anything I've driven through in years. And then the emergency alarm went off on my phone; I pulled over because it was raining too hard to see, and I see that the alarm is a tornado warning!
Hoo, boy.
But I made it to Set's unharmed, and look at that table!
We had a four player game - myself, Set, Chris and Brad - with a central premise of, we've been hired to clear out this hobgoblin-run forced labor camp and free the human slaves, especially a farmer's family that was freshly abducted and kept in a magically-locked cage in the center of the table along with the hobgoblins' accumulated loot. Freeing the slaves on the chains took a series of attack rolls (magic weapons cutting through the chains automatically) to cut slaves free.
To complicate matters, every three turns a wyvern would swoop in to collect lumber harvested by the slaves, and potentially attack us.
The magically-sealed cage would realistically require our wizards to work together to break the wards.
We all spent our first few turns working on cutting slaves free and moving wizards up to the central cage to work on breaking the seals.
On turn 3, both Chris and myself rolled a "1" when the wyvern appeared, and each of us had to nominate one of our figures for the dragon to attack. One of my newly hired thieves ended up in its mouth.
Eventually the truce broke - well, I broke it. I noticed Chris lining a lot of figures up to swoop in and seize treasure once the magical cage was opened, and decided to attack. It, uh, didn't go great for me. Because everyone Chris had in place to seize treasure...was also in place to attack me, and then Set's warband jumped on me as well for being the aggressor. One after another, my crewmembers fell until just my knight, Shojo, was left on the table. Gina texted me around that time about whether I'd be able to pick dinner up for her on my way home (weather permitting), and I decided that it was time for me to bow out and make the long drive home (and pick up food).
I didn't score that much treasure (ironically, Brad's warband swooped in and grabbed much of the hobgoblins' treasure as soon as the cage was deactivated while Chris and I were fighting), I didn't completely free one chain's worth of slaves, and I didn't earn that much XP through spellcasting or my wizard slaying members of other warbands personally.
So I definitely could have played smarter (and probably less aggressively), but live and learn! I still have to tally up my XP and figure out what kind of treasure I actually got. And see who survived...
