This past Friday I ran an all nighter Role Playing Game session with my friends, and it was fun enough to deserve a game report here. We are playing Dungeons and Dragons 4th edition – previously we had played a game campaign that lasted for almost 2 years, but since half the players of that group has left Japan, we decided to start a new game campaign.

As I’m leaving from Japan pretty soon as well, and I’m a bit burned by 4E, I’ve decided to create a short campaign, focused on a single scenario, using advanced characters for the players. Basically the campaign centers around the player’s mission to save Platonia, a city ran by a council of wizards in the mystical “Astral Plane” – the place which separate different realities and dimensions.

In the first two game sessions, the players had found out that a former mage of the city council (“O Leitor”) wanted revenge from his expulsion, and was assembling a large army to lay waste to Platonia. They saved a desertor from the army, which gave them information about their invasion plans. They ordered some defense preparations for the city, and decided to apply a decapitation strike by going against the leader of the army. On the way they were ambushed by assassins from the Leitor, and while they managed to survive the ambush, the last game ended with the group hurtling down the endless mists of the Astral Plane on a broken ship.

For this Friday’s game, I had spent the week preparing a strange “planet” the group would crash on and explore, which would turn out to be a living entity that they could try to recruit to the city’s defense. However, as players characters usually wont, once my group crashed into the mysterious cavern with he sinking ground, the strong psionic presence, and the tunnel emanating evil, they promptly decided to get the hell out of there in some flimsy magic items they had on themselves. Always count on players smashing your carefully laid plans.

So the group decided that they would head back to the place where they were ambushed, and from there continue on their initial mission. On the way, they found out about another assassin that was sent to make sure they had died in the ship crash. It was a Githyanki (a kind of astral humanoid) on a dragon, with a scort of two “Brains in a Jars” – magical constructs.

When the group detected the assassins, they started to flee in another direction, and the Githyanki with the dragon followed them, breaking away from the Brains, which were much slower. From past experience, the group knew that fighting in their magic flying items would result in their items being destroyed pretty quickly, so they decided to look for somewhere to land and fight. When they found such a place (a small crystal formation floating in space), the Githyanki knight decided to keep at a distance from them until the Brains caught up.

At this time, the players for some reason decided to forget their previous experience, and charged at the knight with their magical mounts – what followed was an exiting air combat, where the Minotaur paladin charged at the Githyanki knight and jumped on the dragon — just to have the dragon teleport away from his feet towards the fragile Eladrin crossbowwoman in the ground! Not to be undone, the minotaur grabbed the mount of his nearby elven friend, and free falled into the knight and the Dragon again, pushing the knight out of his mount — but the knight managed to use his magics to return to his dragon.

The Brains finally managed to reach the fighting area, and started to move towards the group – at that time, everyone tried to crowd the knight and his dragon, trying to put him down before reinforcements arrived. That mostly worked, excepted that it triggered a counter attack from the dragon, who belched fire and destroyed the flying mounts of everyone – who fell hard into the crystal structure. All but the Paladin Minotaur, who was still clinging to the Dragon. Seeing the entire group go to the ground, the minotaur decided to grab onto the knight and JUMP, trusting that the fall would hurt him less than it hurt the Githyanki, and that is what just happened.

Separated from his mount, the knight was not so powerful, and the Eladrin crosbowwoman put him out of his misery quickly. However now the group was without any means of flight, and being attacked by three flying enemies, who were quite content to pelt the players from a height. The brains had this nasty ability to try and turn the players against each other using psychic powers, but the group managed to resist that, and protect the Eladrin while she pelted them with more crossbow bolts. At one time, one of the brains got a bit too close and the Elven avenger (a kind of holy warrior), used his short range teleportation power to deal a crippling blow to that brain. Eventually the group dispatched their enemies and decided that stayin on the crystal island would be too dangerous, so they returned to the place where they were first ambushed, and tried to find some cover there to spend the night and recuperate.

The next day, the group decided to resume their mission to find and kill the Leitor, in order to make his army “headless”. They travelled into a region of the astral which looked like a giant, abandoned stone city. In the middle of the city they saw the large Githyanki ship approaching, and decided that the Leitor should be there, so they would spring an ambush of their own. They hid in one of the buildings, and as the ship approached, so did the large army fielded by the Leitor, composed of hundred of those mechanical brains and worse beasties; a second, smaller githyanki ship, two large dragons, and a committee of ogre-magi mounted on wyverns.

The group changed their plans, and decided to try and hijack the small ship and ram it against the big one – it was a brave, but completely insane plan (never mind the fact that they never confirmed if their target was REALLY in any of those ships). They waited until the small ship was just over them, and rushed into it, managing to land before the enemy had time to react.

But then all the hell broke loose. They fought against the small group of githyanki defending their ship, and while they weren’t able to defeat the players, they bought enough time that by the time the group took total control of the ship, the Dragons, Wyverns and some of the flying brains were already in combat range. The large ship had taken some distance and started firing fireballs at the smaller one. In the end the group decided to go with a retreat on the smaller, nimbler ship and, with a lot of luck and bravery, managed to flee from the army on the flaming ship, two large dragons hot on their tails… Nothing like a session which ends on a similar tone as it had began!

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This was an interesting game, and not because it went in the complete opposite direction where I had planned to go. The two fights we had — the aerial fight over the crystal island and the pursuit on the airship against dragons and wyvern-mounting ogres, largely satisfied my quest for the “bizarre”, which was one of the two things that I was aiming at in this mini-campaign. To try and use 4E in what it is supposedly best: to create flashy and over powered combat scenes in super-fantastical scenarios.

The combats were pretty epic, with the Minotaur Palading doing his aerial charges, the Warlord keeping the group healed through waves and waves of area blasts, the Avenger and the Rogue dealing the brunt of the damage to the opponents, and while the Dwarf Battlemind didn’t fulfill any particular memorable scene during combat, since he was the only psionic character in a mostly psionic based session, he dominated the non-combat skills and challenges, and thus everyone had their role during the game.

The second combat – charge against the army, is one of those WTF moments where as a GM you can’t really understand what is going through your player’s collective heads. Even after I described in details just how many people there were in that army, the dragons, the super ship and the dozens of Brains that had put the players into so much trouble recently, they just seemed even more intent into trying it. At least I think I managed to convince them into trying a “stealth” approach instead of a simple head on attack.

I had all the intent of creating a TPK in this scene, limiting my self only by what I had listed beforehand as the available forces, but throwing all of them at the same time with no regards to encounter balance – the fact that they still managed to survive all that denounces the fact of how 4e characters are pretty much unkillable – and that I needed to sort out ship combat rules beforehand.

Now next session is the big showdown – the army will come to the doors of the city, and the players will see what their incursions and (few) preparations paid for. That is, if they don’t come up with some new weird idea :-P After that I’m probably shelving 4E for good – preparing games for this system is just not that fun anymore – I can barely start to wade through the magic items, and while imagining situations for set piece encounters is nice, the actuall act of going through dozen of monsters to pick the right ones with the right combination of powers/etc is kinda off-puting. Added to the fact that the best scenes of this game – the jumping through the air and the airship “mental fight” between the battlemind and the enemy crew members – were stuff not covered by 4E rules, I’m pretty confident that it is time to finish that megadungeon I started writing and put it to good gaming.