***SPOILER ALERT***
I’m running Tomb of Horrors for this leg of the Storm Point campaign – indeed, for the rest of the campaign. You may not want to read on if you’re playing the game yourself.
***SPOILER ALERT***
The latest session of our Tomb of Horrors adventure, and the Storm Point campaign, was a little scattered. Not only were the players getting familiar with their newly leveled-up characters and all their new options, but it was the start of the Christmas season, so everyone ((Myself included.)) was very much in the socializing mode. Still, the end of the campaign is in sight, and the players are starting to get jazzed about the new Edge of the Empire campaign, so I played the heavy a bit to get things focused and moving.
Because we spent so much time at the beginning of the game socializing, I glossed over the way they had discovered the next phase of dismantling Acererak’s plans. Originally, I had thought to run a pseudo skill challenge, much as I had done when we started the Abandoned Tomb adventure: asking the characters what they had done to winkle out the information, and giving them a roll based on that ((I freely admit that there are some issues with this approach in that it can cast the spotlight a little more on the characters with the most relevant skills, but it also rewards creative skill use. And it can generate some interesting backstory elements.)), but with time being what it was, I figures we should get right to the encounter.
The fight was nasty – three bloodshard golems, amidst a number of nasty blade traps. Thrun the Anvil, however, pulled off one of the most perfect examples of the Defender role that I have ever seen: he focused on one of the golems and spent every turn knocking it down and dazing it, keeping it completely out of the fight until the party finished off the other two golems and came to put the poor, shamed, tanked golem out of its misery.
I threw one other thing into the fight, because it seemed cool at the time, and the players loved it when it first happened. When the first golem got shoved into one of the blade traps ((Which, according to the adventure, would not activate as long as a golem was adjacent to it.)), I let the impact smash that pile of animated blades, removing it from play. There followed some wonderful convolutions as our heroes worked out the best way to sweep away the blade traps using forced movement on the golems.
It was a moderately fun fight, but high-level fights in 4E do tend to run long because of the huge amounts of hit points the monsters have. We finally wrapped up the fight and ended the evening on a pretty high note.
We’ve got just two sessions left in the campaign. Then, the Storm Point crew will trade in their hippogriffs for starships.
Guess I better learn the system.