'Ruffed up' A Summary of Session 4 of Lost Mine of Phandelver

Summary of Session 4: Ruffed up

In this session our adventures stealthily attacked the redbrand hideout and Rounded up Iarno and took him back to Sildar. In fact, they were so stealthy, that they managed to almost completely avoid all the encounters!

Which … was interesting!

Good

Some standout comedy moments from our session.

Firstly, an irate goblin owner caused my group much hilarity.

Secondly a fight where one of our characters murdered one of the redbrands with a wedge of Gouda cheese as an improvised weapon.

Depending on the group serious silly can really bond a group.

Bad / Good

Interestingly, my characters were like a surgical knife in attacking the redbrand hideout. They were in and out like stealth ninjas. Which made for an interesting thing from my point of view and really made me way up the good and the bad here. In theory … I massively over prepared … I did a load of work that my characters rendered completely pointless. But on the other hand, my players completely out thought the situation. Which is cool.

However, this also meant that they missed out on some stuff, ie they didn’t find the nothic and the loot, didn’t find a way to cragmaw castle, etc.

Ugly

I need to get better at combat. Seriously now folks, its getting embarassing.

Serious Silly

As far as a I can tell a lot of the accidental comedy from D&D comes from taking the silly things seriously. My characters loved meeting an NPC who instead of being horrified by murder in their tavern, simply cared about where their next paycheck was going to come from. Despite the fact he attacked them with a crossbow … they still let him berate them all and then ended up agreeing to frequent the bar more to make up for lost custom.

The second serious silly came from me describing a store room and mentioning there was probably cheese and jerky in the barrels. This then led to one of the characters improvising a weapon with the cheese and murdering a ruffian who was on 1hp with the gouda.

This act of violence galvanised the group so much that when Sildar encouraged them to give the group a name, they chose to name themselves after the iconic cheese. And so ‘The Goudafellas’ were born.

Not killing folk

The last NPC my group took hostage and questioned they then proceeded to brutally murder. This time, they took someone hostage, asked a load of questions about the layout of the hideout … and rolled VERY successful intimidation roles… but they actually let this one go …

Turns out if I make my hostage NPCs agressive and arrogant … they seem to get murdered. If I make them more sympathetic and they tell them lots of info (or appear to!) … then they seem to let them go.

You can see how I prepped for this session here.