Genius Hour 2.5

Dungeons and Dragons: *spoiler free for Allie and Hannah

Greetings fellow adventurers! This week I'll be providing a recap of how our second session of gameplay went. Despite my best intentions, I cannot get the audio editing platform I want to use work. I believe part of the issue is that I'm uploading way too large of a file to edit, so instead of recording the entire session I will only record smaller highlights. Hopefully by session 3 or 4 I will be able to post a highlights reel of our session.

This week was also out first real scheduling conflict, so I had only two players present during the game. I knew this would happen eventually, so I was fully prepared to take control of our missing player's character and be them for the session. However, managing a larger amount of characters was quite challenging for me. At some points in combat I was managing four characters, but I made it happen. This was achieved through lots of note-taking to keep track of everyone and my players reminding me of things that I forgot.

As for the actual story, the players were successfully able to investigate the disappearance of Thess'ahlia and track down the cult that kidnapped her. When they were gearing up for the trek to Addersfield, I introduced more items to the players for purchase. Some of these items included health potions, cursed weapons, and types of armor. I had a lot of fun coming up with ideas for useless and/or extremely dangerous cursed weapons, and Nyssaadi ended up buying a bow that only hits when the user is blackout drunk. When the players reached the cultist stronghold, they defeated all enemies except for the leader. The players rescued Thess'ahlia and looted the stronghold, where Snargog found a ridiculous amount of gold thanks to a natural 20 investigation roll.

Finally the players took Thess'ahlia back to Port Swordbreak, where she implored them to help her destroy the last of the cult once and for all. The players accepted, and that is where the session ended.

The final three weeks of my genius hour will be highly dependent on everyone's scheduling, so the next two weeks I'll either be working on plans for the final confrontation with the cult or doing a smaller side-quest if we all can find a time to play. The biggest lesson I've learned from this is that scheduling for four people to meet up semi-regularly is more difficult than one would think.