#338

The Halls of Arden Vul

Last week I said this session would begin with a fight to remember, and… not so much, actually. Neferet is one of the major individual foes in the halls, and while the party did outnumber her and her (relatively weak) minions 2 to 1, I thought she’d take down a couple of them and escape. In actuality, the party killed it on the initiative and combat rolls, with one character getting three crits over two rounds (they were hasted), and Neferet didn’t manage to cast a single spell.

The party did have to use up the last charge of a Ring of Wishes to cure one character from greater mummy rot, so this is normally where I’d say “well they won easily but at least they expended a valuable resource so it’s ok,” but this time I do feel I should have done better. Neferet was guarding some pretty amazing items, one wish is a small price to pay for an artefact as powerful as the Iron Circlet of Ghanor!

The deciding factor in the fight was right at the beginning: the party won initiative and managed to cast Dispel Evil, compelling Neferet to flee, before she could prevent their spellcasting by casting Silence. What I should have done is have her immediately activate her magic invisibility item and flee the room unseen, but I didn’t, I had her flee visibly. So the party were able to chase her down and then, through a series of excellent rolls, crush her.

Ah well.

House Buying

After the rapid progress of last week, this week was very slow. The sellers didn’t even appoint a conveyancer until Wednesday—a week and a half after accepting my offer—which means I don’t have the draft contract of sale yet and no searches have been ordered. I should receive the survey report tomorrow, and I hope there’s nothing major in there as it’ll just slow the process even further if there is.

I’ve now got a pretty good plan for how I want to furnish and decorate it. An unwelcome realisation was that I’ll either need to repaint the living room and maybe replace the fireplace mantel, or replace my black bookcases with white ones, to avoid a major colour clash in the new living room. In the living room at my current place I have a white / black / wood theme going on which (I think) works very well; but in the new place there’s a cream carpet, light green walls, and a bright white fireplace: black bookcases would just look really out of place. Also, I find carpet kind of hard to decorate with (a wood floor is much more versatile, and you can always use rugs to add softness) but I don’t really want to move and remodel at the same time. If I was sure I’d get the new place with, say, a month before I needed to move sure; but as I don’t I’ll probably just get some white bookcases.

Here’s hoping next week is more productive.