#400

Hot Springs Island

Today was the first session and, you know, things never quite go as planned but it still went pretty well I think.

I started the players out shipwrecked in front of the entrance to the dungeon—a rich elf’s party basement that I made by converting a map from Gods of the Forbidden North—which took around 2 hours to complete. They did find most of the things in the dungeon, which I wasn’t really expecting, I thought they’d focus on the more easily-accessible treasure (decorative golden strips embedded into the ceiling) and be deterred from fully exploring it and finding the good stuff by the orange sludge and giant spiders. But that’s fine.

After that, they spent a few hours climbing along the base of the cliffs until they descended enough to get onto the island proper. After a bit of discussion, they decided to work their way around the coast, sticking to the top of the cliffs, to get to the ruins of Hot Springs City where they could hopefully catch a boat. Sticking the the coast did pose a bit of a problem for me, the GM, because there aren’t any points of interest in most of those hexes. They’re not part of the Hot Springs Island hexmap proper, they’re only on the diegetic player map which has a less jagged coast and so crosses into more hexes. I did move over one POI (a big stone face carved into a rock looking out to sea) and rolled for encounters based on the neighbouring hexes so it wasn’t completely empty, but I think the intended experience is that every time you move into a hex, you arrive at a POI.

I think this is something that will kind of resolve itself when the players do find an in-world map (which will happen next session or the one after) as that numbers all the same hexes as the GM map, meaning a lot of the coastal hexes they’re travelling through right now don’t have numbers. If they ask an NPC about it, they’ll say something like “oh yeah, not much happens at the coast so the guild didn’t bother numbering it.”

We wrapped up with them meeting a salamander chasing a water elemental. One character speaks Fire Elemental and they got a good reaction roll, so the situation ended with them getting invited to the New Moon Party at the volcano, as “the boss always likes to meet the adventuring sort.”

All in all, a successful first session. It’ll be far less quiet once they actually start exploring the island interior, rather than sticking to the coastline.