Chapter 9

I didn’t make the actual trip too difficult for the girls - they’d been able to rest up at the town, but I wanted to make sure their first session had a good variety of stuff going on. And more importantly, I wanted them to have a sense of accomplishment coming out of the first session and level up from one to two. Low-level gameplay was fun, but it was a little more deadly for some characters than others. Once they got into the level 3 or 4 range I wasn’t risking a character like Renee getting destroyed by just a couple of bad rolls.

The girls, and their guide Fergus, headed out of town and into the hinterland hills where the farmers and shepherds had mostly abandoned their homes. They ended up arriving at one of those farmsteads as night was starting to close in, about a day’s travel from the village, and decided to try and set a trap for the wolves. Using the empty barn, they locked up one of the donkeys with Fergus inside and then tied up the other donkey outside in the yard. There was an argument among them about whether it was right or wrong to use the donkey as bait, but in the end, none of them wanted to be the bait and they promised each other their first priority would be saving ‘Phil.’

I thought it wasn’t a great idea to name a donkey they were using for bait, but then I might have been a bit jaded. Rhia’s father Dan had once played a Druid who specialised in summoning animals and the number of cows that had been sent to their doom in deadly dungeons and dragon caves, not to mention the one used as a distraction in the Unholy Halls of Despair, had reached absurd levels.

Still, they came up with a half-decent plan so I wasn’t about to punish them. They rolled Perception checks, and within a couple hours of sunset, Jade - the most sharp-eyed of the bunch - spotted the prowling wolves as they slowly made their way through the abandoned fields.

Of course, the girls then had to decide when they would spring their trap. Too early and the wolves could just run off. Too late and Phil the Donkey was a tasty snack.

It was a tense few minutes in-game as I described the hunting and stalking of the wolves, and the girls eventually sprang their trap moments before I was going to have the first wolves dart in try try and hamstring Phil. They had the element of surprise, having watched from up in the barn hay loft, and Renee was able to cast her big Magic Missile spell from above while Jade and Olivia slid down ropes they had tied off and positioned for their attack.

The fight was quick but dangerous. There were four wolves in the pack and they each paired off to fight Jade and Olivia. Both adventurers ended up needing to fight back to their feet after the biting of the wolves tripped them up, but Renee was crucial in putting the wolves down before the hand-to-hand fighters got taken down again. By the time the fight ended, with the last wolf fleeing, both Olivia and Jade had suffered some bites. It was just when Olivia was healing Jade again with her Lay on Hands spell that they heard the surviving wolf let out a long howl.

And that howl was answered, louder but far off, by another howl.

“Fuuuuck,” Elyse said.

“OK, we need to decide what we’re going to do,” Tori said. “Cause it sounds like whatever that was is coming for us, and it’s probably not going to be happy. Rhia, Olivia is still hurt, right?”

“I mean, I should be OK ... probably,” Rhia said, wincing a little but sounding hopeful.

“Do we try to do the same thing as before?” Elyse asked. “I mean, I didn’t think we’d be fighting something else that’s big. I already used my two big spell slots, so I just have my little spells.”

Rhia looked at me. “Do we think that thing is coming for us, or was just answering the howl?” she asked.

“Do you speak Wolf?” I asked.

She gave me a deadpan look.

“Well, I guess you’re not sure,” I said with a little smirk.

“Well ... are we going to use Phil as bait again?” Tori asked. “Or should we swap him out for Seymor? I think it’s only fair, Phil already played bait once.”

“OK, if that thing is coming here, I doubt we need bait,” Rhia said. “It’ll smell the dead wolves.”

“But if it’s smart it might stay away because of the dead wolves,” Elyse pointed out. “Should we hide them?”

The girls got to work, pulling the three wolf bodies into the barn and then doing their best to cover up the blood with dirt so it wasn’t as obvious. Then they decided that Phil had been through enough, and they didn’t want to risk Seymour (who I pieced together was the other donkey). They ended up getting back into their ambush position, watching from the hay loft of the barn, and since Olivia was still injured she tried to get in a short rest.

I had them roll perception checks for every twenty minutes in-game as they tried to stay vigilant, while I rolled behind the screen for when ‘the beast’ would show up.