Solo Adventures

The street chase went rather well I think. We started off with Donn returning the hide to Teldorthan and Donn refusing any kind of payment. This almost had me falling out of my chair. My stepson NEVER turns down loot with any of his characters, but ever since he gave that staff to Tobolar he's been Mr. Virtuous with Donn. I forced him to take the 200GP. Of course I immediately had him spend it on supplies! MWHAHAHAH!

So we spent a half an hour or so going over the Adventurer's Vaults and picking up some ever-burning torches and various other implements. He's realized that he needs some sort of long distance weapon or he'll never make it through an adventure alive, so a longbow was purchased as well.

With his newly bought goods in pack, we set up the Market Square tiles (I finally figured out a way to print some of these random map jpegs I've got into proportional D&D size tiles. If anyone's interested, let me know and I can tell you how I do it).

While Donn is perusing the wares he hears the cries of merchants from across the square. Shouts of "THIEF!" and "There he goes! Someone stop him!" reach his ears. Donn turns to see someone with a bag slung over their shoulder running down the street and away from Donn's position. The chase has begun!...

I realized early on that I needed to get creative quick, because Klin (Donn's rage drake companion) has a movement of 8 while Donn has 6. I gave the thief a movement of 7, but unless he rolled a 5 or lower was going to make all of the athletics and acrobatics checks I rolled.

The chase moved out of the Market to Low Town. I printed up an 8 x10 sheet of another jpeg which showed a full blown town with a grid pattern overlaid on it. We used markers to indicate where everyone was moving and when skill checks were employed we adjusted accordingly. Klin would have caught up to the thief a couple of times if not for the fact that he rolled horribly on all the acrobatics checks he was trying to make. Donn realized early on that there was no way he would catch this criminal, but would be able to stay within line of site, which could be helpful. The thief missed just 1 roll, so he got hung up in traffic in the middle of a street before moving out of Low Town into the Thieves Quarter.

I again placed a larger map (about 8 8X11 sheets of paper) out for the Thieves Quarter and had them chase the thief over buildings and through alleys. Klin actually caught up to the thief and made an attack roll, but missed. Donn actually caught up as well, but failed his acrobatics check to jump down off the roof onto the thief and plummeted to the ground. The thief gave him a sly wink before disappearing inside the Leaky Gullet Tavern! The door was now locked with no way to get inside.

Donn went back to the Market to question the vendor who had items stolen from him and found that while most of the stuff taken was junk, the vendor was adamant about the return of a particular item, but refused to go into detail about what it was. Donn found Serim (with some prodding from the DM as to what to do next) to see if he could help. Serim decides to help and they go to the tavern, leaving Klin outside, chained up a goodly distance from the horses which he salivates profusely at.

Long story short, Donn drinks some Eye of Wonderfulness ale and finds it's not so wonderful, meets a barmaid who takes an unusually quick liking to him and gets talked into a cage fight with a Bugbear by the leader of the River Rats gang, Kelson. Donn got his first taste of defeat as well, as the bugbear pummeled him into unconsciousness (though my stepson was really ingenious with some of his acrobatics checks and hit them all, he was unable to actually land any blows). He woke up with the barmaid "tending" to his wounds and a proposition from Kelson to make some money back (he "lost" 50GP at some point through the night) by helping the River Rats with a territory gang fight with the Porter's Guild in a few nights.

That's where we left off because I forgot to print out the map for the fight and it was getting late. We'll probably finish the fight tonight and then it'll be a week or so until my next post.

P.S. If you think this post was waaaay too long, or needed more technical details rather than story details, let me know. I'm more interested in giving people a good base to run their own solo adventures, so any feedback would be helpful.