Painting Nolzur's Marvellous Miniatures Part 1 - Giant Spider

In my last post I took a look at some of the new unpainted (but primed) miniatures labelled "Nolzurs Marvellous Miniatures" from Wizkids. Now painting isn't necessarily a big thing for a lot of D&D players, so I thought I'd put out a quick guide for those of you who might be new to this side of the hobby, and/or want some general advice in painting minis of this sort. To start with, I'm going to have a look at the spiders, since they're relatively easy to get good results with for gaming purposes - and it's always nice to get started with a positive experience.

Materials

Now there are a few things you need when you get started in miniature painting. The obvious ones are paints and brushes - here I'm going to be using acrylics by Army Painter and Vallejo, but other brands are available and suitable. One manufacturer that you'll probably have easy access to is Games Workshop, and their paints are fine too (though they can be a little thicker to work with then the others). Generally, any acrylics made for modelling purposes are suitable, though ones for hobby or craft use are generally not. This is because of the size of the milled pigment particles and thick consistency, which gives them good general coverage and colour density for scenery and larger items, but fills detail and makes them difficult to work with for minis.

As for brushes, I generally use ones designed for acrylic paints and available from art shops. Now there are a massive number of options here, but all I'll say is that good quality brushes will save you time and money in the end - cheap brushes have their uses, but generally it's not for mini painting. I'm going to use Daler Rowney and Windsor & Newton brushes here (plus a knackered old brush - I'll explain that later), but I use a number of different ones, so don't take that as this is what you should use - find a brush make and type you are happy with from a local supplier, and stick with that. I find size 1 down round brushes are the most useful, with a couple of flat brushes for larger areas too.

Other things that help are a painting area, newspaper or something to protect whatever you're painting on, a palette (for mixing paints - which can be a simple tile, pot or a dedicated plastic one from a store (they're inexpensive), and an old jar or glass for water. I try to use two - one with fresh water for diluting paints and another for washing out brushes. A good light source is very helpful, plus some way of seeing the detail on the model - which may include a magnifying lens or glasses.

Setting up

The best way to start painting is to prepare well. Get all the paints you need together, clear everything else away, set things out, ensure you've clean water and your brushes are washed out. Make sure you mix your paints well - shaking usually achieves this but be careful you don't end up showering yourself and your surroundings with it - it tend to hamper the painting process and make you extremely unpopular to boot!

If you can afford a dedicated painting area, tray etc, this helps a lot, because you don't have to clear things away after every bit of painting - especially useful if you can't dedicate much time at any given session to the hobby. That being said, it's not essential and all of this can be done on a limited budget - but I'll let you work out the details of what's right for you and your particular depth of pocket. Here's the setup I used for this:

The first thing we need to do is remove any obvious flash, casting spurs etc from our mini - this spider has a bit on its abdomen, easily dealt with by trimming with a hobby knife or scalpel (but be careful not to cut your fingers off in the process!)

Now you're ready to paint!

Painting - Base Coat

So, here we have a spider.

I'm going to paint this mini in a similar way to the colour renders shown by Wizkids:

That means I'm going to start by painting it with a base coat of grey. I'm using Uniform Grey by Army Painter, but any mid-tone grey you're happy with will do - the great thing about spiders is you can paint them lots of different shades and they'll still look pretty realistic.

First thing to do is to thin the paint a little - how much will depend on the brand you're using, but you want something that will flow, and not gum up the detail. A rough guide is a brush of water to a drop or two of paint. I use water with a little propanol (rubbing alcohol) in it (a millilitre or so in a glass), which helps to break the surface tension of the water and lets it flow better. It's not essential, but a bottle of this will cost very little and last a VERY long time.

So, paint thinned, I give our spider a complete, overall coat of grey. As you will have already seen, I've unceremoniously stabbed it in the underside with a pin (with a tiny amount of superglue on it) to allow me to do this without handling it - this won't be seen at the end, and it speeds up the process since I don't have to paint it in sections. Now, don't worry if your coverage here doesn't look good - give it a second coat if necessary - two thin coats are better (and quicker) than one thick coat.

Now we have a grey spider.

We want to have brown hairy bits to give our spider an even more "shuddery" response from any arachnophobes, and to do this I'm going to use Monster Brown on all the "furry" areas of the abdomen and legs. I'm using thinned paint again, and not worrying about being too precise.

It's now painted, but it looks a bit "flat". This is the thing with miniature painting - you're trying to recreate the effect of light on a larger object on a much smaller one, so you need to cheat. Larger objects create more shadows, giving the eye the impression of depth, and we need to artificially recreate this on our mini, since at its small scale the light scatter drowns this effect out. So now we move onto the magical step know as "washing".

Painting - Washing

Now there are two routes to washing - buying pre-mixed or making your own. I've covered making your own washes on a previous blog article (http://mannmomo.blogspot.co.uk/2013/11/washes.html), so here I'm just going to use pre-made washes, this time from Vallejo, but I'm going to mix them. I'm using Umber Shade and Black Shade in a 2:1 ratio (that is, two drops of umber to one drop of black). I'm not diluting them here, because I want a strong effect and the colours are quite dark.

Now using a wash is the easiest thing in the world - you just paint the whole mini liberally with it and let it dry!

Once dried, the wash will darken the overall aspect of the model, but by differentially settling into the recesses of the model it creates the illusion of shade.

Painting - Finishing Touches

Our spider is quite usable now, but if you're getting into this painting thing there are a couple more steps you can go down. One is highlighting, the other is detail painting. Highlighting a model like this is easily done by drybrushing, which is a technique that can take a while to develop, but rapidly enhances models like this.

There are many posts and articles on drybrushing, but the short story is you remove as much of the paint from a brush as possible (so the brush is "dry"), and then you drag the brush across the model so that any paint remaining on the brush catches the raised surfaces on the model. You can do this as little or as much as you like to build up the effect, and as you use a lighter shade, it simulates light falling onto and picking out those higher areas of the model.

Detail painting is done last, and it's the little things that just add that extra something to a model, and can really make it stand out - for our spider this is really just the painting of the eyes.

So let's start by dry-brushing the model. Using the original Monster Brown with a little white, I used the crappy brush (because dry-brushing WRECKS brushes), get a little paint on it and then rub it off on some paper, and then the back of my hand. Why the back of the hand? Well, you can tell exactly how much paint is on the brush this way - you can weel how dry the brush is and how much paint is coming off. You want to get it so that basically nothing is coming off. You can then use that brush against the model, swiping it across the area you want, and tiny amounts of paint will be left on the raised areas - here you can see the effect on the back of the spider - compare that with the last photo and you can see the effect, which should be quite subtle.

Finally, I'm using some Army Painter Matt Black to paint the eyes

This is thinned as previously, but this time I've using a size zero brush and very carefully painting in the large eyes on the model (which are still tiny!)

It's not much, but it does add something to the model, doesn't it?

And here we have the completed mini, ready to menace our adventurers as they progress towards their destiny!

I hope that's proved helpful to those of you who have not tried painting minis before - the whole process to paint a spider is not long at all, mostly drying time. The effect is pretty good for using in your games, and easy to achieve - so what are you waiting for? Get painting!

Nolzur's Marvellous Miniatures - Part 1

When I saw that there were some "official" D&D minis coming out, I was fairly uninterested. Then I took a look at some renders and they looked quite nice, pre-primed minis and they were doing monsters as well as PCs. They were also touted as pre-primed with Vallejo, enabling you to just get right into painting them...Then the product started hitting the market in the US for a very reasonable price, and this started to look like something worth taking a look at further...when they hit UK shores, they did so at £3.99 RRP for an average of two minis -which is pretty insane value...so I decided to pick some up. Online I found them for £3.59 from Magic Madhouse, and being a DM I ordered a bunch of monsters...here they are;

So let's take a look in greater detail. I broke open the giant spider blister, which contains 3 minis, 2 scenic base add-ons or tokens, and 3 bases. The bases are a little thin, so I'll probably not use them and use my standard size 3D printed ones instead for consistency. Anyway, here they are...

These are very realistic - painted up and they could easily be mistaken for real spiders if put in the bath etc.

There's a little light flashing on the body and some of the legs where the moulds must meet, but overall the detail is excellent and cleanup will be minimal -they're certainly a quantum leap up form a lot of giant spider minis available, and their price-point means you could field a real hoard of these against a party. Detail continues to the underside of the mini too, which is really nice to see...dead spider, anyone?

The included base tokens are also a very nice addition to this set, I especially like the cocooned humanoids - this is a greta little piece!

Three giant spiders and two little scenery add-ons for this price is insanely good value - I expect to see a lot more campaigns featuring spiders now!

Next up are gargoyles - something that's hard to 3D print well and although I have a Reaper figure, it is rather big. Now the gargoyles did surprise me with how small they are, but they're beautiful little minis and will be a doddle to paint (mainly being grey, wash, drybrush) like stone. I bought 2 sets because I like gargoyles - my party has fought quite a few in Tyranny of Dragons, to the point they now trust no statues!

Next up are much larger figures - Bugbears!

These guys are really nice, and pretty big - and again the same price. Here they are individually to show off their detail;

Once again, they are very close to the artwork in the MM, and very evocative of everything a bugbear should be. The next monsters are very similar in both size and accuracy of their depication - another classic D&D monster - Gnolls!

The hyaena-faced Gnolls are really good - I hope they do some more sculpts for variety as I'd like to get a big bunch of these.

The last mini is another spider, but this time it's just a single mini, but it's big - a phase spider;

Coming on a scenic base this time, the phase spider is fabulous - just like the MM rendition and different enough from a standard giant spider, both in size and looks to be distinctive. That said, there would be nothing to stop you fielding this as another type of spider - different paint jobs would probably do it no problem.

Overall I'm very impressed with this new range of minis, they're detailed and evocative, well posed and nicely produced and packaged. The price point for this type of quality and the official stamp makes them a steal, and I've already pre-ordered a bunch more, including displacer beasts! Bring them on!

So what are you waiting for? Get buying and painting!

D&D 5e - Session Zero - the most important one?

I'm a member of a few D&D 5e groups on Facebook, including ones for DMs. I'm always amazed by some of the commentary, often by DMs, with complaints about their players behaviour. Sometimes it's also about DMs too, but the ratio does seem out of kilter with the ratio of players to DMs. Anyway, distribution aside, many of these comments are pretty shocking - players and DMs throwing tantrums, demanding certain things "or else", using their phones (for non-game related stuff) whilst playing - all sorts of disruptive behaviour that would generally be considered anti-social in just about any other setting.

There are questions on some home-brewed rules - a common one being critical failures. Many DMs have house-ruled that a natural "1"  a player attack equals a dropped weapon, a broken bowstring, an attack that hits another player or some such. Cries of outrage are expressed - "My group would never tolerate this", "This slows down gameplay and fun for all", "You're destroying the rules" - all kinds of things are mooted and counter-argued.

Distilling down to the route cause of an awful lot of these, a huge source of these issues boils down to communication - or a lack of it. Some of these get so bad that players are excluded, forced out, or in some cases, groups even disbanded entirely. Now the group I DM is a pretty large one, yet we rarely have any of these issues. Not only that, but none of us knew each other at all this time last year...we were all strangers and got together through MeetUp. Surely we aren't that different? Why haven't we come across this?

Well, I think the reason is that we had a Session Zero - essentially a discussion between us all on our experience, how we wanted to play, what we thought was fun, what we didn't want, schedules - pretty much everything. Everyone had a voice, everyone agreed with what we decided and we had created an open environment where if things changed, we could bring it up. We did this before even rolling a single dice. When we did then roll for stats everyone had a clear idea of what the path ahead of them was - some chose to roll, some chose standard stats, and they also had the option to points buy - that was one of the agreements we made.

We covered things like;

• What style of play did we want? - minis, tiles, paper, "theatre of the mind" (we chose minis),
• How should the characters level up? (we chose needing a long rest after gaining the relevant experience)
• Regular sessions or ad-hoc? (We chose regular)
• Where to play? (A couple of the players offered their home dining room, which was great!)
• What was acceptable at the table - mobile phones being a primary topic. (we agreed phones could be left on in case of emergencies, but not used at the table unless for a D&D related app, like a stat or spell tracker)
• What classes/races, optional rules etc would we use - like Feats, for example (we agreed that we'd just use Players Handbook races & classes, and then expand out from that when we all had a bit more experience with 5th edition)
• What, if any, home-brewed rules would we use? (more below)

Now we use a critical fail mechanic, whereby a 1 in melee will drop the weapon, a 1 on a ranged attack risks hitting another creature in the way. As our party often takes risks in firing into combat, this has resulted in a LOT of very cinematic (and often hilarious) moments - to the point where the party has been named "The Backbiters". Does this mechanic slow the game down? No. Does it hamper the party in a way that breaks the game? No. Is it breaking the rules? OF COURSE NOT! This is D&D! Don't you remember Gygax's famous quote about rules?!?!?!

Now we're not perfect - no group of humans is - we've had some tense and/or uncomfortable points around the table before...but these weren't brought on by rules discussions or mechanics. In any case, they were aired and passed pretty quickly, and we moved on...everyone remained friends. Why? Well, I think we've got a good bunch of folks, which helps, but also everyone has agreed to a common framework in a group franchise - we're all part of this, and all have a similar understanding - in the main because of our session zero.

Everything we have done since that point has thus been an exploration together - everyone is there to have fun, and I'd say we're getting better at it all the time - the sessions we've had in the past couple of months have included some of the best sessions I've ever played  - and I've had skin in the game since the early '80s....

So my advice to any group starting out in D&D, any DM looking for a new group or any existing players who want to get into another campaign - have a session zero. It might seem like a waste of time when you first suggest it, but in my opinion it forms one of the best foundations for building good sessions in the future that you can have. So what are you waiting for? Get together and get talking!

5e D&D - The Chronicles of the Backbiters: The long road North

Last post I left The Backbiters pulling into Baldur's Gate....somewhat singed and browbeaten. They followed the cult across the city and got themselves hired in various capacities by the caravan. Then it was off north, on a journey that covered several sessions. They fought a bunch of hobgoblins, which the trader who owned the ambushed wagon was grateful for.

At this point Lander noticed Darrien was not looking his old self, despite him never contracting the odd disease that still plagued them (despite their measures to prevent the spread of infection) and some discussion was had. No conclusion was reached, Darrien proclaiming himself fine, and his stout Halfling constitution the source of his good health. Interestingly no-one had picked up on the fact that Darrien was casting Chill Touch at every opportunity, despite it not being a Bard spell....

Still, Sirethnis was suspicious, and kept an eye on Darrien as the others slept and she pretended to. She watched as Darrien stealthily rose from his bedroll and went to some of the horses, and started spellcasting. Sirethnis sprang up, rousing the others and challengin Darrien. Darrien cast Phantasmal Force on Sirethnis, who saw a demon rise up next to her and fought the unseen spirit.

There then followed a hilarious Benny-Hill style chase which eventually ended with Darrien rerstrained, and the nature of the Pearl as the Eye of Death revealed as Uro read the journal (not bearing the Eye, he could decipher it easily). The artefact could not be separated from him, so he was trussed and gagged, and carried in one of the caravans. Further on, the party encountered and defeated a family of Perytons, and had a hard-earned rest at a wayside inn that night. 

The party took pity on Darrien and let him stay the night too, untying him for the night - he swore an oath to Thor he would be good. Othrod and Lander gained the attentions of two pretty sisters in the bar, and despite being warned that this was highly suspicious, they went ahead anyway and wined and dined the girls, before taking them to their rooms. Of course they were doppelgangers, and Othrod was caught unprepared and laid out, whereas Lander managed to at least make some noise with his laughing longsword and crying for help before becoming unconscious.

Thus members of the party arrived to find two Landers in the room - and the conscious one was persuaded to have them both bound. Othrod was fetched, saying his girl had left and then he was as startled by the noise as the others were. Darrien wasn't so sure, and went to check his room, finding an unconscious Othrod under the bed. At this point the doppelgangers attacked, and a fight broke out, with Thor transforming into a bear - which the two doppelgangers also did, making it very difficult for the party to tell who was who. 

Ranger Jon expertly shot his arrow into the melee, unfortunately piercing his friend Thor, but Uro blasted one of the doppelgangers, not only injuring it but thanks to his Eldrich Invocations, but also blasting it through the first-story window of the inn. The other doppelganger was killed and Lander (now healed and awake) leapt out of the window to give chase. Unfortunately the rain and darkness made it almost impossible, and so Lander came back through the main bar of the inn, naked and soaking as he made his way back to the upstairs room, to more than a few chuckles and sideways glances from the patrons.

The innkeeper was not pleased with the noise and damage, and Darrien ended up barred from the inn. The following morning a caravan horse was dead, and suspicion immediately fell on Darrien - Sirethnis told the party he should never have been released, and he was bound once again...even Thor was in agreement, for Darrien had broken his oath to him.

For me, this was a great set of sessions - there had been some really nice situations that I really hadn't anticipated when I prepared for these encounters. I figured the doppelgangers were too obvious and the party would end up skipping them, but the way it developed was brilliant, and provided some of the funniest, most cinematic and memorable moments in the campaign. Likewise the way Darrien had played his succumbing to the evil of the Eye was outstanding - I had suspected the party would work something out long before they finally did!

The next sessions included events like Lander's magical laughing longsword going missing, an ambush by Ettercaps and giant spiders, super-fast growing fungus, a magical stag and rescue of an Harper agent. interestingly, the party completely failed to rise to the bait of the "No room at the Inn" encounter, and despite some pretty harsh goading, they simply went and slept by their caravans in the rain - once again they confounded my expectations here.

The last part of the journey was dominated by the cult - with Ranger Jon being recognised by a cult member, Jamna Gleamsilver pointing out the stomach-shredding bone traps in their gruel, and finally a murder of one of the cult guards - the party were accused but their standing as protectors of the caravan by that stage soon quashed that - including the mysterious Azbara Jos sticking up for them. The next day, they arrived in Waterdeep, and a month and a half of game time travelling came to an end.

5e D&D - The Chronicles of the Backbiters: The Eye of Death

Now as a preamble to this instalment I should talk about the party's first adventure - The Master's Vault. This concludes with them getting into the vault, having a showdown with a necromancer and some skeletons, and learning that there erstwhile teacher was actually a different character who had found an artefact called "The Eye of Death". They had a journal which described the Eye's location and how to destroy it, together with a Pearl of Power and a magical longsword.

Now thinking long-term, I knew the party would be doing The Hoard of the Dragon Queen next, and after that probably Rise of Tiamat. They would then be in a position to do an epic Lord of the Rings style quest to destroy this evil artefact. Also, rather than introducing another faction, I had the necromancer at the end of the adventure be part of the Cult of the Dragon, interested in the Eye to help create their undead Dracoliches.

So I created a powerful evil artefact, and rather than have it as another quest in the future, decided that it should replace the Pearl they had found with the journal - the Eye appearing to be such until activated (the artefact needed attunement to use as a Pearl of Power, at which point the character would lose weight at the rate of 1lb/day until they reached their racial minimum. They have bloodthirsty thoughts and enjoy watching things die, and their dreams are full of nightmares about death. It also confounds the bearer as to any clues about it and its method of destruction).

After the character had personally killed 50hp worth of creatures, the Eye enters its first level of activation, and the character can cast the Chill Touch cantrip, favouring it over other methods of attack - the Eye would grow to the size of a large rounded grape, and the character would be aware of this power and become secretive about the item - at this point the character cannot be released from the item by anything short of a Greater Restoration. They gain immunity from Necrotic damage, their touch kills normal plant life and those that stay within 100' of them for 24h or more risk contracting Sewer Plague....

In addition, the Eye requires death constantly, and the bearer is unable to benefit from hit dice, short or long rests unless they have killed (something with a CR, not just a spider or an insect - I know how player's minds work!) within the last 24h. They are obsessed with killing, so much so that their Charisma is lowered by 2 and their Wisdom by 1 whilst they possess the artefact. Their alignment also starts to slide towards Neutral Evil.

Let me now add that the character who picked up both the journal and the Pearl was Darrien - the halfling Bard...this meant he couldn't read the journal (as the Eye confounds its bearer as to its origins etc), so he reported it was written in some sort of code - I was imagining parallels to The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings at this point - one of the great joys of being a DM are these little secrets as they unfold!

ooo o o o OOO o o o ooo

So, preamble done, the last time the party had been beaten by the Cult after seriously depleting their human followers left in the cave system. Frulam had escaped off North to warn Rezmir of the threat, leaving Landregosa to watch over the eggs - a task he felt more than capable of doing having met the party before and hardly being troubled with their advances.

The party had a bit of internal reflection at this point, and talked about planning more and being less impulsive. This half worked on their re-entry to the caves, where the Dragonclaw guards had been replaced by slightly less capable kobolds, who were stealthily eliminated. The party explored to find the bodies of cultists gone, but little else changed, and so went through the mushroom forest - at which point their discipline started to break down, and they proved that wet surfaces and climbing were not their strong point (this was also historically true, with falls being more dangerous in their past than monsters!)

Now I had prepared for the next part with some more 3D printing...they were entering a cave full of bats and piercers (I had replaced the Stirges in the book for these as I felt they tied in with the Roper later on, plus I felt Stirges would attack cult members travelling through here). It turned out they were also easy to print...and here they are.

The party ended up with a few piercers in the back, but some curing later and they got through this, though they managed to lose the Wizard in the process. It was at this point when Darrien reached the 50hp threshold for pushing the Eye of Death into its first level of activation. Anyway, Kylantha the wizard had become disoriented in the swarms of bats flying around in the cave, and ended up going into the foul-smelling Troglodyte area. I could have used Lizardmen for these, but I wanted the Troglodytes to be different, so I ended up printing a bunch of these too. Kylantha cast Thunderwave at them, the noise disturbing the bats again and bringing Sirethnis, Alonna and Lander to go looking for her and bring her back.

Landregosa finally met his end after an epic battle which Landregosa himself ended up doing a lot of damage to kobolds and a guard drake, being the recipient of a Crown of Madness cast by the Warlock Uro. This meant that by the time he was really into fighting the party he was already somewhat down and didn't have the support he should have had. He was finally finished off with a Spiritual Weapon blow from Lander. The party then spent some time smashing his head with a maul and then cutting it off, just to be sure! They weren't out of the woods, however, since the remaining kobolds and beserkers did a substantial amount of damage - to the point where they needed a short rest in the reeking kobold barracks.

This rest gave them enough to go exploring again, and they found the kobolds guarding the eggs (after being glued and burnt by their grenades), followed by the guard drakes and finally the roper - which the party named "Mighty Mike". After some dialogue and some meat trading, the party avoided combat with this creature, which I had used a Reaper mini for that I already owned previously.

The dragon eggs were all extracted and smashed, and other than getting some acid damage from the chest trap in the dragon temple and some poison from the trapped meat chamber curtain, the party did little more before a lengthy debate on what to do next - chase after the cult immediately or go back to Greenest to report and restock. Eventually they decided on the latter course, and went back to see Leosin and Governor Nighthill. Of course Leosin had already gone, and Nighthill equipped them with horses to ride up to Elturel.

On the way to Elturel, the party was ambushed during the night by orcs, including an Orog and Eye of Grummsh from Othrod's old clan. The attack was not only rebuffed, but completely slaughtered. Still, I had no doubt the figures I had bought for the purpose would be used for other fights!

At this point various members of the party started falling ill - something the party traced back to their resting in the filthy kobold barracks back at the cave system. Lesser Restoration seemed to do the trick, however, and remove the effects. This set them up to meet Leosin and Onthar, and give them the opportunity to join the Harpers, or the Order of the Gauntlet. Some joined both organisations, some joined none, so the party had a real mix of outlooks - a good thing overall I felt.

Come the morning they were due to set off, some of the characters were again ill, and they found that Othrod's horse had been killed in the night - something he was very unhappy about and made something of a scene outside the stables about. Of course this was actually Darrien's doing, he killed the horse in the night to sate his bloodlust - driven by the Eye.

Nevertheless, the party set off to Baldur's Gate by boat, and in an attempt to insulate themselves from further disease they separated into infected and non-infected groups, taking the prow and stern. Mid journey they heard cries for help, and decamped in rowboats into the shallow waters of a swamp to investigate, only to find a fair maiden chained to a rock, prisoner of three ogres and their pet crocodile.The maiden was another purchase (at the same time as the orcs), whereas the monsters I had printed

The party dealt with this, but the highlight was Thor being pulled from his rowboat by the crocodile, and Uro casting Witch Bolt, which fried both crocodile and Thor over several rounds. During this time Thor had been unable to break the crocodile's grapple, and afterwards was unable to climb back into the boat, even with lander's help. Eventually Lander and Uro managed to pull his still-smoking, sodden form out of the water, but it did become something of the focal point for the fight!

The Ogres put up a fair fight, including one who was casting Vicious Mockery on various party members. in the end, however, brute force and ignorance couldn't delay their despatch, and the maiden managed to set herself free from the shackles during the fight. She then told the party how her party was ambushed and killed as she was on her way to Elturel, but she'd be grateful of carriage back to her father in Baldur's Gate to get more guards to pick up the two cases of exquisite jade figurines she was taking as a gift. The party offered to take the statues too, but she refused, saying there was no point taking them back just to haul them out here again.

That night, back on the boat during the first watch, Uro cast Vicious Mockery on Othrod. Despite denying it, he did it again, and Othrod was prepared to fight - this woke others, including Darrien, who also cast Vicious Mockery on the half-orc. Sensing something wasn't right, Sirethnis stepped in, saying this was very suspicious when they'd just picked up a passenger. The maiden was confronted and she tore into Sirethnis, revealing her true identity as a Green hag. she had been using her natural abilities to cast the cantrip, imitate others and cast her voice to cause the mayhem. A fight ensued, but she turned invisible and jumped off the boat.

Next day, as they approached Baldur's Gate, a one figure was spotted on some rocks ahead. She cried out and Fireballed the party...it was Myrdinn, their former colleague and friend, who blamed them all for her brothers death. After a couple of long-range Fireballs she vanished, leaving the party shaken and bemused. They were also somewhat down in cleric and druid spells as the cycle of infection each morning was countered by Lander and Thor's Lesser Restorations, leaving their spell slots depleted.

Finally they arrived at Baldur's Gate, their boat somewhat burnt and slightly depressed - they had learned of an old friend that was a new enemy, couldn't seem to shake the cycle of infection they'd picked up and still had a long way to go to track the Cult. What would Baldur's Gate - the largest city in Faerun - bring them?