Bedrooms

Bedrooms



What Happened


While checking the bodies in the entrance hall, one of which was wearing a pair of Wave strider boots, the party heard gagged murmuring coming from one of the room’s upstairs. Eligos tentatively pushed open the bedroom door to see her kidnapped friends bound at the far end of the room. The tiefling, Hogar and Diefenbaker hesitantly approached Eric, Frieda and Bob. As Eligos reached down to untie Eric’s restraints she saw her friends change before her very eyes into giant rats.

Initiative is rolled


Catching the party by surprise the wererats leapt up to attack. Two of them surrounded Eligos, one of which sunk its teeth into the tiefling’s flesh.  The third charged at Hogar, but his hide amour was enough to stop the rat’s bite. The second bedroom door flunk open and charging was a much larger werewolf. The foaming mouth of lycanthrope ripped though Rodney’s light leather armour opening his flesh. Behind the werewolf was another rat, but this one seem a lot more refined than the previous three. He moved swiftly with precision and carried a highly crafted rapier rather than a mundane short sword. He swiped his sword at Glen, pirouetted past the fighter and the wolf and then stabbed at Rodney all in the blink of an eye.

The two strikes in quick succession did not deter Rodney as he forced both his attackers backwards with a crash of thunder; he also summoned a ball of fire, nearly 5 foot across, next to the two lycanthropes. As he summoned the giant sphere it swap out a flame hitting the wererat. With a rat in his face Hogar causally stepped backward and release two arrows into the rat’s chest to bloody his foe. Lord Vicrael also realised a pair of arrows at the rats, both arrows were enchanted with arcane words. The first arrows misses the one of the rats as it tangled with Eligos, but the second found its mark.

Minron’s battle rage descended as he moved towards the leading wererat and what was originally going to be a strategic placement of his shield to protect Rodney and Vicrael soon became a goring charge with his horns on the rat and a sweeping blow of this sword on the wolf. Feeling the burn of the sphere and not being on his back the lead were lead leapt to his feet and slashed and Minron, slide through the minotaur’s legs before taking another swing at Rodney, both of which though missed. As Vicrael’s arcane arrow enabled Eligos to cast her mind's eye forward a split second, predicting the best moment for a telling blow on the wererat, she seized the opportunity to transform. With a furious roar as the hellish blood that flowed through her veins revealing its true power. In the blink of an eye, she transform into a brutish fiend. In her invigorated state she repeatedly smashed at one of the rat surrounding her, the final blow the most telling as it crushed the rats head, while Hogar shot another two arrows into the rat we was attacking to drop in to the ground. This left only rat in the bedroom the Vicrael attacked with a jinked arrow, so as the rat swung at the brutish Eligos he fell to the floor. Outside on the landing Glen used his axes to hack at the werewolf’s knees to slow it down.

Minron then regained his clarity and turned to face the werewolf behind him, instead of attacking in a bloodied rage he brought forth the power of the Raven Queen to bless his allied and send the werewolf hurtling over the banisters leaving it in a heap on the floor below. Seeing his comrade being flung over the railing and then shot at like a fish in a barrel my a magic missile the lead wererat hastily moved away from Glen and Minron swiping at Rodney and Vicrael on route, only to find a half orc charge out of the bedroom towards him.

Dislike having a filthy rat in his face Vicrael teleported away into the bedroom just as Eligos split the remaining rat’s head open. Safety moved away the bard then launched an arrow at it as it flew thought the air he recite a tale of hatred and challenge, inciting Minron to fight it to the end. The werewolf below then transformed into a dire wolf and charged up the stairway to bite Minron, but he deflected the wolf’s jaws with a shield feint. Vicrael’s teleport was not enough to escape the rapier wielding rat as it followed him into the bedroom to bite him, thankfully Hogar was at hand, and as the rat corned Vicrael it gave Hogar enough time to locate the most precise area to resale a sure shot beneath the rats amour to fatally wound him. Having set the wolf up with his shield faint Minron once again called forth the powers of the raven queen to bless his sword to finish off the wolf.  

DM Points


Monsters: 1x Werewolf (L7 Brute), 3 x Wererats (L3 Skirmishers), 1x Elite Wererate (L3 Elite Skirmisher) – 1050 XP – Level 4

Map "Bedrooms" Created map, see picture below.


This encounter is a tip of the hat to the original adventures I based my adventure on. Wizards released an encounter in Dungeon Issue 156 called The Haunting of Kincep Mansion, an adventure for level 12 characters. As soon as I saw it I knew the encounter I would run would be a haunted mansion, but with the characters only being level 4 I could not use it. So I created my own haunted mansion.

I have tried to make each encounter different and used different monsters in each. I wanted to challenge the party with different foes and also experiment to see what works well from my side of the table. I don’t want overpowered monster to get a TPK but at the same time I don’t want underpowered monsters and the party to lose interest. So for this reason I only added one werewolf room.

Kincep has a werewolf theme running through it, but with werewolves starting at level 8 in the monster manual I couldn’t litter the whole building with them. I could have reduced them down to level 4 or 5, but I felt this would have undermined the power of the beasts. Also only having one werewolf model restricted me a bit! So I reduced the werewolf one level to level 7, this gave him a AC of 19, and with an attack doing 1d6+4+ongoing 5  damage he wouldn’t be overpowered if he was the only werewolf in the encounter. I teamed him up with 4 wererats to keep the Lycanthrope theme going and made one an elite monster to up the encounter XP a little.

Another reason I wanted to include Lycanthrope was to expose the party to disease, an effect we had no yet experienced. This though has not really gone to plan. I managed to hit 5 of the 6 with the rat’s bite and half the party with the werewolf’s bite. So at the end of the encounter there were 8 saving throws to see who could stave of the effects of the disease, 7 of which passed. Only the Glen dwarf fighter, and the only party member trained in endurance, was affected by the werewolf’s moon fever. So at the next extended rest Glen will have two saves to see if he can stop the disease, one from his endurance and one from Minron’s heal. So with an average chance of 3.6 people being infected we have ended up with only one and that character being best placed to cope with it. I guess this does show that diseases are unreliable and as everyone gets a 55% chance of shaking it off even if they are attacked a dozen times by a diseased monster. Therefore they are not that effective but do add an additional threat and introduce no combat decisions.