Hunting Wolves

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.

It was right at the hour mark that I rolled high enough, which was just enough time for Olivia to have gotten her rest so I allowed her to use some natural healing to recover her lost hitpoints.

She was going to need them.

The creature that came out of the woods and started padding across the fields wasn’t trying to be stealthy. It may not have been ‘as big as a bull’ but it was definitely a little bigger than one of their donkeys, and that was big for a canine. They couldn’t tell it was a wolf-shaped creature at first though. I described how the first thing they noticed was its golden eyes as the moonlight glinted off of them, and then they noticed that a strange yellow-orange mist of energy seemed to follow in its wake as it moved.

The creature headed straight for the farmstead, its big and shaggy form still agile and almost sinuous in its movements. When it got closer, just outside the yard where the fight had happened, it stopped and sniffed the air.

Then it growled, its eyes turning an angry red, and that growl the girls could feel deep in their bones. And it looked right at them up in the hayloft.

The fight, if the girls hadn’t positioned themselves the way they did, could very well have been deadly for the three of them. I’d planned the fight with six characters in mind, and the action economy of the game was a pretty powerful factor in what made an easy or hard fight. When the girls came up with their plan I’d decided not to tweak the encounter.

The wolf-creature, a modified Warg, had the size that it was able to jump up and bite at them at the edge of the hayloft hatchway. The battle went back and forth, Jade almost getting pulled over the edge and into the yard when she got caught - if the girls backed off too much, the warg could try and scramble up into the hay loft, but if they stayed too far forward it could yank them out and that would be a disaster.

In the end, with all three of the girls wounded, the donkeys screaming in a panic as Fergus tried to keep them calm, and the warg looking pretty hurt by the burns and cuts along its face, shoulders and forelegs, Olivia threw caution to the wind and jumped out of the hay loft, coming down right on top of the warg and driving her blade deep into its back.

The warg let out an immense, ear-shattering **** howl - more powerful than it ever should have been able to make - before it died.

The mop-up was fairly quick, we’d been playing for almost four hours and I didn’t want to go much longer than that so I didn’t draw it out afterwards. The girls were able to rest after the battles, and in the morning Fergus set to work skinning the wolf pelts - they were damaged, but in his words, ‘Salvageable.’ The warg pelt in particular would make a fine sale despite the sword wound in the back purely due to its size.

As I described the girls starting to head back to the village, their spoils hung on the back of the donkeys, I could tell that Rhia and Tori both assumed the session was over.

It was, almost. But not quite.

“As you come over the final hill, the sun is setting over the village, and all seems at peace,” I said. “But as you get closer, you see even less of the townsfolk than you did on your first visit to Tremulous Crook. And as you reach the centre of the village square you see three things. The first is that the Town Hall front door has been sundered open and hangs off its hinges. The second is that the Inn windows and doors are missing, and there are heavy scorch marks around each opening, stretching up the sides of the walls as if there had been a fire.”

“Oh, no,” Jade said.

“Oh, fuck,” Olivia cursed.

“But what’s the third thing?” Elyse asked, obviously feeling nervous.

I’d had options of how this would happen. My original plan had involved the Headswoman they’d gotten along with. But then they’d given me a juicier target.

“Dragged into the centre of the village square is a big apple tree,” I said. “Cut down with haphazard axe strikes that must have taken an hour or more to accomplish. Its branches are broken and hanging limp where they haven’t snapped off completely from its collapse. And carved into the trunk is a circle with the vague shape of a howling hound, as if up at the moon rising above you.”

“Are you fucking kidding me?” Tori shouted, throwing the folder with her character sheet in the air.

“No! Fuck, no!” Elyse said, her eyes actually brimming with tears.

“We’ll find them,” Rhia said, gritting her teeth hard as she held onto the edge of the table so hard I could see her knuckles turned white. “We’ll fucking find them, and we’ll fucking end them.”

“And that’s where we’ll end the session,” I said.

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