Looking forward to Sunday's game

I'm looking forward to game tomorrow, more than usual. Why?

- We have a player coming back after an absence (running Galoob Jah, last seen groping a trap.)

- We have a fairly large group coming (6 players). We have seven on the definitely active list, but one can't make it because of a scheduling conflict. We have another who is trying to fit game back into his schedule, too. After months of "4 regulars" we're getting a little larger set of regular players.

- We will finally get to see that necromancer* Vryce's player made. He's been bringing him session after session, only to have to put him back because they needed Vryce's firepower for that session. I have notes about his spell selection from November 2012. So for people who feel bad that Vryce's player had to put his best guy aside for a while, remember he's been waiting almost 2 1/2 years to run his backup guy. And I'll get to see if the decisions we made about a new spell are both balanced and fun. It's probably balanced, but we'll see if it's sufficiently fun.

- Spoiler: Despite losing their skiffs and getting the altar dropped onto their secret door exit, the bandits raided some merchants in the area in the past week. They aren't a bunch of swollen corpses or paralyzed into inaction thanks to the altar-pushing expedient from last time.

- The players - and their characters - have a much better idea of what to expect. They're certain to load up on rations, several of them learned Boating and Survival (Swampland), and they know what's on tap. They know they have a mix of supernatural foes and mundane foes with supernatural support.

- I'm curious to see how the mix we expect tomorrow will handle the dungeon. In theory, knowing what they face could mean more aggression, as people are dealing with known opponents. Without their best straight-up fighter (the shirtless, and often pantsless, Bjorn), any fight against the bandits will be much tougher. There aren't any NPCs free to fill out their front ranks, which might be an issue for this party (two wizards, one cleric, one holy warrior with an emphasis on holy not warrior, one thief, one martial artist, and two 70~ point NPC halberdiers.) But hey, this is a shakedown adventure with a lot of 250-point guys. As long as people don't take the approach that any risk is a bad risk, or that their 250-point paper men are too valuable to risk in a fight, it should be fine for the survivors.

- One concern there is the "spend 5-6 hours trying to avoid the difficult stuff we found last time" move. I've as much as stated outright that finding a sneaking way into the dungeon unguarded by and not known by the current occupants isn't a terribly realistic plan. It's one that depends on a dungeon with a second entrance and one that egresses into the dungeon in a place such that the inhabitants don't recognize it's a way in. Iffy, at best. They can try to find another way in - I won't say if there is, or is not, another way in. But I asked them not to spend the whole afternoon trying to search a 2.5 mile per side triangular tree/shrub/vine/tangle covered island (that's about 2.7 sq. miles) for a new way in. There might be one, but there might not, and adventure definitely awaits beyond the entrance they know. Like gaining new access to Felltower, blind search isn't the best way to spend an entire session.


All in all, though, it should be a good session, so I'm looking forward to it.



* That's a wizard specializing in necromancy spells, not the Necromancer template from DF9. I may offer him the power-ups from that template, though, in lieu of the "usual" wizard ones.