Where are the Felltower/Cold Fens summaries?

We've had a bit of a dry spell in gaming, thanks to the difficulty of summer scheduling and my long trip.

The dry spell will continue into early September, sadly. There was all of one day we could get a reasonable number of people together to game, and that day is also the first birthday party for my twin cousins. So we had to push it back until September.


We'll do some gaming in between with a subset of gamers, but not DF. Partly that's because the players see the next session's delve as a serious, straight-up fight with a very tough opponent and don't want to go without all of the regulars.

Ironically, it's this kind of "wait for everyone to show up" issue that the episodic, start-and-end-in-town, delve-and-return game style we chose is meant to avoid. That is, we can always play because there is always something to do.

But since the players have (with good reason) been laser-focused on the "island temple" in the Cold Fens, we really don't have any side missions waiting to be resolved. There are rumors of things - and some I know could be completed in a single session - but no firm knowledge. There are rumors of things that are potentially quite large (lost troll city, lost temple, the dragon, the mysteriously dangerous path "around" the watery part of the fens, etc.) and would become a multi-session project of their own.

Since no ground work has been done on anything except the main dungeon, the players can't just zip over and take care of the side issue. The big main issue is seen as needing a full squad. So, we play when we can get a full squad.

Felltower, in a way, has become such. The players got the idea of using the orcs to ward off the cone-hatted cultists. The orcs took bribes/tolls to protect the place. The orcs got too confident and upped the tolls beyond what the PCs felt was reasonable. The PCs skirmished with the orcs and the compact broke down. Now it's impossible for small groups to go into Felltower - the only entrances the orcs don't hold are way too dangerous for a small group at the power levels of the PCs.* (see Mungo)



So we'll wait. We'll play some other games (and I'll make a pitch for a DF spinoff) in the meantime, because DF isn't why we get together. Gaming together is why we get together. Or gaming is the unifying excuse for us all to get together regularly. But it won't be Cold Fens or Felltower. Maybe something totally unrelated. Like, you know, Munchkin. :)



* Tangent - that's kind of a bonus/penalty situation. The bonus is that I no longer make changes to the dungeon based on assumed NPC adventuring activity. New surface-dwelling types basically don't move into the dungeon - either sapient or non-sapient ones. So the orcs have solved the problem of "other people looting our dungeon" for the PCs. On the other hand, it also means penetrating the dungeon is now a frontal assault vs. a fortified position (the dungeon was built as a fortified underground location, and it is mostly intact). It also means there are few if any rumors about the dungeon except for ones related to the things the PCs encounter, because no one is getting close to the place anymore.