Out of Character discussion:

Well illusionist is fun, I'm playing one in another game, but no good against undead (not that that's a deal breaker, just listing pros and cons), druid is awesome with their Entanglement spell and the Druid of the Grove could be a good story hook for him ("hey this is my apprentice, take him out and test him for me"), I love bards but they are mechanically underwhelming in OSE, mage is one I've never seen... What book is that from?

Oh wow! I love that class! What book is it in?

Nice, I'll definitely be making a Mage in the future. Love the flavor of it!

Just add a handful of thief skills and you have the perfect adventurer. I wish they had some armor proficiency but the Mage Armor is a nice enough touch.

Omg I just bought the whole zine based on my like of the Mage class and these new classes are amazing. Broken really, the Gargantua completely outstrips all other melee classes in every way. I feel like the Mage doesn't deserve the increased xp requirement over magic-user considering the Acolyte has the same requirement as a cleric. Man what a great splatbook!

Oh wow! Making me drag out the Carcass Crawler books after all!

For starts, there's the druid Jaroo Ashstaff who seems to take a shine to Eltrezar and has offered his services in the form of potions or scrolls, so if you wanted to go more heavily on scrolls, that's an option through him, right off the bat.

Eerything looks pretty good on her. The only thing I think I've caught is her AC. Normally unarmored would be AC9, but with mage armor, she should have AC7 (basically leather armor), not AC11. That's *Ascending AC* which is a crime.

Aside from that, it looks good and is approved. She has some pretty useful skills that might come in handy, actually.

Is there a place we would be able to buy arcane scrolls? I assumed the Druid only sold divine (leafy magics!) scrolls. I don't have that book, so I don't know what it entails for the mage to scribe scrolls.

If this pesky wizard-disguised assassin hadn't interrupted Eltrezar, he was going to discuss next steps. I'm all for hunting down those gnolls (for the xp) (really, for the dagger), and following some other leads. Let's mix it up!

I would be good with going for the gnolls

Just a heads up, I have been stacked with work at my job, and busy arranging for security personnel and referees for a State Championship tournament our wrestling club is hosting in a couple weeks and basically things have come down to crunch time to make sure everything is ready to go. That’s why I’ve been a bit slow this week.

I’ve got all my responsibilities finished finally (at least on my end) so tomorrow I should back to my regular posting frequency.

I'm out at dinner and drinks with my partner and her brother who's in town. I'll put up an OOC description of what Eltrezar and Luban are doing, and fill it in with a proper post tomorrow.

I'll be backpacking tomorrow through Sunday, sorry for no Saturday posts.

Have fun. Also, we have someone messaging me asking abut joining the game. I'll leave it up to you guys to decide if we want to keep things as they are or bring in new players. They seem to have a pretty new account, which is always a crap shoot; but I guess worse case scenario you add a new PC to the adventure, they wind up flaking on us, and then you have an NPC as your disposal until they get killed or you return to Hommlet and they trot off into the sunset.

Thoughts?

I suppose we should really determine what exactly we are trying to put together here. 7 PCs seems like a big enough troupe to begin with. Would we lay aside the idea of hired help with that many actors already in motion? We also don’t want to just cake walk to the thing either and get 4xp for our trouble in taking down whatever boss lies in wait for us.

That’s a good point. Remember as well that hirelings get an equal cut of that treasure XP regardless of any agreements you make for financial compensation.

I think the timing was unfortunate here. I like the idea of more players, but we've also had terrible luck outside this particular group. I could always put Luban in my back pocket to open up some room, to open up room for another player. Remember, I was new when I joined this game!

I got a request from another player, asking to join the game this morning. Not sure how this game suddenly came up on the radar of two different people in one weekend, but alright.

I’m good with whatever you folks decide, but the more I think about it, you all made the effort to build a second PC specifically so you had more bodies to throw at the module, and stunting your PCs’ XP advancement by adding new player PCs to the party after you already made your new ones is kind of a lousy stunt to pull on my part as a DM.

Maybe we’re happy keeping things as they are for the time being, and seeing how we like doing the two PC thing for now. If you guys decide you’re not really feeling that, we can always reduce your PC count back to one, and then reach out for new players (it’ll take some imagination on my end to figure out how to remove one of your PC from the game, probably, but I’m sure I can figure something out, if I wrack my brain, mwah-hahaha).

Yeah we did just work in our new characters, though I'm less concerned with big XP than with surviving the module so I'm fine with bringing in new blood if everyone wants to. Either way.