This is part of a series about my DMing Princes of the Apocalypse, a D&D 5e adventure by and copyright Wizards of the Coast.

Table of Contents. The Party.

There will be SPOILERS. If you are playing in a PotA game, please don’t read this. If you are DMing a PotA game, or are a DM who wants to see what the ride was like … read on!

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GM Recap

Session 10 (Day 17) 

1. The party asked Jolliver Grimjaw of Rivergard Keep for transportation up the river so they could (cough) travel to Beliard, offering lots of gold. Jolliver, who said his castle protected the river traffic from bandits, pirates, and monsters, opined that for lots of gold, they might get to take his patrol boat upriver when it returned in a few days.
2. Ensconced in the barracks, having been warned to keep their noses clean, Faith, Nala, and Theren promptly started a fight in the chapel (which was decorated with the cryptic Symbol at Rivergard Keep) with Drosnin the priestess and her two assistants. The trio ducked out under magical fog, and, after rejoining with Moony and William, everyone decided to get out of Rivergard … by stealing a boat, shattering the harbor chain, making a great wind, enduring withering crowsbow and javelin fire, absorbing many magic missiles, and watching Moony on the verge of death five times. 
3. They drifted down the river, on their small stolen boat, recovering hit points, and trying to figure out how they’d back north, past Rivergard Keep, to the mysterious Sacred Stone Monastery. …

Player Recap

“Who the devil are you?”

Jolliver Grimjaw, seated in a large chair in front of table littered with used plates and papers. Theren tries to convince him to take us North on the river. He is hesitant to trust us. Theren tells how Moony has experience as a sailor and the rest can help protect the ship and general grunt work. Won’t have a ship leaving for a couple of days. Keep your noses clean until then and we will see. 

Holger brings the group to the barracks, boots a couple of men out of the first two bunk and leaves the group with the disgruntled arms men. William tries to make amends and gives the Reaver who was displaced some silver and tell him to have a beer on us. He accepts with a little less coldness in his voice. Moony pulls out his bedroll and curls up to nap. One of the armsmen looks at him in disbelief, “What the hell are you?” Moony just fixes him with a cat-like stare. William stays with Moony, while the others head to the chapel with Faith. 

As they approach the chapel, they hear a voice saying “…and that is why what has been imparted is so important…” As Faith enters, the voice says, “Hello, is anyone there? Come in.” The altar is blank but there is a symbol of an X with a bar at the bottom. 

Drosnin the priestess demands that they respect her authority and not disrupt her service. When Faith approaches the altar and drops to pray, Drosnin tells her to return to the pews and instructs the guards to keep her in-line. Faith sits and continues her prayers and pays no attention to the priestess. Drosnin is not amused and commands the Reavers to “discipline” Faith. The Reavers approach. Nala places herself between one Reaver and Faith and says, “You really have no cause to interfere” He says “I’ve been given orders, that is all the cause I need,” but he does not approach further.

The second Reaver places his hand on Faith’s shoulder to grapple her. A booming thunder strikes the Reaver. Faith resists the grapple and jerks away. Theren releases the fire bolt he had held. At the same time Drosnin, attacks Faith, who resists. Next she raises her hands gesturing at Theren and a shard of ice flies at him. His shield spell deflects the shard, but it explodes and damages everyone in range. The group decides that it is time to leave. Faith casts fog as the party leaves heading towards the barracks. 

When Theren arrives at the barracks, the party quickly packs their belongings and heads for the docks. Shouts meet them and armsmen race to intercept. A battle ensues on the docks and boat, as the group attacks the heavy chain blocking the channel out of the port. Faith shatters the chain as Moony and Nala race for the boat. The mercenaries and Reaver attack from the parapets with crossbows, as more race to join the fray. William creates a square of thorns and vines to slow the advancing attackers. Nala is last to board and Faith uses a giant gust of wind to push the boat off. Captain Moony gets the ship moving and the group is supporting by rowing and keeping the attackers at bay. 

William attacks one of the mercs with a whip and pulls them off of the parapet and into the water. Theren throws spells at an amazing rate, disabling the Reaver trying to catch the boat. Moony and Theren at the back of the boat are taking the brunt of the attacks. Faith heals Theren and continues to use the wind to push the boat farther into the river. Moony falls to a barrage of Magic Missiles from Drosnin. Suddenly a surprised William starts glowing brightly. There are stars at his joints in the shape of a chalice. He reaches for Moony and heals him. Then Theren is also healed.

A water serpent appears and tries to encoil Nala. She dodges and attacks with her sword. It is a mighty blow, but does not damage the serpent greatly. Theren attackes the sea serpent. The Bugbears reach at the end of the parapet and start to pepper the boat with arrows. (Bugbears? Where did they come from?) Moony goes down again. The ship continues into the river being pulled by the currents. Many attacks and heals later, the boat moves out of range down stream.

Game Notes

Hilarity ensues.

So the Campaign as Written (CAW) for Rivergard Keep suggests the players infiltrate, learn stuff, and then start carefully, methodically, killing bad guys.

Instead, the party infiltrated, then punched bad guys, then fled ahead of all the bad guys coming after them.

Sigh.

That said, in a role-playing game, people are going to play their roles in ways that don’t necessarily chart the most optimal course to success. So Faith is going to insist on going to the chapel (even when it’s suggested they stay put), and is going to act rudely to the rite and instruction going on there, and is going to punch the high priestess in the snoot.

Then the whole party is going to have to flee, like Indy away from the natives he was trying to steal the gold idol from. Because that’s just what the CAW planned for (rolls eyes).

I ran the flight from the barracks down to the boat as legit as I could, as the different internal castle defenses came into play. Mages. Bugbears. Water Serpents. Lots of mooks. Things got dicey at times (the unarmored Tabaxi who happens to be the only one with sailing experience, manning the tiller at the end of the boat, is going to be a natural target, every time he gets brought back from the near-dead), but they managed to, somehow, escape.

And there I was, back at the same conundrum as after Feathergale Spire. The group had hardly defeated Rivergard Keep, but were maintaining a steady course for Sacred Stone Monastery. Rivergard Keep’s fall was a milestone for 5th Level. What to do?

I decided, this time, to not award the milestone. At least, not yet.

Bits and Bobs

The chapel clearly had the Water Cult (Crushing Wave) sigil painted on the wall.  A clue! A clue!

Again, it’s easy enough to blame the player for having their character act so fractiously. But Faith was a contradiction in terms as a character — simultaneously a naif and someone who would jump off a cliff if you told her you didn’t want to. Running into an imperious Cult “Priestess” (the players noted that the spells Drosnin was casting were magical, not clerical, generally true for all the ostensible worshippers of the Princes) was just the sort of thing that would set her off, aided and abetted by the Sorcerer who’d just as soon blow everything up as not. The brief attempt at diplomacy from the Dragonborn fighter simply wasn’t (yet) up to the task.

Not surprisingly, I had no idea this would happen (the CAW didn’t, either). Thus, I had no plans for how the small boat worked that they took, and as we were playing, I (and players) were frantically looking up how small watercraft work. Yeah, team!

(I didn’t even actually have a boat figure to use, because nobody is expected to be fleeing from the Keep on a boat. There’s a boat embedded on the map, but you can’t actually move it. I think I eventually created in Roll20 a rectangle 10×15 and sat the players down in that and moved it around on the map as they escaped.  After the game, I crafted a boat for them next episode to use as they were on the river, which they promptly abandoned. Sigh.)

The party’s ability to zap the chain blocking the harbor exit was genius on their part. Using Gust of Wind to propel the craft was also pretty clever.

There was a small ship in the inner harbor of the Keep, owned and operated and occupied (below deck) by Shoalar Quanderil, a very interesting Genasi pirate. All sorts of fun stuff happens if the players attack the boat.

But, since nobody attacked his ship, or offered to pay him for going after the escapees, he remained below deck. He would be planned for a reappearance multiple times in the future, though only managing once on stage for quite some time.

The water serpent (a transmogrified Raesh the Fathomer) was the first “magic weapons only” critter they’d run into. It would not be the last.

Jolliver didn’t do his own personal magical thing, largely because he had an entire castle of mooks and followers running off to do it for him.

The Keep map is actually pretty cool, and the keep’s defenses (including the Bugbears, which kind of provoked a “Whoa, these guys really are the bad guys, not just reacting to Faith’s attacking them” reaction) were actually pretty spiffy. They took arrow fire, and magic fire, from different locations, and barely managed to make it out (pumping as many healing spells into Moony as they had available). I’ve seen the map for Rivergard Keep repurposed into other campaigns, and it’s definitely suitable for that, even if the main building gets a little difficult (in its open balconies) to manage.

That said, I did end up writing notes to myself all over the map to note things like “this is where the Portcullis is controlled from” or “Guards here respond to battle in K19, K21.”

Add this place to all the others where the generic cultist fighters (Reavers) were drawn up using artwork that in the actual books is labeled as “prototype” or experimental or “We played with the idea of doing crazy shit like this, but eventually decided against it.” I.e., the Roll20 art elements were pretty darned sketchy.

Similarly, Jolliver. He is (SPOILER!) a wereboar (not for any particular story-related reasons). His token has three alternates: full wereboar, transitional wereboar … and a token that has the text “Jolliver Grimjaw” written on it. (Mutter mutter.) So I had to craft a token to look like him in his human form, which I was happy to do, but don’t feel like, for the price of all this stuff, I should have had to.

For much of the campaign I made up titles for each session. Eventually I decided just to use the dungeon name, part X. But I was still doing the titles here, and, in keeping with that Quinn Martin motif, I could just hear the announcer intoning, “Tonight’s episode … River of Danger!”

So there’s two of the Haunted Keeps encountered and left behind, relatively intact. But the fate of Feathergale Spire and Rivergard Keep would be quite different, as the story was improvised forward by me. And while I’d had much, much less chance to do more human interaction with the water cultists at Rivergard than with the air cultists at Feathergale, there would eventually be some connections made that would last through the game.

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