Saturday, January 1, 2022

Bright Red Party Hats!

 Had two great sessions of D&D over New Years, about 15 or 16 hours of play across 2 days. Hardly any combats in that time. The PCs avoided every fight I intended them to get into, by way of clever actions and occasionally good luck. Then they picked a fight with one encounter that was intended to be an info dump. It was huge fun, but very unpredictable.

The best part was right at the very end of the second session: the party's Paladin accidentally adopted a Redcap. The Redcap was assigned to a Pixie noble by his boss, and the Pixie was kind of hoping to get the Redcap killed so they wouldn't be supervised any more. The PCs managed to subdue the Redcap via quick thinking, and then, axe to his neck, said something along the lines of "try any more funny business, and I'm keeping your Redcap". To which the Pixie replied "It's a deal! You want him, he's yours!" A few minutes later, a contract was signed on a mushroom stalk, and ownership of the Redcap had transitioned to the goodie-two-shoes of the party. The Paladin didn't understand at that moment that in D&D, Redcaps need to murder every 3 days or else they shrivel up and die. 

Corruption and deals with the devil have been major themes of the campaign, so it was some kind of wonderful for the moral-compass of the adventuring party to accidentally volunteer himself to be the keeper of a literal murder-monster. Good times all around.