Five Copper Pieces!?

Nothing custom-made on my part. Wizards has put out some tile sets that include a few 3D tiles. The first that I got was called "Harrowing Halls", a small pack, product number DU6. If I remember correctly, either or both of their bigger box sets, "The City" and "The Dungeon" contain 3D tiles too. There's usually just a staircase or two, and a couple platforms. In the big sets, I believe, there's also little tables and cisterns, and a stand-up door or two. Keep an eye out for the description on the back of any pack. The Harrowing Halls one made a big deal about containing 3D tiles.

They don't include enough platforms, I think, to make really big 3D structures. I had to wing it with card boxes, and it was a little precarious, but no biggie.

There may have been a fight with extra-dimensional wisps and some other monster reskinned as a hypnotoad. My players made the hypnotoad joke before it even turned the party's swordmage onto the monk.

A couple other firsts:

First time with monsters of my own creation. I was hoping for "not overpowered" and it turned out just fine.

I got fancy with last game's combat. I haven't yet discussed this latest story arc other than Turrett's dreams, but for this fight, the party finally made it to their destination in the Wolfwood they had been hired to investigate: a weird old ruin in the side of a hill. When they got there, a party of Ashbound shifters had arrived first and murdered one of the people they were to meet there. I had intended a fight where the party had to make their way up to save their employer's colleague as the Ashbound held their ground, dealing with weird glowing gas spheres that could put them to sleep. Instead, I got dumb and had most of the enemy party descend, leaving their leader up top. And to top it off, said leader was most effective when in the thick of things with the other Ashbound, with an aura that boosted their effectiveness. Totally bollixed on my part, but the players had a good time and they loved the fancy battlefield, so it wasn't a total waste.

One of the mysteries going on in my campaign right now is: why is the party's warforged starting to have dreams? Normally, they don't dream at all. But for the last four nights, he's had moments of vivid dream. The first two nights, the dreams he had were straight from his memories -- pleasant ones, even -- that he had mentally buried after the Day of Mourning, when he feared he had lost (and, from his viewpoint, failed) the Cyran human family with whom he had bonded. Then, on the third night, he had a dream regarding the undead they had defeated, that had started haunting the train to Passage they were on. Except, this time, he wasn't himself in the dream, but a human woman, whom the party saw in a dining car the next morning. The night after that, which the party spent in Varna, the warforged dreamt of being someone entirely else, on the run, and almost getting caught.

We also had this last night, though it didn't get opened. More for next session. This is about as close to "swordmage" we think we can get in regards to beer.

The beer with last night's game, continuing with the theme of matching classes in the party.

Like #dndcombat or #dndminis or #dndbattlemaps or what?

Orc bandits on the way to Havenglen. The merchant said, "Oh for... It's the tree in the road tactic again. We're going to get attacked."

He was right.

The last three sessions have been going well. To introduce a new player and his character, I gave the party a short mission to accompany a merchant captain on a trip to pick up some promised cargo. The whole mission went badly: the folks they talked to on the docks laughed at the captain's name; the first mate made some money from the rest of the small crew because she was the only one who thought the party would show up; the cargo they were supposed to pick up wasn't stashed on the island the captain had been directed to; on a supposedly easy job, there were unexpectedly ogres, Cannith-forged defenses, and a kraken to deal with.

What I hope made it more interesting was that, from the moment the players met the captain hiring them, he was very aware of his shortcomings. In fact, this was his last trip as a merchant, and he was very clear that he wasn't great at being a merchant; he was too honest for his own good, and was hanging up his hat after one too many disappointments. He just wanted to finish this one job, collect what was owed him, and be done with it. Instead, the people he had cut a deal with had shorted him entirely, with the intention of distracting him while they got out of town.

At this point, my game took a turn for the weird. I originally planned for the first encounter on the island to be ogres who had wandered onto it when the island had wandered closer to the shore (and I'll get to that). But around that time, I had run into seapunk, became highly amused by it, and suddenly I wanted to make these three ogre pals seapunk ogres with light green hair, their minis done up with cotton balls dyed with food coloring and stretched out to look like seaweed-esque wigs. I didn't get around to it, but one of the ogres was dubbed Plur.

Then it was discovered that the island was really a giant mecha-crab thing that was an experiment House Cannith was in the process of decommissioning, except the seapunk ogres showed up and ate the few remaining workers they found. Whoops. When the party was able to investigate a cargo hold through a hatchway the ogres couldn't descend, they triggered some defense systems, and the island/mecha-crab went haywire, getting up and walking itself into the ocean, tossing the party back into the ocean in the process.

At that point, the retiring merchant captain had had enough and was already losing his cool. But once they made it back to the ship, a young kraken showed up and attacked, having been attracted to the large motions of the mechanical behemoth falling into the ocean.

Halfway through the kraken fight, I spotted that for some reason, D&D krakens are telepathic, and so our teenaged kraken started spouting off "PAAAAARRRRRRRTYYYYYYYY" to its would-be victims. Apparently, he had been looking forward to partying with the seapunk ogres.

Yeah, I don't know either. The party's monk managed to make a flying leap off of the rowboat, kicked the kraken in the head, knocking it prone, and succeeded in an Athletics roll to run along the side of the kraken as it fell over, so as to not fall into the sea. I figure if they're going to pull that sort of thing, I can have raver sea creatures.