'Cragmaw Castle' A Summary of Session 6 of Lost Mine of Phandelver

Summary of Session 6: Cragmaw Castle

In this session my players weilded themselves like a surgical knife. Using their new found skills, they decieved their way into the castle, created a distraction that meant they could sneak up on their quarry, dispatched King Grol and escaped with Gundren. All in a mornings work :)

Bozz, at the Sleeping Giant, is the best

So we’ve ended up with business cards, the players visited and ended up agreeing to help by handing out business cards … they also suggested that they diiversify from ‘bar’ to ‘cheese emporium’ … Bozz is considering. Anyway, I mocked up some after the session and was particularly proud of the tagline:

"The Sleeping Giant business cards'"

My 12 year old had no idea, but hey. Totolly awesome.

Avoid all the fighting!!!

Lots of really really good rolls this session … like they came up with same crazy plans to avoid the fighting:

  • Amazing stealth and deception skills stalking and interrogating the castle. They put in lots of thoughts and planning and totally nailed it.
  • Pretending to be a goblin again but this time, spending some time to teach some canned phrases before going in
  • Convincing the majority of the goblins in the castle that they had to do training drills outside the castle
  • Leaving the owlbear locked up in the room
  • Minimum exploring of the castle, get in, find Gundren, get out.

Funniest moment

When our wizard jumped in to the fight with Grol, doing some general bad-assery Legolas Elf stuff to get in the room, followed by Thunderclap, which … proceeded to kill Gundren and set off all the alarms in the place after all their time and energy making sure they didn’t do this.

Genius moment that only just paid off

Disguise self as King Grol and convincing all the guards running towards the room that everything was actually fine. They rolled crazy high and it was a great plan … I couldn’t bring myself to force the fight.

It was super fun watching and listening to my players plan stuff. They were so intent and proper got into it. Cragmaw Castle is a great map. The fight with Grol is also super fun to run. Very appropriate for the levels.