The Gaming Den

So, first session, last week, was character creation:

• Aasimar Pal4, Scion of a Fallen Kingdom background*
• Human Knight4, Hero of the Peasants, apprenticed by a Knight who occasionally fought in the Paladin's dad's service.
• Human Warmage4, Veteran of the War, "barbarian" slave who was pressed into service as a soldier in the Paladin's dad's army
• Dwarven/Les Experience Thief-Acrobat4, (no background, but basically experimental stock), creation of the Paladin's Dad's crazy wizard advisor, has extra joints in arms and fingers, giving increased dex.

*The Party came up with the joint background that the Paladin's father had died, and his evil uncle took the throne, usurping it out from under the Paladin. The Knight and Warmage knew the paladin through fighting in the dad's army, and the Dwarf knew the paladin as the paladin was the person in the court that didn't treat him poorly. So the party knew each other from years past, I didn't have to throw characters together in a tavern or anything, and I was happy, and everyone got three free minor items as the incentive to work backgrounds together.
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Second Session-First Game
The party was told that, "Well, fortunately, there's a handy social mechanism for getting powerful, potentially troublesome nobles out of the court where they could fuck up plans, it's called adventuring. So the Paladin's uncle sent you guys off, saying, basically, 'Just, go. Out, there, somewhere, I don't give a shit, I hear there's a minotaur ravaging the country side, or something, Go, slay it, help people, whatever.'"
They'd been doing that a few years, the Uncle having taken the throne 5 years ago.
They found themselves in the Manor estate of Lord Naerver. As they poked around a bit, they found that a lot of metal had gone missing in the village, and that the house staff of (the absent) Lord Naerver's manor had heard something scratching at the kitchen door last night, but didn't check it out because, well fuck, it's not like it's going to get it, so who cares? Upon the warmage checking out the tracks, they learned it was a rust monster. They set up an ambush that night, with some broken pots and pans the butler brought them as they were all standing outside trying to figure out who was going to give up equipment as bait.
So, the dwarven lab experiment scales the wall and waits in the shadows, the warmage leans against the manor wall until one of the servant girls brings him some ale and takes him back to bed, the paladin standing out near the bait, and the knight sitting on his damned horse, holding a torch.
Also the entire house staff on another balcony watching these idiots.
The rust monster comes wandering up, and the dwarf shoots it with a grapple-bolt, and the paladin with an arrow, causing it to let out a horrendous screech, which causes the warmage to come running back out, with his sword and not a damned thing else. The warmage hits the beast with a scorching ray, the paladin kicks it, and manages to not have his boot rust off (he wanted to take it alive so they could be led back to it's lair), and the knight just skewers the thing.

So, the rust monster menace is gone, and the knight starts trying to browbeat the steward into giving everyone lodging saying "Hey, we saved the town! You guys won't starve because the farmers ain't bringing you crops because they have no tools!" Which didn't work at all, because, well, a Lord beats some random upstart knight who was given his title by his dying master, and the villagers hadn't complained, and the manor staff didn't even know their was a problem. So the steward told a stable boy to make the knight comfortable, and offered the paladin a guest room, because the paladin's actually the prince.

Next day, they decide to track the rust monster, in case there were more. Going out to the town with the intention of finding a hunter, they go into the tavern and loudly announce that they were looking to hire a woodsman. The tavern owner looked up from polishing the bar and told them the woodsmen were all out in the woods, hunting, mentally adding "duh, you fucking idiots." So the then decided to wander out into the woods and find a woodsman (I am not making this up). I gave the dwarf a roll to notice a rust monster track in the town, and they were able to at least follow it's meandering path into the woods, were they found a woodsman, made him miss the deer he was hunting, and hired him to track the rust monster. He led them to a den in the Lord's section of the forest, and noticed all the wolf tracks around. He got the hell out of there when he noticed that some of said tracks were the size of his head. The knight fires a flask of alchemist's fire from his modified crossbow of "The dm doesn't give a shit, sure, why not" into the den, where it breaks about ten feet in because IT'S A FUCKING DEN. After the flames die down, and they start trying to figure out what to do now, the dwarf decides he'll crawl in. Takes a doused torch (club), and his buckler, and some rope, and starts shimmying in. After about 20 feet, he finds where the den opens out into a roughly 15' diameter chamber full of wolves. And by full of wolves, I mean three are in his face and a giant one in the back stands up, while the rust monster in there keeps it's ass on the floor, knowing to let the wolves do their thing.
So the dwarf start's backing out after getting bit in the face, followed by the wolves, in an attack (miss), move, repeat routine. Meanwhile, outside, the warmage has enlarged the knight and paladin, and is holding the action to cast a fireball. The knight grabs the dwarf when able, and pulls him out of the hole, and the warmage fires his fire ball bead in, failing to miss the mass of wolf filling the hole, and hit far enough back to actually hit everything in the den. The wolves all take a bit of damage, the rust monster continues to stay the hell out of it.

Long story short, wolf form werewolf monks (Were Dire Wolf Monk2, 3 Werewolf Monk1s) rock the party, mostly thanks to the were dire wolf having Rapid Blitz and 8hd. As they're nearing a TPK (they did manage to take out one normal pack member), the leader signals his pack to stop attacking and try to intimidate, trying for all the world to act like normal wolves defending territory. The party starts backing up, taking defensive actions, healing, etc. The warmage drops enlarge, knight gets on his horse and turns to leave and the lead werewolf turns to look at the last three as if to say "take the fucking hint." Of course the knight stupidly decided to just feint and turns back around to charge with a lance. He fucking misses the Clydesdale sized wolf, and gets his horse reduced to 1/3 it's hp, and himself knocked unconscious for his troubles. I decide a warhorse probably tries to leave battle if his master goes limp, and the horse wanders away from the big scary predator that just headbutted it in the chest. The rest of the party decides that now's a good time to leave, and does so. In all the fighting, the warmage would have contracted lycanthropy, but has a periapt of disease protection, so, there goes that hint.

The party heals up on the way out of the forest, and tries to play it off like "oh, yeah, we totally won. Um, don't go back there. There's a giant wolf, leave it the hell alone, or send your Lord when he gets back, or something." They set up to bait the other rust monster that night. The warmage gets bored after five minutes and goes to his nice warm bed. No rust monster shows. They're all pretty much prepared to write it off and leave, when the Lord's daughter comes in from the village because the staff went and got her when adventurers showed up to talk to the lord, since he's off on business elsewhere, not living in his manor like a normal noble. She thanks them for their (completely unneeded) help, offers them all rooms for the night, they tell her about the rust monster and "keep the pointy sticks handy, and, oh, hey, that might be a werewolf, so keep the silver handy too." They decide to stay another night, because, hey, free room and board.

Yeah... that night, as the dwarf waits for a rust monster again, the werewolves enact their actual plan. The pack goes for the village, while the leader heads straight for the manor to grab the daughter, planning on turning her at midnight to be his mate. The dwarf alerts the party with the bait pots. The warmage runs out wearing only his harness of weapons, the knight runs flat out for the stable for his horse, and the paladin starts running down the stairs. The wolf attacks the dwarf, jumps up to the balcony, avoids a trip from the dwarf's whip, is missed by the warmage's spear, and.... rolls a one to bite the fucking warmage, falling to the ground. Next round, same basic thing, but he leaps back down because, hey three attacks, Paladin makes it out the door, and sees a big fuck all wolf in front of him. Round three, the dwarf leaps onto the wolf's back, the paladin gets a flanking bonus, because, hey, technically, and the wolf just fucking jumps up to the balcony where a staggered warmage can't do shit. Wolf moves inside, and the paladin runs back in. Wolf runs in, dwarf attempts to hogtie, wolf breaks rope. Wolf throws dwarf off as the dwarf fails to maintain grapple, and stands up from prone. Just as the knight shows up, hears the crashing on the second floor, and leaps his horse on to the balcony, fully prepared to ream the wolf in a very literal way. The paladin smites the wolf, dropping it.

Party levels up as they basically breath a moment before the run off to protect the town, where screams having been coming from for the last few rounds, and we end for the night.

So the party made pretty short work of those werewolves in town, being given silver weapons by the manor lord on their way out. And the 12 more that had been made from commoners. I decided to instate the "when reduced to 0 or fewer hp, the target doesn't die if the attacker doesn't want them to" house rule, since we didn't want to deal with Van Helsing's paradox.

Along with being told "hey, keep 'em" on the weapons, the party also walked away with four werewolf pelts that had bounties they could collect, and an invitation to a royal wedding happening in two weeks.

The lord offers to take them with him when he teleports back to his office, which they accept. The party dicks around for a bit, hiring a teleport mage to take them to Osturopa to trade in the pelts (because I sure as hell wasn't prepared to run a long journey across the continent). They met Hero-king Bouddica, got their gold and puttered around the Son of Diesed camp, upgraded their weapons a bit, the paladin got one of the pelts made into boots, and teleported back to Aidespol, the city named for the Aides the god of the underworld and wealth, and wealthiest city in the Athosian Empire. Oh, and a dragon showed up to be the paladin's mount. And on they went to the Villa of Senator Argyros to attend the wedding.

On the way, the farm boy cum knight noticed that the fields were strangely empty. Like, no one was taking care of them empty. So he went down to one of the houses and knocked on the door. He was greeted by a beautiful young woman who assured him nothing was wrong. As he busied himself with keeping the womanizing warmage from seeing this farmer's daughter and trying to get her to tell him what was wrong, something about the size of a dog fell out of the sky and bounced off of his shield. Then four more of them dropped out of the sky around the party. The woman tried, and failed, to bullrush the knight into his party so the things could actually have a shot at confusing them, but none the less, the creatures took forms of adjacent party members, and were quickly slaughtered. Oh, and the farmer's daughter was one as well.

Incensed that a wedding would be going on while the nearby serfs were being attacked by demons, the knight rode on to the villa, protected by a large magic circle against evil, to see what the hell was going on. The guards waved them through the walls, and they were immediately greeted by a large area in which commoners had set up tents, having been brought behind the walls for protection. Looking for any reason at all to be pissed off at rich people (knights in my world are practitioners of a Conan-esque martial style, not inherently members of a social class), he stormed off to find the Senator. Who was busy paying people, because it was payroll day, basically. Then they went to find the prince, who was busy taking care of wedding shit. They asked were the bride was, and were told she was busy hunting to help provide all the food that's necessary for both feeding a displaced populace and a large royal wedding that has four separate feasts. They ran out into the forest, following the markers that had been put up in case the fighting force of the villa were needed while they were out hunting, and found, well a clearing full of people pissed off at the guys in clinking armour and weapons running up and scaring off any animals in the area. The bride, Lady Dalia, greeted the party and introduced them to her battle siblings, the squad she fights with in the Athosian army. So it seemed that things really were pretty well in hand and the people in the villa weren't particularly interested in stopping wedding preparations to go kill some demons. So the party did that. Given that changeling demons are CR 1/2 and a fight with six of them barely did any damage to the party, I montaged it and rolled d% to see how many they managed to kill that day. I got, roughly, everythingleft%. So after about a couple hours of hunting down things that looked like other things, then a couple hours of finding nothing to kill, they piled all the corpses, which are usable for making some magic items, into a bag of holding, and went back. They partook of the dinner laid out for everyone and mingled a bit, trying to figure out what the hell was going on.

After dinner everyone went off to their quarters, the warmage with the bride's battle sisters, and went to sleep. Eventually, anyway.
The prince knocked on the Knight's door, and said that he overheard the prince talking about wanting a dragon mount of his own at dinner, and said he had a book in his library that may be of use. As the knight looked through the book, the prince hit him with the Forget Me Stick (except actually magic. It was a club with Deep Slumber) and stashed him in some caves under the villa. Then he tried to get to the warmage, except the warmage woke up, so he had to play it off as checking up on him. Finally he knocked on the door of the paladin and told him about "terrible demons under the manor!" saying he had to "come quickly!" The paladin grabbed the others and the prince led them to the secret passage in the library and told them the demons were down there. He then closed the fucking dimensional door and left them down there where the everyone but the thief acrobat failed to avoid running into the holding cell where the knight had been left. The pit then closed over with solid rock. Running back and triggering the pit again, the thief acrobat ran forward, held the ledge open with an immovable rod, and climbed down. Below, the party woke up the knight, and dug out a hole out of the pit filled in with chunks of crystal. In the larger chamber, they found... a couple commoners mining the crystal walls of the cavern. When pressed about stealing from the Senator, the commoners attacked, dropping the disguise and turning out to be larger specimens of the demons fought before. It was a slightly tougher fight, but at the end, they killed the demons, and were rewarded with a Magic Caustic Longsword, and a Magic Flaming Longsword. They found the bridesmaids hidden in a chamber off the main one, and leapt across a chasm to a ledge that led to another chamber, and found the prince inside, dirty and disheveled. The Prince was able to lead them out of the crystal caverns through passages he knew about as a kid.

Coming up the next night, the party rode into the rehearsal feast and confronted the now known to be false prince. The false prince dropped his disguise, and stood before them in her true form. Combat ensued, in which the evil warlock tried to escape by flying, and was caught by the paladin's dragon mount. ...who died from two eldritch blasts, until the paladin read that he could use ride in place of a mount's AC and saved the damned thing's ass. They were richly rewarded with a bit of gold, a bunch of crystal they can use, and some land.