Jade Regent – Night of Frozen Shadows, Session 2

Second Session (11 page pdf) – We head out to Asvig Longthews’ house to kill us some Vikings. We end up saving some Vikings but killing some ninjas!  Once we hear a chick named “Thorborg” is behind this unholy genre mash-up, we head right out to kill her.

We snuck up on a Viking wake. After V’lk annoyed me by setting off the obvious lion-summoning trap, we got control of the place without a lot of trouble. Asvig Longthews as our prisoner was being intractable, but we knew that a lot of these guys have some kind of head-exploding curse on them for if they talk.  In what seemed to be quite against GM expectations, we managed to dispel the curse and get the Ulfen on our side!

Alas, the ninja ambush that was probably going to be waiting for us at the funeral boats just came to the longhouse instead. And they took me out fast.  With my character, sometimes I end up leading the battle to victory, sometimes I get dropped in two rounds. Not too much in between. Finally, we kill them and head off to find the person behind this, a woman named Thorborg (this made us giggle).

So we argue about plans – draw her to town, ambush her on the road… No, we’ll just go right up to the front door of her keep. Our attempt to bluff our way past the door guards goes badly and we get to fight more ninjas.  They are really annoying, because they can go invisible and then sneak attack you.  For a PC it’s less cool because you can only do it a couple times a day, but of course monsters only have to go one combat and get to use all their daily uses on you.

The humorous silver lining, however, is that the kenku ninjas were equipped liberally with blowguns.  Kenku are bird-people with beaks, not lips. This caused a minor riot to break out when we found it out.  They didn’t use them on us, luckily.  We speculated that there’s some ninja union and they make everyone carry blowguns whether or not they are equipped biologically to use them. “Now that’s Lawful!”

The illustrations in the books add a lot to the play experience.  We always show the monster pics to the players (sometimes having to obscure 3/4 of the page in the book to safely do so) and in this one, the spider eater picture really put us off our feed; we had considered killing it just to clear the way and after we saw it we decided “screw that!”