Hell's Rebels Unprepared

Last night, I ran some more of the Hell's Rebels adventure path converted to 5th edition. We're in the final book! We've got maybe 8 more sessions to go.

I love this campaign, and I feel like I really haven't run it well. Not as well as I could, anyway. I didn't fully prepare the path until we were halfway done with it, and I think it would have really helped me if I had done it all at the beginning.

The problem for me is that while I love these books, they are not at all easy to refer to in-game. Finding a single piece of information in a sea of text is very difficult while running a session.

Preparing: When I sat down to get ready for this session, I had a really hard time focusing. I already had hand-written notes, which I'd made months ago. I just couldn't retain what was on the page and it was a real struggle to get in the mindset.

Right now, the heroes are trying to deal with "haunts" around the city. There are 5 mini-missions that must be dealt with. Completing these missions gives the group magical visions that point them to the source of these haunts - the Soul Anchor, which sits under the city.

The group had completed two missions. There were three left:

1. An enemy they killed a while back had returned as an undead nemhain.
2. A creature known as a "popobala" was riling up crowds of rabblerousers.
3. A HELL PRISON was drawing people into it.

I didn't really have a good feeling about these encounters. I felt like the nemhain would be a boring fight, I wasn't sure how involved I should get with the popobala, and the Hell Prison was kind of vague and could be run a million different ways. Destroying it would likely involve a drawn-out fight with a slew of barbed devils.

The one thing that sort of tickled me was the idea of having their "frenemy", Shensen (a pretty major Pathfinder NPC) meeting with Mordenkainen and being pulled into the scenario happening in my Dungeon Academy game.

Shensen: We had left off with the group about to enter Shensen's lair. They really enjoy picking on poor Shensen, because her lair is connected to the sewers. The group actually made fun of her when her pet awakened dinosaur Gut-Tugger, was killed in the big battle in the Temple of Asmodeus.

So we kick off the session and I was greatly amused at playing Mordenkainen all dramatic. The group teased Shensen some more, and now she is gone from the campaign. The adventurers ended up giving her secret lair to an NPC they'd convinced to defect from Cheliax.

Narcelia: I've dropped a few clues to the group that their enemy, Barzillai, was obsessed with someone named Narcelia. The players surprised me by trying to find her with scrying magic. I had to go through my notes real quick to find out info on her. It took me a minute, but I was able to place her in Port Peril, the main city int he Skull & Shackles path.

She has a pretty crazy story, and I'm quite interested to see if they track her down.

Horse-Killer: I should note that there's a whole thing going on with Essie, the group's necromancer. She's married to a zombie, and she cheated on him with a feywild horse-spirit. Her baby was delivered via stork last session, and now her husband (who was a serial killer when alive) has begun to serial kill the horses of Kintargo.

The Soul Anchor: Then the group decided to do more research to figure out what these haunts were all about. Here's where I got tripped up. What can the group learn about the Soul Anchor? Am I OK with them skipping these missions and going down there?

I had a feeling that the Soul Anchor was immune to divination, but I just couldn't find that info in the book at the time. It played out piece-by-piece, as I tried to find what they could learn. Ultimately, I just decided to let them scry the location, because I thought it would be cool. It felt kind of lame to block them.

I mean, this might mean they'd skip the three missions, but I wasn't all that keen on those missions anyway.

Garbage Versions of Encounters: They ultimately found the soul anchor with magic, but then decided to deal with the three haunts first. I really didn't want to play out the missions because I just wasn't feeling them, so I did what I used to do sometimes in 4th edition - I ran quick B.S. versions of them where the group plows through the thing in a single round.

They took down the nemhain and destroyed her hellcat bones. Then they tracked down the popobala, and learned about popobala fever (indegestion) sweeping over this area of the city. The group mauled the popobala and conveniently found its massive treasure hoard.

Then the group dealt with the HELL PRISON. Usually the group rolls good on saving throws, but not on this night. Most of the group was sucked into the prison and forced into cells via and imprisonment spell.

Ashes and Raal were outside the prison, and ultimately used Ashes' gun that shoots radiant bullets to destroy the prison and free their friends.

Then they made their way to the magic elevator that would take them to the Soul Anchor.

There's some crazy encounters down there by the soul anchor, so I'm definitely looking forward to next week.