Let me start this post with an advance warning: I am writing these journals of the sessions of my D&D campaign in order to have an archive of them for myself. I have played and mastered several great campaigns over the last 35 years, and now find that the memory of them is fading. I lost most written traces of those campaigns as well. So this is an attempt of conserving at least the history of my current campaign. Having said that, not every session in a campaign tells a great story. This session was void of interesting story decisions, but filled mostly with tactical stuff. We had a really great combat encounter, but the fun of that is very hard to put into words for an audience that wasn't there. In fact the whole adventure is more about rolling dice than role-play, as this is planned to be the end of the current campaign. So the following post might be short and boring.

In the previous session the Favorites of Selune came to Moonstairs and discovered that a new troll king called Skalmad is in the process of recreating the old troll kingdom that had existed in the surrounding marshes over a hundred years ago. And the center of Skalmad's kingdom is just the cave system with the portal to the Feywild that the group is looking for. [As I said, this isn't a very subtle adventure.] So the adventurers are leaving town and travel through the swamplands with the help of a rough map in order to find the troll warrens.

Arriving at the troll warrens they found that the trolls have built a door at the entrance. Next to that door is a stream flowing out of the caves, with stalagmites forming a sort of natural barrier to entrance. But as the adventurers are a lot smaller and thinner than trolls, they decide to squeeze through that barrier instead of knocking at (or knocking down) the door. The rogue of the party sneaks ahead of the group to the point upstream where the walls give way to a tunnel in the cave, with a big log serving as bridge over the stream. Trying to look into the entrance cave the rogue rolls low on his stealth check, and is seen by one of the trolls in the cave. Combat ensues.

The front line fighters of the group place themselves on the side of the stream that goes towards the troll cave, while the others place themselves on the other side of the bridge, away from the trolls. As the tunnel only allows two trolls to attack in melee combat, that keeps the trolls from swarming the group. There are 3 regular trolls of the kind the group has fought before, and 4 war trolls with weapons and armor, that are tougher. The trolls not in melee can still throw rocks and do some damage, but with less effect than their melee attacks. So two of the war trolls go out of the entrance cave by the door, and start breaking down the stalagmites at the stream entrance to come at the players from a different side. They succeed in that two rounds later, come up the stream, and now are between the front line fighters and the rest of the group. Fortunately the sorceress manages to pull off a spell that pushes one of the trolls down the stream, and the front line fighters manage to retreat over the bridge and reunite with the rest of the group.

Having learned about the importance of fire against trolls to prevent regeneration, the group manages to beat the trolls down. But the fight wasn't easy, and the players made some good moves to overcome this challenge. As that took some time, we ended the session after this fight.