On the second session of my 5E rerun of Madness at Gardmore Abbey, the group (still just 3 players because of the same 2 absences) further explored the extra-dimensional watchtower. While that struck them with some minor madness effects, they did arrive at the top of the tower and encountered the beholder. Just like the previous group they negotiated a truce with the beholder and helped him (and them) to escape from the tower. While that is a somewhat selfish act to let loose this force of chaotic evil on the world, this second group had a better excuse: In 4E the beholder on top of the tower is designed to be tough but beatable. In 5E it is a standard beholder from the Monster Manual, with a challenge rating of 13, and thus near impossible for 3 level 5 players to beat.

With the beholder were a group of dazed zombies, one of them an elf zombie. They recognized that one as the lost father of Berrian Velfarren, and could thus finish a quest. Another quest done was scouting the layout of the abbey and number of orcs from the top of the watchtower. So they first passed by the elves, and then from there went back to Winterhaven, to hand in their quest and recover from the madness effects.

Berrian gave them another quest to explore the wizard's tower. Lord Padraig had another quest to negotiate peace with the elves. And in Winterhaven they encountered a paladin of Bahamut called Sir Oakley, who asked them to accompany him to the temple on top of the abbey to purify it from evil. With thus lots of options they decided to pass by the elves for the peace negotiations, which were easy with them having already done so many quests for the elves. From there they went up to Dragon's Roost and entered the temple. In the temple were two very strange angel-like creatures, which turned out to be harpies gone mad. Unlike the beholder before the harpies stats were changed to adjust the difficulty of the fight to make it interesting, as standard harpies are only challenge rating 1. With modified abilities causing some nasty effects in a zone around them through singing the fight was quite interesting.

Besides the card they started with, in this session they received 3 cards from the beholder, and 1 card from the harpies. They still haven't really found out how to control the magical effects from the cards, but then there was only one real combat this session.