We've had a few sessions of my home D&D game since I last talked about it, so I thought today I'd jot down a bit of a recap. This is partly for me, so I can reference what happened later if I need, but perhaps it'll also serve as inspiration to anyone reading it or even just as an interesting tidbit about my game.
When last I had talked about this game, I had been about to run an in-office short heist for two of my players, which I talked about here: Making a 1-Hour Heist Adventure.
We did manage to pull that off, though I spliced in some Starforged mechanics to make things easier and ensure we didn't get bogged down in 5e combat, which is notoriously slow.
The two players managed to toss on some quick but sufficient disguises to make themselves look like simple labourers here to help out with an ongoing renovation. As soon as they were given direction by the job-site foreman they ditched their assignment, headed upstairs, and began absolutely ransacking the place with the help of their extra-planar pocket dimension book.
They did manage to get a decent amount of furniture - which is what they were primarily after - but ran into guards three times and left two unconscious before pulling a 'Batman exploding smoke bomb' style trick. The arcane trickster of the group tossed out a fog cloud and they bailed out a second-story window to get away when the last set of guards caught up to them.
So, all in all - they got what they wanted, and I've got a reason to have someone back in Lavan looking for the thieves brave enough or foolish enough to steal from him.
At our next full-group session, we covered what those two guys did with the rest of their downtime, and what the rest of the party did.
With that done, they spent several days lying low, while the rest of the party took their downtime actions - a lot of reading and research, setting up their claimed spaces within the extra-dimensional mansion, and a bit of shopping/selling.
Peril - the team's Arcane Trickster Rogue got a letter from an old contact saying he had heard from a little birdy that they were in the same town, and he might have a job they could team up for like old times.
The party also had their initiation ceremony to welcome them as official retainers of the Bandyhand Institute - allowing them to take jobs for the Institute and giving them access to the library itself and several other perks.
At that point, the players were given the choice of how to proceed: they could follow up with Peril's job offer, they could immediately take a job with the Bandyhand Institute, or they could check in at the Adventurers' Guild and snag any of the available jobs from them.
They chose to goof about with another team of freshly-initiated Bandyhand retainers, and eventually decided on having a "friendly wager" where they'd both take the single job that the Institute had right now, and see who could pull it off first. Because the non-PC team was fairly cocky, they even gave our players a 1-day head-start.
Eager to capitalize on that as much as possible, they figured out where they needed to go and began to plan how they might cut that 7-day's walk down into something more reasonable.
And then someone at the table asked if the other team had horses.
And then the druid asked if she could wildshape into a horse, do a bit of sexy-horse walk near the other team's horses, and try to seduce them into following her.
And all of that was just too dang funny for us not to see if it'd work. So they dressed the team's goblin up as a kenku (which the other team had). This partly worked because I had mistakenly thought Kenku and Goblins were both "Small" size creatures, but despite there being on average only 8 inches of height difference... that's still enough to bump the Kenku into a "Medium" size category.
Either way though, adding a disguise kit's worth of cobbled together stuff onto a goblin and calling it a kenku was absolutely hilarious at the table and I have zero regrets that I let the con work. Our goblin-cum-kenku managed to get the stablehands to saddle "his" team's horses for him and lead them just outside.
At which point our Druid-Horse-wildshape strutted her sexy horse walk around and, with a blindingly high set of 3 rolls all above 20, managed to sway the other team's horses into following her out of town.
So, now my PCs are off on a new quest to look into reports of a cult with a powerful tome doing cult-shit, riding stolen horses from the competing team (which, are still members of their same organization), and have a day's head start.
Next session should be interesting!
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