Pupils of Susan complete the Red Wizard’s Gambit

Funeral, Bastion, Tower

The Pupils of Susan return to Kwalish Downs carrying the cost of their last adventure. After laying Maldurson to rest and provisioning their new Bastion, the heroes receive another assignment in the escalating struggle against the Red Wizards.

Unfortunately, the mission begins with Malforte opening an explosively trapped door and continues with a flock of vrocks turning the tower into a poisonous, screeching death trap. As the party climbs toward almost certain annihilation, salvation arrives from an exceptionally suspicious source: Kalah, a spy working inside the Red Wizards’ operation.

Welcome home. Mind the door.

This session continues our campaign through Red Wizards’ Gambit, the Season of Magic play series for the D&D Encounters program, drawing on “Delia’s Dagger” and its distinctly unfriendly “Demonic Welcome.”

Characters

Brett –Elias Runebow – Neutral Good – Human – Fighter – Arcane Archer – Archivist – Hunted artefacts for Thay – worked for Alyis
Brian – Ploeim – Human – Cleric – Criminal – Oghma – Mule named Quixote
Bryan – Malefort – Neutral Evil – Human – Warlock – Vestige – member of the Bejewelled Conclave – nobleman – foppish
Cody – Syr Kel-Thuzad – Lawful Neutral – Paladin – Acolyte – Worships Bane (may have changed to Cyric) – grain curse.
Conner – Brick – Chaotic Neutral – Goblin – Rogue – Fey lost
David – Ms Susan – Neutral – Human – Rouge / Sorcerer / Fighter – Custom Sage – Grand daughter of Death
Ivan – Whisper – Chaotic Good – Drow (Disguise Self as High Elf) – Ranger – Gloom Stalker – Settlers & Family killed by Alyis

RIP

Cody – Maldur – Lawful Good – Cleric of Kelemvor – collect the Crown of Thorns from Szass Tam
Cody – Maldurson –

NPC

Zorri – Leader of community Immultar
Ezzik – crafter of powerful magic items (dagger), captured by Red Wizards
Uelek – crafter of powerful magic items (combining), captured by Red Wizards
Kalah Qaree – Red Wizard – serve a zulkir of Thay named Xelnene Thrul – saved party
Osmik – crafter of powerful magic items (boots), captured by Red Wizards
Ivorge – crafter of powerful magic items (ring), captured by Red Wizards

Summary

There are several recognized stages in establishing a respectable heroic headquarters:

1. Acquire land.
2. Name the property.
3. Provision the property.
4. Bury one of your companions.
5. Immediately accept another life-threatening assignment.

The Pupils of Susan have completed all five ahead of schedule.

Their growing legend continues through Red Wizards’ Gambit, the Season of Magic play series published for the D&D Encounters program. This session moves into “Delia’s Dagger,” an adventure whose official structure includes “The Entrance,” “Demonic Welcome,” and “Close-up Magic.” Those headings proved less metaphorical than the party might have preferred.

Homecoming at Kwalish Downs

The Pupils returned to Kwalish Downs, the ten-acre estate they acquired outside Immilmar, as property owners, adventurers, and the custodians of several increasingly expensive problems.

Kwalish Downs is now their Bastion: a permanent headquarters where the party can recover, provision itself, build influence, and engage in the sacred fantasy tradition of converting adventuring revenue into real estate overhead.

Yet their homecoming was not triumphant.

The party returned without Maldurson.

Fragments for Maldurson

Before there could be inventories, contracts, fortifications, or plans for the next expedition, the Pupils of Susan buried Maldurson.

For once, there was no puzzle to solve and no enemy whose defeat could reverse what had happened. The party could only perform the small, necessary work of remembrance. Earth was moved. Final words were offered. A companion became part of the history of Kwalish Downs.

The grave transformed the Bastion. It was no longer merely land won through an improbable exchange involving the prototype Apparatus of Kwalish. It had become a place carrying the party’s history, including the names of those who would not live to see what the estate might eventually become.

Maldurson’s burial also cast a shadow over everything that followed. The Pupils had survived, but survival did not mean that the previous adventure was finished with them.

The burial of Maldurson at Kwalish Downs: a solemn fantasy funeral on the estate, with the unfinished Bastion in the distance, Rashemi countryside surrounding the mourners, and the party gathered around a newly raised cairn. Use subdued evening light and leave room for the image to feel genuinely mournful rather than merely ominous.

Bastion Management: The Other Dungeon

With their respects paid, the party turned toward the equally dangerous business of property management.

Supplies were purchased. Resources were assigned. The estate was provisioned for its new role as the headquarters of the Pupils of Susan. These decisions lacked the excitement of fighting monsters, but every sack of grain, repair, hireling, and defensive preparation pushed Kwalish Downs closer to becoming a functioning stronghold.

The party’s expanding reputation made that work more important. A Bastion is an asset, but it is also a declaration. It informs allies, rivals, creditors, spies, and wandering monsters that the heroes can now be found at a permanent address.

It is the adventuring equivalent of publishing office hours.

Character Update: The Pupils of Susan

The party entered this session carrying two competing responsibilities. They needed to establish Kwalish Downs as a viable home, but they also remained entangled in the growing conflict surrounding the Red Wizards.

Their decision to accept another quest so soon after Maldurson’s burial demonstrates either extraordinary courage or a catastrophic inability to recognize a warning.

Both interpretations remain under review.

A Quest Arrives

The quiet at Kwalish Downs did not last.

The Pupils received another assignment connected to the Red Wizards’ activities. Their previous exploits had established that Thayan interests were operating throughout the region and that several apparently isolated dangers were part of a larger campaign.

This continued the pattern established in the previous session, when the party rescued Ezzik, learned that Delia D’Caryn was directing the operation, and received intelligence concerning another captive wizard. The earlier adventure also left Whisper’s search for Alyss unresolved, tying the wider magical conspiracy to his personal pursuit of vengeance.

Rested, supplied, and almost certainly overconfident, the Pupils left their new Bastion and followed the trail to a tower.

The tower had doors.

This would become important.

The Difference Between a Grave and a Door

A grave is something one approaches carefully.

A trapped door, experience suggests, should receive similar treatment.

Malforte opened the tower doors and triggered an explosive trap. The detonation tore through the entrance and knocked him unconscious before the expedition had properly begun.

This was not merely a tactical setback. It was the building’s formal greeting.

The mission’s first major encounter was therefore not a duel with a Red Wizard or a confrontation with a legendary monster. It was an architectural disagreement, decisively won by the architecture.

Character Update: Malforte

Malforte began the adventure as the steward of the party treasury and one of the principal figures responsible for turning Kwalish Downs into a functioning Bastion. In the previous session, his surprisingly competent management of the group’s finances had already become mildly suspicious.

At the tower, however, Malforte exchanged fiscal responsibility for experimental trap detection.

The result was immediate unconsciousness.

His collapse placed the rest of the party under pressure before the true defenders of the tower had even entered the fight. It also established the session’s governing principle: every resource spent at Kwalish Downs was about to be tested, rapidly and without the benefit of a refund policy.

The exploding tower entrance: Malforte thrown backward by a magical blast as shattered doors, stone fragments, smoke, and arcane energy fill the foreground. Above the tower, several vulture-like demonic silhouettes should be descending toward the party.

Wings, Spores, and Poor Decisions

The explosion announced the party’s arrival.

The vrocks answered.

These towering, vulture-like demons attacked the already-disorganized adventurers, filling the battle with claws, toxic spores, and supernatural screams. What began as a difficult entrance rapidly became a fight for survival.

The current vrock is a substantially more dangerous creature than its legacy incarnation. Its 2024 statistics give it 152 Hit Points, poison damage on its Shred attacks, a 20-foot spore emanation, and a Stunning Screech that inflicts thunder damage in addition to the Stunned condition.

The vrocks’ spores were particularly punishing. A failed Constitution saving throw inflicted the Poisoned condition and caused continuing poison damage until the victim succeeded on a later save or received an application of Holy Water.

For a party already weakened by an exploding entrance, the cumulative pressure was brutal. Poison interfered with the heroes’ ability to attack effectively, ongoing damage punished every round of delay, and the vrocks’ mobility allowed them to control the vertical battlefield.

Rules Sidebar: Do Multiple Vrock Spore Effects Stack?

Under the general D&D rule for combining identical effects, multiple instances of the same named feature do not normally add their mechanical effects together while their durations overlap. A creature affected by spores from more than one vrock would therefore not ordinarily take the recurring poison damage multiple times at the start of the same turn.

However, each vrock’s use of Spores can still require its own saving throw, and the longest applicable duration can continue to govern the overlapping effect. This is an important distinction in an encounter involving several vrocks:

• Multiple vrocks can expose the same character to repeated saving throws.
• The character does not ordinarily suffer several simultaneous copies of the Poisoned condition.
• The recurring damage from the identically named effect should not ordinarily be added together.
• A flask of Holy Water remains an especially valuable countermeasure because the vrock ability explicitly identifies it as a way to end the effect early.

From a Dungeon Master’s perspective, the 2024 vrock already generates substantial encounter pressure without multiplying its ongoing spore damage.

Upward Is Not Always Forward

Rather than retreat, the Pupils fought their way farther into the tower.

They climbed.

Each level reduced their options. The tower’s confined spaces favored the demons’ emanations and punished attempts to regroup. Hit Points disappeared. Conditions accumulated. Resources were spent faster than the party could stabilize.

What had begun as a mission now began to resemble a total-party kill assembled one saving throw at a time.

The official “Delia’s Dagger” sequence places its demonic welcome immediately after the entrance, which accurately describes the dramatic rhythm of the session: first the trapped threshold, then the demons, then the realization that the tower had only started objecting to the party’s presence.

Character Update: The Party at the Brink

The Pupils of Susan have often survived by overwhelming their opponents before those opponents can organize. This encounter reversed that advantage.

Malforte’s early collapse deprived the group of momentum. The vrocks’ poison and stunning abilities forced the party to respond to several threats simultaneously. Advancing upstairs compressed the battlefield and made withdrawal increasingly difficult.

The group was no longer controlling the encounter. It was spending everything it had simply to remain in it.

For a few rounds, a TPK appeared not merely possible but narratively appropriate.

That was when Kalah arrived.

Enter Kalah

With the Pupils closing in on annihilation, intervention came from inside the enemy’s organization.

Kalah, a spy embedded within the Red Wizards’ operation, entered the conflict and saved the party from destruction.

Her appearance changed more than the balance of the battle. Until this moment, the Red Wizards’ network had largely appeared as a single hostile force. Kalah revealed fractures within that network, suggesting that spies, defectors, competing loyalties, or hidden alliances are operating beneath its surface.

She saved the heroes, but rescue is not the same as trust.

Kalah has access to the Red Wizards. She knew where the party was. She was in a position to intervene at precisely the moment their defeat appeared inevitable. All three facts are useful. None is comforting.

Character Update: Kalah

Kalah enters the campaign as both rescuer and complication.

Her immediate contribution is undeniable: without her intervention, the Pupils might never have left the tower. Her broader purpose remains uncertain. A spy survives by maintaining more than one version of the truth, and the party does not yet know which version Kalah has offered them.

She may be an ally working against the Red Wizards.

She may be cultivating the Pupils as useful assets.

She may be both.

In espionage, these categories are not mutually exclusive.

Recommended Image 3

Kalah’s intervention: the battered party trapped on a tower stairway while vrocks close in from above and below. Kalah appears through smoke or red magical light, striking at the demons while still visually associated with the Red Wizards. The composition should make it unclear whether she represents salvation, betrayal, or both.

The Cost of Renown

The Pupils returned home as recognized adventurers. They accepted another quest because recognized adventurers are expected to do that sort of thing.

Renown brings access to patrons, intelligence, resources, and increasingly consequential missions. It also attracts the attention of enemies capable of anticipating the party’s movements and preparing accordingly.

Kwalish Downs gives the heroes a home. Their growing reputation ensures that home will never be entirely separate from their wars.

A Bastion offers security, but it also places a name on the map.

Where the Session Leaves Us

The party has survived the tower, but survival has produced more questions than answers.

• Maldurson has been laid to rest at Kwalish Downs.
• The Bastion has been provisioned and is beginning to function as the party’s headquarters.
• Malforte survived an explosively trapped entrance.
• The Pupils endured a vicious assault by vrocks.
• Their advance nearly ended in a total-party kill.
• Kalah revealed herself as a spy and intervened on their behalf.
• The party now possesses an ally inside the enemy organization, assuming she is truly an ally.
• The purpose of the tower, the full scope of Kalah’s mission, and the Red Wizards’ next move remain unresolved.

The Pupils of Susan began the session by placing a companion in the earth.

They ended it alive only because a spy stepped out of the enemy’s shadow.

Between the grave and the door lies the entire philosophy of adventuring: one marks what has already been lost, while the other asks whether you are foolish enough to continue.

The Pupils opened the door.

Of course they did.

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Product and Campaign Notes

This campaign incorporates Red Wizards’ Gambit, an official D&D Encounters play series for the Season of Magic. Its published adventures include “Stolen Spirits,” “The Height of Danger,” “The Depth of Despair,” “The Weight of Responsibility,” and “Delia’s Dagger.”

The vrocks encountered in this session use the updated monster design, which retains their poisonous spores and Stunning Screech while increasing their durability and offensive threat compared with the legacy version.

I could review the publicly indexed campaign post and official source listing, but the supplied YouTube Studio playlist requires authenticated access and its video contents were not available through the public page. I therefore based the session events and character outcomes on your notes rather than claiming details from the recordings.

Author’s note on the title: “The Difference Between a Grave and a Door” is an original Anne Carson-inspired title, chosen for the session’s movement from Maldurson’s burial to the catastrophic opening of the tower.