OK, for the next few sessions worth of blog posts on sessions of Valery and The Other Two, I want to confess what the blog posts are going to consist of. When we started playing this second Tales of the Valiant adventure my oldest, Scarlett, asked if we could record ourselves playing. She had been having trouble remembering from session to session what was going on. We did so and it was fun for a time, but then a few things happened:

• Sam did not want to wear the microphone anymore and his audio became hard to hear
• My wife would be doing stuff around the house and so I had to edit her out of the audio whenever she came to ask us something or talk to the kids
• I occasionally had to edit the audio to keep my audio in sync with the kids’ audio

In short, it became a real pain in the butt for the fact that I am not recording an actual play podcast. It became a chore on top of coming up with the interstitial adventures, tying story to characters, managing the player levels, and so on. So I procrastinated and procrastinated and now it’s been MONTHS since I posted anything. I can’t even remember what we did in those sessions.

To rectify that, I’ve done 2 things:

1. I wrote a Python script to use whisper (which I knew about from using it for subtitles on Kdenlive) to transcribe all the audio and assign it to each of the participants.
2. I asked Claude to summarize the session

I know there’s a lot of animus to AI. I get it. But I also believe in using computers to make the boring or annoying things easy and/or fast. (See all the scripts and programs I’ve written about on my blog over the past 20ish years) But, I’m being transparent here and I will also be transparent when I get caught up to the most recent sessions, which we are NOT recording and which I wrote some notes on. They’ve happened recently enough that I can remember what happened and write my own summaries without using an AI. Because, frankly, I enjoy writing these things I don’t want my blog to be AI generated - what’s the point of that? But I also enjoy playing TTRPGs with my kids (and my other hobbies) so I don’t really have the time to listen to the recordings and create my own notes. I just don’t have the motivation for that.

note: I did read over the summary to fix it for accuracy and ad some asides here and there

The Story

Time elapsed so far in campaign at start of this adventure: 96 days

Summary

Session Recap: The Road to Velder Keep

Party: Storm, Valery, and Beatrice (with a scorpion friend along for the ride) — GM’d by Eric

Two weeks had passed in-world since the party last regrouped, and business had clearly been booming while they were away. The group opened up shop, cashing in a haul that included a 200-gold diamond, a pile of loose weapons, and the mineral hide their from slaying a dragon a few sessions ago (turned into armor and sold on consignment). After a little grumbling over gold counts and pencil-borrowing, the party stocked up on healing potions — regular, greater, and (rare and expensive) supreme — ahead of a new job.

The Job

A messenger arrived with a job offer: travelers had gone missing far to the north, up in Trollheim. That meant a real expedition — overland from Zobek, past Valery’s family territory, up to the Grand Duchy of Dornig (where Appelune from Campaign 01 now lives), and finally to the port town of Thorn to charter a ship west.

The trip up was not exactly smooth sailing (or hiking):

• The party crossed a rickety rope bridge over a ravine — Valery shoved everyone across just before the whole thing collapsed behind them.
• A distracted Storm, walking backward through a forest while chatting with the group, marched everyone straight into a beehive. Bee stings all around, though nobody worse for wear after a few nights’ rest.
• Near the end of the trek, the party mistook a stretch of quicksand for a beach — somehow making it to Thorn without incident anyway.

Arrival at the Veil

After chartering passage west, the party landed in a small farming village of 40–50 people known as the Veil, mid-planting season. They were greeted by Gudrun of Nargenstall, who explained the village’s real problem: the Mossback Raiders, a marauding band led by an ogre, had been terrorizing them, and the local militia (i.e., farmers with pitchforks) couldn’t do a thing about it. Rumor had it the raiders were sitting on a hoard of silver from previous raids.

The village council’s opening offer — farmland and 20 gold a year — didn’t impress Storm, who flatly turned it down. What followed was a genuinely funny back-and-forth of the council scrambling to sweeten the deal (an offer to commission a victory ballad was quickly retracted once someone remembered Storm is already a bard), before landing on four free healing potions to close the deal.

Into the Ruins

Two days’ travel later — punctuated by a fight against a pack of oddly saddled “polar bears,” dispatched with thunder wave, sneak attacks, and a well-timed sorcery point crit — the party reached Velder Keep, a crumbling ruin serving as raider hideout. Investigation checks turned up a squad of raiders inside the old gatehouse, dispatched in a brutal three-round fight before they could raise the alarm (Valery’s scorpion companion put in serious work here).

The real fight was still ahead. Searching a trophy-strewn back room — skulls, dented helmets, and looted weapons hung on every wall — the party found the raiders’ leader waiting for them: Gutmangle, the Trollkin Warlord, a seven-and-a-half-foot barrel-chested brute demanding to know why they’d walked into his chambers. (“I was just looking for the bathroom.”)

The fight was fast and satisfying:

• Beatrice found a lucky replacement weapon — an axe identical to the one that had been turned into Valery’s scorpion companion (by some wild magic sorcery).
• Valery’s thunder wave landed a near-max-damage hit (a failed save doubling the damage to 20), slamming Gutmangle into a wall.
• With Gutmangle bloodied and reeling, the party finished him off with an actual falling meteor — summoned Valery’s wild magic — for a monstrous 70 damage. He didn’t get up.

Loot from Gutmangle’s hoard included stacks of copper, silver, and gold, a five-gold copper amulet, a hundred-gold bolt of silk, and a small armory’s worth of gear (chain shirts, scale mail, crossbows, a pike, tools, rations, and more) — most of it earmarked for the shop next session.

Cliffhanger

With the raiders cleared out, the party found a second staircase behind Gutmangle’s room, leading down into a set of dungeons carved half out of an old jail and half out of storage caverns beneath the keep. That’s exactly where the group left off, with the dungeon delve — and whatever’s waiting for the missing villagers — picked back up next session.

Running total: three long rests banked, one very lucky axe recovered, and the party is 20 gold a year richer than they wanted to be.

GM Notes (NO AI here)

Valery’s wild magic continued to cause lots of chaos. But what I was definitely not expecting was for a meteor to be summoned onto the head of the main baddie.

• Tales-of-the-Valiant