Our heroes are making progress.
From the rude sketch above, you might be able to tell that the party successfully cleared out the kobalds from the "Chaos Scar" ravine. This was a hard fought victory that required a party of eight rather than six.
Because I and my player are new fathers, I was happy that the party decided against slaughtering the innocent kobald kiddies. There is a limit to my imagination.
So much was I struck at the horror of humans slaughtering whole families of goblins that I was inspired to write a module sequence around this. More about this when I am finished.
Once again, twiddla is essential to making this work. This virtual table top provides enough grounding for even tactical discussions, as evidenced by the arrows in that screenshot.
Also, the two shared google spreadsheets (one for the character roster, one for the campaign diary) really take a huge bean-counting burden off my shoulders. This is the first time I have even come close to tracking turns/hours/days and it adds a wonderful dimension to the game.
Even though the rules say that I should not allow the PCs to level during the adventure, I believe that as they are based at the Keep, they should be able to train adequately. Not only are first level characters incredibly fragile, but the encounters in the remaining caves will kill them easily without some leveling.
What fun!
This fire elemental looks crazy:
