So about that fight...<br/><br/>Well, it was a little more touch and go than I'd expected and planned, mostly because I didn't know what tactics you'd all be using. Now I do. Still, it turned out well, a nice little opening fight that drove a few people to the brink while still being winnable. In case it wasn't entirely obvious, the cultists' tactical plan was to have their various critters bar the way and wear you down while the two orc men got in a chokepoint and started defensively fighting to delay you as much as possible to let the druid exhaust all her spells blasting you, at which point she'd pop her growth and rush in to play and feed herself. Obviously, splitting up threw that out. Splitting up did, however, very nearly get Xarithe digested; his adventures were very much a good news bad news thing, since it meant two-three rounds without more magic bombardment but also meant one of your better damage dealers was stuck trying to gnaw on stomach walls.<br/><br/>If you're curious: Both male cultists were stock Half Orc Fighter 3s with Basic NPC stats. The cheetahs and mantis were stock with a very slight amount of beefing up; the female was the one I let myself go nuts with. Custom 20 RP Corrupted Elf race, including such lovely gift baskets as spell resistance and toxicity; she was a Blight Druid 5 too, with the growth domain tossed on for funsies. She had some really vicious spells she never had time to use thanks to Xarithe occupying her mouth, like Call Lightning (hey, didn't I note that the sky was about to storm a few times? Yeah...), Heat Metal for roasting PCs in their armor, and the last resort if Xarithe had directly sent Sira to attack her at the start of the fight- Dominate Animal. That would have just been<span style="font-style: italic">mean</span>.<img alt=":lol:" src="./images/smilies/icon_lol.gif" title="Laughing"/>Whenever a PC has a super-powerful ally or weapon, I instinctively start looking for ways to turn it back against the party. Not every fight, mind you, but this is far from the last enemy that's going to have that spell in their hip pocket.<br/><br/>Anyway! I'll note this in the game thread too, but that was a CR 4 (Druid) + CR 3 (Mantis) + 4x CR 2 (Cultists, Cheetahs) encounter, for a total of 3800 XP, making it an overall CR 7 fight; since the party's effective level is 5, that counts as a "Hard" encounter! 635 XP for everyone, and since we're on Fast progression that's abouuut 1/6th of the way to Level 5. I'll assign individual XP awards and take a drink and figure out once and for all whether I'm using VP soon.