GM Notes: How's It Going

We've now played seven sessions of this campaign. Running a campaign that isn't a simple dungeon crawl every week is challenging but the payoff is nice. Having players that are into that kind of thing is even better. 

In this past session, an evil wizard used the Alter Self spell to impersonate the Abbot of the Temple of Ahki, the home temple of one of the PCs. In the old days (back in highschool) there was never really a good use for spells like that, as the situations never called for it. We were always just fighting. The players have had chances to use disguise, deception, performance, etc. 

There are things that happen in the game that the players are unaware of. I put clues in, and there are ways they could discover some of the hidden aspects, but I'm not leading them there. My thinking is that the bad guys are smart too, and have their goals.

In this last session, the evil wizard attacked the PCs with Stinking Cloud to incapacitate them without potentially damaging the ritual book that was in the room with them. He used Mage Hand to retrieve it while they were barfing and took off. It was a good plan, but amazingly on the next round the PCs all made their very hard saving throws and recovered, and were able to pursue before he got away. His plan was to get away with the book, not fight. But the dice had their own ideas and for the next two rounds the players had good luck and defeated him. Could he have still run? Sure, but he wanted and needed that book, and was trying to retrieve it.  Things just didn't go his way.  Had fewer of the PCs recovered from Stinking Cloud that first combat round he'd have gotten away easily.