Well, she called the Hags "her sisters", so it makes sense :P

So to clear up a few things, the end battle was easier than it was intended to be. You were mean't to face more than one Hag for starters but because you took so long in reaching the end room, two of the Hags had been killed off already.
Also Hags are highly resistant to magical attacks, yet Gertrude failed every saving throw against you.
Then there is BenKii's phaser. To start of with I only let him have his Star Trek gear in an ornamental capacity to go with the character he was roleplaying.
Then I thought, sod it, he's put a lot of effort into the game so I'll roll to see if his phaser gets charged up and of course the bloody dice said yes. So then he uses it to blow up my last surviving (evil) Hag.
I also thought that Tanea's paranoia was going to get Cassandra killed.

The painting with the Dragon. That was an alternative adventure waiting for you except everyone agreed to burn the painting, which is why you were called fools by the Gold Dragon.
The option would have been for three volunteers to enter the painting and help the Gold Dragon battle an ancient and evil Black Dragon in its lair.
The idea was to split your group up by having some go with the Dragon and others through the portal to the pirate ship, leaving only a few to face the Hags at the end (I would have engineered it so that Tanea faced the Hags). In the end, no-one went with the Dragon and too many went to the Pirate ship unbalancing things over there.

I found your first encounter with the Nightmares quite frustrating. Firstly, they killed Origi who was one of the two chosen Halflings and also was being played in a chaotic style.
Then rather than you all gang up and take care of the powerful enemies, people just kept wandering up the tunnel meaning the fight took longer than it should have.

I liked how the two Half Orcs were being played in quite an evil manner (especially Fish).

Thanks for that behind the scenes explanation. Shame we couldn't do the Dragon Quest-line but, hey, there's always next year. At least I hope there's a next year because this was one of the best and most fun forum games ever, and as a bonus we all got to compete for gifts. Absolutely awesome Doc and thank you again for the DnD experience and gifts. If you ever do decide to do another one of these, I'll happily help out with it again. :-)

I wouldn't say the orcs were "evil" in any sort of the way. That web spell at the beginning was purely cast just to delay the caterpillar from following our group, and thus my orc was a protector. It's just coincidence it happened to be another PC is all.

It was the bone dagger. She doesn't like killing/want to kill, there was no way of knowing for sure (because our "alignement sensers" had left) if Cassandra was actually nice or playing (mind) games _and_ Cassandra decides to hand her a bone dagger. Tanea was sure it was part of a mind game of a sadistic creature in disguise. She would have let it go, had the dagger been "normal" = made out of something else. After all, there was no way Gertrude would just hold still and let Tanea beat her to death with her tiny staff. :-D

When I read that Cassandra dropped her disguise and that she turned out to be an ancient crone, I was considering to post something like "I knew it", but her mentioning the herb garder made it (almost 100 %) clear for me, that she wasn't evil. So I'm glad too, that the dice roll failed.

You seem to have been plagued by bad dice rolls. Hope you still had lots of fun regardless.
I liked the little hints at those disappointments in your updates. Like this "damn those dice" or something along those lines being heard in one tunnel and the snippet about your dog's curious look in this tunnel.

I didn't agree with burning it. I was disappointed, they didn't wait to see what was coming into view first though. I just didn't voice it, because burning it didn't seem to be a disastrous move.
Also, quite a view of us were considering to trap the Hag in it, but Rufus seems to have paranoias of his own. ;-)

Well, Genocide mentioned in the norther tunnel thread, that he was hoping to get to kill Tanea.
But giving Fish's actions throughout the game. It probably just would have boiled down to him ordering one of his fellow Half-Orcs to do the job for him. No telling if that would have gotten the job done, I guess.
And Roy ... he definitely had his creepy moments. Very creepy.
Fish was oozing underlying menace though. So maybe in the end he actually would have killed Tanea himself, if he couldn't "convince" someone else to do it for him.

Thank you very much for this fantastic rpg gameplay and this giveaway Doc.

I believe I was the only one who was totally against the dragon painting being burnt. Unfortunately, some members acted on their own instead of discussing as a group.

Nevertheless, this was a huge fun giveaway. Once again, thanks Doc.