Also sprach Schpawn:
We just finished a session, and I'm currently in a mood of "I want to post about how I'm having a good fucking time and really enjoying my fucking D&D game and how when my group got together this evening we ate really good food, drank good beer and wine, and all laughed our asses off and talked shit to each other, and killed tons of Sleestaks and three Neo-Otyughs and two Owlbears and a T Rex, while skirting past Stonehell and got a ton of loot which included a Potion of Super-Heroism that we immediately used in the T Rex fight, and almost had the War Wagon burnt to a crisp but we saved the ballista, and I used Speak with Animals to see what the horses knew and if they were okay, and Speak with Dead to interrogate the corpse of the guy that set the War Wagon on fire who me and Vivuli killed during a chase, while the rest of the party tried to put out the fire, and LATER Dak tried out the demonic fire gems for the first time while we all hung over the Neo-Otyugh caves by ropes after being ambushed, and unleashed a 3-round firestorm that incinerated them all, and then during the T Rex attack stupid Dak said 'I hope I don't roll a 1 on this d30' and OF COURSE he rolls the most mocking fucking '1', rolling up one side of the rule book and back down again, and the T Rex wins initiative and bites him almost in half, but for Super Heroism, and he's got plenty of hit points and we're all throwing the d30s in the last minutes of the session and the T Rex is killed.
And everybody left LAUGHING and SMILING and RECOUNTING WHAT HAPPENED and MAKING PLANS FOR THE LOOT."
That is why I blog about this game in this corner of the blogosphere. On the best days I'm having a hell of a good time. FUN FUN FUN.
Showing posts with label Stonehell. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Stonehell. Show all posts
Tuesday, July 12, 2011
Friday, December 31, 2010
From White Plume Mountain To Stonehell
I entered the RPG'ing hobby circa 1982, during the period James Maliszewski has dubbed the "Late Golden Age" or "Electrum Age," when TSR was beginning to transition D&D away from sandbox- and module-based play toward the more narratively driven campaign settings that characterize the "Silver Age" (1984-1989). In some ways, I came onboard too late to really be aware of the game's 1970s "gonzo," swords-and-planets, sandboxy origins, even though I read ERB's Barsoom books obsessively in junior high school. In terms of my taste in FRPG settings / adventures, I was more of a Tolkien-influenced high-fantasy guy, and felt, for example, that Gygax's Expedition to the Barrier Peaks was a strange anomaly in the D&D product line that came way out of left field. (I now happily understand the error of my ways on that score.)
I also never even heard of a megadungeon in those days, even though I was entranced by that awesome cross-section of Stone Mountain in the Holmes rulebook:
So my early training in how to play D&D was influenced most by TSR's early 1980's emphasis on releasing adventure modules that were published as one-offs and/or originally geared for tournament play, such as B2 The Keep on the Borderlands, C1 The Hidden Shrine of Tomoachan, S1 Tomb of Horrors, and my all-around favorite in those days, S2 White Plume Mountain. Even when I started playing in and eventually running longer campaigns, those campaigns tended to be structured as chains of strung-together module-based adventures, with maybe a bit of town adventuring in between. But again, not a megadungeon in sight. (Though, to be fair, not much over-arching narrative either.)
This led (or at least contributed) to a style of play that (I now realize) was more acquisitive than exploratory. Strangely -- especially given my extreme resistance to min-maxing and excessive game-ism nowadays -- my friends and I in those early days were all about the treasure, and the main (and possibly only) way we were interested in acquiring that treasure was by killing monsters. That was it. We wanted lots of monster encounters with lots of combat, then we wanted to find and loot big treasure hoards kept by the monsters we'd just slaughtered. End of story.
Of course, slaughtering monsters and looting treasure hoards are excellent goals for D&D PCs to have, and I am not saying we shouldn't have been excited by those activities. But I think some of the finer nuances of dungeon exploration were lost on us in the early years. No, we entered White Plume Mountain, knew there were some badassed artifact weapons in there, and we made as much of a beeline as possible toward the locations with the boss monsters so we could get our greedy hands on Wave! Relatively empty chamber with a bunch of mysterious floating globes? Intricate murals on the wall depicting ancient battles? Screw that, we want something to fight!
To be clear, this tendency of my junior high and high school years is absolutely NOT the fault of those excellent modules. Even the relatively straightforward White Plume Mountain has a great number of interesting tricks up its sleeve (discs over lava pools, anyone?), to say nothing of even more open-ended modules such as D3 Vault of the Drow or Q1 Queen of the Demonweb Pits. I have no idea what my group would have done with D3 in those early days -- probably started a minor civil war with the wrong Drow faction and gotten wiped out by Drow clerics long before finding the Fane of Lolth.
But thank goodness I have begun to learn the Old Ways! I look at those early modules with such different eyes now, and -- thanks in large part to James M.'s Dwimmermount campaign reports, the wisdom of so many other OSR bloggers, and (most impactfully) Michael Curtis' AWESOME megadungeon, Stonehell -- I am (in my very late 30's) finally grokking what is so fulfilling about sandbox / megadungeon play. The main thing is that it emphasizes exploration over (or at least in conjunction with) encounters. Taking on a megadungeon the size of Stonehell does not allow a party to be as cavalier as my buddies and I were about traipsing into White Plume in the 1980s. No, its sheer magnitude and its ever-evolving nature require much finer attention to detail, and encourage a certain degree of planning and preparation that one-off module-based play does not so strongly motivate.
For example, in recent sessions of my Arandish campaign, the PCs left Stonehell to rest and re-equip in a nearby town, only to find that when they returned to the megadungeon site a couple sessions later, the hobgoblin Occupational Army encamped atop the south ridge of the box canyon had increased its numbers and its patrol range. Thus the PCs simply could not reenter the megadungeon the way they had gone before unless they wanted to fight their way past a legion of well-armed hobgoblins!
My players seem to understand that mapping is essential in megadungeon exploration. My junior-high friends and I usually mapped in our early AD&D module-playing days, but I don't think we had quite the same sense of urgency about it as my PCs do now. Given the size of Stonehell and the shifting territorial boundaries of the various monster factions within, mapping in Stonehell is a crucial survival technique. I like that.
What I like most about megadungeon play -- and again, KUDOS to Michael Curtis for teaching me this through the excellent example of Stonehell -- is that it encourages, even requires, the party to slow down, check out each nook and cranny, and really soak in the atmosphere of the place. As a DM, I love that part of the process: immersing the players and myself alike in the feel of the game-world. (And here I must also mention the influence of James Raggi, who is arguably the Grand Master of setting a unique atmosphere in a dungeon.) For me nowadays, that is where the real fun and feeling of escape in RPG'ing comes from. Which is not mutually exclusive of kicking a bunch of monsters' asses and looting treasure with great abandon, but it is an added dimension of RPG'ing that I never knew I was missing in those early days in the Electrum and Silver Ages of the hobby.
I also never even heard of a megadungeon in those days, even though I was entranced by that awesome cross-section of Stone Mountain in the Holmes rulebook:
So my early training in how to play D&D was influenced most by TSR's early 1980's emphasis on releasing adventure modules that were published as one-offs and/or originally geared for tournament play, such as B2 The Keep on the Borderlands, C1 The Hidden Shrine of Tomoachan, S1 Tomb of Horrors, and my all-around favorite in those days, S2 White Plume Mountain. Even when I started playing in and eventually running longer campaigns, those campaigns tended to be structured as chains of strung-together module-based adventures, with maybe a bit of town adventuring in between. But again, not a megadungeon in sight. (Though, to be fair, not much over-arching narrative either.)
This led (or at least contributed) to a style of play that (I now realize) was more acquisitive than exploratory. Strangely -- especially given my extreme resistance to min-maxing and excessive game-ism nowadays -- my friends and I in those early days were all about the treasure, and the main (and possibly only) way we were interested in acquiring that treasure was by killing monsters. That was it. We wanted lots of monster encounters with lots of combat, then we wanted to find and loot big treasure hoards kept by the monsters we'd just slaughtered. End of story.
Of course, slaughtering monsters and looting treasure hoards are excellent goals for D&D PCs to have, and I am not saying we shouldn't have been excited by those activities. But I think some of the finer nuances of dungeon exploration were lost on us in the early years. No, we entered White Plume Mountain, knew there were some badassed artifact weapons in there, and we made as much of a beeline as possible toward the locations with the boss monsters so we could get our greedy hands on Wave! Relatively empty chamber with a bunch of mysterious floating globes? Intricate murals on the wall depicting ancient battles? Screw that, we want something to fight!
To be clear, this tendency of my junior high and high school years is absolutely NOT the fault of those excellent modules. Even the relatively straightforward White Plume Mountain has a great number of interesting tricks up its sleeve (discs over lava pools, anyone?), to say nothing of even more open-ended modules such as D3 Vault of the Drow or Q1 Queen of the Demonweb Pits. I have no idea what my group would have done with D3 in those early days -- probably started a minor civil war with the wrong Drow faction and gotten wiped out by Drow clerics long before finding the Fane of Lolth.
But thank goodness I have begun to learn the Old Ways! I look at those early modules with such different eyes now, and -- thanks in large part to James M.'s Dwimmermount campaign reports, the wisdom of so many other OSR bloggers, and (most impactfully) Michael Curtis' AWESOME megadungeon, Stonehell -- I am (in my very late 30's) finally grokking what is so fulfilling about sandbox / megadungeon play. The main thing is that it emphasizes exploration over (or at least in conjunction with) encounters. Taking on a megadungeon the size of Stonehell does not allow a party to be as cavalier as my buddies and I were about traipsing into White Plume in the 1980s. No, its sheer magnitude and its ever-evolving nature require much finer attention to detail, and encourage a certain degree of planning and preparation that one-off module-based play does not so strongly motivate.
For example, in recent sessions of my Arandish campaign, the PCs left Stonehell to rest and re-equip in a nearby town, only to find that when they returned to the megadungeon site a couple sessions later, the hobgoblin Occupational Army encamped atop the south ridge of the box canyon had increased its numbers and its patrol range. Thus the PCs simply could not reenter the megadungeon the way they had gone before unless they wanted to fight their way past a legion of well-armed hobgoblins!
My players seem to understand that mapping is essential in megadungeon exploration. My junior-high friends and I usually mapped in our early AD&D module-playing days, but I don't think we had quite the same sense of urgency about it as my PCs do now. Given the size of Stonehell and the shifting territorial boundaries of the various monster factions within, mapping in Stonehell is a crucial survival technique. I like that.
What I like most about megadungeon play -- and again, KUDOS to Michael Curtis for teaching me this through the excellent example of Stonehell -- is that it encourages, even requires, the party to slow down, check out each nook and cranny, and really soak in the atmosphere of the place. As a DM, I love that part of the process: immersing the players and myself alike in the feel of the game-world. (And here I must also mention the influence of James Raggi, who is arguably the Grand Master of setting a unique atmosphere in a dungeon.) For me nowadays, that is where the real fun and feeling of escape in RPG'ing comes from. Which is not mutually exclusive of kicking a bunch of monsters' asses and looting treasure with great abandon, but it is an added dimension of RPG'ing that I never knew I was missing in those early days in the Electrum and Silver Ages of the hobby.
Sunday, November 21, 2010
Belated Session Reports 18-19: Yet More Stonehell
At the conclusion of session 17 of Arandish Campaign 2010, Innominus the Cleric and Uncle Junkal the Bard both leveled up, so the party now consists of:
PCs:
Innominus, Follower of Endra (Clr.-4)
Uncle Junkal, Rodian Bard (Bard-3)
Hazel, Human Warrior (Ftr.-3)*
Dak (Dwarf-2)**
Yor (Dwarf-2)**
NPCs:
Gorgo (Dwarf-2)
Harry (Halfling-1)
Uncle Junkal's charmed Rock Troll
*As of Session 17, Hazel began mysteriously manifesting arcane spellcasting abilities, and is therefore leveling as a Magic-User for the next three experience levels -- thereafter she will multi-class according to the rules in the LL AEC p. 24.
**Dak's and Yor's players missed session 18 but returned for session 19.
And so: The party began Session 18 (day 41 of the campaign, game-time, and the party's third day in Stonehell) in a small room with a central well wherein they rested for 8 hours. During the last watch of the night (I think - my notes on this are sketchy), during which Innominus kept guard, a faint scraping sound was heard emanating from deep inside the well. Investigating, Innominus spotted a stone being pushed out of its place along one side of the well, as if something was tunneling its way into the well from some adjacent subterranean space. Innominus waked his comrades, and upon peering into the well, the others observed a large piece of stonemasonry get pushed and fall with a splash into the depths of the well, and a ghastly humanoid head wrapped in bandages was now poking into the well shaft from the opening thus created. A smell of musty death pervaded the air, which the party recognized as likely belonging to a mummy. As this first mummy crawled out of its hole and began climbing up the side of the well toward the party, a second bandage-wrapped head poked out of the opening as well. However, sadly for these two mummies, Hazel had a ward against undead she acquired somewhere along the way, and she activated it now. The mummies were unable to proceed up the well shaft or get anywhere near the party, and were stymied.
The party then headed south, into a section of the dungeon they had never visited before. After bypassing a dangerous scything blade trap, they came across a spike driven into the floor with a human skull perched on top. Etched into the skull were some words in a language no party member could read, and an insignia they had seen before: that of the hobgoblinish Skullface Occupational Army. The party proceeded southward with caution.
Soon they came to a partially caved-in section of corridor, and Uncle Junkal persuaded the rock troll to dig through the rubble. They broke through into a large chamber with a white tile floor and two large 8' pillars encrusted with glowing gems of different colors. One of the PCs -- my notes don't reveal whom -- stepped out into the middle of the tiled room, only to be struck by a beam of yellow light that made the character feel refreshed and healed. Close inspection of the pillars --was this Innominus? -- revealed nothing beyond the fact that the "gems" were in fact multi-colored lenses set deep into the pillars.
Proceeding west, the party came to a corridor section with doors on either side -- careful prowling reveled these to lead to rooms of various kinds inhabited by hobgoblins: a kitchen, a small infirmary, a mountain lion wrangler's cat-pen. Stealthily bypassing these areas, the party penetrated further east, reaching a hobgoblin sentry post manned by three hobgoblin soldiers standing near a wall-mounted gong. Innominus swiftly cast Hold Person on these three hobgoblin sentries, and NPCs Gorgo and harry began dismounting the gong from the wall. Thus ended the session. . .
Session 19 opened with four hobgoblin patrolmen approaching the sentry room from the east. Battle ensued after all four hg's saved vs. Dak's poison, and despite this early coup for the hobgoblins, thanks to some oil-flask throwing by Uncle Junkal and a critical mace hit by Innominus, these monstrous defenders were quickly dispatched by the PCs. For some reason this battle carried onward into the small hobgoblin infirmary, and Dak (blindly swinging his battle axe) and Uncle Junkal were able to kill the hobgoblin medic and dispatch his two wounded charges without alerting the hobgoblins in the nearby kitchen.
Next, while Hazel, Innominus, and Yor explored a corridor leading south out of the sentry room, Uncle Junkal and Harry the Halfling searched the sentry room for secret doors etc. (Dak was on hand but still blind -- Gorgo and the rock troll stood guard). The only unusual thing found was a group of strange etchings scratched into the north wall -- no character on hand could read them, but when Hazel returned to the room from the south a bit later, she identified the scrawlings as being an arcane code that listed a numerical calendar date, the word "Mulek," and a mention of something called "the Black Well."
The southern corridor terminated in a floor-to-ceiling bas-relief of a hobgoblinish face with an open mouth -- some careful searching by Hazel and Yor uncovered a secret door inside the mouth. Beyond was a dark, gloomy room, which Yor entered and searched, only to be instantly attacked by two shadowy, ghost-like figures. Innominus leaped to Yor's aid, and even Uncle Junkal dashed down the southern passage to assist in the battle. In fact, the intrepid bard held up the strange mirror he previously pilfered from the death cult's cabin, and while the sight of the mirror did make the shadows flinch, it was ultimately Hazel's and Innominus' combat prowess that laid the two vile spirits low. In the wake of the battle, the PCs searched the cluttered room, and Yor found a heavy iron strongbox buried under some furniture and rubble. Then Hazel, Yor, et. al. closed the secret door and returned north to the sentry room.
Once the party was reunited in the sentry room, Harry the halfling, the group's (relatively unskilled) de facto thief was instructed to pick the lock on the strongbox, which he did, only to be pricked by a poison needle trap and instantly killed. R.I.P., Harry the halfling.
Meanwhile Dak and Yor heard some tapping noises coming from the other side of the west wall of the sentry room. Yor exchanged brief words with a male voice coming from the other side of the wall; they both spoke in kobold. Yor claimed to be "Mulek" and the anonymous voice told him that "Stanthor perished."
Taking the loot accumulated so far, plus the riches found in the strongbox that cost poor Harry his life -- lots of sp, ep, gp, and gems; a few valuable pieces of jewelry; three potions; and two scrolls containing wards against undead -- the party decided to leave Stonehell and return to the nearby Minochian town of Fortinbras, to regroup, rest, re-provision, and re-equip. They made the exit from the dungeon and the return trip to Fortinbras without physical incident, though they did see a newly established hobgoblin military camp perched atop the southern ridge of the box canyon that houses the entrance to Stonehell. But they were able to slip past the hobgoblins unseen and were back at the Drunken Yeti Inn in Fortinbras by the end of the session.
To Be Continued. . .
PCs:
Innominus, Follower of Endra (Clr.-4)
Uncle Junkal, Rodian Bard (Bard-3)
Hazel, Human Warrior (Ftr.-3)*
Dak (Dwarf-2)**
Yor (Dwarf-2)**
NPCs:
Gorgo (Dwarf-2)
Harry (Halfling-1)
Uncle Junkal's charmed Rock Troll
*As of Session 17, Hazel began mysteriously manifesting arcane spellcasting abilities, and is therefore leveling as a Magic-User for the next three experience levels -- thereafter she will multi-class according to the rules in the LL AEC p. 24.
**Dak's and Yor's players missed session 18 but returned for session 19.
And so: The party began Session 18 (day 41 of the campaign, game-time, and the party's third day in Stonehell) in a small room with a central well wherein they rested for 8 hours. During the last watch of the night (I think - my notes on this are sketchy), during which Innominus kept guard, a faint scraping sound was heard emanating from deep inside the well. Investigating, Innominus spotted a stone being pushed out of its place along one side of the well, as if something was tunneling its way into the well from some adjacent subterranean space. Innominus waked his comrades, and upon peering into the well, the others observed a large piece of stonemasonry get pushed and fall with a splash into the depths of the well, and a ghastly humanoid head wrapped in bandages was now poking into the well shaft from the opening thus created. A smell of musty death pervaded the air, which the party recognized as likely belonging to a mummy. As this first mummy crawled out of its hole and began climbing up the side of the well toward the party, a second bandage-wrapped head poked out of the opening as well. However, sadly for these two mummies, Hazel had a ward against undead she acquired somewhere along the way, and she activated it now. The mummies were unable to proceed up the well shaft or get anywhere near the party, and were stymied.
The party then headed south, into a section of the dungeon they had never visited before. After bypassing a dangerous scything blade trap, they came across a spike driven into the floor with a human skull perched on top. Etched into the skull were some words in a language no party member could read, and an insignia they had seen before: that of the hobgoblinish Skullface Occupational Army. The party proceeded southward with caution.
Soon they came to a partially caved-in section of corridor, and Uncle Junkal persuaded the rock troll to dig through the rubble. They broke through into a large chamber with a white tile floor and two large 8' pillars encrusted with glowing gems of different colors. One of the PCs -- my notes don't reveal whom -- stepped out into the middle of the tiled room, only to be struck by a beam of yellow light that made the character feel refreshed and healed. Close inspection of the pillars --was this Innominus? -- revealed nothing beyond the fact that the "gems" were in fact multi-colored lenses set deep into the pillars.
Proceeding west, the party came to a corridor section with doors on either side -- careful prowling reveled these to lead to rooms of various kinds inhabited by hobgoblins: a kitchen, a small infirmary, a mountain lion wrangler's cat-pen. Stealthily bypassing these areas, the party penetrated further east, reaching a hobgoblin sentry post manned by three hobgoblin soldiers standing near a wall-mounted gong. Innominus swiftly cast Hold Person on these three hobgoblin sentries, and NPCs Gorgo and harry began dismounting the gong from the wall. Thus ended the session. . .
Session 19 opened with four hobgoblin patrolmen approaching the sentry room from the east. Battle ensued after all four hg's saved vs. Dak's poison, and despite this early coup for the hobgoblins, thanks to some oil-flask throwing by Uncle Junkal and a critical mace hit by Innominus, these monstrous defenders were quickly dispatched by the PCs. For some reason this battle carried onward into the small hobgoblin infirmary, and Dak (blindly swinging his battle axe) and Uncle Junkal were able to kill the hobgoblin medic and dispatch his two wounded charges without alerting the hobgoblins in the nearby kitchen.
Next, while Hazel, Innominus, and Yor explored a corridor leading south out of the sentry room, Uncle Junkal and Harry the Halfling searched the sentry room for secret doors etc. (Dak was on hand but still blind -- Gorgo and the rock troll stood guard). The only unusual thing found was a group of strange etchings scratched into the north wall -- no character on hand could read them, but when Hazel returned to the room from the south a bit later, she identified the scrawlings as being an arcane code that listed a numerical calendar date, the word "Mulek," and a mention of something called "the Black Well."
The southern corridor terminated in a floor-to-ceiling bas-relief of a hobgoblinish face with an open mouth -- some careful searching by Hazel and Yor uncovered a secret door inside the mouth. Beyond was a dark, gloomy room, which Yor entered and searched, only to be instantly attacked by two shadowy, ghost-like figures. Innominus leaped to Yor's aid, and even Uncle Junkal dashed down the southern passage to assist in the battle. In fact, the intrepid bard held up the strange mirror he previously pilfered from the death cult's cabin, and while the sight of the mirror did make the shadows flinch, it was ultimately Hazel's and Innominus' combat prowess that laid the two vile spirits low. In the wake of the battle, the PCs searched the cluttered room, and Yor found a heavy iron strongbox buried under some furniture and rubble. Then Hazel, Yor, et. al. closed the secret door and returned north to the sentry room.
Once the party was reunited in the sentry room, Harry the halfling, the group's (relatively unskilled) de facto thief was instructed to pick the lock on the strongbox, which he did, only to be pricked by a poison needle trap and instantly killed. R.I.P., Harry the halfling.
Meanwhile Dak and Yor heard some tapping noises coming from the other side of the west wall of the sentry room. Yor exchanged brief words with a male voice coming from the other side of the wall; they both spoke in kobold. Yor claimed to be "Mulek" and the anonymous voice told him that "Stanthor perished."
Taking the loot accumulated so far, plus the riches found in the strongbox that cost poor Harry his life -- lots of sp, ep, gp, and gems; a few valuable pieces of jewelry; three potions; and two scrolls containing wards against undead -- the party decided to leave Stonehell and return to the nearby Minochian town of Fortinbras, to regroup, rest, re-provision, and re-equip. They made the exit from the dungeon and the return trip to Fortinbras without physical incident, though they did see a newly established hobgoblin military camp perched atop the southern ridge of the box canyon that houses the entrance to Stonehell. But they were able to slip past the hobgoblins unseen and were back at the Drunken Yeti Inn in Fortinbras by the end of the session.
To Be Continued. . .
Thursday, November 18, 2010
Belated Session Reports 16-17: Stonehell Continued
It has been awhile since I posted a session report, but that does not mean that my adventurers have been inactive! Far from it! Delving deeper into the perils of the "Stony Hell," they have vanquished lizardmen, encountered hobgoblins, been harried by various undead, and have made a few startling discoveries. So, galvanized by their noteworthy deeds and further inspired by this really terrific post by JB on the fun of recounting the tales of our adventures after we play them, I now present belated session highlights from Arandish Labyrinth Lord Campaign 2010, Sessions 16-17.
Last we saw our intrepid party, they -- Hazel the Fighter, Uncle Junkal the Bard, and Innominus the Cleric, along with Dwarven newcomers Dak and Yor -- were standing around a buried mummy's crypt, occupied by a huge stone sarcophagus filled with treasure, including gold, jewelry, potions, scrolls, and a +1 Flame Tongue. Session 16 opened with the party searching around the burial chamber, Dak the Dwarf soon noticing an interesting glint of something shiny hidden in a cobwebby corner. About to investigate, he was interrupted by yet another onslaught of enraged Lizardfolk -- fairly quickly dispatched by the party due to great damage rolls by Uncle Junkal (who threw flasks of flaming oil) and a natural 20 critical attack roll by Dak with his mighty battle axe. About the worst damage the party suffered in this fracas was Innominus' shield being splintered by a Lizardman's thrown trident (see the recently updated Arandish House Rules for a description of the Shield Splintering Rule).
After dispatching this last desperate group of Lizardfolk defenders, the party returned to checking out the interesting glint in the corner of the mummy burial chamber. Lo and behold, behind a somewhat weakened and flickering illusion of cobwebs was a small lever in the "down" position. Dak pulled up the lever and the bottom of the stone sarcophagus dropped out, revealing a vertical shaft with a ladder down 50' to a large chamber with a minotaur statue in it. The party quickly scoped that chamber and decided not to tangle with an area that might play home to minotaurs. They climbed back up, pulled the lever back down, re-closing the sarcophagus trapdoor, and left the area, heading north out of the Lizardfolk caves and into a more architecturally "refined" area of the Stonehell dungeon.
As they headed north, then west, the party began encountering hobgoblins. I will leave it to my collaborator to fill in any noteworthy details I may have forgotten, but suffice to say that the PCs made their way past one small group of three hobgoblins, turned south, and ended the session in a small, octagonal chamber featuring a central statue of a lizard-like serpent with an open mouth. Just as the party began inspecting this statue, two wraiths swooped into the chamber from the south! The leading wraith pointed at Uncle Junkal and hissed "Give it back, Bard!" Thus ended Session 16.
Session 17 opened with Innominus attempting to Turn the wraiths, and electing to use up his once-nightly d30 roll (see Arandish House Rules) in the process. He rolled a 30! The wraiths were instantly Turned, and the party returned to their inspection of the lizard-serpent statue.
Dak the Dwarf discovered that the statue could be rotated on its vertical axis, so he spun the whole thing 45 degrees clockwise (to the east). The statue spat poison gas into the room, instantly blinding Dak (the other party members had either cleared the room or made their saving throws). Dak's player, Carl, has fairly recently blogged about Dak's blindness, so I will refer you to his post for more juicy details on that. Suffice to say that in the wake of being blinded, Dak simply trooped onward, figuring out (with the help of Yor the Dwarf and halfling NPC Harry) that a hatch at the base of the statue could be pried open and the tank containing 17 more doses of the blinding poison could be removed. For the next few sessions, Dak would be carried around from place to place by Uncle Junkal's charmed Rock Troll, carrying his container of poison at all times.
This poison came in handy a few rooms later, after the party doubled back and came across an as-yet unexplored chamber in the lizardfolk caverns. Therein they found a lizardman shaman, his guards, and his followers, and had it not been for Dak's entering the chamber first and liberally spraying the blindness-poison everywhere, the party may have been sufficiently outnumbered as to have finally taken some much-deserved licks from the beleaguered lizardfolk. But alas, three lizardman were instantly blinded, and one more killed outright by a well-tossed flaming oil flask from Uncle Junkal. Then the rest of the party (Hazel's player had to quit this session a bit early so missed this final combat) moved in, Yor the Dwarf being particularly effective with his battle-axe, dispatching two foes and presenting such a formidable aspect that three lizardfolk broke ranks and fled the scene. The PCs chased down and killed these poor lizardfolk retreaters, Yor killing one with his battle axe and Uncle Junkal scoring yet another critical hit with a flaming oil flask to dispatch the remaining two!
Finally, all the lizardfolk in a wide radius having been slaughtered, the party hunkered down for the night in a small room with a well. The well-room had but one entrance, so Innominus spiked the door and the PCs got some much-needed rest.
To Be Continued . . .
Last we saw our intrepid party, they -- Hazel the Fighter, Uncle Junkal the Bard, and Innominus the Cleric, along with Dwarven newcomers Dak and Yor -- were standing around a buried mummy's crypt, occupied by a huge stone sarcophagus filled with treasure, including gold, jewelry, potions, scrolls, and a +1 Flame Tongue. Session 16 opened with the party searching around the burial chamber, Dak the Dwarf soon noticing an interesting glint of something shiny hidden in a cobwebby corner. About to investigate, he was interrupted by yet another onslaught of enraged Lizardfolk -- fairly quickly dispatched by the party due to great damage rolls by Uncle Junkal (who threw flasks of flaming oil) and a natural 20 critical attack roll by Dak with his mighty battle axe. About the worst damage the party suffered in this fracas was Innominus' shield being splintered by a Lizardman's thrown trident (see the recently updated Arandish House Rules for a description of the Shield Splintering Rule).
After dispatching this last desperate group of Lizardfolk defenders, the party returned to checking out the interesting glint in the corner of the mummy burial chamber. Lo and behold, behind a somewhat weakened and flickering illusion of cobwebs was a small lever in the "down" position. Dak pulled up the lever and the bottom of the stone sarcophagus dropped out, revealing a vertical shaft with a ladder down 50' to a large chamber with a minotaur statue in it. The party quickly scoped that chamber and decided not to tangle with an area that might play home to minotaurs. They climbed back up, pulled the lever back down, re-closing the sarcophagus trapdoor, and left the area, heading north out of the Lizardfolk caves and into a more architecturally "refined" area of the Stonehell dungeon.
As they headed north, then west, the party began encountering hobgoblins. I will leave it to my collaborator to fill in any noteworthy details I may have forgotten, but suffice to say that the PCs made their way past one small group of three hobgoblins, turned south, and ended the session in a small, octagonal chamber featuring a central statue of a lizard-like serpent with an open mouth. Just as the party began inspecting this statue, two wraiths swooped into the chamber from the south! The leading wraith pointed at Uncle Junkal and hissed "Give it back, Bard!" Thus ended Session 16.
Session 17 opened with Innominus attempting to Turn the wraiths, and electing to use up his once-nightly d30 roll (see Arandish House Rules) in the process. He rolled a 30! The wraiths were instantly Turned, and the party returned to their inspection of the lizard-serpent statue.
Dak the Dwarf discovered that the statue could be rotated on its vertical axis, so he spun the whole thing 45 degrees clockwise (to the east). The statue spat poison gas into the room, instantly blinding Dak (the other party members had either cleared the room or made their saving throws). Dak's player, Carl, has fairly recently blogged about Dak's blindness, so I will refer you to his post for more juicy details on that. Suffice to say that in the wake of being blinded, Dak simply trooped onward, figuring out (with the help of Yor the Dwarf and halfling NPC Harry) that a hatch at the base of the statue could be pried open and the tank containing 17 more doses of the blinding poison could be removed. For the next few sessions, Dak would be carried around from place to place by Uncle Junkal's charmed Rock Troll, carrying his container of poison at all times.
This poison came in handy a few rooms later, after the party doubled back and came across an as-yet unexplored chamber in the lizardfolk caverns. Therein they found a lizardman shaman, his guards, and his followers, and had it not been for Dak's entering the chamber first and liberally spraying the blindness-poison everywhere, the party may have been sufficiently outnumbered as to have finally taken some much-deserved licks from the beleaguered lizardfolk. But alas, three lizardman were instantly blinded, and one more killed outright by a well-tossed flaming oil flask from Uncle Junkal. Then the rest of the party (Hazel's player had to quit this session a bit early so missed this final combat) moved in, Yor the Dwarf being particularly effective with his battle-axe, dispatching two foes and presenting such a formidable aspect that three lizardfolk broke ranks and fled the scene. The PCs chased down and killed these poor lizardfolk retreaters, Yor killing one with his battle axe and Uncle Junkal scoring yet another critical hit with a flaming oil flask to dispatch the remaining two!
Finally, all the lizardfolk in a wide radius having been slaughtered, the party hunkered down for the night in a small room with a well. The well-room had but one entrance, so Innominus spiked the door and the PCs got some much-needed rest.
To Be Continued . . .
Tuesday, August 24, 2010
Arandish Campaign 2010 - Session 15
This session, which took place the Tuesday evening just prior to my leaving town (Eugene, OR) the following Saturday to move to Brockport, New York, was quite action packed! So too my life has been: as I write this I am sitting in my new place in Brockport, waiting to start teaching classes next week and also preparing to DM my first-ever session over Skype with my Labyrinth Lord group back on the West Coast tonight.
I am confident this rpg'ing-by-Skype will work great, because we already tried it at the session I am about to describe: Hazel's player had also recently moved out of town, but she joined us via Skype and it worked fine! We could all hear her and see her via a laptop placed strategically in the middle of the room where we game. Bad ass!
Anyway, at the session in question, the group started in a chamber with a charred dirt mound, sifting through the area for treasure and incidental loot. What they found instead were a couple of hogtied dwarves, Yor and Dak, two fellow dungeon delvers who were taken unawares by the lizardfolk in a nearby passage a day earlier. After accepting these two dwarven PCs into the party, the adventurers continued northward into Lizardfolk territory, hacking (the battle-axe wielding dwarves) and slashing (Hazel) and bludgeoning (Innominus) and throwing knives (Uncle Junkal) and ripping with claws (Uncle Junkal's charmed rock troll) as they went. They entered a large, fortified cavern guarded by armed lizardfolk, who seemed to be especially intent on defending an exit leading east. The specific details of the PCs' session-long epic battle as wave after wave of Lizardfolk came at them would be far too long and time-consuming to recount fully here. Suffice to say the party killed twelve lizardfolk and only suffered one casualty, the NPC swordsman Locklear.
After the major bloodbath, the party began exploring the eastern cavern, and discovered a secret door opening upon a narrow eastbound tunnel. The bulk of the party headed down this tunnel while Uncle Junkal and his rock troll guarded their exit back to the west. As the party found an underground river at the end of the tunnel, Uncle Junkal was visited by a mummy, who whispered "Return" and attacked the poor Bard after paralyzing the rock troll with its fearsome presence! Uncle Junkal may have shared his attendant creature's fate had he not rolled his save vs. paralysis with his nightly d30 roll and succeeded!
Fortunately for Uncle Junkal, before the mummy could successfully strike him in battle, Innominus returned from below and turned the mummy! the mummy fled into the western chamber and vanished mysteriously.
Convinced the mummy's crypt must be nearby, Dak insisted that the party help him sift through the lizardfolk's fortifications, which were formed from piles of stony rubble. Sure enough, careful search and digging revealed a buried crypt right under their feet! They pried it open and found a huge stone sarcophagus filled with treasure, including gold, jewelry, multiple potions and scrolls, and a magical sword: a +1 Flame Tongue.
That is where we left off.
I am confident this rpg'ing-by-Skype will work great, because we already tried it at the session I am about to describe: Hazel's player had also recently moved out of town, but she joined us via Skype and it worked fine! We could all hear her and see her via a laptop placed strategically in the middle of the room where we game. Bad ass!
Anyway, at the session in question, the group started in a chamber with a charred dirt mound, sifting through the area for treasure and incidental loot. What they found instead were a couple of hogtied dwarves, Yor and Dak, two fellow dungeon delvers who were taken unawares by the lizardfolk in a nearby passage a day earlier. After accepting these two dwarven PCs into the party, the adventurers continued northward into Lizardfolk territory, hacking (the battle-axe wielding dwarves) and slashing (Hazel) and bludgeoning (Innominus) and throwing knives (Uncle Junkal) and ripping with claws (Uncle Junkal's charmed rock troll) as they went. They entered a large, fortified cavern guarded by armed lizardfolk, who seemed to be especially intent on defending an exit leading east. The specific details of the PCs' session-long epic battle as wave after wave of Lizardfolk came at them would be far too long and time-consuming to recount fully here. Suffice to say the party killed twelve lizardfolk and only suffered one casualty, the NPC swordsman Locklear.
After the major bloodbath, the party began exploring the eastern cavern, and discovered a secret door opening upon a narrow eastbound tunnel. The bulk of the party headed down this tunnel while Uncle Junkal and his rock troll guarded their exit back to the west. As the party found an underground river at the end of the tunnel, Uncle Junkal was visited by a mummy, who whispered "Return" and attacked the poor Bard after paralyzing the rock troll with its fearsome presence! Uncle Junkal may have shared his attendant creature's fate had he not rolled his save vs. paralysis with his nightly d30 roll and succeeded!
Fortunately for Uncle Junkal, before the mummy could successfully strike him in battle, Innominus returned from below and turned the mummy! the mummy fled into the western chamber and vanished mysteriously.
Convinced the mummy's crypt must be nearby, Dak insisted that the party help him sift through the lizardfolk's fortifications, which were formed from piles of stony rubble. Sure enough, careful search and digging revealed a buried crypt right under their feet! They pried it open and found a huge stone sarcophagus filled with treasure, including gold, jewelry, multiple potions and scrolls, and a magical sword: a +1 Flame Tongue.
That is where we left off.
Saturday, July 24, 2010
Sleeping at Sessions
I consider a player falling asleep during a rpg'ing session to be one of the classic events / tropes of our hobby, a sign that your campaign is running well. As has been discussed by far wiser souls than me, old-school rpg'ing in particular involves a great deal of "slogging" through dungeon levels, searching through rooms that turn out to be empty, spending time looking for secret doors and traps, sneaking around, resting, praying for spells, and (at the metagame level) brainstorming tactical plans and hatching strategic schemes. So it is NOT all action-oriented, hack-and-slash, nor necessarily fast-paced. But this, of course, is part of the fun, since it is often during the exploration phases of an adventure that the more subtle nuances of the campaign setting and the characters' responses to it really come to the fore (see, for example, the stuff about the "Followers of Korath" from my previous session report). In short, I think story points and character development happen more so in the "downtime" between epic battles, rather than during them.
Yet I understand the thirst for ACTION and the lust for battle in the game. Hell, every time I play D&D (as a player), I always portray violent, sociopathic, bloodthirsty fighters. I LOVE combat. But one of my goals in picking up Labyrinth Lord last year and starting this campaign has been to (pardon the pun) delve back into a more old-school style of play -- perhaps even more old-school than the way I played Holmes / AD&D in the early 1980s. My most common play experience back then was usually single-module based, including an occasional linked set of "campaign modules" such as G1-2-3, D1-2-3, and Q1. Players would keep our same characters across many modules, thereby qualifying this as a "campaign" of sorts, but I rarely if ever played in a coherent campaign world with returning NPCs and villains, nor did I ever set foot in a megadungeon.
So with this current Labyrinth Lord campaign, I wanted megadungeon-crawl style play, with lots of mundane slogging and shifting of loads of treasure and worrying about mules and tracking elapsed turns and rolling for wandering monsters etc. With the help of Michael Curtis' brilliant Stonehell megadungeon, I am accomplishing just that. What this means, however, is that there are plenty of stretches of time during sessions when, from a neophyte player's point of view, or a bloodthirsty fighter's player's point of view, not much is happening. And thus things can get boring for that player.
The reason I bring this up is that we had a player fall asleep for about an hour of last Tuesday night's session. Part of the explanation for this is that this particular player is (in "real" life) moving this coming weekend, so she was up incredibly late the night before (and very early the morning of) our session packing her stuff, moving boxes around, negotiating with a moving truck company, etc. In short, she was exhausted when she arrived for our 8pm Tuesday session. Beyond this, however, she is playing Hazel, the group's fighter, and as Innominus' player's comments of 4/12 and 4/14 reveal, Hazel really likes killing and fighting and can get a bit antsy when no combat is taking place. So during the long middle stretch of last session, when the party was mostly rooting around and searching for loot in an abandoned chapel, Hazel's player was (not only tired but) bored. So she checked out and slept for awhile, then roused in time for the lizardfolk battles at the end of the session.
And this is how it should be. For as long as I can remember, having some player or another fall asleep during a late-night RPG'ing session is just part of the territory, something that inevitably happens every few sessions or so. Life happens, some people miss some sleep or drink too much beer or simply have very little to do during certain portions of the campaign and check out for awhile to get the rest they need. For some reason, this phenomenon has never bothered me -- I just let 'em sleep unless some crucial event involving their character occurs. It worked well for us the other night and it gave me a warmly nostalgic feeling for all those gaming sessions of yore when the odd player or two caught some winks as game play in general slogged forward.
Yet I understand the thirst for ACTION and the lust for battle in the game. Hell, every time I play D&D (as a player), I always portray violent, sociopathic, bloodthirsty fighters. I LOVE combat. But one of my goals in picking up Labyrinth Lord last year and starting this campaign has been to (pardon the pun) delve back into a more old-school style of play -- perhaps even more old-school than the way I played Holmes / AD&D in the early 1980s. My most common play experience back then was usually single-module based, including an occasional linked set of "campaign modules" such as G1-2-3, D1-2-3, and Q1. Players would keep our same characters across many modules, thereby qualifying this as a "campaign" of sorts, but I rarely if ever played in a coherent campaign world with returning NPCs and villains, nor did I ever set foot in a megadungeon.
So with this current Labyrinth Lord campaign, I wanted megadungeon-crawl style play, with lots of mundane slogging and shifting of loads of treasure and worrying about mules and tracking elapsed turns and rolling for wandering monsters etc. With the help of Michael Curtis' brilliant Stonehell megadungeon, I am accomplishing just that. What this means, however, is that there are plenty of stretches of time during sessions when, from a neophyte player's point of view, or a bloodthirsty fighter's player's point of view, not much is happening. And thus things can get boring for that player.
The reason I bring this up is that we had a player fall asleep for about an hour of last Tuesday night's session. Part of the explanation for this is that this particular player is (in "real" life) moving this coming weekend, so she was up incredibly late the night before (and very early the morning of) our session packing her stuff, moving boxes around, negotiating with a moving truck company, etc. In short, she was exhausted when she arrived for our 8pm Tuesday session. Beyond this, however, she is playing Hazel, the group's fighter, and as Innominus' player's comments of 4/12 and 4/14 reveal, Hazel really likes killing and fighting and can get a bit antsy when no combat is taking place. So during the long middle stretch of last session, when the party was mostly rooting around and searching for loot in an abandoned chapel, Hazel's player was (not only tired but) bored. So she checked out and slept for awhile, then roused in time for the lizardfolk battles at the end of the session.
And this is how it should be. For as long as I can remember, having some player or another fall asleep during a late-night RPG'ing session is just part of the territory, something that inevitably happens every few sessions or so. Life happens, some people miss some sleep or drink too much beer or simply have very little to do during certain portions of the campaign and check out for awhile to get the rest they need. For some reason, this phenomenon has never bothered me -- I just let 'em sleep unless some crucial event involving their character occurs. It worked well for us the other night and it gave me a warmly nostalgic feeling for all those gaming sessions of yore when the odd player or two caught some winks as game play in general slogged forward.
Arandish Campaign 2010 - Session 14
DAMN, what fun it is to have the Labyrinth Lord group all back in the same (geographical) state and gathered round the gaming table once again! After a two-month hiatus, the Innominus (Clr-3) - Hazel (Ftr-2) - Uncle Junkal (Bard-2) party is back in action, furthering their exploration of the second level of a huge underground complex they know only as the "Stony Hell."
It was remarkably easy to get started again. Last session (on 4/14/10) the party ended up sealing themselves into a room with several dank pools in it. This past Tuesday's session began with the three PCs -- accompanied by hirelings Gorgo (Dwarf-2), Steak-Breath (Ftr.-1), and Locklear (Ftr.-1), plus Harry the Halfling (Half.-2), an NPC they rescued from a giant spider last session -- venturing out of the pool room, heading east back through the spider's lair, and making their way generally south and east through Level Two of the "Stony Hell."
In a southbound corridor the party came across a door, locked from the outside, that they wanted to open. Harry the Halfling (a roguish fellow with a knack for traps and locks) inspected the lock, and, deeming it safe, unlocked and opened the door. Beyond the door was a dark, silent void. Innominus tied himself to one end of a rope and, with Uncle Junkal's charmed rock troll holding the other end, he entered the "void" space. This turned out to be a smallish room with nothing of interest within -- a kind of sensory deprivation chamber where no light nor sound could penetrate. Innominus exited the room, closed the door, and the party ventured further south.
The next square chamber they came to offered many enticing prospects -- a closed door, a rubble pile -- yet the group opted to move swiftly through this area, exiting to the southeast and then proceeding due east down a long corridor. On the north side of this eastbound corridor were two doors. The first one was rather rotten and grimy, and was barred from the inside. Harry the Halfling listened at this door and heard muffled voices, but couldn't make out words or even what language the speakers were using. The party opted to move on to the second northern door.
This door was rather more well-kept than the previous one, and had a religious symbol etched on it. Uncle Junkal the Bard was able to recognize the symbol as that of the Followers of Korath, an ancient pre-Noffellian sect of humans believed to have lived on the Komar Peninsula in the long-distant days before Noffel was settled. But what would a Followers of Korath symbol be doing here, in southwestern Minoch, all the way across the Bay of Noffel from the presumed home of the long-dead sect?
The well-maintained door with the Followers of Korath insignia on it was unlocked, so the party opened it and entered what was obviously a shrine or chapel of some kind, complete with an altar set against the eastern wall. Steak-Breath and Locklear stood guard near the door while the rest of the party split up and began searching different areas of the room. After two turns of searching, Harry the Halfling found a secret door in the west wall that opened onto a passage blocked by rubble, and Uncle Junkal and Innominus working together found a secret compartment at the base of the altar, but also noticed (thanks to their combined successes in the second round of searching) that the compartment was locked with a poison-trapped lock. They asked Harry for assistance in inspecting the poison lock, and meanwhile Uncle Junkal went on to search the east wall near the altar for more secret doors. He found one a turn later, and discovered a small treasure chest with approximately 100gp worth of mixed coinage.
Meanwhile, Harry blew three turns trying unsuccessfully to disarm the poison lock on the secret compartment at the base of the altar. The party instructed Uncle Junkal's rock troll to start digging out the rubble-filled passage in the west wall, and Hazel and Uncle Junkal continued searching other areas of the chapel. Shortly (after only one more turn of searching as I recall) Uncle Junkal found a bundle of valuables stuffed under a fallen stone pew: an intact robe of a Korath Priest, a key with a Korath symbol etched into it, and a scroll containing the Cleric spells Snake Charm and Neutralize Poison. Quite a find!
The party tried Uncle Junkal's newly found key on the lock at the base of the altar, and voila! it opened harmlessly. Inside they found a small but heavy iron strongbox with no apparent hinges, cracks, or opening mechanisms of any kind. They took it with them but haven't been able to open it yet.
The rock troll finished digging through to the next room west: the room with the muttering voices the group heard behind the first door. Gathered in this room were five of the disoriented, gollum-like creatures the party had previously seen (4/14/10) in areas northwest of here. The PCs messed with these gollums for a bit but ultimately let them flee.
Finished with the Korath Chapel and the gollum hideout, the party headed east to a three way intersection, then veered south and east again. They saw some rooms I don't feel like describing, but eventually came to a roughly-hewn passage leading into some sinister caves, and, hungry for battle, entered. They were promptly assaulted by five charging lizardfolk with tridents. Gorgo was gored and Hazel was fairly seriously wounded, but the party prevailed, even without the help of the rock troll (who could not fight in the low-ceilinged passage). They crept onward to a large cave chamber with a 20' diameter, 15' high dried mud mound in the center. Sinister wisps of steam rose out of a dark opening at the base of the mound.
Innominus proposed that the group light up some oil flasks and firebomb the hell out of the mound. Meeting no serious objections, the plan was enacted, and Innominus, Hazel, and Uncle Junkal all lobbed flaming oil flasks at the mound entrance. One flask flew wide of the mark, but the other three went in, and soon there were screams and sizzling noises as the living creatures within were quickly incinerated. After the flames died down, Hazel moved forward to inspect the singed corpses, but no sooner did she reach the mound entrance than she inhaled some deadly gases and became instantly nauseous.
Hazel's nausea kept her out of most of the final battle of the session, which began once five more lizardfolk -- including a big leader with an ornate longsword -- came running in from the south to investigate the fire in the mound chamber. The party fought these lizardfolk bravely, though in the fray, the hireling Steak-Breath was killed. Having dispatched these foes, the group (minus Steak-Breath) prepared to hole up for a rest period in the mound chamber. Hazel recovered from her temporary illness and revealed that the fried corpses inside the mound appeared to be those of six more lizardfolk. The PCs have now made some enemies in this region of the Stony Hell!
It was remarkably easy to get started again. Last session (on 4/14/10) the party ended up sealing themselves into a room with several dank pools in it. This past Tuesday's session began with the three PCs -- accompanied by hirelings Gorgo (Dwarf-2), Steak-Breath (Ftr.-1), and Locklear (Ftr.-1), plus Harry the Halfling (Half.-2), an NPC they rescued from a giant spider last session -- venturing out of the pool room, heading east back through the spider's lair, and making their way generally south and east through Level Two of the "Stony Hell."
In a southbound corridor the party came across a door, locked from the outside, that they wanted to open. Harry the Halfling (a roguish fellow with a knack for traps and locks) inspected the lock, and, deeming it safe, unlocked and opened the door. Beyond the door was a dark, silent void. Innominus tied himself to one end of a rope and, with Uncle Junkal's charmed rock troll holding the other end, he entered the "void" space. This turned out to be a smallish room with nothing of interest within -- a kind of sensory deprivation chamber where no light nor sound could penetrate. Innominus exited the room, closed the door, and the party ventured further south.
The next square chamber they came to offered many enticing prospects -- a closed door, a rubble pile -- yet the group opted to move swiftly through this area, exiting to the southeast and then proceeding due east down a long corridor. On the north side of this eastbound corridor were two doors. The first one was rather rotten and grimy, and was barred from the inside. Harry the Halfling listened at this door and heard muffled voices, but couldn't make out words or even what language the speakers were using. The party opted to move on to the second northern door.
This door was rather more well-kept than the previous one, and had a religious symbol etched on it. Uncle Junkal the Bard was able to recognize the symbol as that of the Followers of Korath, an ancient pre-Noffellian sect of humans believed to have lived on the Komar Peninsula in the long-distant days before Noffel was settled. But what would a Followers of Korath symbol be doing here, in southwestern Minoch, all the way across the Bay of Noffel from the presumed home of the long-dead sect?
The well-maintained door with the Followers of Korath insignia on it was unlocked, so the party opened it and entered what was obviously a shrine or chapel of some kind, complete with an altar set against the eastern wall. Steak-Breath and Locklear stood guard near the door while the rest of the party split up and began searching different areas of the room. After two turns of searching, Harry the Halfling found a secret door in the west wall that opened onto a passage blocked by rubble, and Uncle Junkal and Innominus working together found a secret compartment at the base of the altar, but also noticed (thanks to their combined successes in the second round of searching) that the compartment was locked with a poison-trapped lock. They asked Harry for assistance in inspecting the poison lock, and meanwhile Uncle Junkal went on to search the east wall near the altar for more secret doors. He found one a turn later, and discovered a small treasure chest with approximately 100gp worth of mixed coinage.
Meanwhile, Harry blew three turns trying unsuccessfully to disarm the poison lock on the secret compartment at the base of the altar. The party instructed Uncle Junkal's rock troll to start digging out the rubble-filled passage in the west wall, and Hazel and Uncle Junkal continued searching other areas of the chapel. Shortly (after only one more turn of searching as I recall) Uncle Junkal found a bundle of valuables stuffed under a fallen stone pew: an intact robe of a Korath Priest, a key with a Korath symbol etched into it, and a scroll containing the Cleric spells Snake Charm and Neutralize Poison. Quite a find!
The party tried Uncle Junkal's newly found key on the lock at the base of the altar, and voila! it opened harmlessly. Inside they found a small but heavy iron strongbox with no apparent hinges, cracks, or opening mechanisms of any kind. They took it with them but haven't been able to open it yet.
The rock troll finished digging through to the next room west: the room with the muttering voices the group heard behind the first door. Gathered in this room were five of the disoriented, gollum-like creatures the party had previously seen (4/14/10) in areas northwest of here. The PCs messed with these gollums for a bit but ultimately let them flee.
Finished with the Korath Chapel and the gollum hideout, the party headed east to a three way intersection, then veered south and east again. They saw some rooms I don't feel like describing, but eventually came to a roughly-hewn passage leading into some sinister caves, and, hungry for battle, entered. They were promptly assaulted by five charging lizardfolk with tridents. Gorgo was gored and Hazel was fairly seriously wounded, but the party prevailed, even without the help of the rock troll (who could not fight in the low-ceilinged passage). They crept onward to a large cave chamber with a 20' diameter, 15' high dried mud mound in the center. Sinister wisps of steam rose out of a dark opening at the base of the mound.
Innominus proposed that the group light up some oil flasks and firebomb the hell out of the mound. Meeting no serious objections, the plan was enacted, and Innominus, Hazel, and Uncle Junkal all lobbed flaming oil flasks at the mound entrance. One flask flew wide of the mark, but the other three went in, and soon there were screams and sizzling noises as the living creatures within were quickly incinerated. After the flames died down, Hazel moved forward to inspect the singed corpses, but no sooner did she reach the mound entrance than she inhaled some deadly gases and became instantly nauseous.
Hazel's nausea kept her out of most of the final battle of the session, which began once five more lizardfolk -- including a big leader with an ornate longsword -- came running in from the south to investigate the fire in the mound chamber. The party fought these lizardfolk bravely, though in the fray, the hireling Steak-Breath was killed. Having dispatched these foes, the group (minus Steak-Breath) prepared to hole up for a rest period in the mound chamber. Hazel recovered from her temporary illness and revealed that the fried corpses inside the mound appeared to be those of six more lizardfolk. The PCs have now made some enemies in this region of the Stony Hell!
Tuesday, July 20, 2010
Belated Session Reports from Innominus' Player
Since I rather abruptly dropped the ball on providing session reports for the previous two Arandish Labyrinth Lord Campaign 2010 sessions -- which took place back in April before one of our players left town for two months -- I now offer brief updates provided by that same player under the heading of "A Fragmentary Recollection of the Last Couple of Sessions." Thanks to Innominus' player for these recaps!
[any editorial additions of my own will be placed in brackets, like this]
4/5/10
I think Carter had this recapped on his blog, but this would be the episode wherein we killed some yetis and Uncle Junkal charmed the rock troll. [There appear to be fierce territorial disputes taking place between yetis and rock trolls in the vicinity of the Minochian town of Fortinbras.] Somewhere we picked up a dwarf NPC called Gorgo; I think we picked up 1 or 2 other NPCs, because later my notes indicated we gave a crossbow to “SB” (see 4/14/10 entry) [that would be Steak-Breath, a human fighter hireling]. Hazel and Innominus gathered some info in Fortinbras (correct?) and as we got near to Greystone Mountain we clotheslined a near-dead guy with a map [see below], who’s dying words were “Fucking hobgoblins, man!” Then we got up the entrance of the ["Stony Hell"] dungeon, and after checking out a pool with a weird ball in it we decided to camp out in a cave above the pool, which was hot and steamy, and we managed to notice some goblins going from the magic copse to the ruined entrance to the canyon. I think somebody shot at us, or maybe that was the next night.
[Here's that map:]
Loot: From the 3 yeti pelts at 40gp each, UJ, H and I have 34gp, 2sp, 8cp; Gorgo’s ½ share is 17 gp, 1sp, and 4cp. The dead guy had 15gp and 37sp; once we confirm how many are in the party we can split up this little batch of crap.
4/12/10
Much of this session was spent searching around the canyon (Stonehell Ground Level map, attached) with Hazel growing increasingly impatient about not finding anything to kill or any loot worth talking about. We scoped out a ruined building, a magic copse with evidence of a hanging, a bear cave, a dark entrance that could not be illuminated, and then a non-magic copse that showed another passage in. The magic copse had an arcane scroll and a nautical treasure map (“Borogast’s Treasure”). We went into the entrance in the non-magic copse on the north side of the canyon and found a more or less crappy little ruined guard’s garrison (Map 1, attached) that was empty except for a rabid raccoon that put up a hell of a fight, if I recall correctly. We searched the whole thing and eventually found a throne room with graffiti and through a secret door we found a stone table with a hollow leg, which had 50 sp in a tube, a vial of liquid, and a brass ring with rainbow hues. The vial is a potion of extra healing, which heals 3d6+3 damage once or 1d6 three times. My notes say the brass ring is magic, but I don’t recall if we ascertained what it does; Hazel kept it. (I also have a note about “30gp Chamber Pot Gold”, but I’m not sure where that came from.) Even with that, the party felt we were just dinking around the edges of something bigger, so we decided to go through the main entrance to the dungeon.
The main entrance leads to a large room with a spiral staircase descending down 100’ to the first dungeon level (Map 2-1, attached). The party worked through a ruined kitchen, feast hall and a burned out room on the NE side of the staircase room, basically turning up nothing of interest. Moving out of the NW passage we passed two ogre-mouth arches and then to a 4-way passage with a sign pointing W towards “The Dragon’s Den”. To the east was a room of filth, and to the west the passage gave way to rough-hewn caverns, where we met with a group of kobolds hauling buckets of bat guano. We followed a passage south past a 60’ whistling well (we may have lowered someone down on a rope to check this out, and then hauled them back up?), past a chamber covered in green phosphorescent moss and then down to a ruined crypt, the doors of which had the name “Molzak” on them (I don’t recall if UJ did some legend lore business on this thing?). Here we had a crappy couple of battles with rats and zombies in two of eight small tombs in the entry way to a larger room with an altar (?) that Innominus determined was magical. Some searching in a desperate attempt to find something non-crappy revealed a secret side chamber where priestly vestments and a coffer were found. We couldn’t open the coffer, so we stuck it in the bag of holding and made our way back out (we fought the zombies on the way out, hoping to find some loot on the way out).
I believe we then retraced our steps all the way back out to the cliff face to rest for the night.
Loot: An arcane scroll (can’t read it); “Borogast’s Treasure” map; 50sp in a tube; 30gp from a chamber pot; potion of extra healing (3d6 or 1d6 x 3); magic brass rainbow ring (Hazel); coffer that we can’t open and therefore can’t get any XP for the loot inside!
4/14/10
This was an extra special session because we all felt, and especially Hazel felt, that we still hadn’t killed enough or got enough good loot out of this dungeon before the hiatus. So with unprecedentedly large balls in hand, we headed back into the dungeon with the main goal of by-passing random crap and going deeper immediately, down to the second level via the whistling well. Luckily we didn’t encounter anything on the way in, and we all jumped down the well onto a tarp strung up underneath it, perhaps to catch loot being thrown down the well(?). This led us to a diamond-shaped room with passages leading west and east out of it (Map 3-1, attached). We went west and came into a room with ~8 languid gollum-like humanoids lying around, semi-conscious. We decided to pass through the room without getting them all roused, and the clearest path took us out of the room via a NW passage. Along the walls was childish writing and scribbling. A ways along we ran into spear traps on either side of the passage (don’t remember if we triggered them and they missed or someone detected and disarmed them?). Eventually we reached a room with frescoes of sunny fields, which Innominus took to be a children’s play room, perhaps the scribbling in the passage was related to this? Further along past this room there was a hobby horse at a T-intersection, which Uncle Junkal decided he wanted to ride on ... there’s nothing in my notes about whether we got attacked here or if I just remember that Hazel and Innominus thought we were just asking to get attacked while Uncle Junkal was being a dufus. Or maybe the hobby horse collapsed under his weight? Anyone?
Just past that we entered a room full of 8 baths, one of which began to boil on contact (I think someone tested it with a staff). In this one we found a boiled up elf and hauled him out (did we feed him to the rock troll or something? He’s probably hungry.), and he had 700sp and a wand, which we can’t use since none of us are magic-users or elves .... We pressed on into what had been a big dining hall but was now covered in spider webs and looked like a giant black widow spider’s lair. It scuddered up into the webs and we spent a good bit burning oil trying to burn it out, with partial success. After burning up all kinds of webs and crap it eventually fled out of the room, where somebody finally nailed it at another T-intersection (Uncle Junkal with his Double Darts of Doom?). Back in the lair we searched around and found all of 47cp, which was universally denounced as bogus and not worth the encumbrance. Lame loot.
Out to the T-intersection we were ambushed (or surprised at least) by a trio of hobgoblins, one of which nailed somebody with a crossbow before we entered a pitched battle the details of which I can’t recall. My notes say Innominus unleashed the Sling of Madness (d30) and dealt one of them 9HP of damage, and it was subsequently beheaded by Hazel. After they were all crushed by our awesomeness, we searched them for loot and useful stuff. Collectively they had: 60gp; a voucher, perhaps an IOU, that said “Hort’s Snakes”; 2 battle axes; 1 crossbow, and 3 suits of chainmail. My notes say of the armor and weapons “Given to 2 NPCs – SB has crossbow”. I seem to remember that Gorgo refused to use hobgoblin gear (and also didn’t really need it), which leads me to suspect we had two other NPCs from Fortinbras. Anyone remember the details there? Hazel, Uncle Junkal and Innominus each took their uniform insignias, which looked like a skull and crossbones with a hobgoblin skull.
With a nice bit of killing under our belts, we then searched a ruined room with a shattered door and presumably killed a giant (or maybe just large) beetle ... I don’t have details on that. In the room we found a dagger which we kept (don’t know if it’s magic or anything), and a scrap of paper with 4 unknown words in the language of an unknown race, not a “learned language”. Retracing our steps past the dead spider we pushed on to another webby room in which we found a nearly dead halfling and pulled him out. We searched the room and found a secret door with a passage sloping down to a stairway leading further down into the unknown. This is as far as we went that day. We fell back into the bath room to sleep and recover from wounds, so that’s where we’d start off from next session.
I don’t remember the fate of the halfling, whether he just died or did Innominus cast cure light wounds on him before going to sleep? I have noted that he had 20gp, 47sp, a short sword and a partial thieves’ toolkit, but I can’t remember if we had disarmed him before we took him back to the bath room. Was there some distrust since he was presumably a thief?
Also, I have a little list at the bottom of my notes indicating that we kept the dagger from the beetle room, the wand from the boiled elf, didn’t take the spider lair loot (47cp), and then there’s “Mirror” with an ‘X’ next to it, meaning we didn’t take it. Does anyone remember what mirror this might be? Not the one UJ has from the Death Frost Doom cabin, is it?
Loot: 60 gp; 700 sp; a wand; an IOU; a dagger; chainmail, a battle axe, and a crossbow for 2 (?) retainers; and the halfling’s stuff if he’s dead.
A final cartographic note:
As Innominus studied the dead man’s map of Greystone Mountain and compared it to our maps so far, it seems likely that it depicts a portion of the first level that we didn’t explore. Innominus suggests that the room labeled “Start” on the dead man’s map is the room accessed by the spiral staircase, and the passage leading out to the SE (as far as we explored it) bears similarities, with a first side passage off to the east and then a dog-leg turn to the west. If this is correct then anytime we want to kill some orcs or go to the kobold market we know where to find it. Food for thought.
[any editorial additions of my own will be placed in brackets, like this]
4/5/10
I think Carter had this recapped on his blog, but this would be the episode wherein we killed some yetis and Uncle Junkal charmed the rock troll. [There appear to be fierce territorial disputes taking place between yetis and rock trolls in the vicinity of the Minochian town of Fortinbras.] Somewhere we picked up a dwarf NPC called Gorgo; I think we picked up 1 or 2 other NPCs, because later my notes indicated we gave a crossbow to “SB” (see 4/14/10 entry) [that would be Steak-Breath, a human fighter hireling]. Hazel and Innominus gathered some info in Fortinbras (correct?) and as we got near to Greystone Mountain we clotheslined a near-dead guy with a map [see below], who’s dying words were “Fucking hobgoblins, man!” Then we got up the entrance of the ["Stony Hell"] dungeon, and after checking out a pool with a weird ball in it we decided to camp out in a cave above the pool, which was hot and steamy, and we managed to notice some goblins going from the magic copse to the ruined entrance to the canyon. I think somebody shot at us, or maybe that was the next night.
[Here's that map:]
Loot: From the 3 yeti pelts at 40gp each, UJ, H and I have 34gp, 2sp, 8cp; Gorgo’s ½ share is 17 gp, 1sp, and 4cp. The dead guy had 15gp and 37sp; once we confirm how many are in the party we can split up this little batch of crap.
4/12/10
Much of this session was spent searching around the canyon (Stonehell Ground Level map, attached) with Hazel growing increasingly impatient about not finding anything to kill or any loot worth talking about. We scoped out a ruined building, a magic copse with evidence of a hanging, a bear cave, a dark entrance that could not be illuminated, and then a non-magic copse that showed another passage in. The magic copse had an arcane scroll and a nautical treasure map (“Borogast’s Treasure”). We went into the entrance in the non-magic copse on the north side of the canyon and found a more or less crappy little ruined guard’s garrison (Map 1, attached) that was empty except for a rabid raccoon that put up a hell of a fight, if I recall correctly. We searched the whole thing and eventually found a throne room with graffiti and through a secret door we found a stone table with a hollow leg, which had 50 sp in a tube, a vial of liquid, and a brass ring with rainbow hues. The vial is a potion of extra healing, which heals 3d6+3 damage once or 1d6 three times. My notes say the brass ring is magic, but I don’t recall if we ascertained what it does; Hazel kept it. (I also have a note about “30gp Chamber Pot Gold”, but I’m not sure where that came from.) Even with that, the party felt we were just dinking around the edges of something bigger, so we decided to go through the main entrance to the dungeon.
The main entrance leads to a large room with a spiral staircase descending down 100’ to the first dungeon level (Map 2-1, attached). The party worked through a ruined kitchen, feast hall and a burned out room on the NE side of the staircase room, basically turning up nothing of interest. Moving out of the NW passage we passed two ogre-mouth arches and then to a 4-way passage with a sign pointing W towards “The Dragon’s Den”. To the east was a room of filth, and to the west the passage gave way to rough-hewn caverns, where we met with a group of kobolds hauling buckets of bat guano. We followed a passage south past a 60’ whistling well (we may have lowered someone down on a rope to check this out, and then hauled them back up?), past a chamber covered in green phosphorescent moss and then down to a ruined crypt, the doors of which had the name “Molzak” on them (I don’t recall if UJ did some legend lore business on this thing?). Here we had a crappy couple of battles with rats and zombies in two of eight small tombs in the entry way to a larger room with an altar (?) that Innominus determined was magical. Some searching in a desperate attempt to find something non-crappy revealed a secret side chamber where priestly vestments and a coffer were found. We couldn’t open the coffer, so we stuck it in the bag of holding and made our way back out (we fought the zombies on the way out, hoping to find some loot on the way out).
I believe we then retraced our steps all the way back out to the cliff face to rest for the night.
Loot: An arcane scroll (can’t read it); “Borogast’s Treasure” map; 50sp in a tube; 30gp from a chamber pot; potion of extra healing (3d6 or 1d6 x 3); magic brass rainbow ring (Hazel); coffer that we can’t open and therefore can’t get any XP for the loot inside!
4/14/10
This was an extra special session because we all felt, and especially Hazel felt, that we still hadn’t killed enough or got enough good loot out of this dungeon before the hiatus. So with unprecedentedly large balls in hand, we headed back into the dungeon with the main goal of by-passing random crap and going deeper immediately, down to the second level via the whistling well. Luckily we didn’t encounter anything on the way in, and we all jumped down the well onto a tarp strung up underneath it, perhaps to catch loot being thrown down the well(?). This led us to a diamond-shaped room with passages leading west and east out of it (Map 3-1, attached). We went west and came into a room with ~8 languid gollum-like humanoids lying around, semi-conscious. We decided to pass through the room without getting them all roused, and the clearest path took us out of the room via a NW passage. Along the walls was childish writing and scribbling. A ways along we ran into spear traps on either side of the passage (don’t remember if we triggered them and they missed or someone detected and disarmed them?). Eventually we reached a room with frescoes of sunny fields, which Innominus took to be a children’s play room, perhaps the scribbling in the passage was related to this? Further along past this room there was a hobby horse at a T-intersection, which Uncle Junkal decided he wanted to ride on ... there’s nothing in my notes about whether we got attacked here or if I just remember that Hazel and Innominus thought we were just asking to get attacked while Uncle Junkal was being a dufus. Or maybe the hobby horse collapsed under his weight? Anyone?
Just past that we entered a room full of 8 baths, one of which began to boil on contact (I think someone tested it with a staff). In this one we found a boiled up elf and hauled him out (did we feed him to the rock troll or something? He’s probably hungry.), and he had 700sp and a wand, which we can’t use since none of us are magic-users or elves .... We pressed on into what had been a big dining hall but was now covered in spider webs and looked like a giant black widow spider’s lair. It scuddered up into the webs and we spent a good bit burning oil trying to burn it out, with partial success. After burning up all kinds of webs and crap it eventually fled out of the room, where somebody finally nailed it at another T-intersection (Uncle Junkal with his Double Darts of Doom?). Back in the lair we searched around and found all of 47cp, which was universally denounced as bogus and not worth the encumbrance. Lame loot.
Out to the T-intersection we were ambushed (or surprised at least) by a trio of hobgoblins, one of which nailed somebody with a crossbow before we entered a pitched battle the details of which I can’t recall. My notes say Innominus unleashed the Sling of Madness (d30) and dealt one of them 9HP of damage, and it was subsequently beheaded by Hazel. After they were all crushed by our awesomeness, we searched them for loot and useful stuff. Collectively they had: 60gp; a voucher, perhaps an IOU, that said “Hort’s Snakes”; 2 battle axes; 1 crossbow, and 3 suits of chainmail. My notes say of the armor and weapons “Given to 2 NPCs – SB has crossbow”. I seem to remember that Gorgo refused to use hobgoblin gear (and also didn’t really need it), which leads me to suspect we had two other NPCs from Fortinbras. Anyone remember the details there? Hazel, Uncle Junkal and Innominus each took their uniform insignias, which looked like a skull and crossbones with a hobgoblin skull.
With a nice bit of killing under our belts, we then searched a ruined room with a shattered door and presumably killed a giant (or maybe just large) beetle ... I don’t have details on that. In the room we found a dagger which we kept (don’t know if it’s magic or anything), and a scrap of paper with 4 unknown words in the language of an unknown race, not a “learned language”. Retracing our steps past the dead spider we pushed on to another webby room in which we found a nearly dead halfling and pulled him out. We searched the room and found a secret door with a passage sloping down to a stairway leading further down into the unknown. This is as far as we went that day. We fell back into the bath room to sleep and recover from wounds, so that’s where we’d start off from next session.
I don’t remember the fate of the halfling, whether he just died or did Innominus cast cure light wounds on him before going to sleep? I have noted that he had 20gp, 47sp, a short sword and a partial thieves’ toolkit, but I can’t remember if we had disarmed him before we took him back to the bath room. Was there some distrust since he was presumably a thief?
Also, I have a little list at the bottom of my notes indicating that we kept the dagger from the beetle room, the wand from the boiled elf, didn’t take the spider lair loot (47cp), and then there’s “Mirror” with an ‘X’ next to it, meaning we didn’t take it. Does anyone remember what mirror this might be? Not the one UJ has from the Death Frost Doom cabin, is it?
Loot: 60 gp; 700 sp; a wand; an IOU; a dagger; chainmail, a battle axe, and a crossbow for 2 (?) retainers; and the halfling’s stuff if he’s dead.
A final cartographic note:
As Innominus studied the dead man’s map of Greystone Mountain and compared it to our maps so far, it seems likely that it depicts a portion of the first level that we didn’t explore. Innominus suggests that the room labeled “Start” on the dead man’s map is the room accessed by the spiral staircase, and the passage leading out to the SE (as far as we explored it) bears similarities, with a first side passage off to the east and then a dog-leg turn to the west. If this is correct then anytime we want to kill some orcs or go to the kobold market we know where to find it. Food for thought.
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