[BECMI/3e] Operation Meteor

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Lokathor
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[BECMI/3e] Operation Meteor

Post by Lokathor »

"You roll badly, you die. Welcome to First Edition DnD." -Mord Deathsfriend

Tonight's tale is one of humble beginnings. And of frustration. A small, five hobo squad goes off into the wilds to try and rediscover lost treasure.
  • Mord Deathsfriend - Cleric of Death, with a gentle Germanic voice.
  • Emila Weinerhoff - Wizard, with a questioning and particular voice.
  • Guy Lang - Fighter, with a crazed, near-murderous voice.
  • Uncle Chan - Monk of the Iron Fist, who speaks in a strong Russian accent.
  • Oliver Brimble - Thief, who honestly sounds like a griefer.
The game is Caves and Chimeras, a splicing of 3e/Tome stuff over top of a retroclone called Dark Dungeon, which is itself based on BECMI DnD. I'd say it's a little more like 3e than it is like Basic DnD at this moment, the main thing is that I want to keep it enough like older DnD so that we can play with the old 1e modules and boxed sets. Because I want to be able to run all the old boxed sets.

Speaking of which, we're starting off with "B1 - In Search Of The Unknown".

This adventure is actually kinda horrible when played by an impatient, modern group. I think it's probably kinda horrible no matter what. By the end of the night I was very aware of why people think fondly of B2 but never much mention B1. Even if you like slow exploring, there's just not enough going on in this module. There's 56 numbered locations, and the suggested adventure has you adding a monster encounter to 16-20 of them, and a treasure to 15-25 of them (though monsters and treasure don't need to line up). So, a huge portion of the time you'll end up exploring this sprawling place, but finding not much at all.

As a kid, I went through dungeons like this. They can be fun if you're a little cagey about things and you keep second guessing yourself. I think it's interesting to ask lots of questions about the environment, and wonder about why things were built they way they are, and then wonder how they're being used now, and so on. However, that all is based on the idea that the dungeon is at least mostly populated most of the time, and maybe the locals are out when you happen to arrive in a particular location, but there's at least signs of activity.

This dungeon is not that sort of thing. Most of it has been abandoned for ages and ages, and not many have moved in since then. On top of that, this group isn't even the kind of group that has as much exploration interest, I'd say. They're more after the treasures than about the exploration, so this dungeon wasn't particularly well suited to them. Towards the end they got kinda fed up with it and so I just revealed big chunks of the map that weren't inhabited and basically said "here you go, we'll skip past describing these areas since there's no one to find there". I could have embellished more to make the empty sections more detailed, but I don't think it would have helped.

Also, and I really can't stress this enough: The dungeon layout is total bullshit. No, really. There's long passages that do nothing, places that loop around, lots and lots of doors for no reason. The layout is just never something that anyone would have ever arranged as a fort, which really undoes a lot of the story that this is an abandoned fort. Actually, if you google image search this module, there's an entire other layout that some folks on a forum made, because the original map is that much bullshit.

I guess that's it for my "review" of the module, so let's get on with the adventuring.

Episode 01: The Shooting Star They Saw

We join the party after they've already arrived on site at the entrance to the abandoned complex marked out by a shooting star that they saw as they met at a crossroads (which is the backstory of how they met, and why they came here). It's a rocky outcropping on top of a forest covered hill. Piles of boulders litter the bottom of the hill from the excavation long ago, all covered over now with grass and moss. A ten foot wide corridor leads slightly into the shadow and then is blocked by large wooden doors. Local legend has it that within these tunnels is a large cache of goods and treasures, lost to the ages. Roghan (a fighter) and Zelligar (a wizard) once made their home here.

Fair warning, it's really long.
The party is assembled in a marching order of sorts, and they ready themselves to move inside...

Guy Lang: Is it like, dark in here?
GM: Uh, yeah? There's a little sunlight at the edge of the the tunnel, but you'll need torches or something if you wanna see inside.
Uncle Chan: I didn't think I had to bring a torch.
Emila: I didn't bring torches.
Oliver: I have candles.
GM: Well... just spend some of your money and just say that you had them the whole time.
Oliver: I have like 100 candles.
GM: You probably don't want to use a candle. It would go out really easily.
Guy Lang: I will attach a torch to my shield, it's badass that way.
Uncle Chan: I carry no torch, I must keep hands free for punching.
GM: you could hold a torch in your hands, and then kick people in the face.
Uncle Chan: For PUNCHING!
GM: Okay. Make the wizard hold the torch then.

So they move forward, and make the thief check for traps and all that. However, at first level the thief has like a 10% chance to notice traps so it's kinda useless. It's finally decided that the wizard and cleric will hold the torches. They open the door, and there is a long hallway with some alcoves. Three sets. The third set of alcoves has a Magic Mouth spell that shouts about intruders. Also, at the intersection, there's five dead bodies.

For a moment they consider stealing the Magic Mouths, but I explain that it's impossible to steal a permanent effect like that, it'd just float in place if you took away the bricks.

Then they examine the bodies. There's a grey pointed wizard hat that they take, and it has garlic inside. There's a sword with a bad handle that's rusted beyond repair. The bodies are examined with First Aid and they are determined to be 15 days old, exactly, to the minute. Most were slashed to death, but one had his skull bashed in instead.

Emila: You know, I just wanna point to some parallels here. There are five of them, and there are five of us. And they do make up kind of a motley crew, like we do.
Oliver: Yeah, but we're a better motley crew.
Guy Lang: Yeah.
Emila: Well, I hope so.

They examine an abandoned kitchen. Old cooking chimney, tables, but no active food.

They wander around through some empty passages. Tons and tons of passages. There's some mazey sections, and some long straight sections, but like I said the layout for this dungeon is bullshit. They eventually come upon a room with a stage and some pews.

Guy Lang: I check all the pews.
GM: The pews are all kinda average, all very old.
Guy Lang: Well, you know, they might have dropped a coin or something.
Mord: Rifling through ze pews, like, "did anyvne drop a coppa!?"
GM: Nope, not even a penny.
Mord: Vell damn it!

They go over to a garden area. There's some stone half-circle benches with little garden patches inside of them where there used to be well kept mushrooms. Now there's mushrooms spreading out everywhere. Also, two rats. Giant rats! Well, the size of a dog.

They square off with the two rats.

~Round 1~
Rat runs over and bites Oliver in the face. 2 damage, but Oliver makes his save vs Poison.
Uncle Chan punches a rat, killing it.
Oliver runs to the back.
Emila gets closer to throw a knife, but it's too far off so she readies an action to attack it when possible.
The 2nd rat can't quite get up to anyone, so it gets as close as it can and hisses.
Mord moves closer, but also can't close and attack (I decided that there's no charge action in this game, for now). Instead, he moves into the space between the rat and the wizard.
Guy Lang also moves without attacking.

~Round 2~
Uncle Chan moves and punches, but misses.
Oliver lets them handle it.
Emila 5ft steps into melee, and tries to stab the rat, missing.
The rat bites Emila, for 2 damage and an infection.
Mord misses.
Guy Lang hits the rat and it dies.

So I look it up, and the rat's disease effect is -2 to Attacks, prevents magic healing, and makes non-magic healing only half as much. Sounds alright, so we go with that. It's unclear how this disease will go away, probably with more saves later on. Actually we forget about it later on, but whatever.

Mord uses First Aid to heal 1d3 points of damage on the injured. Which is a thing that you can do after each "set" of having taken damage (eg: all of 1 battle's damage is one set, and a later battle would allow another First Aid check). We call the DC 15 and they get some hit points back.

Emila: So, describe one of these mushrooms to me, while I'm wracked in pain.
GM: They're a whole bunch of -aagh- sort've purple and green a lot of them -aah- with sort've spots, and, uh, red bits -ulgh- it's, you know, just sort've, you know, they're not... are you a mushroom expert?
Oliver: Why are you grunting?
GM: The joke was that he's in wracking pain.
Emila: Can I try Nature Lore untrained?
GM: You can.
Emila: 13, that's not amazing.
GM: Well, they're definitely mushrooms, but you've no idea if they're safe or not.
Guy Lang: 21
GM: Guy Lang, you recognize these mushrooms as definitely being not safe.

Everyone immediately proceeds to collect hallucinogenic mushroom samples.

Then they wander off again in search of stuff. They find a weapon rack. They also find a squad of gnomes. A brief argument is had over who has rights to the goods that they're looking for, and then Emila throws down a Sleep spell. Well, she would, but Uncle Chan actually has a higher initiative roll, so he moves and punches a gnome first.

Then Emila casts Sleep. We're using the BECMI versions of spells, and so I had to double check exactly what Sleep did just to be sure. Damn. This is perhaps the nastiest version of Sleep. 240ft range, 20ft burst, Affects 2d8 HD of living creatures spreading out from the center. Any affected creature instantly falls asleep, no save. Welcome to first edition indeed. Emila knocks out 11HD, so all the gnomes fall over, plus Uncle Chan. Then they stab the gnomes in the neck and wake up Uncle Chan. From the gnomes they loot 5 gnome swords (daggers). From the room they loot 12 spears, a hand axe, a longsword, and 20 arrows.

Then they go into the next room, and they find about 30 old beds, like a barracks. They immediately decide to chop up the bed frames and set them on fire, so that no one else can sneak up on them and set the bed frames on fire first.

GM: Okay, are you going to do this all in the kitchen area you found? where there's already a chimney?
Guy Lang: We could smoke 'em out! There's probably other adventurers in here, let's smoke 'em out! I saw Yojimbo just the other day, that's how they got him. They smoked him out, and then killed him as they tried to run out of the place.
GM: Okay, who are you going to smoke out? There's a lot of dungeon complex here.
Guy Lang: We're going to find people, and then we're gonna smoke them out. Trust me.
GM: So where are you going to light the fire?
Emila: Let's light it here.
Guy Lang: We have to find the people first, then we'll know where the fire's gotta go.
GM: Yeah, if you light the fire right here the smoke won't go any direction except your own face.
Guy Lang: Won't it spread in all directions?
GM: Well, yeah, but there's three walls and a doorway that you're standing in, so it'll go out past you.
Guy Lang: Yeah we're not gonna start the fire here.
GM: Emila was suggesting that though.
Guy Lang: Well, Emila is wrong.
Emila: I think I'm right about this, but that it'll take some time for you guys to end up on the same page as me about it. That's okay.
Guy Lang: Okay, I open the next door, here, *points on the map* and I'll see what's behind it. Because when there's a billion monsters, and we come smoking at 'em, I'll seem like a genius. My guy isn't very wise, he just watched Yojimbo and he wants to do this.
Mord: As opposed to Mord, who's not very intelligent, but who still likes the idea. Perhaps because he's not very intelligent.
GM: This is an old bedroom, ages and ages ago. There's a semblance of a mattress left.
Emila: Let's check the closet.
Oliver: Check under the mattress.
GM: Okay okay hold on. *checks the PDF* There's some wall pegs. The bed has not much mattress on it, but it's a well carved frame. Extremely ornately carved. Nightstand is made of rosewood, looks alright, has a drawer with a keyhole on it.
Guy Lang: Open Lock.
GM: There's a table with the three chairs, and a pitcher under the table with three mugs. They're all made of pewter. Plus there's those doors you can see on the map.
Guy Lang: I open the door.
GM: *reveals the fog of war to show 7 goblins in the walk-in closet*
Mord: Oh, there are quite a few things there.
Guy Lang: I'm gonna need someone to block them all in with me.
Uncle Chan: Punch 'em!
Emila: *moves his mini* Uncle Chan, get in there.
GM: No, you were up here, you can't just jump back yet.
Emila: What? What?
GM: You were definitely also saying you were opening the door.
Guy Lang: Realistically, you just need to stop being at the front. Seriously.
Uncle Chan: Nonsense!
Mord: Look, he haz a deth wish, I cannot, uh, help but condone zis.
Uncle Chan: He he tough, like man!
Guy Lang: Yeah, but I mean if he stays alive more he is going to learn magic, and set many people on fire.
Oliver: Let's just set them on fire without the magic then.
Mord: Not if he is always standing in front, he will not!
GM: You guys should roll some surprise checks.
Guy Lang: I rolled a 6.
GM: Goblins got a 4. Guess you're both not surprised.
Guy Lang: Guy Lang is never surprised! He always expects combat.

~Round 1~
A goblin jumps forward and is immediately full of human hate. He stabs at the wizard, but misses.

GM: Uncle Chan.
Uncle Chan:
Mord: sí?
Uncle Chan: sí.
GM: You're up. You pushed open this big double door to a closet and suddenly there's goblins everywhere and they're snarling and waving swords!
Mord: Do they have a pie?
GM: They have no pie, but there's some stuff in there it looks like.
Emila: Are they trapped in the closet?
GM: You don't know, you haven't had a chance to look. But based on the fact that it's full of goblins, maybe not.
Mord: Why were the goblins locked in the closet?
GM: Well, maybe they heard you making a racket and they hid in the closet to try and surprise you.
Guy Lang: DAMNIT! We should have smoked them out!!

Uncle Chan punches a goblin, and it dies.
Goblin misses Uncle Chan.
Oliver... tries to open the lock on the drawer. He fails. But the handle has a cool needle trap on it, so he takes 1 damage.

Oliver: I thought I was already automatically looking for traps!
GM: You were, but that doesn't mean you automatically find them. Also, you can't use that hand for 2 turns.
Oliver: My right or left?
GM: Right.
Mord: How will you masturbate for the next 2 turns?
Uncle Chan: Fuck.
Oliver: Guess I'll just have to masturbate with my left hand for 2 turns.
Guy Lang: This is an emergency situation.
Oliver: Yeah.

Emila goes for a stab attack that misses, then 5ft steps away.
Guy Lang fails to stab a goblin... by one point.
Goblin misses, another goblin moves into a better position.
Mord misses a goblin.
Goblin misses Mord.
Goblin stabs Uncle Chan for 3.

Guy Lang: Wait, your AC is 13? Get the fuck out of there, I have AC 20.

Goblin hits Mord for 2.

~Round 2~

GM: Uncle Chan, your turn to go.
Oliver: Get the fuck out.
Guy Lang: What he said.
GM: Oh, good roll, you hit the goblin, and you kill a gobiln.
Uncle Chan: I kill ze goblin!
Uncle Chan: Also, can I 5ft step after that?
GM: yes.
Uncle Chan: *5ft steps deeper into the crowd of goblins*
Uncle Chan: I eat hornets for breakfast!

GM: Jake, your turn.
Oliver: Uh....
Guy Lang: Get a ranged weapon, you're a chump without one.
Oliver: I have theses arrows, but I don't have anything to fire them with.
Guy Lang: I've watched enough Fist of The North Star to know that if you throw an arrow, you will murder someone.
Oliver: Okay, I'm gonna move here, and throw an arrows at this goblin. *draws a line of fire through Mord*
GM: That sounds really dangerous.
Guy Lang: Don't hit Mord in the back.
GM: There's a strong chance you'd do that.
Guy Lang: That would be like when Ken jumps in front of the arrow that Ral throws... it's obvious... watch that show.
GM: Gonna do it anyway?
Oliver: No, I'm wise and intelligent, so I won't do it.
GM: Just gonna wait?
Oliver: Yeah, actually I'll tell them to hurry up, I'm too old for this shit.

GM: Emila, you're up.
Emila: I get 1 spell a day, is that right?
GM: Yeah.
Emila: I'll think upon the world? I dunno.
Guy Lang: Get out of the way for now.
GM: Yeah they've got a good choke point setup, you can wait if you want.
Emila: I'm gonna step over here and grab the pewter stuff.

Guy Lang: For my turn, Guy Lang steps down and strikes the one who strikes at Mord. He dies.

GM: Alright, this goblin steps down, and tries to hit you. 15 hit?
Uncle Chan: It does!
GM: You take 3.
Uncle Chan: *is left at 1hp*
Uncle Chan: BITE ME!!

Mord misses with his blackjack yet again.
Goblin misses Guy Lang
Uncle Chan: Fight Me.
Goblin misses Uncle Chan.
Uncle Chan: Fight me~
Goblin misses Mord.

~Round 3~
Uncle Chan kills another goblin, and then 5ft steps farther away from the party.
Oliver still can't get a clear shot, so he readies an action to make a sarcastic statement when Uncle Chan dies.
Uncle Chan: fight me!

GM: Emila, are you gonna also prepare a sarcastic statement?
Emila: Uhhhh, no. I'm gonna move 30ft and open this door [to the other closet].
Guy Lang: Why?
GM: Because that might cause more monsters to show up.
Guy Lang: Okay.
GM: *reveals the fog of war to show a giant treasure pile drawn on the map*
Mord: What!?
GM: You see a giant pile of treasure.
Emila: I don't say anything. I don't say anything.

Guy Lang misses.
Mord misses.
A goblin stabs Guy Lang right in the heart, for 6.
And the other goblin misses Chan.
Uncle Chan: FIGHT ME.

~Round 4~
Uncle Chan misses.
Oliver moves over a bit towards Emila.

GM: Alright Emila, whatcha gonna go?
Emila: I'm gonna advance into the room.
Guy Lang: There's gonna be a monster!
GM: There's a big pile of gems and treasure all over the floor.
Oliver: Don't touch the treasure, because it might be trapped.
Emila: I'm gonna scoop up the treasure.
Oliver: You dumb idiot.
GM: You go to scoop it up, and it melts right through you hands. It's an illusion spell!
Emila: Rats, should've seen that.
Guy Lang: Just like in Adventure Time

Guy Lang steps so that he'll be flanked by goblins himself while also flanking a goblin with both Mord and Uncle Chan. North to south it's Mord / Goblin / Guy Lang / Goblin / Uncle Chan. Then he kills the goblin that he's flanking with Uncle Chan.

Mord finally hits a goblin.

The final goblin goes banzai and hits Mord for 5, leaving Mord at 1.

Mord: A good try, my friend.

~Round 5~
Uncle Chan kills the last goblin.

First Aid checks all around. Mord aids Uncle Chan and Oliver, but fails to aid himself.
Uncle Chan attempts to aid Mord, and fails.
Emila fails to aid Mord.
Oliver fails to aid Mord.

GM: You guys are all really not sure what's wrong.
Guy Lang: Boom! Rolled a 21.
GM: Guy Lang, you're like, "okay, here's what you do, you have to take the short sword out from your arm, that's how you fix it."
Mord: Oh! zats ze real lesson.
Guy Lang: You heal 1hp.

In the closet is an old coat with some fancy studs, which can probably at least be melted down if no one wants to buy the coat itself. Also some books. A lantern with no oil, which Guy Lang combines with his oil that has no lantern. Also some old papers, like management documents and old letters that seem to confirm this as being Zelligar's stuff.

One book is a history book.
One book is a plant encyclopedia.
One book is written in an unknown language, but doesn't seem to be magic formulas.
The fourth book is a meteorology book.

They contemplate going to town, but it's several days off, so they decide to camp out in the barracks for a bit instead. First Aid checks are made for Long Term care and so on.

They get up and wander around. They find a dining hall, and beyond the dining all is a room with a statue in it. This is a nice marble statue, worth 5,000gp actually, except that it's a human-sized marble statue so it's like 1,000 lbs or something stupidly heavy like that.

Emila: Uncle Chan should punch it.
GM: It's a very ornate marble statue.
Uncle Chan: does a 5 hit?
GM: ...yes.
Uncle Chan: I do 7 damage.
GM: You do no damage, because it's made of rock.
Emila: What, are you saying rock is....?
GM: I'm saying rock has a hardness of 8, so it subtracts 8 every time it takes damage, so no damage happens to it.
Guy Lang: So describe it a bit.
GM: It's a nice statue of a woman holding her arm out, in like a pose of some sort. Also, there's some benches along the walls.
Oliver: What are the benches made out of?
GM: Oak.
Oliver: Let's burn them.
Guy Lang: We're adding them to the giant burn pile.
Oliver: Yeah, along with those tables.
Mord: Yes.

They explore a bit more

GM: Alright, uh, *reads module* this is an old abandoned room, of no apparent value.
Guy Lang: WHO BUILT THIS GOD DAMNED PLACE?
Mord: zat is an ekzelent question. ze rooms are not symetrikal, ze layout is NONzensikal.
GM: Well, Guy Lang, do you wander around and check the end of the hallway?
Guy Lang: I did.
GM: You did?
Guy Lang: I do it again! What's the point of this stupid hallway!
GM: Make a saving throw against Breath Weapon!
Guy Lang: alright jeeze.... I guess I don't make the save.
GM: You fall down a bit. A door opens up and you fall down a bit.
Guy Lang: wait, vs Breath Weapon?
GM: It's like, how you do reflex saves.
Guy Lang: Why isn't it called Reflex Save?
Emila: This is a different time and a different place Guy Lang.
GM: It's a different time and a different place. That's right.
Guy Lang: I, no, now I want a dragon whose breath weapon is to open pits under people.
Oliver: You breathed on it, and it turned into a weapon.
GM: You fall down a 40ft drop into a pool of water, and you take 4 damage.
Oliver: Well, he's dead, let's all go down this corridor over here.
GM: He's not dead.
Emila: How far?
GM: 40ft, into a pool of water.
Emila: I have two 50ft ropes.
Mord: I also have a length of rope.
GM: Guy Lang, make a swimming check.
Guy Lang: 9
GM: 9? You start to fall under the water, oh no!
Guy Lang: Should I roll again? I'm gonna die here aren't I?
GM: Maybe. Does anyone do anything to improve Guy Lang's situation?
Guy Lang: They're throwing me the rope!
Mord: I toss him ze rope.
GM: okay, okay, Guy Lang roll for a swim check--
Mord: No, no, I just sit back and I laugh for a bit.
GM: That's what I would expect Oliver to do, so maybe other people would do that too. Yeah, Guy Lang roll again with a +5. Alright, you grab at it, and you can pull your head above water and you get a chance to look around. It's just a pretty straight shaft that doesn't lead anywhere it seems.
Oliver: Like a well?
GM: It's kinda like a well, the pool is about 8ft deep.
Guy Lang: Is there like treasure at the bottom?
GM: Hmmmmmmmm, the water is extremely cold, but you do see one metal flask at the bottom.
Guy Lang: If anyone wants to climb down and swim.
Emila: We're not in a position to do that, we're kinda struggling right now.
Mord: Don't look at me my friend.
Emila: We should just get you out of that water, and burn this place down.
Guy Lang: I get the fuck out of here. I leave the thing. Fuck it.
Mord: I First Aid for 3.
Guy Lang: Woo.
Uncle Chan: What was the metal flask in the water?
GM: At the bottom of a 40ft shaft and then 8ft of water, there's a metal flask.
Uncle Chan: Does it look valuable?
GM: It's made of metal.
Uncle Chan: How shiny are we talking?
GM: At least as shiny as a sword.
Uncle Chan: I'm gonna jump down there and swim for it.
Guy Lang: He's going to lower himself on the rope.
Uncle Chan: I know what I said.
Mord: You jump down 40ft, off the top of a 4 story building.
Uncle Chan: There's 8ft of water, I should be fine, right?
Oliver: Oh yeah, totally, totally.
GM: you carefully lower yourself on the rope.
Uncle Chan: Is there something I can tie my rope to?
GM: You can have one of them hold it.
Uncle Chan: Ehhh
Oliver: I can hold it.
Guy Lang: I'm like, super strong, and I'm gonna murder you Oliver.
GM: There is a metal flask, and you obtain it. It looks like a whisky flask, like a drinking flask.
Uncle Chan: That's perfect.
Mord: Really? He could get ye flask?
GM: he could get ye flask.

Then they wander around the map some more.

Guy Lang: I assume that you've been rolling for Oliver's secret door chance every time here.
GM: They don't get a secret door chance exactly.
Mord: You should've been an Elf.
Guy Lang: Alright, what do I see here?
GM: you see a wooden door.
Guy Lang: I open it.
Mord: there's a goat! Do you wanna switch doors?
GM: There is another wooden door.
Guy Lang: Oh my god it's that thing we talked about where there would be a bunch of wooden doors, and then a secret door to the left, and a trillion more wooden doors.
GM: *reveals the entire area around them, it is nothing but wooden doors*
GM: You reveal the most nonsensical architectural arrangement. It's nothing but wooden doors, all around.
Oliver: What the fuck.
Guy Lang: We take every door off of its hinges, and put them all on the burn pile.
Mord: Why is this even a thing?
Guy Lang: WHO MADE THIS DUNGEON? GARY GYGAX? FUCK!!
GM: Yeah, I dunno, it's weird, but... this is how it's designed.
Oliver: We strip all the doors and add them to the burn pile.

They look around so more and find an exercise room, with a training mat in the middle.

Oliver: What's it made of?
GM: It's tatami.
Guy Lang: What else is in the room? And yes, I already assumed it was tatami.
GM: Oliver was revealing his own ignorance by not assuming that it was a tatami mat.
Oliver: I don't even know what tatami is.
Mord: Woven bamboo thing.
Oliver: We add it to the burn pile.
GM: There's a wand on a shelf, and also some metal bars for weight lifting.
Oliver: We give Emila the wand.
Emila: So, I just need to confirm this again...
GM: yes?
Emila: This is a map that you made? or that someone else made?
GM: Someone else made this map.
Emila: Alright, because, this is seriously worthless.
GM: What do you mean it's worthless?
Uncle Chan: It's just a series of useless corridors.
GM: It's... largely a series of useless and abandoned corridors, yes.
Emila: Yeah, useless.
GM: Well, what do you want out of a map?
Emila: Some organizing principle that made it so you could like--
Mord: Like it doesn't even look like a structure that anyone lived in, because it doesn't make any sense.
Uncle Chan: There's just this meandering random corridor, and a room full of doors.
Mord: Maybe they were eating the mushrooms when they were making this place.
GM: They were eating the mushrooms.

Another hallway.

GM: Alright, so you open that door and--
Mord: It's another door!
Uncle Chan: No, it's a brick wall!
Oliver: We add it all to the burn pile.
GM: Well it's like a guest room.
Emila: Are you serious? And then up there the hallway is just a zig zag?
Mord: The more I see the more I want to burn it to the ground.
Oliver: We're burning this entire building down.
GM: This building is made of rock, Oliver.
Oliver: WE'RE BURNING IT DOWN!!
Guy Lang: Smoking them out.
GM: Alright, you get to the end of the hallway, and Oliver, guess what? You finally find a secret door, and it reveals an empty 10ft by 10ft room.
Guy Lang: WHY!?
Mord: God. Fucking. Damnit!
Emila: Ugh, can you just like, wipe this whole session? Spare us?
GM: I mean...
Uncle Chan: ha, where's the fun in that?
GM: There's definitely a little bit of entertainment being had here.
Guy Lang: By fucking you.
GM: Alright, alright, you wander around and explore it all.
Emila: And they're all empty, go figure.
GM: Well, it's a mostly abandoned dungeon.
Mord: Dungeon? I thought it was some temple or something.
Uncle Chan: Mostly abandoned M. C. Escher painting.
GM: It's like a fort.
Mord: Tell me the defensive purpose of all these corridors like a maze are.
GM: So that it takes you for-fucking-ever to actually get anywhere.
Oliver: The treasure is totally in here guys.

GM: Well, there are some orcs in this library.
Oliver: Oh, thank god.
Emila: I cast Sleep on them.
GM: Well, just roll for Init and if you beat all them no one else has to roll.
Emila: 18
GM: You beat all them. You throw your sleep, all the orcs die.
Emila: 2d8... 11
Mord: Gets them all.
GM: Bam.
Emila: Anything good in the books?
Oliver: Is any of it made of paper or wood?
GM: Yessss?
Oliver: Burn pile.
GM: There's a very nice red stone floor that's a little dusty, but would be nice if you polished it up. There's three large oak bookshelves, which are I suppose, you know, burnable, if you insist. There's also all sorts of books.
Mord: Including one mysterious book that's got a picture panel on it, that moves. It flies over an island, including a dock, an observatory, and a strange space ship thing.
Oliver: Guys, the treasure that we found in this temple is the friendship that we shared while trying to explore its emptiness.
Mord: No, fuck you.

They find a blacksmith room, and a skeleton of a troglodyte, and pile of coal next to the forge. Naturally, the coal goes into the burn pile. There's also a shaft down into a deeper layer. They decide to finish off the first layer before delving deeper.

So at this point I decided to just reveal most of the rest of the map that didn't have an encounter in it ahead of time and we skip to the last few features.

GM: There's a room with a bunch of pools.
Oliver: Water won't help us burn things down.
Guy Lang: I check each one for another ye olde flaske
GM: there's all sorts of stuff in these pools.
Guy Lang: Is this The Magician's Nephew?
GM: something like that.
Guy Lang: We've just unlocked a secret.
GM: Pool of pinkish liquid, pool of clear fizzy liquid, murky grey syrup, green slime, watery pool, pool of wine or some other red liquid, one is dried out, one is bubbling hot, one is shimmering...
Mord: Just paste a list in chat.
GM: It's like 2 pages and i'm just giving you the first sentence of each paragraph.
Mord: damnit.
GM: Well you could try something, or you could ignore it all.
Emila: I'll put two liquids in two flasks.
GM: Which ones?
Emila: Wine.
Uncle Chan: Which of these looks the most menacing?
GM: the fizzy one.
Uncle Chan: I fill my flask from the well with the fizzy stuff.
GM: You notice a brass key at the bottom of the pool as you're filling up the flask.
Guy Lang: Oh my god get it!! Put your hand in there!
Oliver: Put your hand in it.
Uncle Chan: I need those hands.
Oliver: If you have some string or whatever I have some fishing hooks.
Uncle Chan: I've got 50ft of rope.
GM: You can pull apart the rope to get some twine.
Guy Lang: We Chewing Gum On A String this shit.
GM: Alright, you hook the fish hook onto the rope, and try to get the key, but the rope burns up as it sinks into the acid.
Mord: Stick your hand in there.
Guy Lang: I poke it with the tip of the longsword.
GM: Ahhh, you use the top of the longsword to get the circle bit on the key. You have one brass key.
Oliver: Get my fishing hook back.
Guy Lang: Can I do that?
GM: Probably, it's got a loop, sure.
Guy Lang: I poke my sword in all the other pools.
GM: Your sword glows a bit when you stick it in the glowy pool.
Guy Lang: Woo!
Mord: I have a bunch of flasks, I'm gonna take flasks of a bunch of things. Wine--
Emila: I got Wine and the black syrup
Mord: Acid, glow.
GM: The wine seems normal, the glowy water is shimmering and is different colors as you look at it. The acid just sorta seems like acid.
Mord: What other pools?
GM: Pink, acid, grey syrup, green slime, looks like cold water, wine, dry pool, hot pool, shimmer pool, green liquid, one has fish in it, one is bubbling over with ice.
Oliver: I take a fish hook and fish for some fish.
Guy Lang: I trident a fish way faster than he fishhooks it.
GM: You trident the fish way faster than the can fishhook it.
Mord: Ice, acid, glow, pink liquid.

Emila: Let's get those beds..
GM: Hold on. Uncle Chan, you gonna look around while they're doing all this?
Uncle Chan: Look around in other areas or in the pools?
GM: In the room.
Guy Lang: I put my hand in the glowy stuff!
Uncle Chan: I'm going to drink the least menacing looking thing.
GM: Uhh, there's stuff that looks like water, stuff that looks like wine, and stuff that looks pink and inviting.
Mord: There'st stuff that has fish in it, the fish are living, that's probably a good sign.
GM: And stuff fish are living in, but that might be full of fish pee.
Uncle Chan: Pink stuff.
GM: You heal 3 hp.
Uncle Chan: boom.
Oliver: everyone drink it.
Guy Lang: Wait what?
GM: You heal d6 hp.
Guy Lang: From the pink one?
Uncle Chan: I dump out my flask of acid and fill it with the pink stuff.
Mord: *rolls a 1* balls.
Guy Lang: Can't you just drink again? there's a whole pool of it.
Mord: Right *rolls a 1 again* damnit.
GM: And it doesn't seem to have an effect the second time you drink from it.
Mord: God!
Oliver: Drink the wine.
Mord: It will help wash away my sorrows, so I do it.
GM: It helps wash away your sorrows.
Emila: The wine is wine?
GM: The wine is wine.
Emila: I drink all my wine in the flask, and then get the pink stuff in my flask.
Oliver: Only works once.
Emila: I haven't used it yet.
Mord: Probably once per week or once per day or something.
Emila: and we might want to perform some experiments upon it.
Oliver: Oh, wanna boil any of this? I have an iron pot.
Guy Lang: hmm, not right now.

GM: Hey, Guy Lang, roll a surprise check.
Emila: We're not surprised!
GM: As you're doing all this, a swarm of kobolds comes rushing out of the door.
Guy Lang: I anti-swarm them.
Oliver: What door?
GM: A secret door. So, you guys are here, and the kobolds jump out at you here.
Oliver: Throw acid on them, throw acid on their face.
Guy Lang: What is this, the 1940's?
Mord: Actually, leaving a few alive to dip into pools iz not a bad idea.
Emila: That's cruel.
Oliver: I vote we do it.
Guy Lang: Uhm, I don't do subdual damage.
Mord: Ah, but I can.

~Round 1~
Kobold throws a javelin Oliverward, and misses
Mord moves flankward.
Kobold misses Mord
Uncle Chan moves 40ft, then another 40ft
Kobold misses Uncle Chan
Oliver moves to the Acid pool, and fills up his iron pot with acid.
Kobold misses with a Javelin
Guy Lang moves.
Kobold javelins Uncle Chan for 4.
Emila moves up 30ft and throws a dagger, missing.

Oliver: Now you're down a dagger.
GM: It falls into the pool of wine.
Guy Lang: We'll just have to drink our way to the bottom.
GM: Only way.
Emila: I got 4 daggers.

Kobold hits Chan for another 2.
Uncle Chan: I don't like these kobolds.
Guy Lang: Punch it in the THROAT!

~Round 2~
Kobold gets hit by Mord for 3 damage and has 4 hp, so it gets to make a knockout check, but it passes.
Kobold misses Mord.
Uncle Chan: I would like to punch a kobold in the face.
GM: Okay.
Uncle Chan: I do not accomplish this.
GM: Okay.
Uncle Chan: I would like to 5ft step away.
GM: Okay
Uncle Chan: Because I'm gettin my shit kicked in.

Oliver moves into position.
Kobold misses Mord
Guy Lang misses a kobold.
Kobold misses Guy Lang.
Emila throws a dagger, misses.
Kobold hits Emila for 6 damage, and she topples over.

~Round 3~
Mord critical existence failures a kobold.
Kobold misses Guy Lang
Uncle Chan drinks his flask and heals 2, then immediately 5ft steps back into the fray.
Kobold hits Mord, for 1 damage.
Oliver moves up and throws acid at a kobold.
GM: There's a chance you'll get acid on Guy Lang and Mord if you throw acid and it splashes everywhere.
Oliver: Okay.
Guy Lang: You're, and I quote, "a bastard in a basket".
GM: Roll a d6
Oliver: Are you prayin' guys?
Guy Lang: Uh, no.
GM: Okay, the kobold saves, so he takes 3 instead of 6. He is just barely still alive. Guy Lang and Mord should also make Reflex saves, I mean Breath Weapon saves. ha ha ha. See that joke I threw in for ya Guy Lang?
Guy Lang: Yeah, I'm just annoyed that I'm gonna take 6 damage because of Oliver being a fucker.
Mord: I failed as well.
GM: Naw you both just take 1 damage. And it's your turn Guy Lang.
Oliver: You should attack the guy that's gonna attack me.
Guy Lang: Nope. I attack the other guy above me.

But he missed.
The kobold missed back.
Emila saves against Death Ray, and she fails, taking 1 damage. Only at -3 total, but she dies at negative Con Score (11), so she's safe for a bit.
A kobold hits Uncle Chan for 5, knocking him down.

~Round 4~
Mord blackjacks a kobold down.
Guy Lang: For once Mord is the one doing everything.

Uncle Chan makes his save, so he stabilizes without taking damage.
Oliver misses with his dagger throw, and it also goes into the wine.
Guy Lang: We need to drink a lot of wine to get these daggers back.
Guy Lang kills a kobold.
Emila stabilizes.
Kobold misses Oliver

~Round 5~
Mord misses a kobold.
Kobold misses Guy Lang.
Oliver only had the one dagger, which he threw, so he tries to stab at a kobold with an arrow. Tries.
Guy Lang kills a kobold.
The last kobold goes into a blood frenzy, but misses Oliver.

~Round 6~
Mord klunks the last kobold.

So now they've got 3 dead kobolds, and 2 unconcious kobolds, and 2 unconscious humans. First Aid is applied to the humans, for 1 and none, to Guy Lang for 3, and Mord for 2.
Oliver heals Emila for 2.

So they skip testing the acid, they know it's deadly.
Oliver drinks the entire pond of wine, and gets the daggers back. Like a prize at the end of the bottle.
They put a kobold in the glowy pond, and it begins to glow in a shimmering way as well. Even after they pull him out of the pond. Guy Lang soaks his trident in the glow pond as well.

The put a kobold into the Green Slime, and it absorbs the entire kobold, and grows a bit bigger in response.
Guy Lang: We should feed all the bodies from this fight into the slime.
Oliver: Do it.
GM: Yeahhhhh, cause that's safe.
Mord: No, give it all of ze wood.
Guy Lang: Can we haul these basins out?
GM: No, they're dug into the ground.
Mord: We can bring a flask of it to the other room.
Guy Lang: Can we get some into a flask, without it eating us?
GM: You don't know if it'll be alive after you cut off part of it.
Guy Lang: I put it onto a kobold's foot, then pull it back out.
GM: It keeps dissolving the foot.
Guy Lang: Get over here Mord, we're going to put this portion of slime into the flask.
Mord: Very well, I do it.
Guy Lang: Do we get it?
GM: Uh, you get some into a flask.
Guy Lang: Yeah we're gonna grow this over a town.
GM: Oh
Oliver: I'm okay with this
Mord: What happens if we dip a kobold into the bubbling ice?
GM: The kobold gets frozen a bit. Seems like dry ice.
Guy Lang: Well, we go into the office, and we'll rest there. Also, I long term care Uncle Chan.

GM: The decor is "pleasant, although uninspired" [direct quote from the module], the floor is a moasic, with a nice painting on the wall. It's signed as from Zeligar and Roghan, to their advisor Merivak. Papers on the desk. A drawer on the desk, and a cupboard.
Guy Lang: Well obviously we open both. Drawer first.
GM: You open it up, but a horrible trap goes off, and gas emits from the drawer, freezing your hand for 1 damage.
Guy Lang: I require First Aid.
GM: Inside the drawer are some boots.
Mord: In a drawer?
GM: It's a tall drawer. I've got a drawer on my desk that could fit some boots.
Mord: Yes, but you don't.
GM: Do you want the boots or not?
Mord: Okay, whatever.
Guy Lang: I put them on.
GM: They're really nice boots.
Guy Lang: That's what they'll be called on my character sheet.
GM: In the cupboard, there's a chest and a really nice medallion.
Guy Lang: I take the medallion. And I open the chest.
GM: The chest is locked.
Guy Lang: Well, you know what that means boys.
Mord: There's nothing in it.
GM: Yeah, there's obviously nothing in it.
Guy Lang: Oliver, make a lock check.
GM: Nope, looks like you can't open this lock I guess.
Guy Lang: We recklessly use the hammer.
GM: You smash it open and there's a big pile of coper, silver, electrium, and gold, all mixed up.
Guy Lang: How many of each?
GM: Well there's plenty of time to count it. 840 copper, 290 silver, 120 electrium, 25 gold.
Guy Lang: Oliver, talley all that.

They looked at one last place in the north where they find a million construction supplies. We called it a night there. About a quarter of the first floor is left unexplored, along with the lower level. They grab the copper wire and leave the rest of the supplies behind, and go back to town for now. 543 EXP for everyone. I didn't divide the award among the number of players like normal, because they'd had a rough time of it.
Last edited by Lokathor on Sun Jan 04, 2015 8:02 am, edited 7 times in total.
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Post by Lokathor »

Episode 02: The Troglodyte Deathscythe
  • Mord Deathsfriend
  • Emila Weinerhoff
  • Guy Lang
  • Oliver Brimble
Uncle Chan was absent this episode due to hangover, and so he guarded the horse while they wandered about amongst the danger. We're still on In Search of The Unknown for now, though it's over by the end of this episode.
So everyone had gone back to town (a 4 day trip).

Mord: And we shall never return to the bullshit dungeon.
Guy Lang: I'm totally cool with going back to the bullshit dungeon to find that last room, and go down the hole to the second level.
Oliver: Yeah, let's not do this dungeon again.
GM: Well, I do not have a second dungeon drawn out, although there are options.
Oliver: Is it equally as bullshit.
GM: I'm gonna level with you Oliver, I'm not sure any dungeon could ever be equally as bullshit as this dungeon.
Emila: What you could do is you could flip the image of this dungeon.

Ultimately, at Guy Lang's urging, they decide that they're gonna keep at the same dungeon a little more, because there might be a treasure in that last room they open. Just one more door to check.

Before they leave town they assess what they've found so far, and decide to buy some things. Mord tries to get a "large shield" for +2 to AC instead of just +1 to AC, and it's explained that such a thing doesn't exist in this edition. Instead he gets some more flasks. Oliver happens upon the idea of purchasing a horse, and that's a little expensive (75gp) and so they decide to buy a mule instead (8gp). Mord picks up a single Cure Light Wounds potion for emergencies, but it's decided that they don't have any wands for sale. They also sell off various gear for fiddling small amounts of change.

It's inquired if there are any local rumors of other places to check out, and it's suggested that a nearby keep always has danger about. They just have to travel out to the borderlands to get there.

Before they leave town, Guy Lang pours out some green slime in an unspecified dark and hidden place, for general mayhem purposes.

Back at the dungeon, they begin to explore the last bits of the first floor. There's a secret door into an old bedroom. In the bottom drawer of the dresser they find a totally stupid amount of copper, like 2500 coins of it. Also there's some tapestry work, but as soon as I mention that they're probably not high in market value they cut my description off and throw it into the burn pile.

They go a little south and come across a throne room. Opening up the doorway across from the thrones reveals a prayer chamber complete with mysterious deity statue, and also a pack of six skeletons guarding said room against intrusion.

Mord quickly confirms that he's allowed to attempt to turn undead as many times per day as he wants, and he's given the go-ahead to try it.

~Round 1~
Skeleton attacks, but misses! (combat is so exciting at low levels when no one can hit each other without possibly just insta-killing each other.)
Mord tries to turn them, fails.
Two skeletons attack Oliver, missing.
Olive 5ft-steps back and throws his dagger, hitting a skeleton and killing it.
Skeleton misses Guy Lang.
Guy Lang misses right back.
Skeleton misses Guy Lang again, and another moves up but can't approach because of the doorway size.
Emila moves to have a potential shot lined up, but does nothing really.

~Round 2~
Skeleton misses Guy Lang.
Mord fails his turn check again.
Skeleton misses.
Oliver does nothing (he's out of daggers after all).
Skeleton misses Guy Lang.
Guy Lang misses.
Skeleton misses Mord.
Skeleton moves up and waits.
Emila hands a dagger to Oliver.

~Round 3~
Skeleton misses Guy Lang.
Mord fails a turn check.
Oliver is suddenly struck by a skeleton for 6 damage! Right in the brain!
Oliver makes a save against Death Ray, and stabilizes.
Skeleton misses Guy Lang.
Guy Lang stabs at the one that hit Oliver, destroying it.
Two skeletons both miss Guy Lang.
Emila tries an untrained First Aid check and heals 2 points on Oliver.

~Round 4~
Skeleton misses... again.
Mord finally makes his turn check! Whee! The skeletons all "flee" into the corner of the room, and they all mop them up.
The temple room itself has a large statue of a giant eagle, copper with bronze feathers painted on top. They don't seem to mind it at all, and they go get a pink potion off of the mule and use it on Oliver (healed to full). Then everyone wonders why the potions were ever left on the mule in the first place and they put them back in their packs.

Emila opens a door to a side room and it's a trophy lounge of sorts. There's two animal heads on the wall, one of a boar, and one of some sort of antelope (specifically a Markhor). Emila isn't too interested but as soon as Guy Lang sees them he is enthralled and takes them to the mule to keep.

They examine what seems to be another closet, but discover an alternate route down into the lower level. This route is a proper set of stairs instead of a cramped hole into the ground, so they decide to use that later when they're ready to move on.

Going around through the halls, they get to a storage room, full of tables and chairs and stuff like that. Things that all get assigned to the theoretical "burn pile".

Moving on, the group opens up what appears to be an old bedroom, and two kobolds rummaging through the dresser.

~Round 1~
Guy Lang kills a Kobold.
Mord misses.
Kobold misses Mord.
Emila does nothing.
Oliver wanders off to explore other hallways.

~Round 2~
Guy Lang kills the other kobold.
The bedroom has some furniture, and also a large mirror. They figure the mirror has some value, and so they place it back near the mule, and decide how to pack it up later.

Emila opens up another door and finds a different bedroom. This one has a locked chest next to a bed.

Guy Lang: A locked chest for the brass key.
Mord: A locked chest zat contains notzing!
Emila: Can I open the chest?
GM: Uhm, yes. Well, if you try the brass key on it.
Emila: I don't have that, so Guy Lang will get it.
Guy Lang: I got it, what's inside?
Oliver: You get gassed!
Guy Lang: Probably, jesus. Happened before.
GM: You open it up with the brass key and there is a
Guy Lang: Another brass key inside.
GM: No, but, well, yes, but also, in addition to the other brass key inside, there is a pearl on a little pillow, like you do with pearls.
Guy Lang: right.
Oliver: The pearl was actually gas!
Emila: I lift the pearl up out of the chest, is there anything underneath it?
Guy Lang: THAT was a mistake. Now we're dead.
GM: Yes, there's a horrible gas beneath it. But no, there's no other things.
Guy Lang: Were you being serious saying there was another brass key?
GM: No. Yes? Whichever is funnier.
Guy Lang: Yes then.

After having looked all around they seem sure that they've explored the first level, so they take the stairs down.

In the lower layer there's a room of carved stone, but one of the walls is basically "missing" and it opens up into a cavern complex of unworked stone. There's a single door within view, which they check first. At the end of the hall there's four purple things that look like giant mushrooms with short tentacles dangling down from the caps.

Oliver: Throw the hallucinogenic mushrooms at them!
Mord: No, zose are... yeah, that's a great idea, to ward off humans we'll throw fetuses at them.
Guy Lang: That would ward me off.
Emila: I'm gettin out of there, that's too freaky.
Oliver: Is it too spooky for you?
Guy Lang: I'm goin in! ...Slowly.
GM: Slowly?
Guy Lang: I move 5ft up at a time, like what's happening, does anything happen? here?
GM: Nothing happens.
Guy Lang: Here?
Mord: One more step.
Oliver: Something happens.
GM: Everything seems fine.
Guy Lang: Oh my god. Should I throw my trident at them?
Mord: You've got a 10ft pole. Probably?
Guy Lang: Yeah I have one, I poke it with my 10ft pole.
GM: You poke it?
Guy Lang: Yeah.
GM: Almost immediately as soon as you poke it, it reacts by giving out the most death curdling screams ever. It's echoing across the entire lower level.
Oliver: ...poke it again.
GM: In response to you having poked one of them, and the first one shrieking, the others immediately begin shrieking. It's almost paralytic at this point.
Oliver: Well, we gotta kill 'em, obviously.
Guy Lang: Okay, yeah, I go all trident on their ass. Do I just get a turn?
GM: There's an Initiative Order involved, let's do that.

~Round 1~
Shrieker shrieks, Guy Lang takes -1 to all attacks.
Guy Lang deals 5 damage to the one he poked. That's only about a halfway hit though.
Emila double moves off down the cavern tunnels to see what's around.
Mord tries his warhammer against the shrieker and misses.
A shrieker shrieks, and Guy Lang/Mord/Oliver take -1 to attacks (it starts stacking, in Guy Lang's case). It also lashes out at Mord with a tentacle, but misses.
Oliver moves in for a stab, but misses.
A shrieker attacks Guy Lang, missing, and shrikes, giving them all another -1
A shrieker in the corner shrikes, but it only affects Guy Lang (the -1 effect only has a 15ft range).
Another shrieker off in the corner shrikes, giving Guy Lang another -1

Guy Lang: They can just keep stacking it infinitely?
GM: Yeah basically.
Oliver: That's bullshit.
GM: It's kinda bullshit, but you feel like if you get away from the paralytic pain of the shrieks it'll wear off pretty quick.
Guy Lang: I figured that too, but I wanna get at least one before I retreat.

~Round 2~
Guy Lang moves around to flank a shrieker (can you really "flank" a mostly immobile giant mushroom? Well, it was permitted), but he misses.

Mord: Emila, when the ogres come for you, we're not helping.
Oliver: It won't be because we don't want to, it will be because we can't attack.
Emila: I'm not really useful there. They're non-intelligent, so I can't Sleep them.
Guy Lang: you could stab them.

So, Emila keeps going down the tunnels on her own to check things out.

Mord is up (at -2) and hits for 9, killing the wounded one.
A shrieker attacks Guy Lang, missing, and shrikes, giving them all another -1
Oliver stabs and misses.
Both shriekers in the corner shriek, giving Guy Lang another -1 twice.

~Round 3~
Mord: What are you at, Guy Lang?
Guy Lang: -3 instead of +5. I just leave the room.

Guy Lang moves away and feels like things will get better quickly.
Emila begins to move back toward the group.
Mord hits a new shrieker for 4 damage.
The shrieker shrikes back (affects Mord and Oliver), and smashes Mord with a tentacle for 3.
Oliver throws his dagger at it, missing, and then 5ft steps back.
The last two shriekers can no longer directly affect anyone, but shriek anyway of course.

~Round 4~
Guy Lang heals a -1 and waits.
Emila moves past the group and down a different tunnel to inspect that.
Mord and Oliver also move out of the shrieker room.
Mord gets some First Aid, and the group moves back up the stairs. Emila is last to move up the stairs, and she spots a coin pouch (10 Electrum) on the ground as she's going back through the tunnels to get upstairs. Just in time too, because she spots a zombie coming out of the darkness towards them!

They get some empty flasks from the mule, and go to fill them with green slime, so that they can throw green slime on the shriekers and then walk away and handle them that way. Emila mentions the zombie, but Guy Lang is not at all worried. They continue to fiddle around with green slime in flasks and so forth. It's mentioned that green slime will eat through metal, and the extra flasks from town were made of metal, so they can only carry so much in the glass flasks at once.

Guy Lang: So, Mord's goal is kill everything, and my goal is to put green slime on the whole world.
Oliver: Your goal is to be Nickelodeon.

After a bit, some monsters bust in on them. A relatively big squad actually. There's a troglodyte, with several orc minions at his back. Instead of attack dogs, he has attack giant spiders. He points at the party and shouts what seems like an attack order.

Oliver: We're all gonna die
GM: I mean maybe.
Guy Lang: I doubt it.

(this fight is actually long enough for some music)
~Round 1~
An orc moves and throws a dagger Oliver-ward, and misses.
Mord moves a bit and readies an attack.
Oliver doesn't have a dagger right now since he threw it at the shriker and ran away. So he picks up the dagger the orc threw at him and throws it back. This kills the orc.
Another orc (there's like 6 orcs total here), having been enraged at his friend getting daggered, moves up and throws his own dagger, but misses.
A crab spider (there's 3 of them) moves up to attack Mord, and Mord's readied action goes off. Mord hits it for 3, and then the crab spider bites at Oliver and misses.
Orc moves and dagger throws at Guy Lang, missing.
Two more daggers get thrown at Guy Lang, both miss.
A spider loses a turn because I moved the wrong mini at first and I didn't wanna sort it out, so he just loses his turn.
Guy Lang moves up and stabs a crab spider, killing it.
Black Widow moves 20ft closer.
Crab spider moves up to Guy Lang and hits, dealing 5 and some poison. I didn't look up what the poison is supposed to be, so I just did a -2 to hit from slowing poison. I looked it up later and I guess it's supposed to be a save at +2 or you just die in 10d4 minutes. They got it easy this time I guess.
Emila casts Sleep. Rolls 2d8, only gets a 2! A major upset! Two orcs fall unconscious, but things suddenly seem a lot more dangerous after a failed spell.
Orc moves and throws.
Troglodyte finally moves, throws a javelin instead of a puny dagger, and misses like the rest of them.

~Round 2~
Mord misses.
Oliver picks up 2 daggers, and throws one, hitting the troglodyte for 2.
Crab Spider misses Mord.
Orc misses Guy Lang.
Other orc misses.
Guy Lang moves to attack the trog, but misses.
Black widow moves closer again.
Crab spider misses.
Emila throws a dagger, missing.
An orc tries to move closer, but has to go around the pool.
The troglodyte claws, claws, and bites, at Guy Lang, missing everything.

~Round 3~
Mord bashes in the troglodyte's brain, and it dies. 5ft step back.
Oliver throws a dagger at an orc, killing it. He also 5ft steps back.
Crab spider turns and bites at Mord, missing.
Orc misses Oliver.
Guy Lang hits a spider for 6.
The black widow is finally in range! In range to miss.
Crab spider hits Guy Lang for 5, putting him exactly at 0.
Emila misses with a dagger throw.
Orc attempts to gut Emila, but she dodges! Those guts should stay inside the body!


~Round 4~
Mord miss a crab spider.
Oliver throws a dagger, kills an orc, but is now out of daggers.
Guy Lang is too far from the pink potion pool to get to it, so he attacks the black widow. He misses and takes a damage, bleeding all over the floor and falling unconscious.
The black widow hits Emila and deals 2 damage on 2d6, along with an Atk -2 poison.
Crab spider hits Mord for 1, but the poison doesn't have any effect.
Emila 5ft steps and throws a dagger, missing because of the poison (rolled a 13, needed 14).
Orc tries to slash Oliver, but fails.

~Round 5~
Mord hits the spider that bit him for 7.
Oliver pulls out his shovel and starts using it as a melee weapon. They specifically found an extra longsword that they picked up, and he's got blade proficiency, so there's no reason that he should be using a shovel as his weapon of last resort, but there you go. The attack misses.
Guy Lang stabalizes.
The black widow misses.
Emila attempt to First Aid Guy Lang, but fails.
Orc attempts to slash down Emila, missing.

~Round 6~
Mord hits the black widow.
Oliver flanks the Orc. He forgot to add his Sneak Attack damage, so he just deals 1d2+1 damage (2), which is not enough.
Black widow misses
Emila 5ft steps into melee with the orc, making a valiant attempt at an attack, but misses.
The orc slashes down Emila, dealing 5.

~Round 7~
Mord smashes the black widow for 6.
Oliver misses.
Black widow, misses.
Emila bleeds for 1.
Orc misses.

~Round 8~
Mord misses.
Oliver kills the spider with his shovel.
Emila stabilizes.
The last orc gets ahold of himself and runs away.
Oliver grabs a dagger and almost stabs the two sleeping orcs, but they decide to wait and try the green slime on living targets. They do some First Aid and feed some pink potion to the party members that fell over until everyone is at least at 1hp.

Next, they stand around one of the sleeping orcs. Mord stands at the ready to smash an orc in the brains with his warhammer, and Oliver pours green slime onto the sleeping orc's body. He wakes up shouting in pain as the green slime acid eats into him, and they stab him dead. The green slime didn't spread out any faster on a live body than a dead one though.

Guy Lang resolves to fill the empty pits with bodies and pour some slime on top to make them into slime pits. He also puts bodies in different places around the cavern, and pours some slime on each of them so that slime is just all over the place should anyone else ever attempt to explore this place.

So that was basically the end of the night. Everyone would have earned 644 experience for all this. I decided to continue to not divide the experience earned by the number of party members until at least they all get to 2nd level. Turns out, Oliver was 13 EXP short from leveling up, so the daggers and the swords that the orcs had, which weren't previously part of the total, were added in so that Oliver could level up between adventures. Exp earned this episode became 725 instead.

They bring all of the spare construction gear in the back of the dungeon outside. Looking at the amount of stuff they want to take back, and the fact that they want to make a single trip, it's suggested that they use the construction gear to form a simplistic cart that they can load everything in to. So they do that, and then never again return to this accursed dungeon.
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Post by Lokathor »

Episode 03: Five Mules Confirmed
"Bree-yark!"
  • Mord Deathsfriend
  • Emila Weinerhoff
  • Guy Lang
  • Oliver Brimble
  • Uncle Chan
This week we're doing a much better adventure. Part 1 of Keep On The Borderlands. Despite this being and adventure classic, almost no one in the group has played this before. The player of Guy Lang has run parts of this before, using a different group, but he doesn't really remember a lot of it, and it's not really a mystery so there's no problems there. The basic idea, for those not familiar with the adventure, is that there's a ravine with some caves that can be seen, and the players go into each cave and try to fight what's in each one. Every time they retreat and go back to the keep the creatures in the caves have a chance to re-organize against any further attacks. Lots of tactical battles, not too many puzzles.
So the group has all their equipment and treasure, being pulled in a makeshift cart by the mule, and it breaks down about 100 yards from town. They're literally within sight of the town wall and the whole thing just collapses right there on the road. The town guards snicker at them from the gate but don't initiate any particular actions to go out and help the group. This is the fifth time their makeshift cart has broken down on their way back to town, and it can go no farther. They'll have to go into town and buy a real cart.

GM: You guys gotta decide what you're gonna get. If you look in the book there's carts, there's wagons, you can get horses for the wagons, all sorts of options.
Mord: We could just double down on mules.
GM: The price on mules has gone up.
Mord: What!?
GM: The first mule you got was at a discount, mules are more expensive now.
Mord: Inflation!

Emila gets a mule and some saddlebags. At this point the full weight of the construction equipment began to be tallied. There was at least 1,400lbs of stuff involved that the mule had been pulling on its own. A truly heroic mule. They sold off most of the spare stuff. Oliver got a heavy crossbow and they used their absurd amount of copper to buy 300 day of dried rations to put in the wagon. They also pile all of their gold into a single communal pile.

Upon seeing that they're buying so much stuff to travel with, the villagers ask them if they're off for a journey. They ask what's around, and the villagers suggest a keep four days to the north. There's been stories of monsters and bandits lately, and that sounds like exactly the kind of stuff that's socially acceptable to kill and rob.

They make the journey uneventfully and arrive at the keep. It's up on a raised section of earth, with a trail that goes around it outside the moat, until it reaches the drawbridge. Towers, crenelations, arrow slits, the whole fortification deal. Very defensive and all that. The group approaches the guards at the gate.

Guard: Halt, who goes there?
Oliver: Put them to sleep.
Guy Lang: Don't put them to sleep, jesus christ.
Emila: I could put them to sleep.
Guy Lang: My name is Guy Lang, and we are, you know, traveling here to investigate the supposed disturbances from the woods.
Guard: Ah, warriors, excellent. And who are your companions?
Guy Lang: Introduce yourselves.
Mord: I am Mord, pleasure to meet you sir.
Guard: Wonderful.
Emila: I'm Emila, a wizard of a kind.
Guard: Good.
Oliver: I'm Oliver.
Guard: Alright.
Uncle Chan: I am Chan, Big Strong Chan.
Guard: Oh, you certainly appear strong sir! Very well, this way.

So they go into the keep. A scribe writes down their names in the log.Their wagon gets kept in the warehouse while they're in the keep, and the mules in the stable. They have a look around the town, there's the sorts of things you'd expect: A guildhouse, a bank, a smithy, a provisions shop, a guildhouse, a chapel (of St. Cuthbert), an Inn, and a Tavern.

Guy Lang: We try to buy some cure potions.
GM: The priest is pretty chatty.
Guy Lang: Sure, we'll talk to him.
Priest: All are welcome here in the temple of Saint Cuthbert! Law and order, justice, that sort of thing is what he's all about. Don't break the law. If you break the rules, I will report you.
Oliver: Oh.
Emila: Nice to meet you, too.
Guy Lang: I didn't come in here just to have someone tell me not to break the rules.
GM: He wants you to follow the rules, as much as you can.
Guy Lang: We tell him that we're looking for people to go with us on our quest.
Priest: Oh? And what is your quest then?
Guy Lang: We were gonna investigate what's happening further down the roads, as was reported. I guess that means we're already following your "rules". I put air quotes around the word rules, like I don't know what those are.
GM: Well, that's okay. If you don't know what the rules are, he will still report you.
Mord: That's very kind of him.

Well the priest doesn't know much about stuff outside of the keep, he mostly tends to the chapel. He does offer to sell Cure Light Wounds potions (1d6+1) for 50gp each. Three are available, and they buy two of them.

They also ask around about any rumors in the town. Except they almost all picked charisma as their dump stat so they're not particularly good at trying to chat up strangers.

Villager1: If you get lost, beware the eater of men! He's crazy, and he comes out at night, and he'll eat you whole!
Guy Lang: Whole?
Villager1: Whole!
Guy Lang: Armor and all?
Mord: Is zis a man, my friend?
Villager1: It's, it's bigger than a man. It's more dangerous than any man could possibly be! He once was a man, but he is no longer.
Guy Lang: I got it, I gotcha, don't travel at night.

Villager2: My husband is a guard, and he saw an Elf go out across the marshes and never come back.
Guy Lang: Alright, elves love marshes.
Mord: Typical elf.

Villager3: There's a powerful magic user, that will destroy anyone who invades the caves!
Guy Lang: Watch out for magic.
GM: Emila, with your Arcane Lore check you figure that this guy is kinda full of shit. Which isn't to say that there's definitely no magic user in the caves, but this guy doesn't know anything real.
Emila: Hmmm.

GM: You ask one guy where the caves are, he's like, "well they're just, they're just, they're there, obviously."
Guy Lang: You are just not telling me anything I need to know, sir.

GM: One person says he heard about hordes of tiny dog-men in the lower cave levels.
Guy Lang: Nice. Gonna find me some tiny dog-men.

GM: Another person who heard the story about the marshes says that there's definitely lizardmen in those marshes, that's why the elf never came back.
Guy Lang: Oh, elves love lizardmen.
GM: Yeah, it's obvious. Well, that's about it for the rumors your group turns up.

Guy Lang: I ask them why they made this keep, seemingly between nothing and nothing.
GM: The Castilian, he owns this keep, built it because there was nothing much here, and it's turned into a kind of trading post of sorts. Also, for kicks.

They spend the night and set out the next day to look around. The constable says that the monster caves should be pretty close, since they attack people relatively often. Emila throws down a 20 on a Tracking check and spots the footprints, following them back into the ravine.

They go over to the closest cave and begin to check the inside. Guy Lang straps a torch to his shield and lights it, and they go inside. Almost as soon as they stop to look around, a group of 6 goblins barges into them. The goblins shout, "Bree-yark!" and ready their weapons.

(And so it begins)
~Round 1~
Emila goes first. Guy Lang says to not use Sleep this early on, and she never got a crossbow in town, so she just readies an action to use First Aid as soon as the opportunity presents itself.
Goblin slashes at Mord, missing.
Goblin misses Oliver.
Goblin moves into the dark and shouts something.
Uncle Chan punches a goblin, killing it.
Goblin misses Oliver.
Oliver stabs a goblin and it dies.
Goblin misses Uncle Chan.
Mord warhammers a goblin to death.
Guy Lang 5ft steps and kills a goblin.
Goblin misses Mord.

~Round 2~
Emila steps a little closer and readies a dagger attack.
Goblin reinforcements show up from farther down the southeast tunnel!
Uncle Chan misses a Goblin.
Oliver doesn't have line of sight with his crossbow, so he just waits.
Guy Lang moves up and kills a goblin.
Mord misses.

GM: Oliver, you see more goblins coming at you from the other direction.
Oliver: Aw, man. Okay, I'm gonna go right here.
GM: Hold on, hold on, it's not your turn yet.
Oliver: What? Why would you tell me that if it's not my turn?
GM: Because you're the one standing closest to that part of the corridor, so even though you can't react yet, you're the one who dramatically tensionally is going to be attacked. That's, like, science.
Emila: It's a science fact.

~Round 3~
Goblin reinforcements show up from the west as well!
Emila keeps waiting.
Goblin misses Mord.
Goblin misses Mord. So exciting!
Uncle Chan moves up and kills a goblin.
Goblin misses.
Oliver 5ft steps, shoots, misses. Then we actually look at his sheet again, explain that attack and damage bonuses are different, and so he hits and kills a goblin.

Oliver: Oh, by the way guys, more goblins are coming from this direction.

Guy Lang kills a goblin, then moves to the other side of the battle.
Mord kills a goblin. Now, it was also at this point when the normal player of Mord had to go do a thing, and so control of Mord was handed over to Guy Lang.

Mord: I think you know what Mord would do.
Guy Lang: Mord would kill.

~Round 4~
Emila is up. There's now 5 goblins to the west, and 5 to the south-east. She 5ft steps and prepares an attack.
Goblin moves up and misses. So dramatic.
Another move up and misses.
A goblin moves up, and Emila gets her attack. She barely hits, and deals 1 damage (1d4-2). Boop. The goblin swings back but is so shocked at having been hit that he misses.
Uncle Chan kills a goblin.
Oliver shoot a goblin dead.
Goblin charges Oliver, and deals 6 to Oliver! He goes down!
Guy Lang kills a goblin.
Mord kills a goblin.
A goblin 5ft steps into the melee, and stabs at Guy Lang, for 4!

~Round 5~
Emila attempts to First Aid Oliver, but only gets 11.
Goblin misses Emila, despite how easy you might guess it to be.
Goblin misses Uncle Chan.
Uncle Chan kills a goblin.
Goblin slashes Uncle Chan for 3.
Oliver stabilizes.
Guy Lang kills ye olde gobbler to the north of him, killing it.
Mord misses.
Goblin almost hits Guy Lang, but does not.

~Round 6~
Emila successfully uses First Aid this time around, bring Oliver to 0 hp. I guess technically she shouldn't have been able to retry in this case, but she had had so little to do during the battle.
Uncle Chan misses, he's too scared to punch the goblins.
Goblin misses.
A goblin runs off into the darkness to the west.
Goblin slashes Uncle Chan for 2!
Oliver crawls away.
Guy Lang kills a goblin.
Mord flanks a goblin, and misses.

~Round 7~
Emila tries to First Aid Guy Lang, but does not.
Uncle Chan kills the last visible goblin.
Oliver is at 0, so he drinks his pink potion (d6) and heals to full.
Mord First Aids Uncle Chan.

~Round 8~
Emila First Aids Guy Lang.
Everyone else just moves back into a group.
Guy Lang makes an active listen check (1d6, success on a 1) but doesn't hear anything.

~Round 9~
A new tide of goblins pour out of the darkness from the west.
Emila throws a Sleep spell, rolls 9. All the goblins go down.
Guy Lang steps up and begins to carefully (so as to not wake any up) stab each sleeping goblin in the neck with his trident. Oliver recovers 2 of his 3 bolts. The others begin searching the pockets of the goblins for stuff to take. Each goblin has some copper and silver, which they collect. Also goblin leather armor, goblin shields, and goblin spears; those are pretty much ignored. The first group that they bumped into has some bags of food that they were carrying around. Guy Lang questions if they really want goblin food, but Emila grabs it.

GM: So there's a big pile of copper, and an okay amount of silver.
Oliver: How much of each?
GM: It'll take you a little while to count it all out.
Oliver: Okay, so let's take an hour to count it all out.
GM: Oliver, you're kinda in the middle of a place full of things that want to kill you. Maybe you should pay attention to the time.
Guy Lang: We're just sorta waiting for more goblins to come along, so we can kill them.
GM: Oh, well if you're just gonna wait forever-- I thought you were trying to kill them fast and get out. That's why I was describing things quickly.
Guy Lang: We'll count it up reasonably fast, and if anyone comes along we'll also fight them.
GM: Alright, after about 30 seconds more goblins come from the west. Do you leave at that point or should we play that out?
Guy Lang: Play it out.
Emila: Yeah, play it out.
GM: Alright then, hold on, *rolls some dice* There's 159 copper and 17 silver.
Oliver: You could count that in 30 seconds.
GM: Not all the copper you couldn't.
Guy Lang: He's a thief man.
GM: Make a Thief Check.
Oliver: How do I make a thief check?
GM: roll 1d20 and add your Thief Level, obviously.
Oliver: 11?
GM: Doesn't sound like superhuman counting to me. You count the coins at a normal rate.

So Guy Lang stands watch while Oliver arranges the treasure. He has just enough time to count it and stick it back into his pockets. They get into a formation and begin to move to the south-east. That's when they hear a loud thumping noise in the ground. They turn around their marching order, head to the west, and see an Ogre backed up by goblins.

Guy Lang: I'm ready. This is the fight of our lives so far. Way cooler than that trog fight.

[After-session Guy Lang Commentary: I was so sure we were all going to die, but I just did it anyway.]

(A theme that builds tension)
~Round 1~
Mord "goes all hero mode" and moves up into position within the 10ft wide tunnel. He readies an attack against whatever comes.
A goblin moves into position and throws a spear, missing.
Another throws a spear that misses.
Guy Lang steps to the front with Mord and readies an attack against what comes.
Some goblins move around and hang back, few are willing to actually stand in what will momentarily be the ogre's path.
The Ogre steps forward, swings a tree branch, and misses.
Oliver moves and does nothing.
Uncle Chan moves around a bit but also basically does nothing.

Emila: I'm... I'm getting out.
Guy Lang: If you could stay here, you could First Aid us if we fall. That would be good.
GM: Emila make a Wisdom Check.
Emila: 18
GM: Emila, you feel like this ogre is the most dangerous creature you've ever see in your entire life.
Emila: Yeah that's, yes, I know. I've seen mushroom things, and that's it. I've seen jack.
Guy Lang: Wait, wait, is it possible for Oliver to do something different? Can he step down instead of over and ready a shot for when there's a clear line?
GM: I guess that's possible.
Guy Lang: We're gonna fight this fucker, because we're insane.
Emila: Okay, I'm gone then. Goodbye.

~Round 2~
Mord doesn't have any of the green slime on his sheet, so he's not carrying any of the slime. It's all back on the cart. Mord 5ft steps in, clearing Oliver's line of sight. Oliver shoots and misses. Mord misses with his warhammer as well.
A goblin creeps up and attacks Mord, but misses. Guy Lang's readied action kills that goblin that creeped up.
On Guy Lang's turn itself he steps up and misses just like Mord did.
Goblins shuffle around.
Ogre misses.
Oliver readied to shoot again.
Uncle Chan stands in place.

Uncle Chan: What else can I do?
GM: You can run away with Emila, is what I would suggest.
Uncle Chan: I'm gonna wait for somebody to die before I run away.

Emila keeps running away.

~Round 3~
Mord misses.
Goblins mill about.
Guy Lang misses, then 5ft steps out of the way.
A goblin moves up and tries to stab at Mord, missing.
The Ogre tries to smash Mord, but misses.
Oliver shoots the goblin, but misses.

GM: Uncle Chan, there's a goblin you can punch now.
Uncle Chan: Hmm, let me think what I would do.
Emila: What would Uncle Chan do in this situation?
Uncle Chan: He'd punch a goblin.
Emila: That's what I thought!

Uncle Chan moves around and punches the goblin attacking Mord, killing it.
A goblin moves up and stabs at Uncle Chan in retaliation. He hits for 6, knocking down Uncle Chan.

~Round 4~
Mord kills the goblin that took down Uncle Chan.
A goblin moves up to Mord, and misses.
Guy Lang kills the goblin.
Another goblin moves up and attacks Mord.
The Ogre hits Mord for a minimum damage strike of 3.
Oliver shoots at the goblin, but misses.
Uncle Chan bleeds for 1.

~Round 5~
Mord hits a goblin for 3 damage, but these goblins have 4hp. No good. He also moves back, provoking an AoO, from the Ogre, but the AoO misses.
Guy Lang kills the weakened goblin.

GM: You've got a move action left then.
Guy Lang: Right. Gotta think what to do. Don't wanna leave Uncle Chan behind.
Uncle Chan: He died doing what he loved, punching goblins.
Oliver: Didn't you die in our last campaign too?
Uncle Chan: Yes, I'm getting good at that.

Goblin rushes into the fight, but misses.
Another goblin rushes in and misses.
The Ogre attacks Guy Lang with a miss.
Oliver shoots and kills a goblin.
Uncle Chan is being stepped on by the ogre, and he also bleeds for 1.

~Round 6~
Mord "is going to... step back into the fray like a maniac. Because Mord loves death!" He kills a goblin.
A goblin moves closer, but doesn't quite enter the melee.
Guy Lang finally hits the Ogre. He deals 7 damage. The Ogre started with 25 hp.
The Ogre hits Guy Lang for 8, dropping him to 0. Guy Lang is staggering and weezing, but not down.
Oliver uses a Cure Light Wounds potion on Guy Lang, healing 3.
Uncle Chan is still being stepped on by an Ogre, but he stabilizes anyway.

~Round 7~
Mord fails to hit, and moves back.
Goblin moves and misses.
Other goblin moves and misses.
Guy Lang hits the Ogre again, dealing 9 more damage (9/25hp left).
Goblin hits Guy Lang for 6, dropping him.
The Ogre hits Oliver in the brain, for 9.

Guy Lang: It's gonna be a Total Party Kill!
Guy Lang and Uncle Chan both begin to laugh maniacally.

Oliver bleeds for 1.

GM: Emila is getting away, Mord what are you doing.
Guy Lang: Mord will take a swing at the right goblin.
GM: ...okay.
Oliver: hahahahahahahahahaha
Guy Lang: Mord Loves Death!
Oliver: We are all going to die.
Uncle Chan: We are good at adventuring.
Guy Lang: We're a party of 4 [actually 5], and this adventure is for a party of 6 to 9. It would have really helped if Emila had stayed and used the Cure potion we gave him.
GM: I think it really would have helped if you'd gotten the fuck out when you had a chance.
Emila: Yeah, that's what I'm thinkin.
Uncle Chan: Uhhhh?
Guy Lang: We also had a bunch of wiffs in a row.
GM: Yeah, but the ogre missed like three times.
Emila: Like, Guy Lang, it's an Ogre.
Oliver: So? Haven't you seen Harry Potter? You shove a stick up its nose.

~Round 8~
Mord misses.
Guy Lang bleeds for 1.

Guy Lang: This is amazing, no one can take that away from me.

The Ogre misses Mord.
Oliver stabilizes.

~Round 9~

GM: Mord, whatcha' doin?
Guy Lang: Mord is a maniac. He loves death.

Mord kills a goblin.

Oliver: Avenge Uncle Chan!
Guy Lang: There's no way he'll live, but if he does, it'll be magic.
Oliver: Yes.

Goblin hits Mord for 1.

Guy Lang: It's not a big deal. It's all whether or not the Ogre hits him. If the Ogre hits him he's dead, if he doesn't he's not dead.
Uncle Chan: If the Ogre hits him it's all... Ogre!

Guy Lang bleeds 1.
The Ogre misses.
Goblin moves around.

~Round 10~
GM: Mord, how ya doin'? What's up?
Oliver: Fight.
Guy Lang: Mord fights. He's a maniac.

Mord kills another goblin, and 5ft steps.

Guy Lang bleeds 1.
Ogre misses.

Guy Lang: I'm just hoping the Ogre won't follow him outside the cave. Maybe everyone else will die but he'll make it. I think he can outrun an Ogre.

One last goblin is sitting back, plus the Ogre.

~Round 11~
Mord hits the Ogre.
1d8+2 has to be 9 or more to kill the ogre.
He rolls a 10.
The Ogre dies.
The crowd. goes. wild.

Guy Lang stabilizes.

The last goblin attacks Mord, and barely misses.

Guy Lang: Doesn't he run away after seeing all the others die, and the ogre die? Or is he like Mord and he loves death?
GM: He loves death.

~Round 12~
Mord kills the final goblin.
The entryway now has 35 goblin corpses.
A single ogre corpse.
Three unconscious humans.
And Mord, covered in blood.
Mord is the MVP.

Mord takes an ear from the ogre, to prove his might back at the keep.

Mord applies First Aid to Oliver (-2), Guy Lang (-5), and Uncle Chan (-3). He bandages up his own wounds as well. He checks everyone's stuff and finds the potion on Uncle Chan. He uses this potion on Uncle Chan to get him standing, and then Uncle Chan and Mord drag Oliver and Guy Lang out of the ravine and to the treeline. Emila is there, and she helps take the bodies back to the keep.

The constable is very impressed with this tale of success, and orders that they be allowed room and board at the inn for free during their recovery.

It's the little things in life.

316 Experience is earned

Uncle Chan: Really? After that many goblins? And an Ogre?
GM: Goblins are 5xp.
Uncle Chan: How did we get so much before?
GM: 1gp of treasure is 1xp. Treasure is most of where you get experience from in this game.
Uncle Chan: Well, someday we'll get to level 2.
Oliver: I don't know what you're talking about. I'm already level 2. Get like me.
Guy Lang: Actually, Mord is just barely level 2 right now.

So now Mord can finally cast one 1st level spell each day.
Which is a fitting capstone for the episode.
Last edited by Lokathor on Wed Dec 17, 2014 7:22 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by Blicero »

Any particular reason you used Darkest Dungeons as your retroclone flavor base? Is this game actually likely to make it to the "MI" part of "BECMI"?
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Post by Lokathor »

So much 3e is being injected into the version we're using that the retroclone base almost doesn't matter. major things off the top of my head:
[*]We've got 3e stat mods (which turns the players into god-mode type characters at first level compared to what the game expects, so they get a bit of a buffer against their stupid actions)
[*]we've got bleeding to death rules instead of death at 0hp
[*]we've got much of the 3e tactical system (space/reach, 5ft steps, AoOs, etc).
Part of this is because I believe it to be genuinely a better rule system than what ADnD had, even if just for uniformity over lots of fiddly tables, but also a large part of why i'm copying things straight from 3e instead of trying to tinker with new mechanics more than i do is that my group already plays Tome stuff, so it's easiest for them to remember when things are close to that.

In terms of one form of ADnD over another:
[*]Dark Dungeons has some proficiency rules that we're keeping in modified form (more individualized per weapon than just giving out 3/2 attack rate and such, my version is inspired by the weapon group rules from Baldur's Gate),
[*]It has "red powder" muskets and pistols (actually Emila made herself a musket at the end of ep3, but i decided to leave that off and talk about it later because i didn't want to bring up red stone right at the end of the post).
[*]It also includes rules outlines for "skysailing", which is basically spelljamming with the serial numbers filed off.
[*]And of course there's a (simplistic) system for realm management.
As I've read through it compared to other retroclones, it sure feels more "batteries included" than Labyrinth Lords or whatever else, so I went with that.

In terms of if the players will ever get to high levels, it is entirely possible. My current plan (and I don't mind if my players read this as well) is to finish up B2, move on to T1-4 The Temple of Elemental Evil, play as much of that as they want (which gets the players potentially as high as level 8 if they finish the whole thing, though I've been told that it turns into a slog later on and groups get bored of it), and then run a module or two from the S series as needed until they're able to attempt a run through GDQ1-7 Queen of the Spiders. After that there's a few high level modules to pick from, such as The Rod of Seven Parts. My general intent with the game is to keep things simpler for me and stick to premade adventures where possible, but there's adventures all the way up into the late teens, so I should be good for a very long time. The path I just outlined takes at least two years of real time to play out or so based on reports, so that's a long way off. If we decide that we want to go back and play a lower level adventure they can probably have some of their henchmen form a temporary off-shoot group to go do stuff and bring back some spoils without resetting the campaign overall.
Last edited by Lokathor on Sat Dec 20, 2014 8:15 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by Lokathor »

Episode 04: The Orcish Nightmare
  • Mord Deathsfriend
  • Emila Weinerhoff
  • Guy Lang
  • Oliver Brimble
  • Uncle Chan
  • Sarventes
They had a very long fight with a stupidly large number of orcs, and then they got some treasure and experimented with green slime.
So, to recap, last time the group went into a goblin cave, got in a fight with some goblins, more goblins showed up with an ogre, they all kept on fighting until the only thing left standing was Mord, and he got the group back to the keep along with a single Ogre ear to prove that he'd killed said ogre.

Mord: Zis is how I picture ze world in about, oh, 20 years. Me standing alone, with everything else dead.

The group gets their inn charges compensated by the Castilian of the keep as a reward for defeating the nearby ogre. They spend only 3 days healing, now that Mord can also cast Cure Light Wounds each day.

GM: At the tavern, a new adventurer of seeming skill has come into the keep.
Emila: Hmm, does he look like an ogre?
GM: Nope, he looks like an elf.
Mord: Oh.
Emila: So he's not a spy.
Guy Lang: He's not like the race elf, he looks like Will Ferrell
Sarventes: Ha, I really didn't know how serious to play it, but I was dying to say 'he looks a lot like Will Ferrell'.
GM: He definitely looks a lot like Will Ferrell. Like if Will Ferrell were an elf.
Mord: Oh please, that's ridiculous.
Guy Lang: That would be absurd. Well, what say we have this elf join us?

Also, they talk to a priest (of an order too small to be widely known) that will join up with their quest to fight evil. He's got two acolytes that follow him around but don't talk because they have to follow a vow of silence until they also become full priests. They wear green robes over their armor with a red belt to tie it all together. The priest says that, since the main characters are tough enough to fight an ogre, that the he'll have his group join in with theirs (for a share of the money of course).

They decline to purchase much more in the supplies department, but Emila does have her musket (which is basically a crossbow with a palette swap). With that, they're off.

Emila: Well, do we wanna go down the way we went before?
Guy Lang: We could go into a different entrance if you guys want.
Uncle Chan: Perhaps one not completely filled with dangerous, dangerous trolls.
GM: Well...
Mord: I think it might be hard to find one of those.
Guy Lang: I think they all have crazy monsters in them.
GM: To address what Uncle Chan said, you're guessing that everything here is full of crazy, deadly things. To address what Emila said, yes, you're suspecting there's quite a bit more to the goblin cave area that you didn't explore. As you can see on the map you didn't actually get a chance to look around much. To address what Guy Lang said, you see a few other cave entrances around the area, although you do recall being warned that the lower cave levels were supposed to be simpler and easier.
Guy Lang: The higher you go, the crazier stuff gets.
GM: Yeah, for weird reasons. You're not sure.
Guy Lang: All we know is that that's what the townspeople told us, and I'm gonna actually believe them on this one.
GM: A powerful god named Gygax once deemed it so.
Guy Lang: There's a pantheon of gods, and above all the rest of them is Gygax. And he is mysterious, and we don't know his powers, but he created this universe.
GM: Well, just this part of this universe.
Sarventes: He's like a universe sub-contractor?
GM: Yeah.

There are three different new ones that can be spotted easily, and they decide to go with a new one. Last time they went to the one farthest east to the south, this time they go to the one farthest east to the north. Kinda working their way in. A marching order is arranged with Guy Lang and Sarventes at the front (in plate mail) and Jovan (plate) and his Acolytes (chainmail) at the back. Others all in the middle. Guy Lang, Emila, and Mord light torches.

They go about 10ft north inside the cave entrance to an east-west T-section when a group of four orcs decide to take great offense at this home invasion, and charge the group from the east. Initiative is rolled, but with 6 players, 3 allies, and 4 enemies there's a lot of clashes. Since fights later on might have even more creatures within them, we resolve to start rolling 1d100 for initiative instead of 1d20 for all future battles.

(long music for a long battle)
~Round 1~
Sarventes moves up and hits an orc with his scimitar, killing the orc.

Sarventes: Oh, I was afraid I might get mobbed, running out first.
Guy Lang: That... won't happen.
GM: Yeah, these guys are pretty much chumps.

Guy Lang moves and kills an orc too.
An orc moves in and misses while shouting loudly.
Emila moves into the intersection and readies her musket against anyone approaching in response to the sound of combat.
It turns out that there were some orcs out of sight to the north! An orc from the hidden group runs west along a parallel hallway north of the one the group is in, and Emila fires, but the bullet goes into the rocks.
Oliver also moves and readies to shoot.
Mord moves and readies an action to smash things with his mace.
Jovan steps inside and waits, things seem under control.
An orc dramatically misses Guy Lang.
An orc comes around the corner and moves up to Mord, gets killed.
An orc moves past Oliver's line of sight, also to the west, and Oliver shoots him in the arm, but he keeps going.

Oliver: I shout at him, "give me my bolt back, please"

The acolytes move in from the outside and stay in position to prevent any sudden attacks from the rear.
An orc moves up to attack Uncle Chan, but Uncle Chan punches him first, killing the orc.

~Round 2~
Sarventes kills an orc.
An orc misses Mord
Guy Lang kills an orc.
Emila moves and shoots at an orc that's in partial darkness. A natural 20 is rolled, but the miss chance still causes the attack to miss.
The orcs moving along the north route run west into the darkness, and lots of orcish snarling and warning shouts are heard.

Emila: How do we know extra languages again?
GM: Well, you all know Common, plus you get bonus languages equal to your Int mod.
Mord: I know -2 bonus languages.
Emila: So do Orcs and Goblins speak the same language?
GM: Nope, Orcish and Goblin are different languages.
Mord: There should be some cross, like French and Spanish probably.
Sarventes: Is there a system to intuit what's being said?
GM: Well, you intuit based on the fact that you just invaded somebody's home, and they're shouting about it, that you're being warned about to the other orcs here.
Sarventes: Yeah, I guess it doesn't matter too much what they're specifically saying.

So they pick which languages they know, and then Oliver repositions himself.
Mord moves and misses.
Jovan moves and kills an orc.
Uncle Chan moves around into that more northern east-west corridor. He discovers that there's basically a duck blind, only more like an intruder blind, and it's pretty well disguised from the outside. That's where the second group of orcs was lurking, though there are no more of them now. Uncle Chan takes a stuffed goat head from the blind area.
There's shouts off to the west.
A spear is thrown at Oliver, and misses.

~Round 3~
Sarventes double moves to the west.
Guy Lang double moves to the west as well, his torchlight revealing that the room to the west is a dining hall of some sort, with benches and tables and a large wooden chair that has some orcish word on it, perhaps a name or title of some sort. Only a single orc is spotted in the shadows at the moment.

Mord: Does it have gilding on it or anything?
GM: No it looks like it's made from the same wood as the trees in the area are. It doesn't look particularly special really, other than the word carved into it. It could just say "king" for all you know.
Sarventes: If we scratch the VIN numbers off this chair how much could we make on the scrap market with it?

Emila shoots an orc, and it dies.
A orcish spear gets lobbed out of the darkness, but Oliver steps aside.
Oliver readies an action to shoot once someone with a torch has moved in to reveal more orcs.
Mord moves up and waits for the fog of war to be lifted, reserving 5ft of movement for if he needs to run away quickly. The fog of war is lifted to reveal some more orcs about 55ft away from him, so he uses his last 5ft of movement to run away quickly. Oliver fires and misses.
Jovan moves up to stand next to Mord.
Uncle Chan moves up to Jovan.
The Acolytes move up into the battle line that is being formed. There's now a big north-south wall of PCs+allies on the east of the great hall, and then a few orcs on the west side of the room.
An orc moves closer.

Guy Lang: I'm glad that they're moving up to us, because if I had to move up I'd get shot with like 1,000 spears.
GM: Good point. The orc moves to here and throws his spear.
Guy Lang: Too smart for my own good.

A spear goes into Mord's leg for 3 damage.
A spear goes into an acolyte for 4 damage.
Many many orcs all move out from the darkness. There's about 20 orcs that end up forming the opposing side.
During the many orc turns, the injured acolyte goes down to a second spear hit.

~Round 4~
Sarventes throws down a Sleep spell, rolls 9. A bunch of orcs all go down. At this point I'll note that they probably should have woken up easily during the battle and been able to get back in the fight, but that didn't happen this time.
Guy Lang moves and stabs an orc dead.
Emila throws down a second Sleep spell, rolls 6.
Oliver shoots an orc, it dies.
Mord moves up and kills a lady orc.
Jovan kills an orc.
Uncle Chan moves in and punches an orc in the heart, killing it.
Acolyte 2 uses First Aid on Acolyte 1
An orc hits mord for 2.
Another orc hits Uncle Chan for 6! He's at just 1hp.
Then another orc hits him again for 5!
Many other orcs attack and miss.

~Round 5~
Sarventes kills an orc.
Guy Lang kills an orc.
Emila misses.
Oliver kills an orc.
Mord is flanked by orcs and backs up, and also misses.
Jovan kills an orc.
Uncle Chan stabilizes.
Acolyte 1 stabilizes on his own, so Acolyte 2 moves into the battle, dealing 1 damage to an orc.
An orc tears into Guy Lang for 6 damage.
All the rest of the orcs are ineffective as usual.

~Round 6~
Sarventes kills an orc.
Guy Lang actually misses an orc.
Emila uses First Aid on Acolyte 1, but doesn't manage to help.
Oliver misses.
Mord misses and backs up more.
Jovan is pretty much invulnerable to the orcs, so he keeps going. Hits, but only 3 damage.
Acolyte 2 swings and misses.

GM: Well the acolytes aren't helping too much, but Jovan is making up for it. The orcs point and shout things you don't understand.
Sarventes: Why would anyone want to speak Orcish in the first place? It's not like they're contributing goods or magic to the economy. I feel like we're not missing out on much by not speaking with them at all.
GM: A classic racist elvin argument.
Sarventes: That's true I guess... oh god what if in a hundred years there's an industrial revolution and all these caves are full of steam stuff and it's all a Dickensian nightmare.
Mord: I was thinking that the orcs would be stocking all the shelves in stores, and we'd ignore them, because they're orcs.
Sarventes: Yeah, never talk to an orc. I don't even like it when orcs are working in food service, cause ew they're touching my food.
Guy Lang: fuck.

~Round 7~
Sarventes kills an orc.
Guy Lang kills an orc.
Emila kills an orc.
Oliver contemplates shooting through the square of Acolyte 2, but they decide that Jovan is too powerful to safely piss off right now. Instead he readies a shot for as soon as anything isn't in melee with other stuff.
Mord moves back to help create a formation, but misses with his attack.
Jovan kills an orc.
Acolyte 2 misses.
An orc hits Acolyte 2, sending him to 0hp.
An orc 5ft steps around into melee with Oliver, which in this edition prevents missile attacks entirely, ruining his chance at a readied shot.

~Round 8~
Sarventes and Guy Lang both kill an orc each.
Emila tries for a First Aid on Acolyte 2, but doesn't manage to help.
Oliver 5ft steps back and totes murders the guy that was blocking his missile attack.
Mord deals 3 damage to the orc that got hit by the acolyte for 1... but they have 5hp so he doesn't die.
Jovan strikes down an orc.
The orc chief has gotten into melee at this point, but he's about as useless as the rest of the orcs.

~Round 9~
Sarventes kills one orc.
Guy Lang kills another.
Emila misses.
The orc chief misses Guy Lang.
Oliver 5ft steps up, drawing his dagger and using extreme CQC powers to combine the crossbow and dagger into a single deadly style. The roll is a 20, and he can clearly remember the basics of CQC. The chief takes 3 damage.
Mord also hits the chief for 3 with the power of Flanking.
Jovan takes down an orc.

~Round 10~
Sarventes kills the orc chief.
Guy Lang kills an orc.
Emila just waits around, because they've got it under control.
Oliver starts stabbing the sleeping orcs.
Mord misses his flanking strike.
Jovan kills the last orc.
First aid is rendered to all. Jovan uses a Cure Light Wounds on each of his Acolytes. Then they begin to loot stuff. Mostly they arrange it around so that they can pick it up with the wagon later on. There's electrum, silver, spears, leather armor, gold, the chief has a ring, chainmail, a mace, and a shield.

Sarventes: Who didn't take any damage? Emila, Oliver, and me?
Guy Lang: And Jovan didn't either.
Sarventes: I thought he did.
GM: Jovan was never hit. He was like an invulnerable wall of metal. His acolytes both got beaten down, but he knew exactly what he was doing.
Guy Lang: Yeah, Jovan is a tough motherfucker, so, ya know, watch out for him.
Sarventes: Is he important to our questing?
Guy Lang: I mean, in that he's tough as shit.
GM: He's tougher than anyone else in your party.
Mord: By a fairly significant margin, because apparently he has 18hp.
GM: Yes. He is a 3rd level Cleric. You saw him cast two Cure Light Wounds spells in a single day just now.
Mord: Woahhhh.

Guy Lang grabs up the orc chief's shield. It has a blue griffon on it, but doesn't glow or anything super like that. The ring is silver and has a small ruby in it.

They wonder how they'll get all the stuff to the wagon. They contemplate carrying it all, and they contemplate putting it in a barrel or something and then carrying that, but they decide on the really good plan, "move the wagon to the ravine, load it up, and then leave, because that's what the wagon is for in the first place".

They head up along the corridor that the chief came down from. In one room they find some extra equipment and all of the orcish food. They take the equipment, and leave the food.

Another room is the chief's room. There's a tapestry of a dragon breathing fire and burning down a village. It's on a heavy canvas and they roll it up to take it. There's a second tapestry of a boat, and as they go to roll that up an alcove is revealed in the back. There's two extra chainmail suits, four long swords, and a locked chest.

Guy Lang: Why didn't any of his dudes have these?
GM: Gygax. Module said that they don't reorganize their defense until they're attacked at least once so I just went with it, and they had all this spare equipment they didn't use.
Mord: What was that last part of the stuff here?
GM: Two chainmail, four longsword, and a locked chest.
Emila: Hmm.
Oliver: Hey, guess who tries to open said locked chest, but also checks for traps inside said locked chest first.
Mord: is it me?
Oliver: It's me.
Guy Lang: Maybe some day you'll be high enough level to actually open a lock.
Oliver: One can only hope.
GM: *rolls* You find no traps, but you do not manage to open the chest.
Oliver: Motherfucker.

They shake it gently to make sure something is inside, and then they plan to bash it open. There's a lot of clinking sounds like metal on metal, but some of it also sounds like metal on glass, like coins and a glass vial. They decide to not bash it open. After searching more in the room they find the key to the chest (under the pillow). There's a bunch of copper, silver, gold, and even platinum. Also a potion and a scroll.

It's this point when I have to explain that they need to use Read Magic to examine arcane scrolls for later use. One skill I put on the skill list was "Magepunk", but that was more for sky ship engineering and things of that nature, it doesn't let you identify items (Analyze and Read Magic do that after all). However, up until now they'd only ever been casting Sleep, so Emila and Sarventes needed to pick what spells they even had in their spellbook in the first place.

Sarventes: Yeah, if we just looked at this all willy-nilly we might damage it.
Guy Lang: Well, it could be an Explosive Rune that explodes when you read it.
Sarventes: No flash photography then.

So they both get Read Magic as a required spell, and they both get Sleep since they already used that in the game, and then they look at the list and pick some other spells to know.

Emila tries out a sip of the potion to see what it might be.

Emila: Does it taste like almonds? If it tastes like almonds it's probably cyanide, and I'll die.
GM: It tastes like cranberries.
Oliver: But he's allergic to cranberries too!
Mord: Oh no!
GM: I'm pretty sure you've tasted this before, because I think someone has fed you a Cure Light Wounds potion, and that's what this is.
Emila: Amazing.

GM: Well, then that's about it for the orc cave here. The other big room that you haven't checked yet was the orc common room, but it mostly has junk, old clothes, some playing cards I guess.
Mord: What game? Orcs Against Humanity?
GM: Yeah, Orcs Against Humanity. It's like Hearthstone actually, a free to play, and they want you to pay for premium booster packs.
Emila: Bastards.

So they go back to town then, and get the cart, and drive it out to the ravine to pick up the stuff. The group gets 206 exp each (a 7.5 way split, the NPCs count as 0.5 each).

Sarventes: All the levels are different for each class. That's unusual.
GM: No! That's what old DnD thought was balanced... Hint: It's not balanced.

Guy Lang begins to set some tables around so that he can dump green slime on them and convert them into slime traps. He tries to use the corpses as well to grow more green slime so that it doesn't run out. However, these slimes are active slimes! They can move around, now that they're outside the first dungeon where a spell was suppressing them from moving. Guy Lang runs immediately away (it only moves 1ft/round).

Guy Lang: I consult with Mord. He's kinda an idiot, but we're in this slime thing together.
Mord: Yeah.

So the plan is to touch the foot of a corpse into the slime, then drag the body back so that just a bit is on the foot. Then cut a finger off the corpse and dip it in the tiny slime pile and put it into a flask and seal it so it can't get out.

GM: You're looking at the slime, and you don't feel like this is a good idea, but you try it anyway.
Guy Lang: I've got Wisdom 7, I feel like everything is a good idea.
Mord: Yes, just like how Mord has Int 7.
GM: Alright, you move the corpse in, drag it out, there is now slime spreading out but just a little.
Guy Lang: I scoop up just a little smidgeon, I just need a little amount in the flask.
GM: Well, make a dexterity check.
Guy Lang: *rolls low*
GM: It gets into the bottle, but also on your hand.
Guy Lang: I should ask, is this the metal eating kind? Because I've got a plate mail glove on and all.
GM: Yep, it appears to be the metal eating kind because it starts eating into your gauntlet right away.
Guy Lang: I'm gonna take that off, I guess I lose that piece of armor.
Mord: Just use a metal item to scrape it off. Sacrifice a dagger.
Oliver: Just cut your hand off.
Mord: Well, Mord doesn't know this I guess, but just use the dagger; scrape, scrape, scrape.
GM: You throw off the gauntlet, toss it on the ground, and within about 6 rounds it has become green slime.
Guy Lang: Gonna need to buy a new gauntlet. Worth it. So I got a little in the thing?
GM: A tiny smidgeon, yes.
Guy Lang: I cut off a finger and drop it in there. Then I cork the shit out of it.
Mord: It's weird that corks would work.
GM: I don't think that cork would work.
Emila: Cork wouldn't work, that's organic material.
Sarventes: You need a ground glass stopper.
Guy Lang: I put in a glass stopper.
GM: Okay. Can you make a glass stopper for a glass vial? Wouldn't it just slip out?
Guy Lang: They have real life glass stoppers.
Sarventes: Yeah, glass stoppers is how you deal with real life things that can't be contacted with rubber and stuff. What they do is they grind glass until it's +/- 1/10,000th of a millimeter to fit into the vial.
Guy Lang: It was made by a wizard. Made by a wizard.
GM: I think you'd need a much higher quality flask than the flask you currently have if you want to stopper it with this glass nonsense.
Sarventes: Yeah they're really expensive in real life too.
Mord: That's fair. Somehow the green slime has not eaten us while we've been traveling. Now it's a problem and we'll have to deal with it later.
GM: Yeah, any metal flasks get eaten through, and any glass flasks can't be sealed, but you have enough time to drop it safely.
Guy Lang: We're going to buy a really really expensive glass flask.
Mord: But actually, yeah, we have to have this.
Guy Lang: Green slime is the bomb.
GM: You can try for that. No one in the keep is an expert glass maker, you'll have to find some place better.
Emila: I could try. What's the difficulty on it?
GM: Mostly you need a proper workshop, which doesn't exist at the keep.
Emila: Fire and sand.
GM: A little more complicated, but yes.
Emila: If they have a blacksmith they have essentially all the tools I'll need.
GM: I don't know if a blacksmith's coal fire is hot enough to make glass. Is it? [later turned out that they are hot enough]
Sarventes: The problem is not making the glass, it's grinding the stopper. That's gonna be an extraordinarily high tolerance set of positive and negative grinding bits, and that's gonna be a special tool.
GM: Yeah, you'd need that special tool beyond just the skill requirements.
Emila: I wonder if we could make the special tool.
GM: You suspect that you could make it, but you just don't have it right now.

So that's a new party long term goal gained. With that, they move the goods into the wagon and drive the wagon back to the fort. Read Magic is memorized overnight, and the scroll is checked. It's a Fireball scroll, cool find to end on.
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Post by Lokathor »

Episode 05: Jovan's Secret
  • Mord Deathsfriend
  • Emila Weinerhoff
  • Guy Lang
  • Oliver Brimble
  • Uncle Chan
  • Sarventes
Based upon the group's success last time, the Curate of the local chapel gives them a knowing look from across the square while they're unloading supplies to sell within the keep, and makes a small motion to beckon them inside the chapel.

Also there was a thing between sessions where Guy Lang (not a scientist) got Sarventes (actual scientist) to come up with an alternate Green Slime storage system. It involved using wax to keep the stopper in place, and apparently wax is some specially constructed hydro-carbon that you can't normally digest or process in any way. Now, that sounds convincing, but the GM had read a blogspot article (high quality counter-research here) that there's a weird type of bird that actually can eat and digest wax.

GM: I read a blogspot article that said that there's a kind of bird that can eat wax, so I'm gonna say that a green slime can also do that; unless it's made of stone or glass, the green slime can probably get through it.
Guy Lang: Just cause there's one type of bird that can do it doesn't mean a green slime can do it. There's one type of fucking archaea that can eat arsenic, that doesn't mean that you could eat arsenic.
GM: But a green slime probably isn't gonna be poisoned by arsenic.
Oliver: A green slime can absorb arsenic.
GM: Yeah, I mean a green slime will be fine if you pour arsenic on it.
Guy Lang: That's not true. That's NOT true!
GM: Arsenic isn't fire or cold or sunlight, so it's gonna be fine.
Guy Lang: I need Sarventes to show up and tell you how wrong you are.
GM: Look, the point is: it can go through wax. That's the call. If you want to have as powerful a weapon as portable green slime, you have to put up with the fact that you'll need to get a special glass grinder and make some special flasks.
Mord: Could we store them in a bag of holding or something like that? The inside of the bag is an other dimensional space, not just cloth.
GM: Hmm, okay, that'd work. It'd safely stay in the pocket, and you could invert the bag which ejects everything from the pocket, and you'd dump slime on something.

The argument went on for even longer than that, but really that's the highlight. They now have two potential slime transportation methods. Still no waxed stoppers allowed; no one gets to have portable green slime containers available with 1st level adventuring gear.

So they go talk to the Curate, like he motioned them to do.

Emila: Hello.
Curate: Hey there, Emila. How ya doin?
Emila: Alright.
Curate: Well, I have a matter that I'd like to discuss with you. I don't want to put you out of position, but I've obtained some very dire news, from a village to the south. The priest there has been having some difficult times. Canon Terjon. He would like someone to... you know... he can't go wandering off into the woods, but you're the types that could. I'd like very much if you could investigate this matter for him.
Guy Lang: Probably better than what we have here.
Mord: Yeah, there appear to be a nearly limitless number of goblins, so anything is better really.
Uncle Chan: I wanna die punching goblins.
Curate: Well, if you go do this instead of punching goblins, I can give you an additional two cure potions to speed you on your way.
Uncle Chan: What is the possibility of there being goblins?
Curate: I don't know, Canon Terjon did not say.
Mord: He just said that you were, "having troubles"?
Curate: Yes, there have been some disappearances on the road, the area has a history of foul dealings just beyond the village, and so it could be related to that, it could just be standard brigands and that sort of thing.
Mord: Standard issue brigands, huh?
Curate: Standard issue brigands, standard issue Brigadier Generals.
Emila: Alright, well let's head out there once you give us those potions. We need those potions.

So the Curate hands Emila 2 cure potions, and he passes those over to Mord. The group (including Jovan and his two acolytes) travels several days south back southwestish to the town they started in (Verbobonc) and then several more days southeastish to a village called Hommlet (Map).

Emila: Where are we coming in on the map? 1, or 2?
GM: You're coming in by 2.
Oliver: Let's go to Elmo's parent's house.
GM: You... wanna go to elmo's parent's house?
Oliver: Yeah, does he have a goldfish?
GM: He does not have a goldfish.
Oliver: What kind of shit is this?
GM: I don't, I don't know.
Emila: I knock on Elmo's parent's house door.
GM: An old man greets you, looks you up and down. Sees that you have all these armored guys behind you.
Elmo's Dad: Oh, who are you then? Have you come to our village to trade?
Emila: Uh, yes.
Oliver: Is elmo home, or is he on his computer?
GM: Let's see if Elmo is out. *rolls some dice and checks the chart* He is in the area. He comes out.
Elmo: What's this all then? What are you guys doing here? I've never seen any of you before.
Mord: Who exactly is Elmo?
GM: I dunno, you asked for Elmo.
Emila: We're here to talk to you Elmo, and so we're gonna have to talk about your dad.
Elmo: Oh, well what has my father done?
Emila: He is a suspected thieving bandit.
Elmo: My father!? A Bandit!? I don't think that's true at all! He's a simple farmer!
Oliver: I don't know about you, but I've never seen your father and the bandits in the same place.
Guy Lang: Very true.
Elmo: What are you talking about? You just got here! I've seen my father being attacked by bandits all the time!
Oliver: No, that was a setup.
Guy Lang: Bandits just going around, and only attacking when he's nearby...
Oliver: Yeah, it's like he's the leader of the bandits.
Elmo: What!? This is nonsense! I'll not hear of it! Who are you and what are you doing in this village!?
Oliver: We know that your father is the leader of the bandits, and we want him to join our party.
Elmo: What party? What is this for?
Oliver: To kill goblins.
Elmo: Oh, kill goblins. Well I haven't seen any goblins in the area lately. There have been some disappearances on--
Guy Lang: That's because the goblins all got killed by bandits. That's why we're interested in your father.
Elmo: Well, my father is not a bandit, as I've attempted to explain to you.
Emila: Why do you say that your father is not a bandit? Does he have something to hide?
Elmo: Well, I would think that my father isn't a bandit because he's been attacked by the bandits, as I've said.
Emila: Well, likely story.
Oliver: Wouldn't he get other bandits to attack him, so that people don't think he's a bandit. Just sayin.
Elmo: ...that doesn't make much sense.
Emila: If I was a bandit, I would stage a bandit attack.
Elmo: Why? Well, uhm, anyway, I think it's time for you to leave my father alone, and what is it that you're looking for in the village besides things to do with my father? Thank you very much.
Emila: We're here to clean up some bandit business.
Elmo: Bandit business? You should probably speak to one of the town elders if you're here on bandit related business. They can tell you a little more about the disappearances that have been happening lately.
Emila: Where would one locate an elder?
Elmo: Canon Terjon is at the church, or over at the Tower you could speak with someone. There's Jaroo in his grove. You see that big clump of trees over there? That's right where you'd wanna go.
Oliver: Alright, we're gonna go over there, but you be warned--
Elmo: To Jaroo?
Oliver: Wherever. But you be warned, we're gonna be watching your father. If he shows any sort of bandit shit, we're gonna kill both of you now.
Elmo: Uh, I'll watch you more than I'll watch my father, with all these threats going around.
Guy Lang: Sounds pretty suspicious.
Emila: Yeah, that sounds pretty suspicious.
Elmo: Huh.

Emila: Alright we go to Jarash.
GM: Jaroo?
Emila: Whatever, where's he on the map?
GM: #6, the Druid's Grove.
Emila: Alright let's bust down the door.
GM: Uhm, maybe you should not bust down the door.
Mord: Maybe we shouldn't not bust down the door?
Emila: The element of surprise would be on our side.
Guy Lang: We should talk to the guy that we were sent to go see.
GM: Canon Terjon?
Guy Lang: Yes.
GM: He's up at the Church of Saint Cuthbert, up on the hill.
Guy Lang: that's where we go.

So they pass around several farms, that grove, a large inn, a blacksmith, across up a bridge and they're up at the church. It sure looks like a church of Saint Cuthbert. It's got a statue of him holding a big club, glaring and such like he does. The townsfolk are all going in and out. The group enters and there's more people milling around, and some priests. They ask to speak with the canon, and a priest goes off and brings him back after a minute or two. He comes back and sees that they're all wearing armor and weapons.

Terjon: Ah, good, good. Excellent, excellent. Are you here about the matter that I sent word of to my nearby fellows?
Guy Lang: Yes.
Terjon: Okay, well, there is a matter that has been troublesome. There have been disappearances off to the east road. Long ago there was a moathouse with some troubles that we don't need to get into now, but it suffices to say, that though the group that was in charge of the moathouse at the time was destroyed, the moathouse itself remained, and occasionally it becomes taken over, and people prey upon those who would travel the roads. I need you to go and investigate, make sure everything is alright.
Guy Lang: Kill everyone in the moathouse?
Mord: And possibly burn it down so it doesn't happen again.
Terjon: Well, the moathouse is made of quite a bit of stone. It would not easily be burned. If you can find some way to destroy it permanently then I fully invite you to do so.
Uncle Chan: Fill it with flammables, and burn it down.
Mord: Yeah, seems dumb to build it like that, it'll just get burned down.
Terjon: It was once attacked by a moderate force that had some siege weaponry with them. They knocked down some of the upper levels, but the lower level remained strong. As the upper levels crumbled into rubble around the lower level, it actually began to protect it against further assault. It's quite a mess now, be careful. You don't want any rocks to fall on you or anything like that.

Terjon is busy, so he says that his assistant, Calmer, will work with the party should they have any further need of information. They head out of the church and pay a guy at the Welcome Wench (an Inn) a gold piece to manage the wagon and mules for a few days while they're out at the moathouse and such. They head down the road.

At this point there's a text box to read:
T1: Temple of Elemental Evil wrote: A scrub of thorns, thistles, weeds, and shrubs grows thickly along the edge of the track which leads to the ruins. Even the track is mostly overgrown and cluttered with fallen branches and trees. Here and there it is washed out, in other places a mire.

Some game evidently still follows the pathway, however, for after a mile or so faint traces can be seen. But even considering this, going is slow, and it takes over four hours to trudge along on foot. Considerable hacking and clearing is necessary to make the way passable, so the way back won't take nearly as long. After two miles, as the track turns more northerly, the land begins to sink and become boggy. Tall marsh plants grow thickly where cattails and tamaracks do not. Off to the left can be seen the jagged silhouette of the moathouse.

A side path, banked high to cross over the wetland to either side, just north to the entrance of the ruin. The track here is only about 15 feet wide or so, with crumbling embankments making travel near the edge dangerous. The bogs stink. The vegetation appears dense and prolific, but somehow sickly and unhealthy, creepers and vines throwing their stran- gling loops over the skeletons of dead saplings and living bushes alike. The rushes and cattails rustle and bend even to a slight zephyr, and weird bird calls, croakings, and other unwholesome sounds come faintly across the fen.
GM: I don't know how a tree has a skeleton exactly, but according to that, trees have skeletons.
Uncle Chan: It's a spooky tree.

(picture)
There's a road that leads up to the moathouse. The drawbidge looks like it was destroyed during the attack that brought it down. Now there's just a big sheet of wood across the space, but it looks rickety. Probably not safe for the mules and wagon to try to cross. There's rubble everywhere. The former second floor has completely collapsed, and parts of the walls are also now piles of rubble.

They debate if they should climb over the rubble to get inside, or just use the front door. The door might be watched by the bandits they're trying to attack, and the moat might be full of crocodiles or something. Guy Lang says they should take the bridge, so they do.

They go around the path, when a giant tongue shoots out of the bushes at them. They expected to be attacked by arrows, not a tongueing. It's a group of giant frogs.

(Frog Music)
~Surprise Round~
Several tongue attacks come out of the bushes, and one of them grabs onto Emila. 6 damage, Emila is unconcious.

~Round 1~
The large frog that bit Emila backs up, dragging her towards the muck of the moat.
Uncle Chan punches a frog, it's hurt but not out.
A frog hops over and bites onto Uncle Chan for 6, latching on!
Guy lang moves in and misses.
A frog hops over and bites Guy Lang.

Guy Lang: Jesus these frogs are gonna kill us.
Mord: This is how we'll die, not by goblins, or by ogres, but by simple frogs.

Oliver steps back and shoots his crossbow, hitting a frog.
Mord move in and misses.
Emila rolls a save to stabilize, but she can't because she's being dragged by a frog and such.
A frog attacks Mord but misses.
An acolyte kills a frog.
Jovan hits a frog.
The other acolyte misses.
One frog misses Guy Lang.

~Round 2~
The frog that has Emila backs towards the mucky moat again.
Uncle Chan punches a frog in the face, killing it.
Guy Lang moves around, but doesn't hit.
A frog misses.
Oliver misses.
Mord hits a frog.
Emila stabilizes, but is still being dragged into the waters.
A frog retreats back into the water because it's super injured.
Acolyte misses.
Jovan kills a frog.
Acolyte misses.
A frog hits Guy Lang.

~Round 3~
The frog drags Emila.
Uncle Chan punches the frog dragging Emila, but it's still not quite dead.
Guy Lang stabs a frog in the brain, only the one dragging Emila is left.
Oliver misses.
Acolyte1 misses.
Jovan kills the last frog.
There's a lot of First Aid that happens all around. A lot of failed checks more like. No one manages to make a successful check on Emila, so Mord has to resort to using Cure Light Wounds on Emila. They've still got a Sleep spell readied, so they press on while injured. They also chop off all the back legs from all 5 frogs that they managed to kill, and they're gonna cook them later.

There's a tower inside the gate, so they decide to peek into the tower first. There's some bones, probably from soldiers that were left during the attack. There also appears to be some coins on the ground in there.

Mord: We are nothing if not the sort of people who would scrabble around on the ground for dirty coins.

Oliver checks for traps, and finds none. He is 15% confident that there's no traps. He goes into the room to start picking up coins, and then a giant spider leaps out at him. Which was technically not a trap.

Mord: If it had been a tiny hole that shot needles, you'd have seen it. Giant spider? Nope.
GM: A "great wolf spider" is what we're talking about here.
Uncle Chan: Do you scream like a little girl?
Oliver: I dunno, let me roll for that.

~Surprise Round~
The spider bites for 3 damage, and a save against poison.

Oliver: Firstly, do I scream like a little girl?
GM: You rolled a 17? That's pretty good on your screaming save, you don't feel the need to scream right now.

~Round 1~
GM: So Oliver says "hey guys, I'm gonna get these coins, there's no traps in here", and then everyone hears a giant scream.
Mord: He passed his scream check.
GM: It's not a girly scream, it's just a normal scream. Okay, it was a Wilhelm Scream. Suddenly there's a scream like a man getting bit by an alligator, Uncle Chan what do you do?
Uncle Chan: Hmm, well I guess I wouldn't immediately run to someone screaming, so I just go, "what the fuck is that?"
GM: Fair. Emila what do you do? You can see Oliver, there's a bunch of motion going on in the tower, but you're not sure what.
Emila: I'm gonna ready my gun, if any unfriendlies pop through, I'm gonna blast 'em.
GM: Alright, Guy Lang you hear a scream, but you're not sure what happened.
Guy Lang: Well, I always know that it's always my enemies coming for me. I run to try and kill whatever is in there.
GM: Oliver is taking up most of the door. You can see frantic movement but you're not sure what's happening yet. Mord, you hear a scream and Guy Lang runs towards the tower.
Mord: I go over and see what's going on. Oh wow, a spider.
GM: There is a spider. It's about 4ft across, and it has jumped out of the rubble and is attacking Oliver.
Mord: Holy shit.
GM: Acolyte 2 isn't sure what's happening, he just readies his mace. Jovan looks around, but also not sure. Acolyte 1 gets ready. The spider bites at Oliver.
Oliver: He's such a dick.
GM: 1, and make another poison save.
Oliver: Pass, so on my turn I'm like, "hey guys there's a spider in there. Jesus fuck there's a spider in there."
Uncle Chan: Golley gee gosh!
Oliver: and I get away.

~Round 2~
Uncle Chan can't see into the tower very well, so he points and laughs at Oliver but doesn't go into the tower.
Emila climbs up some rubble to try and get a good vantage on the courtyard in case anyone comes out from the other direction.
Guy Lang moves in, stabs the spider for 7.
Mord moves in and misses.
Jovan's group shifts about, but does nothing much.
The spider bites at Guy Lang, missing.
Oliver does First Aid on himself.

~Round 3~
Uncle Chan keeps laughing at Oliver.
Emila moves higher up the rubble.
Guy Lang stabs the spider to death.
They dig out some coppers and silvers from the tower. Also an ivory box, like the size of a large bible. Two handles on the side. Seems nice.

They keep pressing in on the moathouse, since they still haven't used Sleep yet. There's a great hall sort of thing, but the roof in there is intact, and it's harder to see into the dark areas while they're standing in the bright light. It'll probably be fine without any special lights inside, but they light up some torches anyway.

Guy Lang and Mord go in first, Emila and Oliver are near the back. Jovan's group is in the middle. They begin to approach when javelins and bolts begin to fly at them from arrow slits in the walls.

(A classic battle theme if ever there was)
~Surprise Round~
Mord gets hit with a javelin for 5. The other attacks all go wild or bounce off of armor and shield.

~Round 1~
GM: Guy Lang, you can see some sort of... bandit!
Guy Lang: It's his dad, we always knew it to be true.

The bandits make some ranged attacks but miss.
Guy Lang moves to the doorway inside, and readies an action against anyone.
Bandit moves up a little, but doesn't engage.
A bandit moves into melee, and Guy Lang misses. The bandit also misses though.
Mord moves up and attacks the guy that moved in, killing him.
Bandit moves in and misses.
Uncle Chan moves in and kills a bandit.
A bandit attacks Emila from an arrow slit, but misses.
Oliver moves and readies to shoot if he gets a clear shot.
A bandit misses.
Emila moves in. She lobs a Sleep spell through an arrow slit and knocks out the crossbow bandits on one side.
A bandit hits Uncle Chan with a halberd for 4, sending him down.

~Round 2~
Bandit misses mord.
Bandit misses guy lang.
Guy Lang stabs a bandit and he dies.
Acolyte 1 moves in and attacks a bandit hurting the bandit, but this movement causes him to block what would have been Oliver's line of sight.
Jovan also moves up and attacks a bandit, hitting.
Mord flanks a bandit, but misses.
Acolyte 2 hits the bandit king. Well, more like bandit prince.
Uncle Chan bleeds a bit.
Oliver takes the shot with Acolyte 1 and Jovan in the way. He misses and hits Acolyte 1 for 5.
Bandits move and miss.
Emila has her LOS blocked off, so she just readies an attack.
Bandit misses.
The Bandit Prince also misses.

~Round 3~
Guy Lang hits the bandit prince, but he doesn't die.
Acolyte 1 move over and hits Oliver in the face for 5.
Jovan considers what to do. Guy Lang gets an 18 on his Charisma Check, so Jovan decides to not keep attacking the group, and goes after the bandits, killing one.
Mord kills a bandit.
Acolyte 2 kills a bandit.
GM: There are no more bandits standing.
Oliver: There's an Acolyte 1 standing, we should kill that guy.
Mord: We go behind the murder holes, and murder the bandits back there.

Uncle Chan stops bleeding, he's just unconscious. Emila yells at Acolyte 1 and makes her Diplomacy check, so she calms the enraged Acolyte. She doesn't manage to render any first aid to Oliver though. Mord First Aids Oliver, but he is still unconscious. Jovan cures the wound of Acolyte 1, and he takes his Acolytes to the side to explain him things, about controlling anger and stuff.

Guy Lang: They're all priests right?
GM: They're some sort of priests, but they haven't said what their order is.
Mord: You can be a priest of the Rage God.
Guy Lang: I tell them, "that guy's an idiot, and he just loves crossbows"

They start to grab up all the bandit gear they can see, and have to be reminded to First Aid on Uncle Chan. Mord gets Uncle Chan standing up again while the others count out coins. The bandit prince has a gold chain too. He also has a turtleneck, but this gold chain isn't light enough to flow in the wind. It's of moderate to average weight.

They look around in the grand hall a bit. The bandits collected together most of the potential treasure already, a lot that's left is junk. They go around to find the sleeping bandits, and stab them both in the throat. The room is a former trophy room, but the antlers and such are broken and old.

The group is fairly battered at this point. Town is only about a 2 hours walk away, but it's troublesome to move an unconscious body that far by hand. Instead they rest overnight right there in the moathouse, which heals everybody some, and then Mord uses Cure Light Wounds on Oliver. With several suits of armor, some shields, and some weapons all packed onto their backs, they go back to town.

Mord: We couldn't sell all the old leather armor. We need to rebrand this stuff, premium jerkey or something.
Guy Lang: We haven't tried to sell any leather armor to this town.
GM: You saturated the market at the keep, but you might be able to sell more here.

Back in town, Emila readies a Detect Magic spell. They lay out all the things they've found recently, particularly that ivory box, and cast. The ivory box is not magical, but that shield that Guy Lang took from the Orc Chief is!

GM: Anything else you guys wanna do back in town, since Emila is just gonna cast Detect Magic and seemingly do nothing else all day?
Oliver: We go around town and talk to people.
GM: Okay, anyone you want to talk to?
Oliver: We go to Elmo's house and tell him we killed his father.
GM: I'm not sure that would serve your purposes.

Well they all get 111exp, so everyone is at 1,901. So close to level 2 for Guy Lang and Uncle Chan.

Oliver suggests they sell the frog legs, but Mord offers to cook the frog legs instead. He rolls a 24. They're some of the most excellent frog legs ever. He's from Germany, but he learned his cooking in France it seems. Premium frog legs. Also there's like 10lbs of the stuff. So everyone eats a huge amount of frog legs. They don't even need to eat any other food for the rest of the day. Guy Lang shares some with Jovan and the Acolytes as a peace offering, and they seem somewhat mollified.

The next day, Emila casts Analyze (it's like Identify, but free and with a check instead of costing 100gp and always working), and is able to specify for sure that the magical shield is a +1 shield.

On the third day they take Discount with them (one of the mules), and go back to the Moathouse. They explore the area a bit as well. There's a storage hallway and then some stairs down into a lower level. Also the hallway has like a million rats. They don't attack Oliver right away though, since he practically is a rat himself (ha ha, etc). There's some stairs that once led up to the second floor, but that's all rubble now, and the stairs themselves are blocked by rubble too.

One room has an old dusty bed that actually isn't chopped up. There's broken pottery, and a silver torch holder that Uncle Chan takes.

There's a barracks they find. Many beds, and in the south end of the room there's a giant lizard about 8ft long, and next to it there's an old storage chest.

~Round 1~
Mord moves in and deals 8 damage to the Lizard.
Emila hears some clamoring, but looks into a different door at the other end of the hall instead. It's a conference room, and she picks up an old sword she finds.
Oliver opens a door to the kitchen area. There's a cask of something near the fireplace, a table, some plant hangers with no plants in them.
Guy Lang moves toward the lizard fight.
Uncle Chan lands a good hit on the lizard, it's almost dead.
Jovan and the Acolytes follow Emila

~Round 2~
Mord misses the lizard.
Emila goes farther away from the main group. There's a (non-undead) skeleton on the floor, and a live giant snake curled up in the corner. Emila shoots at the snake, and misses.
Oliver, upon hearing a gunshot, goes in the direction of Emila.
Guy Lang stabs the lizard, and it dies.
Uncle Chan rifles through the chest that was next to the lizard. There's some copper, Scale Mail, and a light crossbow with 24 bolts.
Jovan and the Acolytes creeps towards Emila, but he is very wary, not knowing what is being shot at.

Mord's turn was up, but the snake was being forgotten about, so it retroactively takes an immediate turn: The snake moves towards Emila and bites her for 2, plus 2 poison damage. Emila is at 0.

~Round 3~
Mord moves toward the gunshot, lacking any other enemies to fight.
Emila 5ft steps and hides under the skeleton on the ground.
Oliver moves.
The snake--

Guy Lang: Wait why didn't Jovan move towards the snake?
Danel: Well we forgot about the snake until after his turn.
Emila: But if the snake bit me back then, Jovan would have seen what was attacking me.
GM: True, but he also probably wouldn't go towards a 12ft snake so much.
Emila: That's what I'd do, and I'm totally fine.

The snake bites Emila for 1, plus 5 poison. Emila is at -6.
Uncle Chan heard a gunshot, and then some screaming, and then the sounds of people wondering if they should double cross each other.

Guy Lang: What was the sounds of the double crossing?
GM: That was the sound of Oliver and Acolyte 1 being all dodgy about not letting either of them get behind the other any more.

Uncle Chan double moves towards the fight.

Mord: Let's not double cross Jovan while also being attacked by a giant snake.
Oliver: We wouldn't be double crossing Jovan, we'd be double crossing Acolyte 1.
Guy Lang: If we were gonna double cross Jovan, we'd need Emila to cast Sleep on him. That's just the truth of the matter. If I could have Jovan without the Acolytes I would, but we have to take them all.
Oliver: Jovan's cool, Acolyte 1 is a dick.
Mord: Says the guy who nearly killed one of the acolytes while he was drunk.
GM: Oliver, roll a charisma check.
Oliver: 7.
Guy Lang: That's not... good.
GM: It is, in fact, time for Jovan to reveal his true intentions.
Guy Lang: He's been evil all along?
GM: He's been secretly evil all along!

Jovan swings at Oliver, but misses.
Acolyte 2 misses Oliver.

Guy Lang: So, if Emila stops moving, the snake won't attack again, right?
GM: The snake might attack again. It might keep trying to eat Emila.
Guy Lang: It would make sense to me if it fought the other living creatures in its domain.
GM: I think snakes just try to eat whatever they can eat.
Guy Lang: Okay, well, half the party dies.

~Round 4~
Mord hears the horrible sounds of sudden betrayal! He double moves toward the new enemies.

Oliver: So wait, Jovan's just evil? Why was he planning on double crossing us, and why at this exact moment?
Guy Lang: That's part of the campaign.
Mord: Because you failed a charisma check.
Oliver: He has nothing to gain from this.
Guy Lang: No, he's actually just Evil. Like if you read the module he's evil.
GM: Like, I don't know if Guy Lang remembered this part about it [from having run B2] when he said that you guys should try and recruit Jovan.
Guy Lang: Oh, I knew!
GM: But yeah, this is a thing.
Guy Lang: When the Acolyte was down before, I thought about saying to turn on them. Like because I knew they were evil. But that was just player knowledge.

Emila bleeds for 1.

Oliver: I point at Acolyte 1, and then give him a thumbs down sign.
GM: Okay, have fun with that, Dirk Strider.

Oliver is in a melee, so he has to attack with his dagger. He misses, and then 5ft steps back a bit. He's in melee with 3 other guys, but they're in a 10ft wide corridor so he's not totally in trouble yet.
The snake drags Emila's body back into the corner.
Acolyte 1 swings at Uncle Chan, and misses. He 5ft steps back.
Guy Lang double moves, but is terribly slow and doesn't make it into the battle.
Uncle Chan 5ft steps, and misses.
Jovan moves up, hits Uncle Chan for 6. Chan is still standing, but barely.

Emila: By the way, I regret nothing.
Guy Lang: I will equally regret nothing, even though I'll probably die.
Mord: Actually, you know what? I have an idea.

Acolyte 2 misses.

~Round 5~
Mord: I'm gonna use my brilliant plan, and see how this plays out.

Mord double moves out of the room and over to Discount.

GM: Oliver it's your turn.
Guy Lang: Okay, if you take a shot and hit, I will stay and fight. If you miss with this next shot I'm gonna run. I want to kill Jovan, I want whatever he has that's +1, I want his magic crap.

Oliver hits Acolyte 2 for 5.
The snake drags Emila. ~Just snake things~
Acolyte 1 smashes Uncle Chan right in the skull for 6 damage (knocking him out), and then 5ft steps down.

Uncle Chan: I just wanted to punch goblins!!

Guy Lang starts dropping all his extra equipment so that he can move faster, bumping his speed from 20ft to 30ft. That's a move action. He considers throwing his trident at Jovan with his standard, but decides that +3 vs AC 21 isn't good enough odds, so the just gets out.

Uncle Chan bleeds.
Jovan moves around Oliver to block his exit somewhat, dodges the AoO from Oliver, and then misses Oliver with his own attack.
Acolyte 2 hits Oliver for 2!

~Round 6~
Mord gets up to Discount, grabs the ropes, and heads for the entrance. He also drops his backpack while doing this to get up to 30ft speed. They get onto the improvised drawbridge, and Discount's foot falls through! Discount breaks his leg, and takes 3 damage and -3 maxhp. He's also at only half movement and carrying until it the leg gets magically healed.

Oliver withdraws and carefully counts out 30ft of movement, but he wouldn't get too far. Instead he just books it between them, both AoOs miss, and he moves 60ft out into the courtyard.

Acolyte 1 moves up and smashes Uncle Chan's unconscious body again. Chan is 1hp away from death. Turns out, once someone is already in shock it's hard to send them further into shock.

Guy Lang moves away.

Uncle Chan rolls a death save. He fails and takes 1 damage. He has fully bled to death.

Jovan and Acolyte 2 move after the group as they flee.

~Round 7~
Mord leads Discount 15ft off the bridge, and then uses Cure Light Wounds on him to fix the leg up.

Oliver throws a dagger instead of firing his crossbow, so that he can lose more encumberance than just the 1 bolt. He moves back 30ft.

Guy Lang gets away.

Jovan and Acolyte 2 sling at Oliver, he's hit for 3 damage! He's at 0.

~Round 8~
Mord and Discount double move away at 30ft, getting far enough from the battle.

Oliver double moves up to Guy Lang, and takes 1 damage, putting him at -1. Guy Lang has promised to make a single First Aid check before he keeps going, which might get Oliver back up (with a +0 bonus, it's only a 25% chance).

Acolyte 1 double moves to be up with Jovan and Acolyte 2.

Guy Lang uses First Aid. It's a success. He rolls 1d3, gets a 1. Oliver is... at 0 again. Guy Lang moves away.

Jovan and Acolyte 2 move up and sling at Guy Lang, missing.

~Round 9~
GM: Mord is escaped, we'll take him out of the turn order. Oliver, I think you're dead man.
Oliver: No, I refuse.
GM: You're both going 30ft, and they can keep slinging rocks at you for a long time. You're moving along a path made of rocks.
Oliver: Well... how far is town?
GM: Like 2 hours away.
Oliver: Fuck.
Guy Lang: Use a thing to heal yourself.
Oliver: I have nothing to heal myself with. I put everything on the wagon, and I put my faith in the people to have my back.
Guy Lang: Right, I got this. See, my first aid was to cure you collapsing. His first aid will be to cure his slings wounds.
GM: Ehhhh, that's not how it works.
Guy Lang: One shot!
GM: Eh, alright, fine, Oliver you can get your one shot.
Oliver: My one shot?
GM: You can roll one First Aid check, and heal 1d3, and you'll also take a damage in doing it.
Oliver: So I'll have to get at least 2?
GM: Yeah, you'll have to get at least 2.
Oliver: I can't not do it.
GM: You could just surrender, maybe?
Oliver: No, I can't.
GM: No, you probably can't, they'd probably feed you to an ogre or something.
Oliver: *rolls a successful First Aid check*
GM: Alright, alright, now roll 1d3 and don't get a 1.
Oliver: *rolls a 1*
GM: It's not enough! You're bleeding out of your wounds as you bandage them!
Emila: Run away!

Jovan and the Acolytes all sling and miss.

Mord: Do one amazing strike.
Oliver: I can only do 1 attack.
GM: What if it's so amazing~
Guy Lang: Line 'em up, like Nazis on a tank.
Oliver: Oh, I can Climb Walls.
GM: You could try to climb walls, yes.
Oliver: Find Traps... Read Languages...
GM: I don't think there's a special thief skill to cover what you need to cover right now. Which is your ass.
Mord: Can you just feign death, like with a bluff check?
Oliver: No, they'd bash my head in like they did with Chan.
Uncle Chan: They seem very thorough about all this.
GM: Or they might feed you to the snake. Really no telling.
Oliver: After we gave you frog legs! We gave you high quality frog legs.

Oliver moves 30ft.

They move and miss.

Oliver: there's gotta be a point where they just give up, right?
GM: Not really, particularly with you, since you shot one of them in the back.

The sling at Oliver, and he goes down in a hail of slingstone fire.

GM: Your vision goes back, and it never returns.
Emila: Awesome. Alright, so how much experience did we get from all that then?
GM: Oh, you did beat that lizard, so you get 38xp.
Emila: Was I eaten by a snake?
GM: You were eaten by a snake.
Emila: That's fair, that's fair. So, what does this mean for the future?
GM: That depends on what Mord and Guy Lang want to do. How much of this story will you tell the locals?

Guy Lang informs all the locals that the priest they came through with was actually evil, and he turned upon them at the moathouse. Also, those guys that were with him are dicks too.

Ostler (innkeeper of the Welcome Wench): The moathouse you say? The moathouse!?
Guy Lang: Yes
Ostler: Oh my friend this is terrible and grave news. You must find more people to go with you and you must return there to defeat this evil priest. The moathouse is a center for one of the most terrible and evil cults in recent years, and I'm afraid that if you leave it to lie it will grow into a powerful evil that will take over the entire kingdom.
Guy Lang: Awesome. Alright, we're gonna kill this guy.
Oliver: Oh, oh, fuck you.
Mord: So uh, what kind of evil?
GM: He eyes you and then ushers you inside the building. Away from the rest of the commoners.
Ostler: Many years ago, about 10 years now, there was a terrible evil cult. They had a temple where they based their operations. It spread out into the nearby area, you know, bandits, raids, that sort of thing. All the time. As the evil of the area grew, an army was eventually raised to destroy the temple, which is up near a town called Nulb. That moathouse is nearby as you know, but it was too small to threaten the army, so they moved past it. Once the temple was handled, a smaller detachment was sent to destroy the moathouse as well. As you have seen, it was mostly burned to the ground, though ever since it has been a place of occasional bandits. Lately there have been disappearances on the roads, and it seems like our worst fears are confirmed, that evil is rising in the area again.
Mord: Yes, but, evil? You have just mentioned so far bandits. They are a little evil, not a big evil.
Ostler: You said there was a priest that turned upon you?
Mord: Indeed.
Ostler: If this priest was with the temple he may be trying to unleash its power. The temple was sealed away though it was not actually destroyed. If this priest should find others to work with him, his magics will be able to undo the seals upon the temple.
Mord: Well alright, what kind of temple was it then?
Ostler: Mostly a large church type building, a temple. Deep beneath it there were caverns full of monsters and demons. I didn't hear the full story myself, but it took a sizable army to defeat the forces the first time.
Guy Lang: We just need like 10 guys.

Oliver: I want my last words to be official: "Take care of Discount"
GM: Mord and Guy Lang, Oliver stumbles after the two of you, and you hear him shout "Take care of Discount!!" and then a rock smashes in his old man brain.

There is at least one layer below the moathouse. Jovan and the acolytes have gathered some information, and may have met up with others.

So the guys that died make some new characters with 1500xp, and the stage is set for a mighty battle. The Wizard is gonna be a Fighter instead. The thief will become a Stonewarden instead (the old "dwarf" class renamed to not strictly be a dwarf). The monk will play a monk with a bow instead.
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Episode 06: Ambush Night
  • Mord Deathsfriend
  • Eberhard Alphons
  • Guy Lang
  • Quigley Hemshaw
  • Father Cho
  • Sarventes
Due to an audio recording mixup, I have no useful record of this session. Instead, I have a copy of what all the players said but none of what the GM said. How frustrating.

So, I'll just briefly go over the major events and call it good for this week.
The party consisted of Guy Lang and Mord (who made it out from the fight against Jovan), and Sarventes (who didn't show up to that fight at all in the first place. They talked to Terjon (Canon of St Cuthbert) and Ostler (the Innkeeper) about all this. Fearing grave danger if evil priests were able to do whatever they wanted out at the moathouse, the party was tasked with stopping them. To assist, Ostler let them stay in the Inn for free (least he could do really) and Terjon sent out word to other St Cuthbert churches in the nearby area that they needed more assistance. After a week some more people had arrived.

Eberhard Alphons - a knight with a sword
Quigley Hemshaw - a tunnel fighter with a battle axe
Father Cho - a monk with a bow.

There were some others at the Inn, but the others wanted to be paid ahead of time instead of just having shares of the treasure (read: the others were NPCs instead of these new PCs) and so the group decided to not take any of them along. They did purchase a number of cure potions from Terjon (50gp each, he does have to cover his costs at least) before heading out.

Arriving at the moathouse, they look around a bit on the upper floor. It's only been a week, but there are no bodies at all anywhere to be seen. They suspect that Jovan made them into zombies or some such, but proceed down into the lower level via the stairs that they found before.

Sarventes goes first down the stairs. At the bottom, a green slime drops onto him and begins to eat through his armor. Guy Lang runs up to assist, but the second green slime drops onto him. Using their torches they burn at the green slimes until they're dead. As the slimes are about to die, some zombies begin to shuffle towards the group. They're pretty ineffectual, but Mord does get clawed once. The slimes die the next round, with their armor having been damaged, but still working well enough. They battle the zombies for several rounds (12 zombies total) until the GM just says "Honestly I'm waiting for Mord to try a Turn Undead because this is kinda pointless." and Mord admits that, even though he can use it an unlimited number of times each day, he... actually he had no real reason to not just use Turn Undead, so he does so and they just chop down the zombies without any resistance.

They examine the area. It appears to have a bunch of rubble to the west of the stairs, and to the east is a door leading northeast. To the southeast is a series of jail cells and a torture chamber. Within one of the jail cells is a gem, so Mord grabs that. Quigley notices a secret passage via his stonesense, but they also decide to open the door to the northeast (which opened silently, as if it had been oiled recently). Northeast is a 20ft by 20ft room full of garbage along the walls but with a path along the floor to the eastern wall with another door. Father Cho listens at the door, but doesn't hear anything. They decide to go down the secret passage instead. There's a 5ft wide shaft with a 30ft drop to the bottom. Along the shaft there are ladder rungs stuck into the wall. At the bottom it goes east about 20ft and then south. The tunnel is very cramped, only 5ft wide and 5ft tall. They go along in single file until they get to a door.

They push open the door, and immediately there are several gaunt humanoids that hiss at them and smell of death. They decide that ghouls aren't too scary, and begin to fight. Sarventes dives right into the middle of the pack, and gets paralyzed within moments. The others, since they're stuck in the tunnel without a way to push out into the room, just run away. One ghoul follows into the tunnel while the others begin to eat Sarventes. The one in the tunnel is killed, and they decide that maybe they don't want to just leave Sarventes for dead, so they go back and try to help him. Things get a bit sticky for a while, and Mord never managed to turn them despite making 5 attempts, but they kill all the ghouls and manage to barely save Sarventes.

Looking around, they're in a crypt. There's a natural tunnel off into the rocks to the south, and a passage way to the southeast. They go southeast and arrive at a T section (north, south, west). They go south and find a pool of water. Some sort of well that the people in this complex use.

There's a sword and some coins just sitting right there in the water, so Quigley obviously goes to grab them. It instantly becomes apparent why no one else took them when a giant crayfish leaps out of the water and attacks the unsuspecting Quigley. Two claws hit him, each for 2d6 damage (very high by old dnd standards), and he goes from full hp straight to the deep negatives by the end of the surprise round. Sarventes uses Sleep on the crayfish, and they stabilize Quigley. The group then crowds up around the crayfish and stabs it repeatedly until it dies. It actually lives through some of the stabs thanks to its super crayfish durability (27hp!) but they get it. After that they look in the water some more and find a scroll case made of bone, as well as a platinum hair pin with a ruby in it. The scroll case was water-tight, and had three scrolls in it, so they hand that to Sarventes to hold on to.

Then they make a campfire and eat fresh cooked crayfish and decided to just camp right there for the night because they don't want to carry Quigley back to town.

Right there in the complex full of people that would eagerly kill them if discovered.
Right at the water source where inevitably people will go and get some water at random intervals.
Right inside a room where there's only a single exit.
You can see where this is going.

So they eat the crayfish, go to sleep, and Mord is on watch. They set a torch alight and put it up at the T-section to the north of them, so that they'll see anyone approaching. Later into the night three gnolls come to get some water. They see the torch sitting in the ground, and two proceed to check on what's happening while one goes back to the other gnolls. Two go down and see Mord at the doorway. Mord sees them seeing him. Again, suddenly it's apparent that some bad decisions were made by the group somewhere along the line.

Mord shouts and the party begins to wake up. A cure potion is used on Quigley to get him up too. The gnolls charge in and one gets struck down, but reinforcements show up. There's many gnolls, and one of them was spotted going off along another tunnel, probably for more reinforcements. Some of the group is convinced that this is a good thing, since they can make a stand in the tunnel with no fear of anyone getting behind them. Others bring up that they'll also have no fear of any possible escape. They decide to book it while they can. They manage to push up to the T-section, and head back towards the crypt, fighting gnolls the whole way. Soon some human guards show up as well, and the party carefully retreats into the secret tunnel. Sarventes drops some caltrops at the entrance to the tiny secret tunnel, and the gnolls (who are like 7.5ft tall remember) decide they don't really want to go into the tunnel anyway. So the players manage to make their escape and head back to town, arriving just as the sun rises, battered and relatively beaten.

However, they do feel like they're about 800 points more experienced, and this is enough to get most of them to 2nd level (Sarventes is still 1st level though). They pay for their armor to be repaired, and Sarventes uses Read Magic each day to uncover what scrolls he got ahold of (Push, Stinking Cloud, and Fly). Everyone resolves to totally not get ambushed as much next time, and that ends this episode.
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Post by Blicero »

So you decided to get rid of the elfish immunity to ghoul paralysis in your game?
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Post by Lokathor »

Well, at the time, they were all complaining that the Elf/Swordmage was basically a straight upgrade over the Wizard (which is pretty much true), so I took out all the minor extras as a way to mollify them a bit without having to think too hard about class balance. Then several sessions later they got into a fight with ghouls... and I forgot about the elf ghoul immunity until after the fight was already over. Since he's survived the whole ordeal, I decided not to worry about it.
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Post by Lokathor »

Episode 07: Scenario for Bloodshed
  • Mord Deathsfriend
  • Eberhard Alphons
  • Guy Lang
  • Quigley Hemshaw
  • Father Cho
  • Sarventes
Last week's ultra-brief summary was fitting for this week as well. Once again, they didn't manage to actually get much done plot-wise. They mostly got bogged down in a few melees. The final one of the evening literally took an hour and a half before they just retreated back to the surface.
The party heads out of town, they kick in the door to the north route that they found before, and an Ogre stands up. Quigley Hemshaw suggests killing it by shoving a wand up its nose, but no one is brave enough to try getting into melee with just a tiny wand, so they decide to use swords and maces instead. The Ogre decided to bring a gigantic halberd to the fight.

Mord moves in first and misses, though without provoking an attack from reach because the ogre hasn't gone yet. Next the ogre slashes Mord to bits and he falls over like a sack (14 damage). The rest of the party carefully moves in and eventually takes down the ogre. It's 5 on 1, so there's not much question that they'll get in. Of note is that Father Cho manages to actually hit with an arrow for the first time ever during this fight.

They use a potion on Mord and he becomes stable but is still unconscious. They didn't bring a mule or the wagon with them, so they'll have to carry him all the way back to town. Before they go they decide to look around for treasures, of which there are some among the ogre's things (some coins and a cloak that actually isn't full of holes). Sarventes recognizes the cloak as being of fine elven make, so they pack it away. They also hear some banging on the door to the south of the room, and they open it up to find two human villagers (Josef and Bezor) and a gnome villager (Glorglepop). They take the villagers with them back to town, and they receive great thanks and praise. They also get an iron ring from the gnome showing that they're now officially gnome friends.

Back in town they drop off their money and Mord's unconscious body at the cart. Quigley does a First Aid check on Mord now that they're back in town, but he's still at -1. So they rest overnight, and next day he wakes up at 1hp. At that point he casts Cure Light Wounds on himself, and he's back at full (but no spells). They wonder if they should go back right away, or wait another day to have another cure ready. On the one hand, waiting for spells is always good. On the other, it seems like there are some enemy plans in motion by now and they can't just wait around forever or bad things will happen.

Guy Lang looks around for hirelings, and there are still people to hire in town, but they still want to be paid money, which is a major snag for this group. There's a Fighter, Wizard, Thief, another Fighter, and Monk. The cheapest one is 400gp, and they don't even have 400gp without selling off some gems or something, so they decide to skip on hiring anyone. Instead they just re-arrange who's holding how many cure potions, and head out again the next day.

They look around the ogre area again, and Sarventes realizes that the east alcove in the ogre room contains a secret door. It leads down a small staircase and into a tunnel. They come to an east/south fork, and they decide to go "left from the character's perspective", which is east. Around a swerve they come upon some guards who shout and yell and get ready to fight them.

(I'll run out of battle themes eventually, but not yet)

There appears to be 6 human cultist guards, as well as a sergeant guard. There's three doos off to the east, a table and some sleeping mats, and a hallway off to the north. The guards all have crossbows and swords.

The fight appears to go well at first, but then the sergeant moves off to the north yelling something, and next round several bugbears join in on the side of the cultists. The party quickly decides that they're outmatched and going to be totally swarmed, so they retreat and run back to town again (and they have to use another potion in the process).

Back in town they consider the difficulties of recruiting people. On the one hand, the town will be totally fucked if no one signs up to help the main characters. On the other hand, exactly because of how dangerous it is, people want to get paid to handle this danger. Particularly since at one point the group came back to town with half the party members dead. Does some harm to the reputation. Also, while the party is doing all the moathouse nonsense, people in town have begun to increase fortification efforts within the town, so it's not like they're doing no work at all while the party does the moat house stuff.

Guy Lang decides that they don't need people to go down into the lair with the party, they just need people with crossbows and swords to stand outside as backup and guard the mules and wagon. That's probably a lot less dangerous, so they might be able to convince some people to sign up for that. Sarventes also suggests that, instead of the party hiring someone, they should talk to the town council about providing support.

There's a regular town elder meeting the next day, they're held in the town tower each week. Guy Lang requests an audience, and he's allowed in because everyone knows that the group is doing their best to stop the moat house. Always glad to hear about any updates. He says that they've encountered quite a bit of resistance within the moat house, and some of the fanatical cultist guards did yell about Elemental Evil for sure. He explains the plan that some of the town fighters should set up a camp at the moat house surface, while the main party goes in to fight. That way the party will have a safe line of guarded retreat to fall back upon when they need to. The council thinks that this is a reasonable enough plan, and so they send half their hired mercenaries with the party to guard things. This means eight 1st level fighting men and a 3rd level fighter sargent to direct them around.

Meanwhile, Quigley Hemshaw spends the two days in town attempting to sell off more goods from the cart. They still have a lot of junk items, like leather armor and spears and pickaxes and stuff, but some of it is back in demand now that the town is trying to shift to a military stance and ready itself against the cult. Sone leather armors, some spears, a mason's tool set, a cobbler's tool set, some saws. They keep the two barrels they've got. 17 pick-axes are sold.

It's questioned why their cart hasn't been looted while it's been staying in town most of this time, but since the local patron is Saint Cuthbert it's a pretty law-abiding place. The town is among some rainy hills, and they mostly deal in grapes and wine as their export. Hommlet is a small town, a few days away from the county capital of Verbobonc.

Guy Lang asks that they send word from Hommlet to whoever else is in charge nearby, and they are told that the Viscount has been made aware of the situation, but that ultimately resources in the area are spread thin dealing with other sources of trouble from both the Elemental Evil cult and various other forces. The viscount won't be sending much any time soon, it seems.

They wonder if there's any tea partiers with guns that they could get to sit outside the stairs as well, but there are none to be found. So they head out back to the moat with half the merc squad in tow, and the wagon and five mules. They set up "base camp", and the party proceeds down into the dungeon.

At first, the route down the stairs is clogged with rubble, so they check the secret passage to the ghoul crypt, which is also blocked up with rubble. The group decides to use some of the additional picks they've got to unbury the stairs. They go down the stairs and explore the same room as before, but it's been abandoned. They explore to the south side of the fork instead, and they find everyone from before, as well, as a ton of other creatures as well.

A very long battle ensues, in which they manage to bring down several guards and two of the six bugbears. Eventually they begin to retreat as more cultists show up, and they are blocked in by a portcullis that drops into place. Three of them rush to open the gate while the other three slowly perform a fighting retreat. They all manage to get through the gate, and let it drop back into place as the cultists try to follow. Father Cho launches some arrows through the gate, and the cultists flee the shots.

The party makes their way back to the surface, and tells the tale to the camp mercenaries, who all listen with excitement while staying in place to shoot at anything that might show up along the stairs while they camp out.
Last edited by Lokathor on Sun Jan 25, 2015 8:44 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Episode 08: The Jovan Assassination
  • Mord Deathsfriend
  • Eberhard Alphons
  • Guy Lang
  • Quigley Hemshaw
  • Father Cho
  • Sarventes
So the party managed to get out of the dungeon last time, after alerting the entire complex. They're safe on the surface in the moat house, and they begin to tell their story and arrange supplies on the wagon. They realize that there's a lack of bows in the situation, so they tell two of the badgers (the mercenaries) to take some money and go get some from town and come back. The badgers get to the gate of the moat house and then run back inside and say that two men are approaching on horses.

The badgers get into the rooms behind arrow slits, the party stands back a bit, and Guy Lang stands near the entrance to the moat house to greet these people approaching. They both have plate mail. One has a sword and shield, one has a long staff.

Larenth: Who goes there? Who would disturb this place?
Guy Lang: I am Guy Lang. That's... that's pretty much it. I am Guy Lang.
Larenth: Why have you come to this place?
Guy Lang: We have come to this place to root out bandits, and get what they might own.
Larenth: Well, rooting out bandits is always a worthy cause indeed.

They both get off their horses and approach across the bridge.

Larenth: Tell me of this bandits problem.
Guy Lang: We had to deal with some bandits that were using this place as a base. We, you know, we had to fight them off and things. They put up some resistance, and then went down into the underground, so we have to decided to pursue them into the underground. Would you like to step inside, sir?
Larenth: Oh, yes, of course, of course.
Guy Lang: These are my companions. We had planned to go back in. What are you here for?
Larenth: Well, you have me at a bit of an embarrassment sir. You see, I'm here for you.
Guy Lang: Oh?

At this, the sword guy draws his sword and begins to look rather menacing. Staff guy steps back.

Guy Lang: So, you're here to kill me?
Larenth: Yes, well, you see, we can't have you interfering with the plan.
Guy Lang: Oh, okay, gotcha.
Larenth: Yes, you know.
Guy Lang: I wanted to make sure I had it all clear, before I--
Larenth: Yeah, very simple really, it's just that-- ah, I wish I didn't have to do this, but you've forced me hand really.
Guy Lang: I just didn't want to make a mistake before I did this.
Larenth: Very sporting of you, very sporting indeed.
*Guy Lang rolls a 1 for initiative*
Guy Lang: Damn.
Quigley: The lowest initiative ever.

All the initiative rolls are tallied up. We've been rolling d100 for initiative because I hate duplicates and there've been so many people in some of these fights. Finally there's a large fight and no duplicates, yay.

Guy Lang: These guys did not know what they were getting themselves into. It's too bad, because I can already tell that I like this Larenth guy.

The lieutenant with a sword is the first to take a decisive action. He draws his sword and shouts, "For Zuggtmoy!" and begins to swing like a maniac. He also draws a dagger in his offhand. His first attack hits, and it sets a positive tempo for Team Evil.

The badgers begin to fire, but they're pretty useless with those bows. Around that time Larenth's backup shows up from a secret spiral staircase, and the battle becomes a complex pincer attack situation on two fronts. Things looked pretty dangerous for a bit. Larenth and the Lieutenant were totally competent at melee fighting, and they handled the party while the badgers handled the evil rabble. After a bit the evil rabble had been dispatched relatively quickly, because those badgers were way better with their swords than they were with their bows. They joined the party, and the whole group of them stabbed the two enemy leaders all the way to death.

The party picked up the stuff they could find around, and camped overnight. The next day they went down into the dungeon to have a look around. They finally explore the last part of the complex, and find the two Acolytes. They are dispatched relatively quickly, but Jovan appears from a room as well. He goes down without too much trouble since it's five on one, but behind him within the room (Larenth's former quarters) is an evil alter with a ring of blue flame glowing upon it.

Guy Lang pulled out a coin and threw it at the fire to test it, and the coin burned up instantly. Then they wondered how much the blue flames could really burn up, so they threw the bodies of Jovan and the Acolytes in as well. One at a time, they each burned up instantly and entirely. This seemed to be a serious sort of flame. The group was sure that the fire was bad news that had to be stopped, but they weren't sure how to stop it.

Father Cho decided to take decisive action and pee on the blue fire. Unfortunately, the blue fire spread up his pee trail and began to spread all over him, burning him alive. Father Cho stopped, dropped, and rolled while the other party members patted him down with blankets, and they managed to get the fire out before Father Cho completely burned up. During the initial panic they hadn't noticed that the fire on the altar had gone out when it spread onto Cho, but as things relaxed they realized that, foolish as it was, Father Cho had managed to put out the evil flames. With this, the evil seemed to be defeated for now.

In doing all this, and mostly because of all the riches they found within Larenth's quarters, most of them leveled up to level 3!
Last edited by Lokathor on Sat Feb 07, 2015 11:46 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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