1000 Statues, A Session Report
Played today in Mr.Mann's ongoing 1000 Statues game on the GCB OSR Discord server.
The Party
- Misha the Wide (Myself) - Level 3 War Bear
- Liam Putterbaugh (brawgur) - Level 4 Cleric
- Uale Xerive (Col. Jesus/spuk)- Level 2 Elf/Bisnesssynth
- Frank the Fighter (roguewithwhimsy) - Level 3 Fighter
- Vat (Jay) - Level 1 Dwarf
- Percy (wil) - Level 1 Fighter
+5 Elven mercenaries and a porter. RIP
Session Recap
After purchasing 24 sticks of dynamite (a very wise decision in hindsight), we descend down to floor 13 of the dungeon, the invisible Greek Chorus lamenting our descent further and further down.
After nearly getting caught in a poison trap and destroying some zombies, we cleared out the poison room only to find ourselves into a room with 11 Wraiths. Deciding that wasn't going to cut it (and only surviving this encounter due to Liam's Turn Undead ability), we retreat and find the stairs down.
On floor 14 we meet more of the lizardmen. Once we assure them we're not with Ascellus Tiramusu they are friendly and give us directions to "The Chef" who is to the south of them. We decide to go visit him, intrigued by what this person is. What he is is a 12 Hit Die Earth Elemental with a Southern (?) accent and pretensions to French cooking, which mostly comes down to him slopping mud in front of you.
We do agree to eat some of the mud, but decide to explore further. As we find the Chef's private study, I get an emerald medallion (the thing that controls the elemental, we find out later), and all of the hirelings then get turned into red mist by an invisible attacker. Some of the previous delvers recognize this as an invisible knight, clearly a formidable foe. With no way to deal with him, we run back towards The Chef (with Liam getting clobbered on the way out) and ask him to go take care of this rude customer in his restaurant. The Chef obliges and destroys the knight, sustaining some considerable damage to himself. Thankful we offer him to come adventure with us, Misha impressed by his largeness. He agrees.
We return to find the knight's obsidian greatsword, a truly powerful magical weapon (+2 greatsword, allows you to step in and out of shadows while wielding it) which we also pocket. Exploring some more of the floor we find 20 ghouls in the middle of forming a human (or ghoul?) pyramid. Liam turns them and we finish them off with liberal application of dynamite.
Finding the stairs down we discover that the entrance into Floor 15 is carved out of jade, with 30 swords all pointing at the stairs in a circle on the floor. None of us like the vibes of that so we decide to call it good, head back up, pick up The Chef on the way there, and head back out.
Along our ascent back we run into a sight of some orc ghosts that run away from us and then commit suicide, the sight apparently shaking Uale very significantly, reducing his INT by 1.
Observations and Thoughts
For a short, 2 hour session, this felt like a lot happened. The party was, as you can see, very fighter-heavy, but the MVP of the session absolutely was brwagur because Liam's Turn Undead got us out of a bunch of potentially very dangerous (if not outright TPK) moments.
The 1000 Statues game is something I keep hearing on the server, but unfortunately it happens at the dead of night for the time zone I live in, so I jumped at the opportunity to play in it at least once. It was a blast, I always enjoy Mr.Mann as a referee, and the dungeon is odd, small and quirky, with some very OD&D feeling numbers of encounters (11 fucking wraiths. Really, blark?) which helped give it some of that sauce.
The finds we got were also great. A very very potent magical weapon, that Misha skipped on because of his polearm affinity, and a big and beefy ally? Hell yeah!
I suspect a lot more of the weirdness and character of the dungeon come through on repeated visits, with this one the dungeon mostly came off as small and....wet. The wetness appears to be a recurring motif.