The Dungeon Game: Weekends at Stonehell, session 1
Today was the first session of what I hope to be my Campaign 26 game.
Party Members
- Tina the Titanic - Level 1 Martial Artist
- Grimthorpe - Level 1 Thief
- Recknik the Weary - Level 1 War Bear
- Sneaky TBD/Shifty Jan - Level 1 Thief
- Balthasar Finklestein - Level 1 Paladin
- Vako - Level 1 Fighter
- Telperion Desh - Level 1 Magician
Followers
"Wolfboy" (Porter and Cook)
Session Recap
In-Universe Date: February 7, 3017
The party had just arrived recently at the Fortress-City of Zorb, out in the newly independent territory in the North-East Reaches. Tina the Titanic, a Martial Artist with a penchant for knives, recruits a band of fellow adventurers, and after they gear up and get some rumors from the other adventurers head out to Stonehell, the former black site and infamous prison complex of years past.
After a 10 hour trip to the dungeon, they arrive in front of the ruined gatehouse, and quickly explore the canyon in which Stonehell is housed, settling on a one of the ruined buildings to set up camp. Their reasoning is that with how long the trip is, it's best to go into the dungeon in the morning, rather than risk having to go out of it at night. The party explore the rest of the region a bit, then settle in for the night.
Near dawn, Grimthorpe the diminutive thief hears a rustling in the weeds near by and before he can react he is jumped by a trip of equally diminutive critters - two rat-like beings and a bug, all standing upright and armed with small spears. Grimthorpe lets out a shriek which in turn freaks out the assailants and they attack, killing him. He manages to take one down with him, and the rest of the party finish them off. All the commotion awakens another adventurer that had shown up, Recknik the War Bear, who decides to join the party.
They bury their comrade in a small hole they had dug up and spend the rest of the morning exploring the canyon, clearing out one of the caves of a crab spider and some giant centipedes, before deciding to use that for their next camping spot. They leave Wolfboy, Tina's personal valet, cook and porter, to set up camp and head into Stonehell proper.
Once in the dungeon they pick a direction at random, busting into what was once a kitchen. Telperion the Magician decides to see if the old hand cranked water faucet still works. Unfortunately it does, producing a green slime which attempts to grab onto him. The party just leave, slamming the door behind themselves.
Continuing to explore they find a room full of refuse and kill some Spiting Cobras that had taken residence in it. They find a talking giant statue head, and when asking him if they can take its eyes, it says they can, but will be cursed to die if they do. Balthasar's inquiry about the infamous flaming skeleton of Stonehell is met with a cryptic response.
Exploring further the group hears the sounds of work up a head, and decide to send the thief in to sneak around, but with no light the best he can do is hear that numerous diminutive individuals are clearly busying themselves in the room up a head with god knows what. By the time he returns to the party and they decide to approach, the room had been emptied. Balthasar steps on a pressure plate, triggering a dart trap (that simply bounces off his armor). This seems to annoy the small creatures in the nearby room, who yell at the party to go away and stop messing up the trap. They pelt the group with projectiles, which seem to find no real purchase against Balthasar and Vako's armors. The group debate charging head on (well Balthasar does anyway) and instead just retreat. They check out another room and find it to be full of fresh corpses and fresher still 10 giant rats which attack Recknik who was the one responsible for busting down the door. They swarm and overwhelm him, killing the poor War Bear.
Telperion unleashes a Color Spray into the room, knocking out half the rats and after dragging the bear's body out of the doorway the party finish them off. They dig around, finding a nice stash of heavy silver coins and decide this will do. They head back out, taking Recknik's body with them and burying him on top of Grimthorpe, before collecting Wolfboy and heading back to Stonehell, with some amount of cash.
Observations
So, session 1 of the campaign started strong with 6 players. Some returning faces, some of The Usuals for my campaigns and also some new people too! A good mix. Grimthorpe's player just had really bad luck this entire session, losing both his thief and then the pregen he took midway through. Sometimes that's just how things go with these games.
I skipped a whole lot of the stuff that's above ground in the game, because as Mr.Mann had pointed out on Discord - A lot of the cool and interesting stuff in Stonehell is deeper into the dungeon, so there's no point in having players spend 6 sessions just messing around above ground before they even make it in there. I do agree, though I am keeping some of the elements around anyway, because I feel they are important for the module.
Overall I did not get the chance to do nearly as much prep for this as I needed. Yes, the whole point of this campaign is to keep it mostly low prep, that's why I am running a published module, but still there are things I wanted to get done but due to work I was not able to. Primarily, I want to make a better reference for myself of all the monsters, since flipping back and forth between the list and the key for the dungeon is obnoxious. I managed to make myself a reference that I put as an insert into my GM screen, I just need to make one for all the level 1 dungeon enemies at least. Hopefully I can do that by next session.
There is a lot more I could be doing with this - the trip from Zorb to Stonehell and back is just handled as "you go there", because while overland travel can be an entire session or even campaign on its own, the name of this campaign is "The Dungeon Game" and I want to at least initially focus on that part of it.
I do have plans on how to expand the setting and the general game area further down the line, if need be, but that is long term stuff I don't have to worry about just now.
The session was, as a whole, a rousing success. While Stonehell's floor 1 is known for not having a lot of treasure (which makes sense within the module itself), the players still managed to find enough money to make the trip worth while. There was a good mix of classes too, and almost everyone just rolled insanely high stats, with Balthasar the Paladin being an absolute beast!
An observation from this one session is this - man Stonehell has a lot of enemies. On one hand, that's good - you get some XP from them, even if in my case it's just 20 per enemy HD, but it definitely means that combat is expected. Makes sense - it bills itself as Saturday Night Dungeon kind of game, where you kick down doors, kill enemies and just rinse and repeat. We'll see how much my players vibe with that kind of gameplay loop.