The Dungeon Game: Weekends at Stonehell, session 11
The group explore the rest of of the forgotten wizard's laboratory and come out of it with a lot of magical loot as a result.
Party Members
- Tina the Titanic - Level 4 Fighter
- Telperion Desh - Level 3 Magician
- Vaco Adjacent - Level 3 Paladin
- Balthasar Finkelstein - Level 2 Paladin
Followers
Zorrel "Captain Nasty" Gnast (Fighter 3), Tiny Tina (Cleric 4), Rutger (Robot 3)
Session Recap
Determined to finish what they started last time, the Crownless Company head back into Stonehell to explore the rest of the newly discovered hidden wizard's laboratory on floor 1. Along they way they have a rough encounter with some wolves, but after dispatching them they stop by the statue of the Sphinx and call its name. It animates and ask them a riddle, which Vaco Adjacent answers correctly. They are rewarded with coins, potions and a magic wand.
After a short break to rest and heal up, they venture back and make it safely to the part of the dungeon they wish to explore. Going through the rooms they encounter numerous vermin (giant rats, giant slugs, strange shades composed out of trash and dust, weird moss-like slimes), however save for some zombies and skeletons, the laboratory appears to be abandoned. There are some close calls, with Vaco Adjacent being nearly killed by the wolves early into the delve, and Captain Nasty almost dying from a very potent strain of Turbo Plague carried by the giant arts in the dungeon. In both cases they were saved by Tiny Tina's helpful magic.
As they make their way through, killing and looting everything they can, the group do get quite a bit of treasure however. Telperion discovers a minor IOUN stone, they find some more potions, an alchemical device that can transmute potions into different potions and a magical tome that can increase a person's Constitution permanently by reading it.
They also find a shrine to Math, an aspect of the God of Law concerned with magic and the one most familiar to Magicians and other arcane casters, with the divine magical presence still active in the room.
Satisfied with having achieved an important goal of theirs (as they had first heard about the wizard's hidden lab months ago) and with quite a lot of loot to show for it, the party return home successful in their venture.
Observations
With this session, we now fully see the effect of choices made in previous weeks. With me giving XP for magic items found, and the party finding quite a few of them, they ended up earning 7665 xp for this session, which since I no longer divide among PCs means that basically everyone leveled, Tina the Titanic (who's coming out of semi-retirement to go adventure) leveling twice, same with Rutger the Robot. At this point the regular PCs are all levels 3 or 4, and they have not even finished exploring floor 1 of Stonehell yet. Now, this big spike was mostly due to the magical treasure they found, which won't be happening every session, so I suspect things will plateau out again, but it did leave the players very satisfied.
All in all it was a very solid session, but also not one that really necessitates a lot of writing about, as you can tell by how short the recap is. There was mostly just finding vermin, taking stuff and continuing ahead until everything was explored. There were some close calls, because apparently giant rats with their disease are actually very deadly, nearly killing two characters in a single combat just due to poor dice rolls.
This very much felt like a typical Arcade Style session, of simply moving room to room, killing what's in there and looting what's left. And yeah, I enjoyed running it, the players enjoyed playing in it, and the challenge of the game felt fairly appropriate throughout, despite how high level the PCs are. The campaign is definitely hitting that sweet spot that comes after 10 to 12 sessions, where it really starts going and people start to really have an idea of what it is they want to do in the game.
Which of course is also why my brain has now started to want to tinker with the ruleset again, but I likely won't do that, as the current one works perfectly fine and there's no good reason to just change up all the classes in the game, especially as two of the PCs that played are Paladins, which would likely just have to be re-classed or just stick around as vestigial classes anyway, neither of which I am entirely happy with. But if ultimately I do decide I want to switch things around (maybe later in the campaign), I am sure we can figure this out with the players.