The Dungeon Game: Weekends at Stonehell, session 13
The party do some more mapping, have their first proper run-in with the hobgoblin forces and recruit a talking cockroach to come work as a seer in their camp.
Party Members
- Tina the Titanic - Level 6 Fighter
- Telperion Desh - Level 5 Magician
- Vaco Adjacent - Level 5 Paladin
- Balthasar Finkelstein - Level 3 Paladin
- Sneaky Jan - Level 4 Thief
Followers
Zorrel "Captain Nasty" Gnast (Fighter 5), Tiny Tina (Cleric 5), Rutger (Robot 5), Brother Blue (Martial Artist 3) and Kurgan (War Dog 3)
Session Recap
During downtime, Telperion spends the time with the charmed orc wizard Grim Maw in order to properly learn the fine details of the orc making ritual. Tina the Titanic, unhappy with the kind of negative attention having an orc in the base is bringing moves their research and experiments into the Ghost Beggars caves, away from prying eyes.
They also hear from other adventurers that the hobgoblins are growing in presence on floor 1. Clearly they're claiming territory now that the orcs have been broken as a faction.
With that information, the group decide to finish exploring and mapping out the quadrant where the orcs used to reside. Venturing down into the dungeon once more, they go back to the territory where they saw goblins last time, and indeed there were more goblins there as well. The group easily dispatched all the goblins they saw, exploring and mapping the rest of the rooms. In the process some of the party members got hit by Telperion's Sleep, but luckily that does not seem to matter much.
Exploring further east, the group find a big throne room of some kind, and while they explore it they get approached by a patrol of hobgoblins. The 10 men unit is composed of a sergeant in plate armor, 9 soldiers with strange padded armor and a gunner armed with a machine gun. The hobgoblins tell the party to beat it, as this is now their territory. They ignore Tina the Titanic, insisting on speaking to the men in the party (making everyone furious in the process) and so the groups fight, the fight being ended by the usual combination of Sleep+Bombs.
Taking the sergeant's fancy plate armor and the SMG, the group continue exploring, finding bits of loot and even a magical sword along the way, eventually making their way into a room with a crystal statue of a pony. As soon as Telperion tries to get near the other door in the room, the statue animates and attempts to stomp him. Tina the Titanic and the others attempt to tame the horse statue, but fail, and in a heartbreaking (and neck breaking) moment it has to be put down at the end of Balthazar's two-handed greataxe. Tina swears she is taking this thing back to base however, and will put it back together.
Having finished exploring the quadrant and satisfied with their map, the party decide to head east into the Kobold Market to finish some business there. Along they way they are deeply concerned to find more hobgoblins just hanging out and guarding the stairs into floor 2, a job previously handled by kobolds.
When they make their way into the market, they first stop at Shrimp the cockroach seer to give her a gift. A while back Vaco the fighter (not to be confused with Vaco Adjacent, the Paladin) had gone down into the dungeon and stolen one of the crystal eyes from the talking statue head, and then Rutger the robot had polished it into a crystal ball. Shrimp was very pleased by the gift and in fact agreed to the invitation of the company to come join them in Crownfall Keep and practice her craft as a soothsayer there.
While the rest of the party went to meet Old Gus, the raccoon kobold shaman and trade him a healing potion for his Serpent Lens artifact, Sneaky had Invisibility cast upon him, and went into the restricted kobold areas, getting a better sense for who and what was there, before heading back out.
Tina the Titanic went to have a meeting with Sniv the Trustee, who confined in her that the hobgoblins are definitely starting to take up territory, and unlike the orcs (who were happy to just beat people up), these guys have pretensions to much more. He is worried about the fate of the kobold market.
Observations
So, relating to my previous post from the other day, today's session had plenty of things happening, but also nothing that really needs reporting on. Realistically, I could have condensed all of the above with "The party fill out their map and win some fights".
With the group now having several level 5s, a level 6 and so on most fights are basically just one-sided beatdowns. For most of the fights I didn't even make them roll, because really, with 2 paladins and a robot, they have plenty of fighters to take out, say, giant centipedes (all three being immune to poison), and fights against 1 HD enemies are basically only relevant for about the opening round of combat, maybe at most the second round, after which it simply is clear the party wins.
While it might be more prudent to play it out, in practice the theoretical damage I can deal over 2 more rounds of combat with like 2 goblins still alive is not worth the time it takes to process that combat. The simple fact is that the party are too powerful for the enemies on this level, and beyond considerations like bombs and machine gun fire, basically regular combat can't do much to them, except maybe deplete someone's HP.
Hell, Vaco Adjacent took 3 bombs to the face, eating a total of 11 damage and he still had like half his HP left anyway. This is the proper mid-level party plateau where the characters are strong and durable, but not invincible. It allows for proper resource attrition, as the group doesn't just retreat after casting 1 spell and being hit a couple of times.
A note on restocking - I had actually forgotten to restock the dungeon before (oops), and last session with the big shift in power was a good opportunity to do so. I am however making a point not to restock the first floor too much, as I don't want play to simply remain on that one floor for half the campaign. The party wants to finish the last quarter of the floor just to fill out the map (and get the money associated with selling the map back to the authorities in Zorb), which is fair.
So far, 13 sessions in, my view of the campaign is pretty good. That point of overwhelm which seems to hit at this point has not happened yet, as I am deliberately making a point to not take on too much interactivity, too much reaction from the game and factions or do too much session to session changes, and it is working well for me. The players don't seem to mind, or really notice, that things are not changing dramatically session to session, so that's also fine as well.
EDIT: An addition relating to the above. So, in my game the party have set up Crownfall Keep/Tally Town right outside the entrance to Stonehell, in the valley where the old above-ground prison buildings were. As part of running that keep, they collect taxes from other adventuring parties on behalf of Lord Krofax, and also get to take an additional 5% for themselves. This has allowed them to have a small, but consistent passive income while also allowing me to not have to deal with upkeep for multiple characters, and instead just tracking their upkeep via the domain's weekly upkeep costs.
As part of this I have a very simple system set up to simulate other adventuring parties. It's a small series of linked rolls that determines how many parties there are for that downtime period and how much money, if any, they get out of the dungeon. Then that is totaled up and the 10% taken for taxes and 5% taken by the players.
However the main real use for those parties has been to allow me to regularly give updates (if vague ones) on what is going on in the dungeon during downtime. As the other adventurers talk, and as such offer information how the PCs actions have impacted the dungeon, or how other forces are changing it (like the rising presence and threat of the hobgoblins).