The Dungeon Game: Weekends at Stonehell, session 15
The Company finish mapping the last part of Floor 1 and get into some scrapes which are a lot more dangerous than expected.
Party Members
- Tina the Titanic - Level 6 Fighter
- Telperion Desh - Level 6 Magician
- Vaco Adjacent - Level 5 Paladin
- Linh the Lightbringer - Level 3 Fighter
Followers
Zorrel "Captain Nasty" Gnast (Fighter 5), Tiny Tina (Cleric 6) and Rutger (Robot 5)
Session Recap
With Floor 1 of the dungeon so close to being fully mapped, the Crownless Company head back into the quiet halls of the crypts. They bust down some more crypts and loot them, discovering a lot of grave goods. Perhaps too many, in fact, as their porters can barely hold all the stuff. Deciding to go drop it off, they head back only to be attacked by six ghouls. This ends up being a very dire fight, as the ghouls win the initiative and paralyze both Tiny Tina and Captain Nasty, reducing the party's capacity to fight back. Luckily for the party Tina the Titanic is able to slay most of them, and while the ghouls paralyze most of the characters, they decide to cut their losses and run.
With Vaco Adjacent and Rutger guarding over the rest of the party everyone returns back to the surface to drop off their treasure, regroup and pick up a new recruit, the warrior Linh the Lightbringer. With some extra firepower (arming their new comrade with the machine gun they took off some hobgoblins in a previous delve) and also Slinky the Snake Skeleton, the group head back into the depths.
Busting down some more doors, they use the machine gun to take down some zombies, but the commotion draws the attention of more undead and a swarm of rats, and a strange black-robed figure, which casts Silence on Telperion and later Tiny Tina, cutting off the magic from the party. The party let the rats run past, kill the ghoul and then have a short chat with the figure, who turns out is an Anti-Cleric and thus they kill him.
With this done, the group explore further, finding some other odd things like a desecrated shrine, a furnace shrine to the chaotic god Baal and, eventually, another group of Chaos cultists. More castings of Silence are exchanged (with Tiny Tina giving back this time, silencing the head cleric), a magical staff is turned into a snake and tangles with Slinky, eventually both of them and some cultists being gunned down by Linh's machine gun fire.
The group clean up the rest of the cultists, loot a secret room they find and finish their map, happily returning back to the surface.
Observations
So the session was more of the same as last time - clearing out the last quadrant (1B for those of you reading along at home as part of the Megadungeon Book Club!). As much as I have commented on the party being very high level and thus most combat not posing issues for them, there were two exceptions.
One was the ghouls, who due to winning the initiative every single round nearly caused a TPK after paralyzing key figures in the party. The other one was fighting Anti-Clerics, and the general danger of being in fights with spellcasters, who can now also dish out out just as well as the party did.
That ghoul fight was very very curious. Ghouls are in general an odd outlier in terms of power among low-level monsters, as even 1-2 of them can devastate a party if the paralysis takes hold, and 6 of them? Yeah that is 18 attacks every round, any one of which that hits can completely take out a fighter no matter what their HP total is. Thinking about it, had initiative gone the other way around, this could have also been a completely one-sided beatdown on the part of the party instead.
The weird black clad cleric is an actual named NPC, Malfreces Nul who feels like he should be more of a presence, but...kind of isn't. I mean I did bump him to a level 5 instead of a level 3 cleric, since that made more sense to me and I did that like a month+ ago when making notes for the level, but what that ultimately amounted to is him being able to cast two spells instead of one before the party simply caved his skull in.
However, oh man are casters such a pain in the ass to run in a fight. I really should have pre-written what spells he'd use in a fight, but I didn't and so I had to look up spell lists during the game, though luckily it did not really slow things down.
All in all, this is a big milestone for the players and for the campaign, as floor 1 is now completely mapped out!