The Dungeon Game: Weekends at Stonehell, session 18
The characters finish their business with the asshole pixies and help lead out the inmates from floor 2, then run into some snakes and toads.
Party Members
- Tina the Titanic - Level 6 Fighter
- Telperion Desh - Level 6 Magician
- Vaco Adjacent - Level 5 Paladin
- Tobias Little, a.k.a. Lil Toby - Level 3 Cleric
Followers
Zorrel "Captain Nasty" Gnast (Fighter 5), Tiny Tina (Cleric 6) and Rutger (Robot 6)
Session Recap
Tina the Titanic had spent the last few weeks of downtime sending in aid like food, blankets and gear down to the inmates on floor 2. They and the Crownless Company had very much become friends and Rythik had decided it was time to take his people out of this hellish underground and back to the surface. However, there was finished business to attend to first.
Prepared with Detect Invisible spells, a sprayer filled with paint and a nasty attitude, the party head once over into the giant hall with the mushroom ring and the pixie jerks that ran them off last time. With being able to see them the fight goes absolutely in the party's favor. Two of the pixies manage to escape, while the rest are slaughtered. For good measure the group damage and break up the mushroom ring, as it was clearly a portal into the Summer Lands (though apparently inactive at present). They also find a curious fist-headed mace.
With the pixies slain the group return to Rythik to ask for a reward for the quest that they themselves invented for him. He shrugs since these people are his friends now, hands them a box of assorted coinage and tells them they can have his magical chain mail and shield once his people are out of the dungeon. All the inmates had been preparing to go, and the party lead them out, deciding to use the elevator in the brigand caverns to make sure the bright light of the outside doesn't mess up these underground dwellers too badly.
Along the way there they do find out that the hobgoblins had put up official signs informing everyone in the dungeon that the south-western part of Stonehell's first floor is their territory, along with a group of rather spooked goblins. A quick fight ensues, however the deadly bombs of the goblins to manage to take out seven of the inmates, before the others beat the weird muppets into pulp.
With people safely settled in the Ghost Beggars caves, the party rest for the night, healing and preparing themselves for further exploration. With knowledge that the hobgoblins tend not to venture too far outside their own quadrant on floor 2, the group decide trying for the north-eastern sector.
They find that part of Stonehell to be very heavily adorned in serpent motifs, and do in fact encounter serpent men. The interactions are friendly (?) but mostly cold, with the two groups not being interested in messing with each other. They do run into some giant toads which Tiny Tina befriends using her spell that allows her to speak to animals. Unfortunately one of the giant toads activates a nearby trap and gets sliced in half by a giant scything blade, but everyone gets over the tragedy of it all fairly quickly.
Exploring more they do run into some hobgoblins, a trio that were clearly doing recon. The party get rid of them, importantly getting their hands on another hobgoblin machine gun and ammunition. Feeling satisfied with the work they've done and having found good treasure in this quadrant they return back to Crownfall Keep.
Observations
This session very much had three distinct phases to it. The first one being the fight against the pixies/psykes on floor 2, which the party had spent time and money preparing, and while they won fairly easily some people did manage to get stuck a few times with daggers. Then there was the second phase of moving this large group of people across the dungeon, which luckily only resulted in a single encounter in the end (the goblins).
The party themselves are too durable to really be taken down even by 6 bombs, though some of the inmates did perish. However as we've mostly treated them as a giant blog anyway, in practice this was not much of an issue.
The third section, of course, was just going back to dungeon exploring. I think everyone had a lot of fun going into a slightly different looking environment (with the walls of that part of Stonehell having scale-like tiling, snake motifs and so on) plus the encounter with the giant toads was a lot of fun for everyone chatting with them, feeding them and then the one toad just getting totaled by the nearby trap.
The party also really enjoyed the whole "table of coins all glued together" setup in the room before hand. A fun touch. The snakemen rolled really good reactions both times the party ran into them, which meant they simply had no reason to try and antagonize this clearly larger and more powerful force, so rather reserved and stilted diplomacy is what happened instead.
Machineguns continue to be a rather scary force equalizer, which was my goal with them in the first place so it's good to see them still perform their job correctly.
There was some minor frustration regarding rules and how they were understood on a few occasions, along with concerns that the hobgoblins might just result in the party never really moving past level 1 of the dungeon, as things keep appearing. This is something I am very conscious of and plan on not pushing too much as I actively want the players to keep going deeper, which I think they do as well. Or at least some of them anyway!
Snake Charm, which came up a few times due to the serpentine theming of that quadrant, is a rather odd spell. It is very specific, in a way which would be nice and flavorful, if it did not have to sit next to just generically strong and useful spells on the spell list. It is a general problem with...honestly most D&D spell lists out there, and the players and I had some talk about that during the session. So far the D&D-adjacent spell list that I've enjoyed the most in my campaigns remains Wonder & Wickedness.