The Dungeon Game: Weekends at Stonehell, session 19
The party explore the floating atelier of a dead wizard and then do some more mapping of floor 2 of Stonehell, meeting some snakemen along the way.
Be warned, this is going to be kind of a long one.
Party Members
- Tina the Titanic - Level 6 Fighter
- Vaco Adjacent - Level 6 Paladin
Followers
Tiny Tina (Cleric 6) and Rutger (Robot 6)
Session Recap
Part 1 - Fabien's Atelier
Maribel the Marbled, one of the magicians in Zorb and a contact of the Crownless Company approaches them with a request. The floating island atelier of another wizard, Fabien, has been malfunctioning. She is almost certain Fabien is dead, but her actual concern is the island collapsing on and destroying the garden underneath. She asks the party to go hopefully stop the thing from collapsing, and of course they are welcome to loot whatever they can find in there.
Taking on the task Tina the Titanic and her diminutive counterpart, Vaco Adjacent and Rutger the Robot head off to the garden, accompanied by the porters Packett and Loadwell as well as Tiny Tina's mule Justinian the Great.
The trip to the garden is uneventful, and the party decide to go explore the currently invisible island. They make their way up the invisible staircase (helpfully made visible by a glittering powder Maribel provided them with) and find the corpse of Fabien sprawled out on his front lawn, dried and cured in the hot summer sun.
They take off his robes, and notice that the corpse changes slightly, deducing after some experimentation that the robes make the person wearing them appear as Fabien himself. They knock on the front doors, but since nobody answers they decide to just go inside the atelier and check what is going on. They are greeted by a toucanet which squawks out a warning that the engine keeping the island floating is failing and everyone is going to die.
Weary of the iron statue in the room the party look around and deduce that one of the doors has a weird lock that resembles the weird angular beak of the toucanet. As they throw a net to try and grab the bird the iron statue indeed comes to life and warns them to knock it off. After quickly using the agitated bird to open the door the party dispose of the statue and go inside a room with a strange cabinet and a miniature dollhouse. Vaco's Detect Evil senses as malevolent presence from the dollhouse, so he throws a grande, blowing up the thing. Out of the ruble a tiny dark dragon appears, yells at them and turns invisible, flying through the cabinet in the room to grow in size and flies out of the building.
Outside he finds Packett and Loadwell by the door, assaults them and eventually throws both porters over the edge, sending them to their death down below. It breathes a cloud of smokey darkness at the party and swears revenge, before flying away. The group decide they care more about their people than this stupid wizard bullshit and so go back down, resurrect Packett and then rest for the night, resurrecting Loadwell in the morning too. In the night they do hear an explosion coming from the atelier.
The next day they head back up, loot the tiny horde of the tiny dragon, and mess around with the cabinet, finding that it can shrink or enlarge people and items going through it. Tina the Titanic decides to make herself even more titanic by doubling in size. The characters decide that no matter what, they are taking the cabinet with them.
They go to the control room, which Tina can bust down with her massive strength, and the others go inside to investigate it. Upon seeing the control button to honk the horn of the flying island the party smash the thing multiple times, sending loud honking through the nearby valleys. Unfortunately that drains the rest of the energy reserves in the control room, causing the engine to get even worse. Seeing that they can't possibly save the island the group rip out the cabinet from its room and head back down to safety, watching as the invisibility shield falters and then soon the island also collapses down onto the garden, turning into a giant smoking heap of rubble.
Returning to Zorb they report back to Maribel. She is obviously unhappy about the whole garden being destroyed situation, but seems deeply intrigued by the robe and the fact that Fabien was, indeed, not the same person. She offers to buy the robe off the party for 5000 gilders, but they manage to negotiate her up to 10k instead. She also buys the cabinet off them, as she explains that its magic is not permanent (lasting only 24 hours after use) and indeed the cabinet itself has had its enchantment destroyed by being ripped out of the floor of the atelier.
Satisfied with the money they made, the group return to Crownfall Keep to rest and recuperate.
Part 2 - Back into Stonehell
The next day the quartet head down to floor 2 of the dungeon, deciding to do some more mapping of the snake area they ran into last time. They kill off some giant black widow spiders and find a rather curious thing - an elevator that seems to go down deeper into the dungeon. Deciding not to risk it when they are so low in numbers, they instead keep exploring, finding a pair of snakemen. They inform the group that beyond the room they are in the whole area is taboo to any outsiders, as it is a religious site for their cult to Yg,the Father of Serpents. The group head to a different direction, eventually finding a chute that leads up to floor 1, and a pit trap that they had blocked when exploring the catacombs on that floor.
After finding a curious pair of magical lenses underneath a sleeping mat the group decide they have done well enough for themselves this week and return back home to identify their new finds as well as spend some of the money they got off the mission to the atelier.
Observations
With only two players this week, I decided to set up a quick side adventure for them to explore, similar to how I did the last time I only had two people. In this case I was looking through my collection of adventure pdfs, and decided to check out Wyvern Songs by Brad Kerr. I really enjoy Temple of 1000 Swords by him, and have run it several times before. As such I was interested in trying out another adventure by him and ended up settling on Fabien's Atelier, as it seemed perfect for a single session game.
That decision ended up having kind of a knock on effect to the entire session. While I did warn the players that this was going to be a more puzzle-like dungeon than how Stonehell usually operates, the fact is that they have not been exposed to something like it before and so felt like they could not really figure out what they are supposed to do, with every action seemingly just making the situation worse and the engine closer to exploding and killing everyone. As such they very much decided to just cut their losses before it got too bad and simply abandoned the dungeon fairly quickly.
Both players were rather disappointed by how this played out, one of them feeling like they just failed at playing through the dungeon period, the other one feeling like they just messed up things by how they acted and what they decided to do. It lead to general unhappiness regarding how things played out, it seems, and I definitely can understand it. For me, as a referee I thought the session itself was fine, with this being a "loss" for the party, on paper, but in practice I felt the actual play during the session was interesting, fun and at times even funny.
My partner expressed interest in potentially playing through the adventure again, perhaps just by herself, to try and figure out how one is supposed to play through this type of dungeon module. This also lead her and I talking about an approach to RPGs that we seem to be not necessarily in disagreement with, as much as just having fundamentally different views about. To her, the way the entire atelier section went was just them making "the wrong choice" and so things not going the way they would want them to go. She has expressed in previous discussions her feelings that effectively character death is "punishment" for playing wrong, as playing right and doing the right choices would not result in that.
That contrasts considerably with my view, as I did not see what happened with the atelier as a "wrong" or even a bad choice, simply a choice that then lead to other things going the way they did. Had the party managed to repair the engine they would have now had a flying island at their disposal, which would have also altered the campaign to some extent, just as the island crashing and burning has. Truth be told, with how little I am simulating the world in Stonehell, the practical consequences of the existence of the island would not have actually been much, but it would still be a thing that exists in the context of the campaign.
As a referee, I would have of course loved if they had seen more of the adventure, as I found Fabien's Atelier a rather charming little location with its own quirks and slightly goofy tone, very much fitting along with Temple of 1000 Swords. So I do look forward to maybe running it again as a duet.
Overall, this session was a curiously rare situation for me - a session where I, as the referee, was quite happy with how things went, while the players seemed disappointed by it. I say rare, because usually I am a lot more critical of how well the session had went, despite the players being very happy with it and excited with what had transpired.
As for Fabien's Atelier itself - I like it, I should probably read the rest of the Wyvern Songs adventures too, as well as look closer at Hideous Daylight, as the atelier very much ties into the events of that book too. I continue to like Brad Kerr's work and would gladly run more of it in the future, perhaps making a better choice of which of his things to actually use however.