Gorgon Bones

The Dungeon Game: Weekends at Stonehell, session 21

header

The Crownless Company are joined by new members, strike a tentative deal with the snakemen, and then explore floor 3 and its bugbear infested hallways.

Party Members

Followers

Zorrel "Captain Nasty" Gnast (Fighter 5), Tiny Tina (Cleric 6), Princess Pizzabones (Thief 4) and Rutger (Robot 6)

Session Recap

After the long break to pursue other projects, the Crownless Company venture once more into the dungeon. This time they are joined by Fleebow, a thief who decides to join after failing to pickpocket Telperion, Huntsman, the amnesiac martial artist who returned after several months of meditation, and also Princess Pizzabones, a "reformed" opossum kobold that lives in Tally Town's trash pile.

The group go down to floor 2, using the quick rout that Tina the Titanic's work crew dug over the month of August, and Tiny Tina approaches some of the Snakemen, using her recently acquired snake googles to appear even more friendly. She offers them a bunch of chickens in exchange for them giving her a map of their territory. They say they must consult with their elder first, before they agree, but will leave a map out for her if the elder agrees.

With that sorted the group take the elevator down to floor 3, whereupon they are attacked by four gargoyles as soon as they step out of the elevator room. The gargoyles deal serious damage to Rutger, who must retreat back into the cramped elevator room, causing a panic among the porters. One of them attempts to grab the leaver to get the elevator back up to floor two, but is stopped by the screeching Princess Pizzabones latching onto his his arm with her teeth and making him let go.

Eventually the gargoyles are slain, and the group explore the strange new part of the dungeon they have found themselves in. The walls, floor and ceiling are all smooth and spotless, as if the rock was melted rather than chiseled, and there is a perceptible hum of magic in the air, which causes minor headaches and discomfort in the non-spellcasting members of the party.

Exploring the third floor the group try to head south in an attempt to reach a potential backdoor way up into the territory of the hobgoblins. Instead they find a room filled with baboons covered in mechanical parts and plates. The group dispatches them, with Vaco Adjacent harvesting some of the tech off them to use for spare parts in Rutger's repairs. As people stop to catch their breath (and not throw up) from the throbbing sense of magic in the air a group of five large, pumpkin-headed hairy beasts approach. The bugbears seem fairly polite, explaining to the group that this part of the dungeon is the domain of their master Fulkth, and tell them they need to leave to the south and stop using the elevator.

Taking the polite, but firm, hint the group head south eventually running into a room with a broken up mosaic of the continental magical ley lines. Telperion Desh finds a magical ring of invisibility in the room, and also ends up falling for a pit trap concealed by an illusion, breaking both of his legs quite badly (luckily as a Lich he now does not feel pain and is mostly inconvenienced by the whole thing), before Rutger drags him out.

Another group of bugbears manages to sneak up on the group, an impressive feat considering Vaco Adjacent's Detect Evil power being active. However the bugbears prove to be friendly and chat with the group for a bit, giving them the lay of the land and explaining some things, before heading out.

More exploration is done, with more weird monkeys and even more bugbears being encountered. The group do kill a group of them, but then successfully bluff their way out of a fight with another patrol that comes to investigate. Eventually they discover a curious feature mentioned by some of the bugbears - a pair of heavy doors which are seemingly unopenable. Brute force does not do, nor does the magic of of the Doorknocker mace. They also encounter some odd small pale men, who mostly cower in fear of the group until the Crownless Company leave. Slightly perplexed the group explores a few more rooms and decide to head back up, having gotten some good money and information out of the dungeon.

Observations

First game after the break, and a great way to start things back up! I spent yesterday writing out reference sheets for the monsters on this level, because one of the things with Stonehell's super minimal and compact design is that the monster lists are a bit too minimal, with a lot of their abilities simply not listed, because you're expected to have Labyrinth Lord open for most of the regular monsters.

I ended up skimming most of the NW and SW portions earlier today before the game, as I didn't have the time for longer prep before, but due to how easy Stonehell is to run it did not cause many issues in game, I only had to stop once for a break just to read up on some things.

We had two returning players who had been around before, and who I now hope will become at least semi-regular participants. The campaign has moved away from a true open table into an invite-only kind of deal, because for logistical reasons I now run it at our apartment, rather than my LGS, and I am not particularly thrilled to have randos at my place. Plus I have a consistent core of 3-4 players already so that's plenty.

That big initial fight with the gargoyles was very chaotic in a very fun way. With most of the group and their porters being stuck in the elevator it was pure panic on the part of all the hirelings, and also Rutger getting quite a serious beating, because turns out even 0 AC does not protect you against enemies that make 4 attacks per round. Luckily most of the party are now equipped with magical weapons, so they had no real issues with them.

Floor 3 in general has so much more going on and is so much more fun than the first two, that frankly it's a bit silly just how stark the difference is. The factions and personalities present are much more pronounced, there's just all kinds of wizard bullshit going on (always a good time in RPGs) and just a much bigger variety in terms of enemies. It is curious just how much the difficulty of encounters does jump up though, to the point where even the party being on average level 6s they take quite a lot of beating with some of the enemies.

Now part of that is because my Bugbears are a lot scarier and have various weirdo abilities, like a hypnotic gaze or fucking lazer eyes (those smacked some characters good in the one fight against bugbears in the session), however even then gargoyles are quite scary as they are, and the plated monkeys in the dungeon are also fairly robust in terms of the damage they can dish out.

Overall I am excited to see more of level 3 being explored, especially since I decided that I am only going to run the first 5 floors of stonehell as the whole dungeon, skipping on the deeper levels in book 2. That would necessitate some tweaks and rearrangements, I'll probably grab a quadrant from the deeper floors and put that in floors 4 or 5, but I have not decided on which ones yet.

I also felt less of a need to add extra treasure or magic items to the quadrants of level 3 that I read. The money is not as amazing, but considering PCs get XP for magic items that is offset quite nicely.

I have a plan for a future post detailing more of the changes I did to Stonehell, similar to the previous one I did, which will also include my proposal to simply get the good parts of floors 1 and 2, combined them into one and just shorten the dungeon by half. There is just way too much space with way too little going for it in those two floors.

#Campaign #OSE #OSR #Session Report #Stonehell #The Dungeon Game