The Dungeon Game: Weekends at Stonehell, session 22
The party gets some info from some snake men, finds access to the hobgoblin stronghold and meet an information broker.
Party Members
- Tina the Titanic - Level 7 Fighter
- Telperion Desh - Level 6 Lich
- Vaco Adjacent - Level 6 Paladin
- Tobias Little, a.k.a. Lil Toby - Level 5 Cleric
- Huntsman - Level 4 Martial Artist
Followers
Zorrel "Captain Nasty" Gnast (Fighter 6), Tiny Tina (Cleric 6), Princess Pizzabones (Thief 4) and Rutger (Robot 6)
Session Recap
As agreed upon from their last expedition, the Crownless Company goes down to meet the snakemen at level 2, and actually end up speaking to Elder Ghariel, the shaman and leader of this group. He explains to them the importance of the caves in the initiation rituals of their people, as well as the occasional presence of a large crocodile-like reptile known as Song of Night.
He thanks them for respecting his people's territory, and in return gives them the activation phrase for a portal in a nearby room that brings them down to the domain of said reptile, in case they might have some use for that.
With that business taken care of, the group hops on the elevator and descends down to floor 3, heading swiftly south to avoid the bugbear patrolled territory. They succeed, but run into six large albino apes. The party does not want to mess around with these things and use machine gun fire (employed by Rutger the robot and Huntsman the martial artist) and grenades to kill a bunch of them, with the last two running away. As it becomes evident soon those two stragglers ended up running into a large group of kobolds that had come to investigate what all the noise was about. Princess Pizzabones chats with them for a while, and the kobolds recolonize the party as friendly and simply ask to get the ape corpses for food, giving the group some more info on the nearby parts of the dungeon before taking their leave.
The group continues south, stopping to explore some rooms and fighting more simians - both the odd plate-coated baboons and more white apes. Eventually all the monkey business is done with and Telperion uses a Knock spell to open the sealed doors, which reveals the staircase heading down to floor 4, a hallway blocked off by a collapsed ceiling and further access east. Tina the Titanic frustratedly looks at the map trying to figure out what on earth are they even skirting around.
Soon after their goal of finding access back up to floor 2 is rewarded by finding the staircase. As the party stay in the stairs they send in the possum kobold (who now has a ring of invisibility which she uses to great effect!) to scout ahead. She finds some hobgoblin sentries and as she heads back down to tell the party what she found, the party are instead busy with the chaos of an ochre jelly falling from the ceiling and onto Tiny Tina, and the liberal amount of firebomb fire that then is needed to get rid of the thing.
The commotion predictably attracts those previously mentioned sentries, which Princess knocks out using a scroll of Color Spray, before the party finish them off. The party proceed with extreme caution, skirting clearly guarded parameter of the hobgoblin's strongold and territory, before they find a room full of yellow mold. Deciding to grab some of it in a jar with future biological warfare in mind, before deciding to finish exploring floor 3. As they do so Princess nearly falls into a big pit and the group discover a wind obelisk, a magical construction that channels clean air from beyond this realm of existence as a way to keep the air in the dungeon from stagnating, as well as a curious (and concerning sight) a hall filled with the clearly petrified remains of other dungeon denizens and adventurers.
Soon the party also find the source of those statues - Lachesis the gorgon, who invites them into her opulent home in the dungeon and plies her trade as an information broker, getting information on the party in exchange for giving them the rough whereabouts of Captain Nasty's wererat sister, and broad information on Fulkth, the master of the bugbears the party had run into before.
Deciding to take their leave the group figure they pushed their luck enough for the time being, and return back to Crownfall Keep with only some minimal hassle along the way.
Observations
I am quite happy with this session - while not much of note happened in it, the party did some good exploring and met an interesting NPC and finally found their target, another access to the hobgoblin's territory!
It feels nice to have 5 players at the table, and with some changes and spreading around of player roles everyone had something to do during the game, and the party employed new tactics, relying on submachine guns and bombs to engage with dangerous groups of enemies. Which helped a lot, as 6 white apes could have cause some damage even to a high level party like this. I doubt anyone would have died, but considering the brutal fight with the ochre jelly it might have compounded into some losses.
Speaking of, oh man that ochre jelly. I rolled the encounter as the party were heading up the stairs to floor 2, making a point that they are staying in the actual staircase and not going all the way up (as the invisible thief was sent ahead to scout). The jelly fell right in the middle of their formation, burning away a good chunk of Tiny Tina's HP, but luckily between fire and also splitting it multiple times (and the split jellies were also on fire as was everything else at that point) they managed to get rid of the thing without too much trouble. A few bad rolls though and things would have gone a lot worse.
I do a trick I saw from Nathan when he ran Devil's World Heroes, where enemies that have magic or poison or just other special abilities I count as double their HD for the purposes of experience points gain. And for one reason or another floor 3 just have a bunch of those, and so the party is starting to make actually decent amount of experience just from killing enemies. That ochre jelly for example counted as 10 HD for experience, which is not nothing! With not splitting XP between party members anymore, I actually have thought that for a future campaign of this set up I would instead use Nathan's later refinement of this system that he did for Evil Labyrinth, and just give XP based on a table relevant to the HD, and simply bump up certain enemies in their functional HD. I really liked that effect and I think it's good.