The Dungeon Game: Weekends at Stonehell, session 26
The Crownless Company keep exploring the Wizard Bullshit and find a lot of magical loot, as well as a way into further magical bullshit.
Party Members
- Tina the Titanic - Level 8 Fighter
- Vaco Adjacent - Level 6 Paladin
- Tobias Little, a.k.a. Lil Toby - Level 7 Cleric
- Telperion Desh - Level 7 Lich
Followers
Tiny Tina (Cleric 7), Princess Pizzabones (Thief 6), Rutger (Robot 7) and Captain Nasty (Fighter 7)
Session Recap
With Fulkth now removed as a threat, and the bugbears that served under him now working for Tina the Titanic, the characters decide to stop at the wheel of fortune and a random teleportation glyph they found in floor 1. Fortune is clearly feeling favorably towards the party, and the teleporter seems to go into a small tucked away library with a magical grimoire containing low level spells in it.
With most of floor 1 currently being an active construction site, as Tina the Titanic expands her domain down into the first floor of Stonehell itself, the group head back down to floor 3 and the magical zone where they encountered Fulkth.
Trying to open the double doors in the hall of mirrors they get rebuffed by a force field of some kind, refusing them entry. So they instead go east and find themselves in a labyrinth full of traps and also pressure plates that drop gelatinous cubes from the ceiling. The first one manages to catch the party by surprise, engulfing several characters (before being destroyed from the inside by Tina), the second ones mostly just serve as a source of jewels and gemstones.
The group finds some more teleporting glyphs and, being the theme of the day, use them to explore some of the wizard residential areas, looting them for various magical weapons, scrolls, potions and a tome on physical culture by one Bateman. After fighting off a wraith and a living shadow, the group also decide to use the key they found to unlock the strange repulsive double doors.
It works, and they find themselves in a magical chamber filled with glowing runes. The group explore some of the nearby chambers, but there is clearly more magical rituals needed to really do anything with these chambers, and so they decide that they need to prepare for that before hand. Instead they spend the rest of the session carrying out anything they can, up to and including the fancy furniture of the departed wizards that once lived in this part of the dungeon.
Observations
A quick session mostly because some of the people in it were tired, and also because the magical chambers on floor 3 are kind of...a lot and require probably an entire session all of their own. Maybe next week, some spooky wizard nonsense for Halloween!
However, the short length of the session did not affect the payoff, with large amounts of money, magical gear and a permanent stat boost item recovered! Those in turn also mean quite a lot of XP, as magical items have consistently been the biggest chunk of XP gain in this campaign. It's definitely something I've noticed affects the pace of the campaign, even more than not splitting XP. I mean the two facts feed off each other, of course, but having large chunks of XP happen every few sessions when the party find a stash of scrolls or potions or other magical items really gives a nice feel to the session.
In the past I've generally avoided giving XP for magical items, as they tend to be a reward in and of themselves, and I still have some apprehension regarding the judgement calls I need to make as a referee on some of the XP values for more bespoke items. For most stuff like magical weapons, scrolls or potions I just use a list Justin H gave me a while back. But it still can be a bit tricky figuring more custom stuff like all the permanent stat up items I've included (which give between 6k and 7.5k xp each) or the various IOUN Stones etc.
On the other hand, this is not any more arbitrary than deciding how much treasure is or isn't in a given dungeon/room/lair so it's not like it doesn't all just come down to referee calls eventually. One of the treasures found was also an actual treasure map, which I now need to figure out where to put and maybe have as a potential side adventure for a single session. Hm, maybe a good use for the old Judge's Guild Book of Treasure Maps!
...or maybe I just slap together something out in the wilderness and call it good. We'll see how the week goes I suppose.