The Dungeon Game: Weekends at Stonehell, session 27
The group explore more of Floor 3, get into a fight with some ogres and finally find the wererats, including Captain Nasty's sister.
Party Members
- Vaco Adjacent - Level 7 Paladin
- Telperion Desh - Level 7 Lich
- Huntsman - Level 6 Martial Artist
Followers
Jenx (Bombard 4), Rutger (Robot 7) and Captain Nasty (Fighter 7)
Session Recap
Being short staffed the group decides to keep things simple and just goes down to the north-western quarter of floor 3, one which they had explored a bit in the past, but hadn't gotten much done in.
First thing they find is a statue of an oliphant, with an unseen presence declaring as soon as they enter the room to "Approach not the beast ‗less you bear the oliphant‘s greatest fear!". Not having any mice handy, Vaco Adjacent steps forward to the thing, with the statue coming to life and attacking him. He manages to quickly escape out of the room and Telperion throws a fireball in, before the door swings shut and does not permit them any more entrance.
Exploring further the group find and dispatch a small contingent of hobgoblin stragglers, clearly hiding after the destruction of their base of operations. The encounter yields several more clips of machine gun ammo, but not much else. As they head west, they hear clanking and noises, and find a pair of ogres working out, pumping iron. Deciding to be friendly they chat with them and asking for workout tips.
Vaco specifically asks what the ogres eat to get so big, to which they smile and reply "You." and attack. The party manages to dispatch them without too much issue, but the commotion brings in several more ogres from nearby rooms. A big melee ensues in which Vaco Adjacent is hurt rather badly, and the party slays all but one of the ogres, who surrenders. Once he realizes that these are the Crownless Company, he asks why they hadn't introduced themselves to begin with, but started swinging instead! Some negotiation clears up the mess, with Bubba the Ogre actually being one of the first dungeon denizens to fight in the newly created Thunderdome that the party built on floor 1 of the dungeon. Vaco Adjacent heals some of his wounds and Bubba tags along with the group as they explore the dungeon.
With a lot more muscle coming along they decide to head south and check out the were-rat territory, still looking for Captain Nasty's errant sister. With Bubba's help they move the giant boulder blocking the entrance into the were-rat territory and go in. They are immediately attacked, though they dispatch the rats easily, Nasty flying into a rage and trying to get information out of one of them, but ends up just killing the guy instead. As the party search through the room and the belongings of its former occupants, several more were-rats attack.
Bubba gets slain, the other ones are killed, but one the party capture alive, because it turns out to be Mimi, Zorrel Gnast's sister. While initially she attacks her brother, the party uses a Sleep spell to knock her out and take her with them. Looting the rest of their stuff and burning their nest the group figure they try and fill out some of their map. They dispatch some harpies and find a curious floating boulder, which they take along with them.
They find a room with an oddly pointless trap involving mosaic tiles and busts of old guys, as well as finding a giant shaft which served a long-gone elevator. The boulder is pushed down into the shaft, whatever magic makes it levitate resulting in it gently floating down into the darkness.
Rutger heads down climbing the shaft wall to explore, but all of this commotion had drawn the attention of four gargoyles which roost in the shaft who proceed to attack the robot. It manages to climb back out so that Huntsman and Captain Nasty can finish them off before the gargoyles in turn had finished ripping apart the robot's electronics.
Beaten up and damaged, the group decide to call it there. That combined with a prisoner who is rather hard to keep a hold of, they head back out, with Telperion making plans on how he can cure his companion's sister from her lycanthropy.
Observations
So, both a short timed and short staffed session today. Between people being busy or sick, we ended up with only 3 out of the 4 planed players.
The lack of clerics, scout and primary fighter was definitely felt, as the group took quite a bit of damage, both from the ogres as well as the gargoyles. While Jenx the Bombard can dish out quite a lot of damage, using fireballs when everyone is in melee is also a good way to kill your own team, so a lot of his use was negated. On the other Huntsman, now being level 6, was quite good. Having multiple melee attacks when unarmed (and one more when hasted) combined with a good critical hit range meant he often dealt ~10 damage whenever he would crit.
The only other notable thing was finally paying off the, admittedly not very front-loaded, story of Zorrel Gnast looking for his were-rat sister. While he was willing to kill her, since she clearly had no desire to go back with him, Telperion's player did insist on capturing her alive to try and cure her.
The two big fights of the session were quite interesting too. While ogres don't do great against heavily armored targets, having only a single attack a turn, when they do hit it tends to hurt a lot. Conversely the Gargoyles have four attacks and that can chew through even Rutger's 0 AC by sheer force of numbers, however each of their attacks often doing only 1 to 3 damage on average. It was still enough to get him down to 2 HP though, and had the party failed their initiative roll once the whole mess was brought back up the shaft, it's quite possible the robot would have been slain, which would in turn make him fall down to level 4 and make retrieving him much more difficult.
Overall, this was quite a good session, even if a bit of a short one. Both I and the players enjoyed interacting with the gymbro ogres, as well as having Bubba follow along for the short time that he did.
Sadly between being sick and other commitments The Dungeon Game has been a bit spotty in terms of its weekly schedule. Had to cancel last week due to me being sick, I'm cancelling next week due to travel, but at least after that I should have uninterrupted sessions until late December! I am getting this to the end of the year and fulfilling Campaign 26's challenge, come hell or high water!