The Dungeon Game: Weekends at Stonehell, session 3
The party spend some time exploring the valley outside of Stonehell and score some decent treasure.
Party Members
- Tina the Titanic - Level 1 Martial Artist
- Vako Adjacent - Level 1 Paladin
- Sneaky TBD - Level 2 Thief
Followers
"Wolfboy" (Porter and Camp Cook), Medium Sized Marta (Woman at Arms), Sinthia (Woman at Arms), Konan (War Dog)
Session Recap
In-Universe Date: February 21st, 3017
After spending a few days during downtime hunting for wolves and getting hurt in the process. Sneaky the Thief began the game already hurt. So the party decide to head out back to their forward base in the caves above Stonehell's entrance and let him rest while they explore and fortify the thing. They head down into the dungeon to drop off the two sacks of wolf teeth they promised to the orcs, and head over to the talking statue head room. They ask it some more questions to try and discern what its deal is, then remove and take the door to the room with them.
On the way out they are accosted by a fire beetle, but quickly dispatch it without much issue. Vako, who is a different Vako than the fighter but seems to look suspiciously the same, uses the beetle's glowing nodules as makeshift lanterns and hanging them off the straps of his gear.
Once back outside with the door the party spend a few days working on fitting int into the cave's entrance (the fact that most of the rock around is limestone helps a lot). They are interrupted by five brigands that decide to have a go at robbing the group, only to end up ripped apart by the party's newly acquired war dog, courtesy of the personal kennels of Lord Krofax himself. Tina explores some nearby ruined building and finds a long forgotten hidden cache of coins, a big score worth 1000 gilders.
With the door fitted the party take a few more days of rest and then explore the valley some more, finding someone else already had the same idea as them - across the valley from them there is an entire complex of rooms dug into the side of the rock, clearly used as a base of operations in the past.
The place is now empty, save for a rabid racoon that the group put out of its misery (carefully from a distance so as not to get anyone sick). They almost get caught by a sandbag trap set at the door for a completely empty room. Exploring deeper they find some odder stuff - a throne with a spike-filled trap in front of it and a poorly concealed "secret" room with a massive stone table. In one of the table's legs Sneaky finds a bag of coins, an odd ring and two potions.
Deciding that they like this place much better as a base of operations, the group go to poke around in the semi-ruined Gatehouse at the entrance into the valley, checking up on rumors they heard about it being inhabited by something or someone. They find some ghosts and strange flying beasts that they run away from. Determined not to bother with the place, they go back to their new base, move all their gear into it and start shuffling doors around, including putting one at the entrance.
That gets interrupted by 17 kobolds that clearly are not happy with more adventurers settling into this place, having spent a bunch of time and effort to get rid of the previous batch. The party promise they're friends and pay the kobolds 70 gilders to not fuck with their stuff and keep an eye out for anyone else trying to do the same. The kobolds agree, take the money and leave.
Having secured the place as best they can the group head back into Zorb with their newly acquired wealth. They find out the ring is magical, but its magic is dormant, and the potions are the rare and expensive potions of extra-healing.
Observations
Rather short on players this week, due to one of the regulars being away, one of the people who signed up being sick and deciding to stay home, and a bunch of the people who have shown interest not...being around. So it goes with open tables.
I think it was a good decision on a part of the players to just explore above ground, considering the good payout they got from it. I will say though, encounters on the canyon are weird as written in Stonehell. Once per hour is fine and dandy, but what about at night? Do I roll an encounter for every hour the party are sleeping? Because if I do that then that's kind of nuts. But maybe it should be? A thing to figure out as the campaign goes on for sure.
I was so happy for them to actually find the abandoned adventurer base, because it was just very funny to me the amount of effort that went into making the shitty cave into a habitable space, when literally some 70 or so feet away from them there was an entire complex already carved out. Sure it needs cleaning and fixing up (getting rid of the racoon corpse would be helpful) but at least it's already got a level floor.
War dogs in B/X continue to be absurdly, comically good at their job, however I have already anticipated that and put a bit of a hard cap on the amount of war dogs actually available for sale. Mind you with the windfall from this expedition, the party are now buying all three of them anyway!
The small player count also meant that we got our first level up, as Sneaky (Name To Be Determined. That's what the TBD means if you couldn't tell) is now level 2, the first character to achieve that. More and more I am convinced the actual true strength of the Thief class, in no matter what iteration of it, is the fact that these fuckers level up super fast.
The encounter with the kobolds was quite interesting. I am not entirely sure how to proceed with it going forward, as we are now starting to get into "it's good if there's some actual reactivity in this campaign" territory that tends to give me the most headaches and make me go overwhelmed as a GM. I keep planning on writing a whole post about that, but I did cover it partially in my Zandan retrospective and my attempts to somehow stay ahead of the overwhelm of trying to figure out how multiple factions/individuals react to and change based on the things that happened.
As the whole point behind this campaign is to have something as chill and as low work for me as a referee as I can make it, I might just have to push this further down the line and not worry about it right now.