The Dungeon Game: Weekends at Stonehell, session 4
The Crownless Company has two new members, and spend most of the session fighting against orcs.
Party Members
- Tina the Titanic - Level 1 Martial Artist
- Vako Adjacent - Level 1 Paladin
- Telperion Desh - Level 1 Magician
- Jimthorpe - Level 1 Assassin
- Huntsman - Level 1 Martial Artist
- Grock - Level 1 Cleric
Followers
"Wolfboy" (Porter and Camp Cook), "Sparkles" (Porter and Torch Bearer), Medium Sized Marta (Woman at Arms), Sinthia (Woman at Arms), Konan (War Dog), Kurgan (War Dog), Krull (War Dog), Jug (Porter) + his three Giant Toads.
Session Recap
In-Universe Date: March 7th, 3017
The Crownless Company is joined by three new recruits - Grock, a cleric of the God of Law, Jimthorpe, the brother of a previous member Grimthorpe, Huntsman, martial artist with partial amnesia, and also Jug, a local youth they hire as a porter and guard for their forward base, who seems to have control over amphibians and is followed everywhere by a trio if giant toads. The group head back to Stonehell and ignore the gate house, instead spending the rest of their afternoon/evening digging around the ruins trying to see if they can score more hidden treasure. They can't. Grock decides to take on an oath in front of the statue of St.Ras in one of the ruins, swearing to fund a vestibule dedicated to him in the Zorb monastery.
Once the group is done they head back into their base, however they trigger several traps on the way in - a tripwire that results in Vako Adjacent getting smacked on the head with a sharp stick and Tina getting doused in firebomb liquid, ruining her hair. Swearing up and down at the kobolds for their habitual trap setting, the party settle in for the night.
The next morning Huntsman decides to swim into the nearby pool of water and finds an odd silvered glass hemisphere firmly embedded in the rocky bottom of the pool. Not sure what to do with it, the party head into the dungeon.
As is tradition at this point their first stop is the stony oracle head, who they ask some more questions and then they decide to go to the strange windy and whistling well in the nearby caverns and throw a coin down it. When nothing happens, Huntsman volunteers to climb down it (tied with a safety rope around his waist, of course). The climb is slow, but steady, eventually ending in a tarp that he accidentally rips and finds himself in a new part of the dungeon.
Up top, a patrol group of orcs find the party and engage them in combat. With half the party busily trying to bring Huntsman back up (yanking his rope and nearly smacking his head on the stone ceiling on the way up) Telperion uses his Sleep magic to take out most of the orcs, who are then finished off by Jimthorpe's deadly blade and the brutal attack of the party's war dogs.
After looting the bodies of the pigmen the group head back out to drop off the heavy chain armor and two handed weapons, then descend back into the depths. Deciding to explore south Vako falls into a pit trap (becoming increasingly annoyed still at the prevalence of traps all over the place) and bonks his head yet again. After pulling him out the party don't really have any means to cross the pit trap and so instead head east, finding a room with old bones and piles of rusted weapons.
Just as they ponder if these weapons are stockpiled by orcs they get their answer in the form of another orc patrol. These ones get attacked by some bombs from the party, but eventually manage to make a charge into the party's formation, killing Grock who with his last gasp summons a Light spell to blind one of his killers before collapsing on the floor, choking on the blood of his ripped up throat.
The party make short work of the remaining orcs, and decide to explore south again, finding a room with five ragged and leather+fur clad individuals. The party try negotiations (which they've tried so far with every encounter), but the men simply attack them. With war dogs and warriors at hand, the party make short work of the warriors and find out they were cannibals, eating and roasting human meat.
Being done with Stonehell for the time being they head back out, taking Grock's remains and burying him in the same ruins as their other fallen comrades. They leave Jug and his toads, along with one of the war dogs, to guard their forward camp. With their base now having a proper lock and door bar installed (courtesy of a laborer they brought with them for the expedition), Jug buckles in for the week and the party head back, making a tidy profit off the looted orc gear and singing and toasting to Grock's dedication to St. Ras.
Observations
Another six player session this week, which I always love. The energy you get from these is what makes me enjoy weekly gaming this much! Two new players, one of which (Huntsman's player) had this be his first ever session of an RPG! A big honor and I am glad that it sounds like had a blast doing so.
His character was comically perfect in the rolls he made, with a 9, 13, 14, 18 and 18 as his attributes....but a 1 on his hit dice. At least the 18 CON gave him some bonus to his HP. I really hope he survives for a bit longer.
Other than that, there is not much to tell about the session itself, it was fairly standard dungeon crawling gaming. However there are two things I do want to note on the campaign organization's end.
First thing - the time. I have gone back and edited the previous posts too, but I decided that tracking two calendars while also keeping 1 to 1 time is just too much of a bother. My aim with this campaign is to keep things as bare bones and as simple as I can for myself in order to stave off overwhelm and potential burnout from too many moving pieces to keep track of.
As such I decided to lean into the whole 1:1 time and make it so that every expedition, no matter how many in-universe days the characters take, actually takes 1 day anyway. And the date of the in-universe time is the exact same as the IRL one, except the year is of course 3017 instead of 2026. I think this will save me a lot of headaches, and I had already established from session 1 that "time fuckery" is part of the setting, as the Wizard Wars have caused either 2 or 5 years to straight up disappear from existence, and thus the exact in-universe date is a hotly debated topic among academics.
Second thing - encounters. Man, Stonehell does not fuck around. 4d4 kobolds, 2d4 orcs can result in fairly beefy groups. In earlier sessions the players had to rely on luck, diplomacy (and damn good reaction rolls) and just running away in order to avoid TPKs, but now with their trio of war dogs direct fights happen a lot more often. I think that's a good thing, and it lets them actually interact with the module as it is presented. Which, in turn, puts less onus on me as a referee to figure out and adjudicate encounter rolls - they simply show up and things go as they go.
EDIT: Third thing - As one of the players pointed out, there was a very neat little interaction towards the end of the session, after the party defeated the berserker cannibals, which I glossed over in the recap, but will now go into detail about it here.
Vako Adjacent is a Paladin, which in my game means that he is personally in direct contact with the God of Law, and under God's personal supervision and direction. As I despise shit like moral codes and alignment gotchas in D&D, but I wanted to include Paladins because (some) people just like Paladins, this was a compromise I came up with.
The Paladin can not ever "fall from grace". They can not ever be corrupted by Chaos or by other gods or anything like that. By this I don't mean that it's not a thing that can't happen in the game, I mean literally they are not able to do that. The God of Law simply will not permit those things to happen. So in effect the player trades some amount of control over their character for a bunch of really strong abilities. The God of Law, as the name suggests, is mostly interested in legal matters and not personal beliefs and morals, which in turn shapes the broader society of the setting. People don't care if something is "good" or "right", they care if it is strictly permitted or not under the law.
Now, this brings us to the end of the session. Having dispatched the berserkers easily, Vako's player said "I will take a bite off the meat they were cooking." Since I, as the referee, knew that this was human meat, and since I had decided prior that cannibalism is not Lawful, I simply told the player "You will not taste the meat."
Which in turn made him instantly realize "Oh shit, this is human meat." It's not that I as the referee stopped him. His God stopped him. He simply did not permit the action to take place, and that provided the player himself with insight into the fictional situation which he could not have really been able to come by otherwise. I think this is is neat.