The Dungeon Game: Weekends at Stonehell, session 5
The party engages in some very profitable tomb robbing and gets in a bunch of fights.
Party Members
- Tina the Titanic - Level 2 Martial Artist
- Sneaky Jan - Level 3 Thief
- Telperion Desh - Level 2 Magician
- Vaco Adjacent - Level 1 Paladin
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 14th, 3017
The Crownless Company head back to Stonehell, leaving some of the laborers they have hired to make modifications to their newly established forward base. Jug, the local youth they left in charge tells them that there has been commotion, fighting and explosions heard coming from the Gatehouse, but he hasn't actually seen what had happened.
Heading into the dungeon the party do their customary first stop at the stone oracle head, however they find it is already being questioned by four bandits. The bandit leader gets annoyed at the stone head's vague answers and leaves, offering to just peacefully part ways with the party.
From there the party decide to go check out the corpse storage room they had stopped at on the way to the oracle. Having heard someone muttering inside they get accosted by a ghoul dressed in fancy (if old and worn) servant uniform with a heavy gold collar around its neck. They kill it and take the golden collar, then finish exploring the western edge of their map, finding a pit trap and a storage room filled with junk and trap-making mechanisms. After several turns of fruitless searching they give up on it and continue south.
Finding a room with a stone statue of a 4 armed lizard, the party try to drag the stone bowl full of coins from a safe distance, but all that achieves is triggering the obvious trap and collapsing the ceiling on them, leaving them with nothing. After some more exploration they finally decide it is time to go back to the enticing metal double doors they had ran into on a previous delve.
Sneaky the thief picks the lock on the doors and the group find a series of crypts. Grave robbing being known as a fairly lucrative activity, they proceed to spend some time breaking into the tombs, fighting and killing the ghouls, zombies and skeleton that resided inside and looting anything valuable.
The whole process gets interrupted several times, either due to orcs approaching them (and getting promptly blown up by a bomb from Tina the Titanic), or Vaco the Paladin becoming paralyzed by a ghoul's touch and the group having to sit around and wait for him to recover. While they do that a group of kobolds approach, but the usually friendly (or at least reserved) tone breaks down as the kobolds become very visibly agitated once the party tells them they had killed the ghoul in the corpse storage room. Before the kobolds can really attack though, Telperion Desh puts them down with a sleep spell, the party slit their throats and throw them down the nearby whistling well for whatever is in the floor below to deal with.
The final interruption comes from some giant toads, two of which get dissuaded from engaging via the employment of caltrops, but one does get into melee and causes some serious damage to Konan the Wardog, before he and the rest of the dogs and mercs can put the giant toad down.
Finally done with all the crypt looting the party find a strange room with a bone altar and a laughing skull carved out of the stone behind it. Clearly suspicious of the whole setup, they also discover a secret door hiding a trapped chest with a bunch of money and some healing potions. Satisfied with their haul for the last couple of days, the party decide to head back out, but not before one last bit of religious intolerance-motivated vandalism, roping the bone altar and pulling at it until it topples over.
With a very successful expedition everyone in the party (save for the paladin) level up and they start making big plans on how to spend their newly acquired pile of cash.
Observations
A much more successful session for the party this time around. The issues of fighting in hallways continues to be a bit pressing especially so in the crypts which were even more cramped. However Vaco Adjacent having 2 AC means that most things don't really hit him to begin with, at least not at this level of the dungeon.
The giant toad encounter proved just how fucking nasty those things can be, nearly killing one of the party's precious war dogs! Surprisingly that was probably the most dangerous fight the group got into in a session mostly dominated by fighting. The orc encounter was the funniest one, with ALL of them failing their saving throw and getting promptly blown to shit. A complete non-starter as far as fights go, but hey grenades would do that!
On my end, the session was fairly simple to run. The party basically just kept fighting stuff, only really going back to the surface to rest once and so they can drag all the heavy armor and weapons they took off the orcs. Otherwise the rolls on the crypts and their treasure were fairly kind to them, resulting in the highest XP earned of a session so far at 5038.
The party are starting to make plans on how to use their newly acquired wealth, and Tina the Titanic is going to retiring and transitioning into a management/domain game role. Tina's player is deeply invested into that part of the game, despite me actively trying not to spend too much time and brain energy on it (as it will completely overwhelm me if I have to), but we have come to a compromise on how to handle that. She also is very attached to the character and wants her to stop going into the dungeon and risk getting her killed, so she'll roll up a new level 1 and keep playing that instead.
Overall I am curious to see where things go, and a bit worried as a lot of the plans the party are making more or less just end up being "let's negate a bunch of the challenge and play loop by setting up stuff" which is to be clear absolutely fair and reasonable, but in turn complicates the process of running the game on my end. My solution for now is to just not worry about any of it, and should they just get stuff like Continual Light or just other things that negate a lot of the dungeon challenge, I think that's okay as they are still only on floor 1 of Stonehell and there is plenty of other challenges yet to come. However I can't deny that feelings of the inadequacy around how simple the campaign is (and I am keeping it intentionally simple) are rubbing against the desire for players to make plans and bikeshed ideas and downtime stuff which is making me antsy. Something to ponder and keep in mind as the campaign goes on.