The Dungeon Game: Weekends at Stonehell, session 9
Tiny Tina and Telperion go on a side mission to find out what has happened with Coal the Bear, and end up recruiting a down on their luck gang of bandits.
Party Members
- Tiny Tina - Level 3 Cleric
- Telperion Desh - Level 3 Magician
Followers
Sinthia 3 (Fighter 1), Medium Sized Marta (Fighter 2)
Session Recap
In-Universe Date: April 18th, 3017
Jug, one of the party's commoners at their Crownfall Keep base, spots some bandits wearing a distinct black and yellow checkered bandanas leading away Coal the Bear up the switchback on the southern end of Stonehell's valley.
Tiny Tina, who had spent the last two weeks trying to befriend the bear, recruits Telperion to go help her investigate what is going on. They grab the party's regular muscle, the women-at-arms Marta and Sinthia and head out early in the morning to explore the area.
They stumble into a cave system used by the bandits as a base of operations. They fight and kill a few brigands and in the process an errant Sleep spell also hits Coal the Bear, who the brigands had lured into the cave for some unknown reason.
Exploring some more the group find themselves into a small kitchen area inhabited by an ornery parrot that starts to squawk and cause a noise, drawing the attention of one Zorrel Gnast, a beared one-eyed warrior and leader of the Ghost Beggars gang that reside in the caves.
Confused by how these people got here, Marta swings at him with her magical greataxe, causing him a fair deal of damage. After the party overpower the slightly disorganized bandits Zorrel surrenders. Tiny Tina heals him of the wound they inflicted on him, and the two groups get to talking. Zorrel in his youth was a pirate (going by the adventuring name Captain Nasty) and his gang had not been having the best of luck, bleeding members of the years and most recently having half their numbers killed in a botched attempt on a caravan.
The Crownless Company decide to recruit what is left of the Ghost Beggars gang, who at this point almost seem relieved to not have to deal with any of this shit and worry about where their next meal will come from. Telperion offers Zorrel personally to join the Crownless Company and come adventure with them, which he agrees. This banditry business had not been going great so he figured returning to his youthful adventuring days might make him feel better.
Later on, as Tina the Titanic and the rest of the groups negotiate the specific terms of the two groups joining, Zorrel pulls aside Telperion and confides in him that the reason he operates so close to Stonehell is that he is looking for his sister, a woman by the name of Esmalia. She had fallen with a gang of what turned out to be wererats and has now been cursed by lycanthropy as well. His plan is to somehow save her and cure her if he can, or kill her if he can't. Telperion promises to help him with this endeavor, and also swears not to tell Zorrel's men about any of it.
With negotiations complete and the various treasures the bandits had incorporated into the Crownless Company's liquid assets, the two groups settle in planning for the future.
Observations
A small, but eventful session this week. Due to ongoing issues of lack of players and additional drops of some of the regulars, this session I had only two people. They were not going to get much done in Stonehell proper, so I prepared a quick side adventure, by using Michael Curtis's Supplement One: The Brigand Caves. I had wanted to incorporate this one into the campaign as it directly ties to floor 1 of Stonehell itself, and this was the perfect opportunity to do so.
While I was not surprised that the party would do short work of the brigands (Telperion as a level 3 Magician has access to up to 5 casts of Sleep per day, meaning that most low level encounters are effectively solved already), I did not expect Zorrel the leader to roll such insanely high reaction rolls when offered to negotiate with and surrender. This ended up becoming a wonderful transition into a rules change I have made for the campaign regarding recruits and hirelings.
While I normally enjoy the logistics game of figuring out all these followers, their morale, loyalty, housing, food etc etc (and have done so in previous campaigns like Between the Serpents of Smoke & Steel), I did not really want this for The Dungeon Game. Instead something I had had percolating in my head for a few years now is making it so that a character can only have one sidekick or companion, but that one follower gets a lot more XP and just generally works as a secondary character and potential replacement for a dead PC.
This obviously causes some issues with the way the party had operated so far, but the encounter with Zorrel just presented a perfect opportunity and he is now Telperion's Companion, providing a fairly beefy fighter to keep the magician safe.
I also have decided to ramp up the XP gain in the game as well. Reading oldhawkeye's excellent post on the topic the current setup I have is this: Any XP gained during the session is not split, but is earned by every character that participated, with every Companion in turn gaining half of that amount. The party still gain XP for killing enemies, getting treasure and finding magical items, but it is not split up anymore. Further more, characters can level multiple times up to level 3, after which they can only gain 1 level per session, regardless of how much XP they got.
With how XP requirements for leveling double up it means that even with good sessions like this one (where the party got 2953 xp from all the loot from the Ghost Beggars that they acquired for themselves) leveling will not get too fast, which was an issue I had in the Greylands and later in BSSS.
To be fair, the issue I had there was not exactly the PCs having higher stats, as much as me not being able to figure out how to design higher level challenges for those mid-level PCs. With the Dungeon Game simply running people through Stonehell, that issue is already taken care of for me by the module, so I am a lot more confident letting people level up faster.
We have yet to see how these changes will affect the campaign, as this was the first session using them, but I an confident it'll work out especially with my broadly smaller table than what I aim for. While I much prefer to have 5 or even 6 people for open table arcade dungeon crawling, I simply have not been able to consistently get that. It's odd and baffling, especially as I have not had that issue 4 years ago when I ran the Greylands and BSSS, but I suppose times change and people find other stuff to do.