Up and At ‘Em! [session 16]

Adventurers Present

Bilbo - hobbitish rogue

Hugh Kha-Rez - draconian barbarian (joined late and left early)

Mossmullet (Kronral Ungart) - dwarfley cleric

Orsek Ungart - dwarfley barbarian wizard

Red - elfin rogue (joined late)

Thik Thak - orcine fighter (joined late)

Awakening in the depths of the lower caverns of Quasqueton, the group was a bit on the small side: only Bilbo, Mossmullet and Orsek were present for the first couple hours of play.  However, this team proved plenty capable of tackling the challenges they faced.

Heading up the stairs back to the upper level of the dungeon, they raced through an unprecedented number of rooms.  They found a trophy room of the original inhabitants, filled with moderately valuable statutes, tapestries, and other nice but ultimately overlarge treasures.  Making a careful note on the map (“dragon skin”), they had little choice but to leave these items behind and continue looking for smaller, more valuable trinkets.  Heading on, they found a large throne room with a small but valuable onyx dragon statue.  Carefully exploring the room for traps and deciding it was safe, they pocketed the statue and moved on.  A nearby corridor ended in a suspiciously walled up wooden alcove, so the party successfully explored it and located a secret door.  The door led to the long-dead fighter/owner’s wood-paneled bedroom (very 70s, right?), and crossing the room immediately led to an attack by the monsters under the bed: 4 giant centipedes.  They were dispatched, but not before striking a monstrous critical hit on Orsek, doing enough damage to fell a rhino and even overcoming his dwarfley resilience to poison.  Happily, Orsek’s a tough little SOB, and he just walked it off.

The three then found some additional loot in some girl’s room, then some more loot in a storeroom.  They then followed a ridiculously long corridor back around to the throne room, where they finally noticed another door which they’d somehow missed before.  Inside was an ash pit with some filthy, filthy lucre in it, and an ugly demon-face statue on the wall.  As they looked at the demon-face (and broke off its nose), 5 ratlings found them and attacked.  The battle was extremely one-sided, and 4 of the 5 were dispatched to the ratling afterworld when the fifth surrendered.  He was tied with rope, and forced to lead the way to yet another bedchamber.  This new room belonged to the fighter’s retainer, and held even better loot than the fighter’s room had.  But before they could explore and collect, they had to deal with a VERY whiny giant mushroom (Shrieker), which only stopped its infernal racket when the party chopped it up into veggie burgers.  The party discovered a cask of tasty ale, which  healed up everyone’s wounds (liquid courage!), while also leaving Mossmullet and especially Orsek a bit inebriated.  So much so, in fact, that this second ratling prisoner AGAIN managed to slip away from the group!

Bunches of Fun
It was right about this point that the three were joined by more players: Red, Hugh and Thik Thak.  The enlarged party soon came to an enlarged room, filled with 14 different small pools of watery stuff of variable interest and lethality.  The first pool, once the heroes decided to drink from it, had magical healing properties (much like the ale but with far less drunk-and-disorderliness about it).  The remaining pools revealed fun things like: goldfish, super-inebriants, acid, boiling water, sparkle-glow water, green slime, magical muteness, mud of unknown qualities and sleeping potion.  It was fun, but took FOREVER to explore.  Next the group found a secret door, and found yet another bedroom.  Which had some valuable stuff in it, but nothing of real interest.

The group then wandered through a bunch of corridors and some rooms which they’d previously explored, like, 7 or 8 sessions ago, culminating in actually locating the exit!  Hooray!  Hooray for mapping!  Hooray for not wandering in circles until you drop from boredom and exhaustion!  Mapping GOOD!!!

After finally having a beginning-end connection to this dungeon, the group went back to exploring new territory.  They went and found a long room with some kind of flying pac-man monster in it.  The monster was probably big and bad and tough, but his attack was poorly timed in a meta-gaming sense; the players were tired and about to end the session, so they pulled out all the stops, used their Inspirations, and unloaded upon the poor beast.  Frying pans did 19 damage, Guiding Bolts of Lightning did even more, and the creature was nuked before it could so much as emit a whimper.  Thus ended the gaming session.  But more fun awaits the intrepid interlopers (yeah, there it is - you know you’ve been waiting for my inevitable alliterations!) in Quasqueton, since it appears that about half of the first level remains unexplored.  Hooray!

Party Experience Gained
(for those who could be there the whole time - the others earned less)

Combat:  148 each
Exploration:  325 each