18 Adar, heavy rain. Oleander was back at the table this week, along with Jack and Anadalia from last week. I would have loved to have a full house for our last session of the semester, but alas, a heavy driving-culture city plus teenagers means occasionally a ride cannot be got. We had a good time, all the same.
Oleander popped out of the NPC cloud with her 60(!) rabbits in tow. They all managed to miss the hammer trap. The party dispatched the skeletons in the False Tomb quickly and was able to give Gorah’s party the slip while they were tending to their wounded. Suckers!
The party found the secret passage down to the Upper Tomb. They were being (mostly) appropriately cautious, and discovered a secret guard’s post. They crept a little too close to a sand-filled pit in the center of an octagonal room and were assaulted by horrific disembodied, mummified hands. Jack accidentally triggered a trap on the third step down, in the hallway to the east, but managed to catch himself before being shot down the now-ramp the stairs had transformed into.
The party hoisted Jack back up the ramp and kept exploring the other doors in the octagon, almost getting zapped by a lightning trap and discovering a paper that had what seemed like a name scrawled on it: “BALTOPLAT.”
Jack wanted to explore more down the stairs, in spite of hearing the ominous occasional grinding of stone-on-stone, so after the trap had reset, he made his way down with an umbilical rope. He was immediately set upon by a living statue with the head and tail of a cobra. Some ingenious spell usage was deployed here by Anadalia – first, she displaced Jack to confuse the stone guardian, then cast animate object on 3 “objects” – the guardian’s sword, shield, and the guardian itself. The guardian managed to hang onto the shield, and to keep control of itself, but its sword flew out of its hand and immediately came smacking back into it. Sadly, the session needed to wrap up, so we ended with the guardian taking a swing with its shield at Jack’s displaced image, but it whiffed badly enough to maintain the illusion. Jack then managed to score a hit with his pickaxe.
We voted for MVP, Embodiment, and Workhorse and doled out XP for those awards and bid each other l’hitraot until January 25.
Referee notes and lessons learned
This was a much more canonical “D&D” session, wholly dedicated to dungeon crawling. The three combats we engaged in are the sum total of all combats in 4 sessions of gaming, which really says something about how OSR this campaign is leaning. I am going to introduce some (non-lich-snake) NPCs into this dungeon, because I can feel Anadalia’s interest waning with the combats. This is not a combat-heavy module, per se, but it’s easy by happenstance to move from one battle to the next and miss the traps and tricks.
Rabbits!
The party kept trying to get Oleander’s rabbits to scout ahead. I had them roll a d12 to determine the hand of the clock in whose direction the rabbit was going to randomly scamper off and sniff uselessly at the floor. You want trained rabbits, you gotta train em!
I am not pushing on the verisimilitude here – the rabbits are strictly character flavor, so I am neither making them a help (without investment) or a hindrance. Once they’re helpful, then they will also be candidates to harm the party. If a horse won’t go into the underworld, why the hell would 60 rabbits on leashes? Because the rabbits can’t actually do anything currently. Or the party will think of something genuinely useful, without training them, and it’ll be, I’m sure, hilarious, and so I’ll be happy to indulge. No harm, no foul, grognards!
Animate Objection
I am also sure there are DM purists out there screaming at the idea of Animate Object affecting the equipped weapons of a Living Statue. I made a very conscious decision here:
- The spell came from a Chaos Spell Book (a Knave thing), which rolls a random spell every day. So this isn’t something they currently have constant access to.
- I had the Guardian roll a strength check for both equipped items. It lost one.
- I ruled that since the Guardian is a construct, it was an “object”. I may change this ruling in the future, but (I think?) I had it roll, effectively, a spells save.
- I didn’t want our first major combat to have a bunch of “no.” I did give them a decent number of “no, but” throughout the session, and I thought the solution was genuinely innovative.
- I’m not afraid of them breaking the game, because broken games can become other, unbroken games.
I do want them to try to think laterally about the problem. About the Guardian, Skerples says
The room is designed for the players to flank the Guardian, flee, push it into the chasm, or flee past it and hope it doesn’t follow them (it will, but only until it can no longer see or hear them).
I think they’re going to fight this thing to the death, where they could easily run from it. I’m going to overdo it with the uselessness of the battle by having zero loot. No magic shields on the wall, nothing.
Also, I was a little dejected that we had to cut right in the middle of a fight, for a two-month hiatus, no less. Thus is life!
Standard Practices
These are not seasoned dungeoneers. I’ve had to resort to just telling the party “YOU SHOULD WRITE DOWN THIS NAME.” I’ve played a fair amount of 5e, and I’ve always taken extensive notes, so I don’t think it’s a 5e culture thing, necessarily. Maybe it’s just kids? Maybe it’s their damned phones that they’re always SMSing on or whatever the hell it is and handwriting is a dying art and old man yells at cloud etc.
Regardless of cause, the fact is I need to be pushing them without railroading them. The occasional “would you like to listen at the door before opening it?” could go a long way in helping them see what’s possible and supportable by the system. Part of the downside of having a bunch of high schoolers with almost no autonomy or spending cash is that they don’t have copies of the book, PDF or otherwise, and they don’t necessarily even understand how I’m underpinning the rules with OSE, because in Session 0 I didn’t want to drown them in procedure. Procedure that, by the way, that they’re not going to actually WRITE DOWN grumble grumble.
Ultimately it’s a process, and I’m not going to put them in a position to be totally hosed by the rules. I will allow them to retcon the hell out of something they did based on a misunderstanding. The pivot to Tomb of the Serpent Kings has illuminated something for me – these kids are not necessarily prepared to just dive into a sandbox and know exactly what to do, and thus, having a “learning dungeon” is a great boost into the form. They’ll have to exit the dungeon soon and we can go back to choosing different paths, but for now they’re getting some good schoolin.