A Dungeon Game Session 0 - Play Report
Dungeon 23 created a lot of noise when Sean McCoy first floated the idea in late 2022. Unsurprisingly lots of people jumped on board and then lost steam and didn't complete their dungeons, which was always going to be the case. I tried the exercise again in 2024 and was one of the failures, but my D23 dungeon continues to live on and I'm about to start running it for the fourth or fifth time.
Every Wednesday for the past couple of years I've been playing in Luke Gearing's ongoing megadungeon campaign using Delving Deeper. He's unable to commit to it for the next couple of months, so I've offered to take over the slot and run A Dungeon Game. I've previously run my D23 dungeon in this slot a couple of times when Luke's game hasn't run, so we're just going to pick off where those older sessions left off even though the last one was over a year ago. Luckily I keep good notes.
I've previously written session reports for this dungeon from playthroughs using Mausritter and an older version of A Dungeon Game. You can find them on the #playreports tag. The early rooms of this dungeon are very thoroughly covered in those reports. This post serves as a very quick recap of the two sessions we've previously played, just to serve as baseline context for things going forward.
In session one the party made their way to a small room off what appeared to be a main central corridor, where they encountered two men proclaiming themselves members of the Rusted Hammer, who claim this level of the dungeon as their territory. They were engaged in excavating some stone statues buried in the walls of the dungeon, and they chatted to the group and explained some of the lay of the land.
During the conversation a positive encounter roll produced the bear that dwells on this floor, a hulking thing studded with the broken weapons of those who have tried to slay it and failed in the past. The group immediately prepared themselves, making use of magic to coat themselves in shadows and to place a sigil of Preserving Life upon the forehead of one member of the group. Another successful casting of Rambling Peace rendered the bear "festival drunk", and it began to trundle away from the group down the corridor.
Unfortunately Plorg saw this as an opportunity to lasso a mace from the back of the bear, prompting a new reaction roll. Angered, the bear turned to attack the group, who unleashed attacks on it as they fell back through the doorway. The session ended with Jenny falling to the bear's hug but being revived by her Preserving Life sigil, and a failed morale roll on the bear's part causing it to flee into the dungeon. The group chose to stay here between sessions, wanting to pursue the bear rather than allow a week to pass.
The next session saw a much smaller group, just Jenny and Grundle showing up to play. They began where we had left off the previous session, with the bear fleeing into the complex. They began to follow it but soon lost the track, and found themselves moving slowly along long corridors with few branching paths.
After a little exploring they found a series of doors, one of which was bricked up. They began to drill through it, creating a hole large enough to reveal a large sarcophagus. They realised that the wall had been erected quite hastily and were able to push it down to give access to the room beyond.
Upon opening the sarcophagus the pair were faced with a foul undead creature that immediately began to strike at them with a silvered sword coated with runes. They managed to get the door locked with the creature inside, and then Jenny cast a Ceremony of Combusting Swarm that she intended to trigger when the creature came through the doorway. A catstrophic failure on her Cunning check saw the spell go off, destroying the creature but burning out her ability to ever perform magic again.
Battered and bruised but in possession of the sword, the pair fled back to town and Jenny began looking to her new life as a warrior rather than a mage.
That brings us up to date. Tomorrow's session will officially be "Session 1" of this new campaign but, for at least some of the players, will mark their third delve into the dungeon.