A Dungeon Game Session 1
Last night I ran the first session of what will hopefully be an ongoing bi-weekly campaign through my Dungeon23 megadungeon, using A Dungeon Game.
As with the other play reports I've written I'm less interested in narrativizing play and more interested in talking about the procedures I'm using and the decisions I'm making "behind the screen". There's a lot of mystique about what GMing actually entails that puts people off trying it and I'd like to help demystify it as much as I can.
If you read my previous play report from when I ran this using Mausritter then the initial parts of this report will be familiar. The dungeon is bigger now, though, and it's being run using the system I'm writing it for.
This was a 3 hour session, so this report is long.
Character creation took about five minutes, and threw up some interesting decisions. Osmund decided to learn some Rituals and, having only lost 1 max hit point after learning his first Ritual (a Sigil of Limerent Peace) decided to gamble and learn a second one (a Sigil of Glimmering Abominations). Katherine went back and forth on whether or not to learn any, being happy with their overall stats, until realising that when rolling an Extra they'd gained an additional 3 Brawn. Since the cost of Rituals can come off max health or an attribute they decided to take that extra Brawn and essentially exchange it for a Ritual, reducing it by 2 to learn a Revealing Alarm Ward. Marius decided to forego rituals, sticking with an impressive array of attributes and health instead.
Created and equipped, the adventurers headed into the dungeon with no information or goal other than exploring and extracting some treasure. In the first room they found lanterns hanging from the ceiling, some already lit and others extinguished due to lack of oil. From this they established that they are not alone in the dungeon, and proceeded with appropriate caution. Osmund took the lit lantern from the ceiling, stowing his own to preserve his oil.
They ignored the door to the south, instead heading to the tapestry along the wall that was swaying slightly in a warm breeze. Katherine pulled the tapestry aside, revealing a rough hole knocked in the wall giving access to an adjoining room. Spying that the hole was supported by new wooden beams and that the debris had been piled neatly in the corner of the room, the group took this as confirmation of their suspicions of not being alone here. (This was the result of an encounter roll of "1. A gust of wind from deeper in the dungeon", which interacted with the tapestry and the hidden hole in the wall behind it quite nicely.)
Heading through the door to the south the group came to a passage that ran west-east, with junctions at both ends. They chose to head to the door to the east, opening it up and finding themselves in a room with the arms of statues protruding from the walls and a rusted iron door to the south. As they entered I called for a light roll from Osmund, which was failed. His lantern guttered but didn't go out, and we increased it to 2d6 for the next roll.
This room, as written, has a 1-in-6 chance that members of the Rusted Hammer are here and actively engaged in excavating the statues. I forgot about this. When I remembered I rolled and got a 1, but I'm already described the room as being empty and told the players that they heard nothing when they listened at the door before opening it, so I ignored the result. In hindsight there was no need for me to roll it.
The group spent some time examining the arms of the statue, poking and prodding at them to determine if they were actual statues or perhaps petrified people. They dug out some of the dirt around the hands to reveal more of the arms, but determined that it would take time and equipment to fully excavate them. They decided to come back at a later date, and turned their attentions to the iron door carved with runes and holy symbols. Since Osmund is a Clergyman and knows two Sigils, we decided that this was enough experience with religion and magical glyphs to determine that none of the symbols on the door was a Sigil or a magical trap of some kind. Thus, they turned their attention to the hinges, which were rusted solid.
The discussion about how to open the door went on for a while, so I made some encounter rolls but got nothing. I also called for a light roll, and this time it was failed with a 6 on the die and the lantern went out. The group took this as a sign that they'd lingered too long, and vowed to come back to this room later.
Heading south they soon came to another junction and once again opted to go through the door to the west rather than follow a long passage. They found themselves in a small room with a door on the opposite wall and a metal hoop protruding from the masonry beside it. Pulling the hoop revealed that it was attached to a bar that extended to around 3 feet. When fully extended the doors to the room locked, and the group heard a grinding noise from beyond the western door.
After some experimentation the group discovered that the hoop opened a secret door in the western passage, but that it locked the doors to the room. They decided to take a hammer to the panels in the door, knocking the bottom out of it so that they could lock the doors and crawl through it. Since this was going to be noisy I rolled for encounters, getting a result of "6. The scrape of claws on stone. Heavy panting. A bear, flesh studded with broken blades. Hungry." An encounter distance roll produced a result of 80 feet, and so I described the noise coming from around the corner to the north.
Katherine, who had been outside the room, immediately crawled back through the hole they had created in the door to the relative safety of the room. As the group stood there inactive trying to decide what to do I described the sounds approaching, trying to force them into action through a little pressure. With nothing happening the bear reached the door, swiping a paw through the hole they had created before pushing its snout through into the room. Realising that the doors weren't locked, Katherine pulled the hoop to lock the doors and open the secret door.
At this point I made a reaction roll for the bear to try to determine what it would do. Getting a result of "7. Uninterested" I had the bear move away to the south through the secret door. Seeing this, the group closed it again and determined not to explore that section of the dungeon now that the bear was trapped in it. In hindsight, I think I should probably have awarded XP for the bear for this, but I didn't and nobody complained and there's a good chance the bear will come into play again in future sessions when they've interacted with the Rusted Hammer and learned that the adventuring party wants the bear dead.
They headed back to the junction and decided to push east, figuring that there was a high likelihood of ending up near the bear again if they went south. Another light roll saw another lantern extinguished due to a 6 on the die, and the group lit their third light.
They pressed on to the east, becoming increasingly nervous about the long passage they found themselves in. A series of three doors revealed themselves and they took the opportunity to get off this passage and start heading south again, but they soon found a room flooded with murky water and decided that they didn't like the idea of trying to cross this room without any way of knowing what the water might hold. While they were discussing this I called for a light roll and my encounter check turned up an encounter of "The scrape of metal on stone. Hushed voices. 2d6 Torchbearers and 2 Sellswords heading back to the base of the Rusted Hammer." Encounter distance was 110 feet, and so I placed this group far down the eastern corridor heading away from the party in the direction of the Rusted Hammer's base at the other side of the floor. I normally like to have encounters moving towards the group, but this was a good opportunity to lean into the tense, eerie mood that had been developing as the group kept seeing evidence of other people in the dungeon but not encountering them.
At this point the light check I called for produced our third extinguished lantern in about an hour of play, and I stopped so that we could discuss it. It was annoying me a little bit - especially asking the players to make a light check every Turn - and I wanted to know how they felt about it. Initially I suggested switching to the light system from The Vanilla Game for the rest of the session, but it wasn't annoying the group as much as I thought it was. We decided that we'd do away with the "lights automatically extinguish if the dice show a 6" part of the rules but keep the rest. I also made the decision to only call for rolls every other Turn rather than every Turn.
With that decided, the group pressed on to the next door and found a newly constructed wall immediately behind it. Some questioning about the nature of its construction and discussions about whether mortar can securely fix bricks to wooden door frames followed, and the group decided they could simply push the wall over into the room beyond. They did, and I rolled for encounters due to the noise but none were triggered. Inside they found a stone coffin, the lid mortared in place. Katherine knocked on the lid and something immediately knocked back, making the lid shudder and sending cracks through the mortar.
Osmund decided to use his Limerent Peace Sigil, etching it directly onto the top of the coffin. The trigger for the sigil being activated was "the creature in the coffin opens the lid". Writing a sigil takes a minute, so I rolled a d6 for the wight inside the coffin. I decided that if the die showed a 6 it would break the mortar and interrupt the casting, but it didn't. Osmund rolled to control the spell and succeeded, and the sigil settled into the stone. Since the group was still knocking on the lid and trying to goad the creature out, and since it was obvious they wanted to see the spell (and their plan) take effect, I described the lid being pushed aside and falling to the ground, cracking through the centre of the sigil, the sigil flashing blue with the release of magic. I made a saving throw for the wight and failed, and so the Limerent Peace spell took effect and the wight simply sat up in its coffin and exhaled gently.
The group tried to talk to it, but they soon realised it couldn't speak and that the spell holding it to peace was going to expire in 10 minutes. So instead they decided to kill the thing. With 10 minutes until the sigil expired there was little reason to have the group roll attack rolls or damage against a creature that couldn't defend itself, and so I awarded XP and the group put the room behind them.
After finding a large chapel to the south, where they looted a silver chalice and a bottle of wine from a hidden compartment in a stone altar, they headed north to a room with a large, felted table and a set of dice carved from human knuckles. My encounter roll gave us "Stifled sobbing. Arduin, a villager. Scared and hiding from the Rusted Hammer" at a distance of 60 feet. I placed her in the adjoining room, and the group followed the sound of her crying to find her huddled against a collapsed portion of ceiling that was blocking some stairs down to a lower level. The group approached cautiously, assuring her that they weren't going to hurt her, and she asked that they escort her back to the entrance of the dungeon. I asked about how fast they intended to move and they told me they wanted to go as quickly as possible, confident in their route because they had been mapping during exploration. Because they were going to be fast and loud I rolled 3 encounters, none of which turned up anything, and the group returned Arduin to the entrance of the dungeon and helped her leave.
Back where we started, the group decided to take another look at the iron door they'd left behind earlier. This time they decided to smash the hinges off and get it open, letting it fall to the ground with a huge thud. The encounter roll this triggered gave me the bear result again, but since they'd already sealed it off in another part of the dungeon nothing happened.
Here they found a well capped with a 7" thick, 3 foot diameter lead disc. They spent some time calculating how much it must weigh (we settled on somewhere around 1300kg) and trying to figure out how much it might be worth, as well as trying to decide how to extract it from the dungeon give its mass. The decision they reached was that upon their return to town they'd get a wagon, block and tackle, and tools to cut it (since lead is a soft metal that can be cut), with the intention of breaking it into pieces to make transporting it easier. This will presumably be the goal of a future session.
After this they continued to explore, heading to the south this time, charting rooms and growing increasingly anxious as they continued to have no real encounters beyond gusts of wind and slamming doors from elsewhere in the dungeon. They came to a large octagonal room with a huge metal hexagon in the floor, broken pulleys rusted to the ceiling above it. Some prodding and poking (and some loud jumping on the metal plate) convinced them that there was hollow space beneath it, prompting one of the players to ask, "what the hell is going on in this dungeon?" They decided that this is probably the cap of an oubliette that contains something horrific, and thought it best to stop poking at it until they're better equipped to deal with whatever might be beneath it.
This room held a few exits - a door spiked shut to the west, another long straight passage to the east, and a shirt staircase ascending to the south. They decided to take the staircase, finding that it levelled out to a walkway set with narrow arrow slits that looked down onto a dark room below. At this point the mapper realised he was going to have trouble with this section - and I realised I'd made a huge mistake.
There are three north-south passages that enter this section of the dungeon. Because I was running the dungeon from the maps in my notebook (which are broken into chunks) rather than my complete map, I picked the wrong entrance for the group. They should have come into a room further west of the octagonal room, and while this section is explicitly designed to be hard to map, it's not meant to have actually impossible geography. As soon as I realised the mistake I told the group what had happened and how to fix their map (shift the octagonal room 60' to the right, basically) and they thankfully weren't annoyed or upset about it. I offered to tell them how the rest of the geography here links up to the sections they'd already mapped, but they were happy to just keep exploring and try to link it up themselves.
They headed back to the octagonal room, took the spikes out of the door to the east, and found themselves in a room filled with skeletons (4d6, to be specific, which rolled out to 17 skeletons total). In the corner stood a statue with one ruby eye and a hollow where another ruby once sat, and another door on the opposite side of the room. The mapper guessed that this would bring them back to where they could start linking up part of their map.
They were, of course, very concerned about the skeletons and had two theories - either that the skeletons would animate if disturbed, or that the statue would animate if disturbed. To test this, Katherine threw a stone into the room, aiming to hit the skeletons. The moment it made contact they began to rise, and the group beat a hasty exit and spiked the door shut again.
Although they'd entered the octagonal room from the north, my mapping error and the subsequent fix meant they didn't actually know what lay to the north of it now, so they headed up that way and found themselves at a crossroads where they could go northwest or northeast. Based on their map they assumed that west would take them back to the flooded room, which they still wanted to avoid, and that east would wrap around to the large chapel and the long west-east passage they'd been in earlier, so they headed east. Here they found themselves in a huge room filled with pillars wrapped in vines, and a massive stone tree in the centre with unlit lanterns hanging from it. There were several exits from the room heading east and south, and one door in the north wall that linked back to the large chapel they'd looted earlier.
After poking around the tree a little they decided to light one of the lanterns. This immediately caused a ghostly choir to rise up, singing hymns that grew up volume until the sound flooded the dungeon. This triggered three encounter rolls, all of which bore fruit. I got the bear again, a pained animal scream from somewhere in the dungeon, and the sound of slamming doors - nothing that would actually put the party in danger, but the players didn't know that. They decided to beat a retreat back to the entrance, plotting a route using their map and moving as quickly as possible. Another couple of encounter rolls didn't produce anything, and light rolls all succeeded, so the group escaped successfully and managed to get back to town to bank their loot and gain some XP.