A Dungeon Game - Session 2

02 Oct, 2024

Session 1 is here. This was another 3 hour session so this is again a long report. I'm running this with A Dungeon Game.

This session saw the introduction of Garrow, a former astrologer with a constantly-bleeding nose.

While the group discussed what they wanted to achieve this week I made a couple of rolls - first to see if the bear had managed to get loose from the section of dungeon they trapped it in, and second to see if the Revealing Alarm sigil the group put on the crossroads in the dungeon last week got tripped by anybody. We assume a week of downtime between delves, so I rolled 6d6 for the latter as encounter rolls. They all came back negative, so nobody has been past that part of the dungeon this week. The bear was essentially another encounter roll, with a 1-in-6 chance of it getting loose. This one came back as positive, so I decided it had managed to widen an extant hole in the wall between two rooms and force its way out.

Meanwhile the party had decided they wanted to go ahead with their plan to remove the lead disc from the top of the well and sell it. They hired a couple of tunnel diggers and bought a wagon and a horse - things which aren't on my newly-created equipment list, so I grabbed my AD&D equipment list and took the prices from there (converting GP values to SP). We had previously established that the lead disc was going to require two wagons to transport due to its weight. They could only afford one wagon, so they resolved to doing two trips.

The pair of rooms where the well and the buried statues lie have a 2-in-6 chance of being occupied by Rusted Hammer employees undertaking excavations, but since the sigil hadn't been triggered I didn't make that check and let the room be empty. Leaving the wagon and the horse outside the dungeon - with another Revealing Alarm sigil placed on the wagon to alert them if anybody moved it - they headed inside with their tunnel diggers. A roll on my part determined that sawing the lead disc in half would take two Turns, so the group set a watch and let their employees go to work. They also asked the tunnel diggers how long it might take to excavate the statues buried in the wall in the adjoining room. They were advised that this job would take a week or more, requiring much more technical work than sawing a lead disc in half (erecting roof supports, etc).

Another pair of encounter rolls yielded nothing, so the group took the first half of their lead disc and loaded up the wagon with it. An encounter roll while doing this gave us doors slamming from distantly in the dungeon, which finally brought a sense of urgency and peril to what had so far been a very sedate delve. There was a brief discussion about having the tunnel diggers construct some sort of barricade in the passageway near the Revealing Alarm sigil, sealing the occupants of the dungeon behind it so that the group could go and explore the secret area. But, not knowing that the bear was free, they decided they would rather not seal themselves in a section of the dungeon that very probably contained the bear.

Eventually they decided to play it safe and at least extract the lead disc before doing anything else. Our normal convention is that returning to town makes time advance by a week, and we had a brief discussion about this since the lead disc was going to require two trips. We decided that it felt a little punitive to make it take two weeks in game to get both halves of the disc home, so we agreed that they could make two trips to retrieve the disc on the understanding that the full week following would be spent finding somewhere to fence the disc and asking around to find someone to fence the buried statues that they intended to excavate on their return. This meant no downtime activities like writing scrolls, healing (not that they needed it), buying new equipment, or hiring new retainers for the return delve.

During the week I made another batch of rolls for the Revealing Alarm sigil on the crossroads and advised the group that it had now been triggered.

Their plans to excavate the statues had now been pushed back another week due to their inability to hire more tunnel diggers in town, so they headed into the dungeon with a new plan - find a way to lock the secret door shut so that nobody else could open it (keeping the bear sealed, as far as they understood) and begin exploring the rest of the floor. This plan immediately went out of the window when they arrived at the dungeon to see light spilling out from beneath the door to the statue room, and the sounds of an excavation underway.

Peering under the door the group saw two pairs of booted feet on the far side of the room, clearly engaged in digging out the statues. There was a brief, whispered conversation about what approach to take - sneak past and leave them be, interrupt and introduce themselves and maybe find out some more about the dungeon, or take a violent approach.

The party chose the violent approach, deciding to subdue their opponents rather than kill them. They kicked in the door, spilling into the room and striking the pair of strangers from behind. From their position of surprise all of the attacks hit, and the enemies slumped to the ground. Unfortunately the party had failed to take note of their surroundings and didn't notice the Sellsword lurking in the corner on the same wall as the door. A morale check on my part showed that he didn't break, and so he stepped forward and struck Marius from behind with a mighty blow that would have felled the hero. Marius chose to sacrifice his helmet to negate the damage roll, and the party turned to face their surprise opponent.

Agility checks were made to see who would act first, and Marius elected to retaliate by striking the man with his lantern. There aren't any rules for using lanterns as weapons in A Dungeon Game but conveniently I had written about just such this situation in my example of play, so I used that ruling for this situation - the attack would deal 1d6 damage, and we'd use the normal light rules to determine how long the oil burned for. Marius' attack roll was one above his Brawn, but he used the -1 from his Scar to reduce the roll to exactly his Brawn - a crit.

The strike killed the Sellsword immediately, dousing the body and the entrance to the room in burning oil. I determined that the sound of the combat should trigger an encounter roll and finally got something of substance - the bear, at a distance of 60 feet. Marius quickly shoved the burning body out of the room into the passage and closed the door behind it, badly burning his arms and sealing the group in a pair of chambers with no exit (except, potentially, down the well) but also blocking the door and hopefully using the flames to keep the bear at bay.

While the body burned outside and Marius listened at the door for signs of the bear, the others interrogated the workers they had attacked. They learned that they were tunnel diggers hired in town who knew nothing of the dungeon. Upon a threat from Garrow to murder them if they didn't talk one of the hirelings soiled himself, and the group had a stark realisation that maybe they were the bad guys here. Deciding that they had scarred these poor men enough they waited for the bear - put off by the fire - to leave before escorting the hirelings out of the dungeon and sending them home with some silver from Katherine's supply. Meanwhile, Marius cut the arms off the immolated sellsword (now extinguished) to carry as bait for the bear.

The group headed into the room with the metal hoop and chained it to the wall with the clever application of some pitons, guessing that this would mean the door was unable to be opened from the other side. Then they headed south to explore some more. They soon came to the room with the small hole in the wall that looked through to another chamber. They found the door off its hinges, the hole in the wall massively and violently expanded, and the door in the adjoining room also demolished. They very quickly deduced that this was caused by the bear breaking free, a hunch confirmed by the existence of fur and blood on the sides of the hole in the wall.

Looking at their map the group deduced that the passage they were heading down would link back up to the room filled with skeletons that they had previously spiked shut, so they took this opportunity to cross over into the adjoining chambers (which they correctly deduced from their map were sealed beyond the secret door and otherwise inaccessible). Knowing that the bear was loose elsewhere in the dungeon, they took this as an opportunity to explore a section that they had previously written off.

Heading north to confirm their hunch that the passage linked up with the secret door, they found a room containing 7 small statutes of the same woman in identical poses, hands outstretched and feet wrapped in vines. The quality improved across the series of statues, as though someone had been practicing their sculpt. There was some debate about the potential value of them, but the group decided to press on rather than try to extract them.

To the south they came to a room with another statue of the same woman in the same pose (though bigger, and with slight differences - the vines this time were around here head, not her feet). A huge slab of stone dominated the south wall, looking something like a door with no obvious means of opening it.

Initially they talked about using crowbars to pry the slab off the wall, before Garrow asked if the statue's hands were outstretched. Seeing that they were, Marius put one of the severed arms in the hands. The statue accepts sacrifices of food and money and, since the arms were explicitly bait for the bear, I decided that these constituted food. The arm burned up and turned to ash, and suddenly a puzzle presented itself.

This began a section of play that I think was a little frustrating for the group. They spent a lot of time experimenting with putting things in the hands, trying to figure out what did or didn't burn and also trying to work out what connection the statue has to the stone slab. Unfortunately there's no connection, and a lot of time was wasted here.

I tried to apply some time pressure with random encounters (we got another instance of doors slamming) and light checks (a lantern went out while trying to figure out this 'puzzle') but the group had become determined to figure this out. Eventually I decided to try and move things along by montaging over things, telling them explicitly that over the course of the next ten minutes or so they would figure out that the statue burned food and coin but didn't seem to have any impact on the stone slab at all. In a final attempt to work out what was going on, Marius put his hand in the bowl.

We had already determined that human meat constituted food, and so I had him make a Brawn save which he failed. 1d6 damage later - having already been burned by the immolated sellsword earlier - Marius was on 0 hit points, taking another Scar, and rolling to see if he died. Since he passed this check I ruled that he came back to consciousness at 1hp, and advised the group that there was still no movement with the slab.¹

This seemed to get the job done, and the group once again turned their attention to the stone slab and the tools at their disposal. A couple of crowbars later and they got the slab off the wall, triggering another encounter roll with no result and being greeted by a gust of cold, fetid air from beyond the slab.

Down a small passage they came to a room with 12 chains running floor to ceiling, each of them holding a lantern that sat cold and dark on the floor. The floor was loose dirt, with the gleam of gold and silver twinkling from beneath the earth in their torchlight.

As they moved into the room I described the shadows moving and writhing on their own accord and the group hesitated for a moment. The shadows began to peel themselves off the walls, loping slowly across the room towards the group, and I asked them for actions.

Everyone fled back to the statue room with the exception of Marius. I had him roll Agility to see if he could act before the shadows, which he failed, and so they descended on him. Twelve attack rolls later Marius was very much dead. Shadows deal both hit point damage and Brawn damage, and unfortunately Marius' Brawn wasn't high enough to resist this onslaught, so he simply perished there with no hope of recovery at the expense of a new Scar.

The party fled, leaving Marius' body in the chamber with the lights and the shadows and very relived to find that they weren't pursued. Back in town they managed to bank the XP they gained for overcoming the Sellsword and the two tunnel diggers, and we left the session with a discussion about whether or not they would try to recover Marius' body in order to perform a funeral (for which I'll be using the rules we use in Luke Gearing's Wednesday OD&D game, namley that XP can be purchased on a 1:1 ratio using GP [or in this case, sp]).

#adungeongame #playreports