Two Weeks and No Game

There was no session this past week.

The weather and a comedy of other things killed it. One of those things that had any one thing gone differently we would have played.

I certainly can’t say I’m blameless, but oh well. It’s too late now.

We better be able to play this week though. I think I’m going through withdrawal.

As for the game itself, I think I need to loosen up a little bit on the difficulty level on the players. The only issue with that is that I know what kind of the stuff the party could get and I’ve heard plenty of things about the dungeon giving out a lot of treasure – after the first little bit.

To give a bit more in actual Rappan Athuk, my goal is to have more in-dungeon combats, and less in-wilderness combats.

So no more d6’s are being rolled for random encounter, we’re back to the d12. In non-traveled wilderness a 1 or 2 is an encounter, but on trails only 1 indicates an encounter of some kind. And now that the party is slightly higher in level, the combats won’t be so draining, so that should help as well.

The more I look at the new 4E recovery rules (modified for 3E), the more I like them and am fairly sure we’re going to adopt unless someone in the group puts up a good argument against the idea.

I’m getting eager to find other 4E rules that can be adapted to our game that won’t change what we have set up already. I know there have been changes to the hit point gains when leveling (no more rolling for hp), but I think we’ll be sticking with what I’ve made.

I’m also wondering if I should contact Necromancer games to see if it’s ok to scan the maps and show them online to make it easier for readers to follow the group’s exploits like I did with the WLD.

See you in a week.

Rappan Athuk #6 - The Lair of Dungie

Now that WotC is actually releasing more information about the rules of 4E, I’m once again getting hopeful.

There has been mention that it’s possible to have entire parties without spellcasters being required. That is something the game has long needed. The crutch of needing a cleric has long been a problem for D&D, especially for 3E.

Dale has told us a story of a campaign he once played in where the only healing they had came from a 2E paladin. That paladin was treated like royalty by the group.

If that happens in our group, we just make a rule – first player to lose a PC makes a healer.

Then there are the changes to the death and dying rules, which I believe we’ll be adding at our next session.

The rules are simple enough, and they’ve listed modifications for use with 3E.
If you’re knocked to 0 hp or less, you’re unconscious and dying.
Each round after that on your action, roll 1d20.
20 = you’re regained a third of your hp and are ready to fight some more.
11-19 = you stabilize and are done rolling, unconscious but stable.
1-10 = you get slightly worse. If you get three of these, you’re dead.
If at any point in time someone heals you, you heal as if you were at 0hp, not -7hp or something.

That is a great improvement to the mechanics at higher level when you can be smacked for more than 20 points of damage in a single hit. There are plenty of times where being at unconscious at -1hp is much more desirable to being left standing with 1hp.

So my rating for D&D this week is:
Crunch = +3. I’m getting very hopeful for this new edition’s setup to make things both simple yet elegant enough to handle most situations.
Fluff = -3. I’ve seen no change to the debacle that is the new Forgotten Realms, but being able to run Dragonlance in pre-cataclysm is much more possible without the need for a healing cleric any longer.
So the net is a 0. Another new high.

As for the game session, it was a bit disappointing.
I killed 3 PC’s that night, only one can I solely attribute to players.

There was no Justin or Joy this week. So their dwarf and elf PC’s (Bash & Saeri) got a room together at the inn and we shall tease them mercilessly about what went on in that room.

Last week the party had very little money and was not willing to waste it at the inn by getting in a bidding war for a room.

So at a late time of 5pm, the party left the village for the ruined tower to sleep there.

But, as expected, they had a random encounter.

Once again a pair of forest trolls jumped down out of the trees and attacked the party.
And once again, the party took a great deal of poison damage, much more than the last time they fought this species of troll.

The DM and the party each made some mistakes for this encounter.

The DM’s mistake was realizing too late that these trolls are a tough CR4 or an easy CR5. They are listed as CR4, but their constitution poison makes them tougher than they appear.

The party’s mistake was not concentrating all of their attacks on one target. That is something you must do when dealing with regenerating or fast healing creatures.

The end result - the trolls were defeated, but everyone in the party had been poisoned multiple times.

Lars died when his constitution dropped to 0.

Mouse had a positive con and was stable, but had -8 hit points when the poison fully kicked in.

Saver had a similar problem, but was only at -3hp.

I actually had to look up the unattended rules in the death and dying section. The results, every hour the PC’s had a 10% chance to stabilize to 0hp, failure meant they lost another hit point.

Now Dale claims that he would had just considered this a TPK and started off with a new group. But I thought that would be a waste. And how often do you have a fight were everyone dies or falls unconscious on both sides? I looked at this as an opportunity.

One hour went by with no random encounter and a hit point lost by Mouse and Saver.

A second hour went by with another hit point lost by each, with Mouse dying as a result. A random encounter is rolled, and now the opportunity comes in.

Ryan and Javier (Aaron’s and Brian’s new PC’s – a half-orc fighter/rogue & an elf fighter/favored soul) were on their way through the woods to find the fabled dungeon of Rappan Athuk until they ran across a group of bugbears.

Luckily they hadn’t been seen and used the opportunity to take out a few bugbears. When one or two would break away from the main group of bugbears, Ryan and Javier would follow them and take them down.

They were following a group of four this time around when the situation to turned from a game of sport to a rescue operation.

The bugbears had happened across a field of battle with 5 bodies, 3 human and 2 troll.

Neither Ryan nor Javier could make out what was being said, but it was obvious it had something to do with dinner and loot until one of the bugbears noticed that Saver wasn’t dead (yet).

Two of the bugbears scouted in different directions to search for something (no one spoke the language) and the party saw that as their sign.

When Javier cast Magic Weapon on Ryan’s guisarme, one of the bugbear’s keen ears heard the words of the spell and combat began.

The combat was difficult and took a while, but the two PC’s took the bugbears down with no small thanks to half of the bugbears being 3 rounds away.

While Ryan looted the bugbears, Javier helped Saver. After some chatting they decided to join up and head to town.

Read that as: “They saw the PC stamp on each other’s forehead, so they joined up.”

It was 10pm at least by this time, and none of the PC’s had tracking. Saver barely had an idea of where the tower was (to the east) or where the village was (to the north). He had always had people do that for him.

The roughly followed the trail to the north, but quickly got lost. What should have been a 4 hour long trek at the most turned out to be an 8 hour random walk through the forest (all while carting Saver’s two dead comrades).

Twice did they come across a grove of grey trees that whispered to them, and not in a good way and once they had heard the pained sounds of a large bird. Each time they either paused or backed away.

Eventually they did find a road, and were going to rest, but a patrol came along and escorted the exhausted group to town.

They spent the next two days resting up and improving their equipment with the treasure they got off the bugbears and the previous 2 PC’s, who were both given a proper burning by Saver.

Trake, the weaponsmith, was quite sad to hear of Vars’s death when they sold back to him the bastard sword he had just forged.

After two days and Saver buying a new map to the dungeon, the party once again left for Rappan Athuk.

Somehow they made it all the way to the dungeon with no encounters.

With only a party of 3 they decided upon finishing searching the first level of the dungeon while avoiding Dungie.

First things first, Saver had to fill the new PC’s in on what has been found so far. Unfortunately for everyone, Dale forgot to mention some details.

They made it through the graveyard and mausoleum safely, and even found the partially-cleared rubble room with nothing bad happening to them.

Until they got to some of the traps in that series of rooms, each with a trap that Saver (Dale) partially remembered some of them, but he wasn’t paying attention very closely the first time around. So when they came across the 20’ deep pit trap, Ryan fell into it, with a ghast there to cushion his fall.

Then they were at the T-intersection that leads south, to the rat cavern, and north, to unexplored areas and the probable home of Dungie.

Being semi-brave adventurers, north was their direction of choice.

Shortly up the hallway, 50’ or so, the came to an open doorway with some arrows sticking out of the frame and a badly corroded humanoid skeleton.

Beyond the doorway was a cavernous room with just a single table and chair. With extreme caution they checked room out, finding some vials in the table’s drawer, and an open secret door.

With just as much caution they checked out the area behind the secret door finding another hallway that led to another natural cavern.

This cavern was used solely as a latrine, with several holes lined up in the ground and an actual toilet on top of one of them.

They turned tail and got out of there, feeling that nothing good can come from searching this place. I would guess they believed Dungie to be waiting in there for them.

As of that moment, as far as they know they had searched out the entire first level of the dungeon except what is behind the rubble in the rubble room. So they headed there and got back to digging.

They believed that the pit trap would keep Dungie away. They were horribly wrong.

After a couple of hours of digging Dungie showed up and blocked their only exit.

They thought that maybe Dungie was just here to watch so they kept on working. (I have no idea why they would think that.)

The next reality show on Fox – When Excrementals Attack.

Dungie moved into the room, giving an opening for them to get past him. But to do so, one of them would have to take an attack of opportunity. Ryan volunteered for that job.

Shortly after Javier and Saver made it out of the room and escaped down the hallway, but Ryan did not. He was successfully grabbed by Dungie and was not able to break free. Eventually he was strangled or suffocated to death. I don’t think anyone wants to know the specifics.

Thus Aaron’s second PC died for the night.

Saver and Javier chose to go down to the next level of the dungeon rather than play an infinite game of cat and mouse with Dungie.

At the bottom of the stairs to level 2 they found piles of torn apart rat skins and an intense enough smell of ogre urine that could actually overpower the stench floating down from the level above.

There were also 4 locked doors, 1 to the north, 1 to the south, and 2 to the east. The north door had a key sitting in the lock and a handaxe embedded in it. They grabbed the key and chose to explore beyond the northernmost east door.

That path led them to a door with a large spiked ball, rolling into this room from a hallway to the south, then the ball would roll south again under its own power, only to repeat this shortly thereafter.

The two of them smelled a killer trap, so they returned to the first room and chose the southernmost east door.

That door’s path led them to a room at the other end of the spiked ball’s run. The room also contained a stone coffin and a decaying corpse next to it.

Javier stopped to check the corpse.
It was late and time to stop before we could start the combat resulting from that.

In two weeks tune in for Javier’s probable death.

Rappan Athuk #5 - The Dung Monster

Yep, you read the title right.

You’ll have to read below for that bit of entertainment.

We last left the party very drained of resources, in a dungeon level whose every nook reeked of feces, with no way out of the dungeon for at least two days. Food and clothing absorbed the stench and even summoned water had didn’t taste clean.

Their only bit of good fortune was finding a room that had gone unseen by the denizens of the dungeon for a very long time, or so far as the party knows.

The reek made it hard for the party to get any real rest, but they had plenty of time to waste.

Several fortunate random encounter rolls and the next thing the party knows it’s time to get back to adventuring.

At this point the party has only directions to go for adventuring, head north down the hallway, or head south down the hallway.

This group’s general axiom for choosing directions in D&D is “Monsters to the left and treasure to the right.” Even though it means nothing, it’s certainly no worse than flipping a coin.

From their vantage, south (right) became their option and not much later they came to a large natural cavern full of rats of all sizes, dire rats. Tied to a wall was a half-elven wizard pleading for help from the party as a horde of rats were nipping at her blood-soaked clothes.

Paranoia paid off again as the party called her bluff (great Sense Motive roll vs. a pathetic Bluff roll).

When the party pulled their weapons, the lady’s expression changed to hate and anger as she commanded the rats to destroy the party. Four of the dozen dire rats in the room change shape into their humanoid were-rat form.

The two sides clash, but the party quickly obtains the advantage in spite of the nasty strength poison the rats use (1d6/2d6 strength damage with a DC24 fortitude save).

Their leader, the “damsel in distress” half-elf, who is not a wizard after all, does have a nasty trick. She has a few pouches of Dust of Sneezing and Choking and she tosses one at the party, managing to only affect one of her own dire rat minions.

Now normally I would let the combat stand as is, but this item was way too much over the top and it would have killed the entire party outright through very little of their own actions.

The dust acts like a poison if you’re caught in its area of effect – DC15 fortitude save or take 2d6 Con damage (repeated one minute later for another 1d6), but even if make the save you’re still effectively stunned for 5d4 rounds while your body coughs away. During those 5d4 rounds, those that survive can easily be picked off with the wererat’s arrows.

I changed (nerfed) the dust slightly to give the party a fighting chance. The Con damage stays, but the guaranteed stun has been replaced by not being able to do anything but move at half speed as a full round action and you face the Con damage again next round.

That seemed pretty reasonable and realistic to me, but I still got some whining.

Lousy ingrates.

The party still won, but only barely. The poison damage left Mouse with a 0 strength score. Vars was down to 1 point of Constitution thanks to the dust. In fact, after this point I don’t believe that anyone in the party doesn’t have at least one stat damaged.

Vars even got a disease from one of the rat bites, and lost 2 more Con two days later, putting him back down to 1 Con.

In spite of their victory, the half-elf managed to escape. Since her most powerful minions had all been destroyed, she hid and waited for the party to leave the area before she returned to loot what she could from the wererat’s lair, then fled, taking many rats and dire rats with her.

But that doesn’t mean the party didn’t get at least a little loot off the wererat’s bodies, but it was barely even 250gp overall.

After that they holed up in their hiding place until the next day when Mouse got back 1 point of strength so he could begin casting Lesser Restorations. He didn’t have enough to go around for everyone, but the party isn’t crippled in power now and can continue exploring and run if need be.

As they head back to the mausoleum to check on its roof-raising status, Mouse notices that his chalk signs, marking where traps are located, are now gone.

They find the mausoleum about half-way up and the sarcophagus is closed again, with no sign of the black skeleton.

With nothing for them to do other than rest, and being too weak to risk any real fighting, the party decides to dig out the collapsed room they found last session in the hopes that it is concealing an exit.

Luckily for them once again, they have no random encounters and head back to their hiding room at the end of their “work day”.

The next morning they get back to work and clear some more of the rubble away from the room, making some headway.

The third morning the party is in a much better position to deal with things, or so they thought.

Along their path from their secret room they head back north but find the largest pile of dung they had ever come across, looking as though it had just been dropped right there in their path, but no trap door was above it.

The idea of trudging through it did not appeal to the party, so they went back south a short ways to wererat territory.

The large room where the wererat fight occurred had no dire rats and about half the number of normal rats as before, all of which fled at the party’s approach.

The cavernous room had plenty of exits the party could explore, and they did.

There was an underground river they checked out. Upstream effectively dead ended unless they could breathe underwater and swim against the currents. Downstream went for quite a while, but when it got to be too deep for Mouse, they turned around.

Slam found a pathetic looking helmet that he found near a headless dwarf skeleton; only to find out later it was magical. No clue if it’s cursed though. He has to try it on first.

They found a small tunnel that was big enough for Mouse to investigate alone, and could smell some fresh air after 20’ of travel. They realized it was indeed a way out, but just for Mouse.

They found about 50gp in copper and silver in the wererat’s main lair. There had been more treasure, but someone had recently fled with it.

And finally they found some stairs leading down.

While it certainly must be comforting to know where they can go for the next dungeon level, they weren’t yet ready to leave this area. Their food was running short and didn’t want to get in over their heads just yet.

(Mouse did offer to go get the party food and leave through the rat hole, but it would require that they hand over some money to him. They understandably passed.)

The only option they’ve given themselves for travel is through giant pile of excrement.

They have a simple idea, Saver is to use his Mage Hand spell to move the pile 5 pounds at a time.

Unfortunate for them, Dungie, the living pile of (insert euphemism here), didn’t appreciate that. He was just lying there, enjoying his day, when some jerk poked him with a spell.

It slowly flopped itself towards the party and we rolled initiative.

(I used WotC’s large water elemental as Dungie’s fig.)

Round 1:

Saeri had her bow ready (paranoia pays off again) and shoots the thing with one of the poison arrows they got off the wererats. It hits, but fails to penetrate its damage resistance of 25/magic. Plus Dungie’s immune to poison anyway.

Saver casts Scorching Ray, but he fails to beat Dungie’s spell resistance of 100.

Dale: “Does everything have SR in this dungeon?!?!”

I didn’t fill them in on Dungie’s abilities just yet. Hey, I’m there to have fun too.

Vars has no magic weapon, so he backs up a bit.

Dungie slowly pulls itself forward, using a double move action to move a whole 20’

Mouse moves next to Vars and casts Magic Weapon on one of Vars’s bastard swords.

Slam wants a magic weapon too, so he gets next to Mouse to mooch that spell too.

Round 2:

Saeri wants that spell too, so she stands next to Mouse as well.

Saver takes a few steps back and casts Scorching Ray again. He fails to breach the SR.

Dungie moves forward another 20’

Vars rushes to face Dungie and hits him for 8 points of damage. As a reward he has to make a reflex save to not lose his sword in the mess that is Dungie.

Mouse casts Magic Weapon on Slam’s greataxe, then steps back some more getting a little closer to the rat cavern.

Slam rushes to face Dungie as well hitting hard for another 16 points of damage.

Round 3:

Saeri moves back to stay with Mouse.

Saver casts Magic Missile this time, but still manages to not break that SR100.

Dungie regenerates 24 points of damage right before the Vars’s and Slam’s eyes (no clue to explain that visual to them though). I then fill the party in on the DR of 25/magic, the SR100, the regeneration of 25, and the immunity to poison. And then Dungie extends a pseudopod to slam Slam. The sticky mess grabs hold of Slam, who is now partially stuck inside Dungie. (Karma in action.)

Vars runs away to the rat room where the party can hopefully maneuver around Dungie and flee from it.

Mouse runs away to the rat room.

Slam tries to break free from Dungie’s grip, but fails.

Round 4:

Saeri runs away to the rat room.

Saver casts Create Water from a distance, hoping to weaken the stickiness of Dungie. Nothing good happens. I’ll let you create your own mental image of what it actually looked like.

Dungie crushes Slam for 9 damage and resumes moving towards the party.

Slam tries to break free again but fails again.

Justin must face the onslaught of jokes and deal with a character in a bad situation. He’s the group’s low-comedy person, so I feel it’s justified.

Round 5:

Saver pulls out a vial of oil, moves up next to Slam and Dungie, and covers Slam in oil hoping to help him break free.

That tactic backfires as Dungie just rolls over on top of Saver while crushing Slam for another 6 damage.

Slam finally pulls himself free and runs away to the rat room.

Round 6:

Saver remains stuck and Dungie crushes him for 9 damage while once again chasing after the party.

Round 7:

Saver breaks free and runs to the rat room.

Over the next several minutes the party lures Dungie away from the hallway until they can safely run back to the hallway and get past where Dungie originally was.

And yes, Dungie is the name the dungeon designers named him.

There is more to the story, but I won’t tell you until I tell the group.

The party successfully makes it to mausoleum, which has fully reset from the trap.

While the rest of the party takes 20 on searching the mausoleum, Slam and Saver stay near the secret door handle mechanism in case the trap is triggered, and because they’re covered in feces from head to toe.

In spite of the thorough searching, the party finds nothing they haven’t found already. Most notably they haven’t found a way to open the main doors.

After a short while Aaron puts the pieces of this puzzle together. He has Mouse run back to the rat room (no sign of Dungie anywhere), then up the tunnels the rat’s created and out into the main graveyard.

Mouse then quickly goes to the dwarven statue, finds the iron key, darts to the mausoleum, knocks on the doors and opens them with the iron key (which teleports away).

The party flees the room, pausing just long enough to see if the ceiling lowers (it doesn’t) before the doors slam shut behind them.

After checking to see if the iron key teleported back to the dwarf statue (it did), they get the heck out of there and headed back to the village of Lhend via the quickest route, the swamp edge.

Of course they have some encounters along the way.

First is another squad of patrolling hobgoblins that eye the party but do nothing otherwise.

Then a horde of zombies crawl out of the swamp and attack the party. For sport the party kills them all, collects the XP and continues their journey.

And finally they find an unconscious man on the ground next to a dead horse, a flipped cart, and plenty of rotted fruits. After some quick investigation, they healed the man who told them he didn’t see who attacked them, and they could find no tracks. Then everyone went back to their business.

They stop before entering Lhend so the party can bathe a bit.

While in town Vars finds that his nice new bastard sword is ready and everyone stocks up on trail rations (around 10 days a piece) and other sundry equipment (possibly including shovels).

Saver manages to tick off Trake the weaponsmith for the final time when he tries to sell the lawful good dwarf 4 rapiers, one with a good coating of poison.

When the party finds that the inn is full (except for the horrid common room), they decide that they want to spend the night in the ruined tower, and possibly make the place a cache location.

It’s late, but the party feels they should be able to make it to tower.

We shall see.