My Greyhawk campaign continued this week with an adventure from The Mines of Chult.

One of the things I try to do with my Greyhawk game is to run it in semi-sandbox mode. That is, every so often I ask my players what they want to do next. We’d finished the last session with the adventurers saving the town of Brusington from an undead monstrosity, and now they were taking some downtime. Rich’s wizard was researching spells, Greg’s sorcerer was learning to the play the spinet, Adam’s paladin was involved in matters of the heart, and Martin’s cleric was researching magical places to explore.

It was, of course, Martin’s wizard who gave me the hook for this session. They’re in the north-western part of the Arch-clericy of Veluna, what magical sites would be around here? Perhaps an old Flan druidic stone circle. Perhaps it was on top of something interesting. I wasn’t sure yet, but I was sure I could invent something by the time they got there.

So, how far away? Perhaps a day. Any encounters on the way? We rolled – and by that, I mean the players. Whenever there are wandering monster checks to make, I get the players to roll, so they feel like they’re doing something.

They got one. I pulled out the old 1983 Greyhawk boxed set and checked its random encounter tables. Halflings. I checked the original Monster Manual. 30-300 halflings, 70% in lair. Huh. We rolled again. 270 halflings, in their lair. Perhaps a village. And they were stout halflings. A mining village? Digging under the stone circle? I had most of the parts of the adventure worked out. And, because I’d recently reviewed (and later done some editing on) The Mines of Chult, the adventures in it were fresh in my mind.

There was one adventure that I’d very much enjoyed reading. The Wounded Earth by Tony Petrecca. It would work very well as the basis for what lay beneath the earth. And so, I made certain the Mines of Chult was on my iPad, and off we went.

So, they met the villagers. They learnt about the mine and found out where the old stone circle was. The villagers described a recent tremor, and worried about the fate of Downton (the site of the last adventure, where the town had disappeared into the earth!) And off they went to the circle to investigate.

Stone circle. Runes. I had to explain to some of the players how big the stones were – for some reason, they were thinking of it in Spinal Tap terms. Not that they’d seen Spinal Tap.

Then came an earth tremor. The earth split open, revealing a shaft downwards, into which Greg fell. From there, it was into the tunnels and – eventually – the mine. Where they met the wounded guardian spirit that the halflings had inadvertently burrowed into, healed it, and gained its services for the village.

Along the way, I cheerfully threw out a large part of the backstory for the adventure, inserted my explanations, wondered at a couple of rules missteps in the stat-blocks (these are things I spot easier when running something than reviewing it), and allowed the players to feel they’d accomplished something.

Except for Martin, I’m afraid, whose dice were afraid to roll anything above an 8 and didn’t even find a permanent magic item – the entire reason he’d proposed the expedition in the first place! As a cleric of Boccob, he’s got an interest in recovering rare magic. So, I’ll have to find some for him and make certain to include it!

I emphasise that I hadn’t planned to run this adventure. Instead, I was intending to run a mystery adventure of my own devising, using some of the monsters from Monsters of the Guild. However, I hadn’t quite cracked how I wanted to run it. I’m still new at designing investigative scenarios, so I’m not good at improvising them. I’ll happily improvise a funhouse dungeon, but I’m still working out investigations. I might have been DMing for 30 years or so, but there are still things to learn!