We returned to my AD&D campaign last Saturday after a break of four weeks. In some ways, the break was even longer because I’ve run a lot of session for the new players recently; this was the first session where Paul and Jesse were able to play their high-level characters, which are 7th and 9th level respectively. The rest of the group ranged from 3rd to 7th level. In all, there were eight players in the session. It could have been twelve, as Callan was ill and unable to run his Rifts campaign and his players have often participated in the AD&D game when he’s been unavailable, but twelve would be stretching it. Instead, I gave the other four a copy of Last Night on Earth to play and happily returned to the Caverns of the Oracle.
I’ve been running this particular dungeon since the second session of the campaign about 21 months ago – we occasionally divert into other adventures, but it’s been a major feature of the campaign. With such a history of adventure in it, you’d think I have a lot more of it prepared. This is certainly not the case! The current level of the dungeon, which has the artefact on it they’ve been searching for, has a map drawn for it and a scribbled page of brief one-line descriptions of the rooms they’ve already explored. The rooms they haven’t explored yet? I’ve got no idea what is in them, although I have marked the one where the artefact is in.
This particular part of the dungeon is notable for how I’m improvising the room contents as we go along. I make use of the random tables in the DMG for inspiration as to what is in them – the group were unlucky enough to meet a gorgon that way – but there are a fair number of tricks and traps that I’m adding because they seemed like a good idea at the time. It worked for this session, but it’s not something I recommend for continued play.
The dungeon is also turning into a real funhouse dungeon. There’s a vague theme to this level, with various links to polar, extraplanar settings and the place being quite chilly, but it’s not terribly coherent. The idea is far more to entertain the players rather than providing a ‘realistic’ dungeon. With eight players at the table, that’s quite important. Although there are monsters to fight, a fair bit of the entertainment is coming from seeing their friends deal with these strange situations, before they also give them a go.
The players and their characters were as follows for this session:
· Tait: Chump, human fighter 7
· Jesse: Latud, human magic-user 9 and a human cleric 4 henchman.
· Harry: Trevalyn, half-elf magic-user 2/thief 3
· Lachie: “Bob”, dwarven fighter 3
· Sam: Ran-ki, human magic-user 3
· Lee: Thanir, human cleric 7
· Paul: Grunt, half-orc fighter 7
· Brian: druid 5
At present, I’m keeping the number of characters at nine, with henchmen being used to make up the difference. With eight players, that left room for only one henchman, and it was adjudged that Jesse’s cleric was the most useful. It’s a pretty effective party.
Paul had a copy of the player’s map, and I made the group show me the route they were taking through the dungeon before they got to the unexplored areas. As they made their way through the one-way doors, they sighted a figure slipping out of sight to the north. They followed to find a door closing behind whatever it was. The group then got particularly paranoid: they’d explored the room before, but no-one could remember what was in it. (My actual notes for the room said simply, “cages”).
There was another door to the room, so the party decided to split up and approach it from both directions at once. I then had a lot of fun with the party, with most of the party vanishing as they entered the room. For the few survivors, I described how a blackened skull rolled out…
One of the players foolishly picked up the skull. It rattled – within was a large ruby, which proceeded to heat up and explode. Instead of throwing the gem as far away as possible, the player just dropped it at his feet…
With the characters outside now “dead” – except for one who was fleeing, blindly, through the dungeon at top speed, I shifted to those who had entered the room. They’d been trapped in a cage with an elderly man calling himself “Koli” asking them questions about what they were doing in “his” dungeon. This allowed us some entertaining role-playing, with Koli discussing the keys they were searching for and asking them why they wanted to release Odin, and finally concluded with him telling the key they were searching for was in the north-east and letting them go.
I’m not sure if anyone picked up on the clues as to Koli’s true identity; he did describe himself has being half-giant, half-god, but I’m pretty sure that most of the players only have a vague grasp of Norse mythology.
In any case, the die roll indicated a wandering monster as they made their way to the north-east part of the dungeon, and thus, two trolls appeared around a nearby corner and started thinking the party looked good to eat. I didn’t describe them as trolls, rather as “green giants”, so the party weren’t immediately aware that they’d regenerate – and, in AD&D, that only begins after three rounds. The battle didn’t take that long, but the party were rather disturbed by the slain bodies “still twitching”, and clued on to the fact that they might regenerate. They doused them in oil and set it alight, thus destroying the threat.
The next room was empty, but had an icy floor with tracks leading to another door – within was a great, scaly bull with red eyes. The front line (Paul, Lee and Tait) charged in whilst the magic-users supported them with magic-missile spells. It didn’t take long to kill, but the creature was a gorgon, and both Lee and Tait were turned to stone by its breath in their initial rush to engage!
Stone to Flesh is a 6th level magic-user spell and requires a 12th level magic-user, something they definitely did not have with them. Harry checked the other door from the room and discovered it had a panel that peeled off to reveal a sign: “Madam Majorie’s Un-Petrification Parlor”. What luck! Yes, the events in my games may be occasionally chaotic and arbitrary, but I don’t like keeping players uninvolved for long periods.
Madam Majorie turned out to be a medusa – quite a pretty one – who had the means to unpetrify their friends. I think she referred to the gorgon as “Frank”, and was unconcerned by its death. “That’s alright, dearie. Frank will come back to life soon!” – a statement that rather concerned the players. All she wanted in exchange for the unpetrification was a kiss, something I’m pleased to say the group did swiftly. After restoring the fighters, she and her wagon disappeared along with Frank’s body.
The next couple of rooms contained a couple of interesting traps; the first was ten copper poles, each with a valuable ruby on top, however the poles were trapped with electricity which would burst out all over the room if the rubies were removed. Harry attempted to disarm the trap… and, astonishingly, succeeded. 3rd level thieves in AD&D are not renowned for their chances of disarming traps!
The second room was similar: silver poles with diamonds on top. Harry, of course, went to investigate, only to discover that it wasn’t the poles that were trapped, it was the floor: a long pit which slid open as he crossed it; he fell towards the gleaming spikes below, his fall only arrested because the group had tied a rope to him to pull him away from the poles if necessary! Unfortunately, the pit then snapped shut and left no obvious way of retrieving him.
Brian attempted to push open the pit with his spear; this seemed a good way of doing it to me, so I required an Open Door check. Brian failed badly, with a roll of 6 on the d6, so I had him push too hard and fall in himself, taking 3d6 damage from the fall and the spikes. After that, everyone was a lot more careful and were eventually able to retrieve the trapped characters and the diamonds. This was a lot of money they’d just got – 100,000 gp worth – and would do a lot to help the newer characters quickly reach the level of the experienced characters.
Of course, by this stage some of the party were quite wounded. So they decided to rest in the complex, in a room containing a strange clockwork device which they never had quite worked out what it did. It proved to be a poor place to rest, with a neo-otyugh and five werewolves coming by to pay a visit and interrupting the spell-casters’ rest. Eventually, the group returned up a couple of levels to a safe place (the orc caverns), and passed the rest of the night uneventfully.
There was one further room in this particular part of the dungeon, and it held a beautiful woman who wanted a kiss in exchange for the key she held. Lachie was more than happy to give her one, but – of course – it was a trick. The woman was a night hag, and she summoned a barbed devil to protect her as she attempted to slay Lachie. This was the first real time in the campaign that magic resistance came into play, and the magic-users found their spells fizzling, but the fighters definitely proved their worth and both the barbed devil and the hag were soon dead. The key proved to be fake, and the exact location of it remained a mystery; there are other rooms in the north-east section of the dungeon, however, so it’s only a matter of time before they find it.
By now it was time to end the session; it had been a relatively brief one due to a late start and ran for about 2¼ hours in total, but it had a far amount of incident in it. Most of the lower-level characters gained a level as a result, and we’ll pick it up again in two weeks.