Well, last week our intrepid heroes managed to defeat the final big bad of the dungeon in one of the most anticlimactic encounters of my DMing career. The ancient evil they’d found clues of throughout the adventure turned out to be a vampire who had been trapped in gaseous form inside an urn in a secret room on the lowest level of the mine. Letting her out should have been a pitched battle that they may or may not have actually won. While they had the right kind of weapons to at least make a good go of it, she was high enough in hit dice that the cleric would have needed a perfect roll to turn her, and her ability to dominate members of the party into her willing servants….well, let’s just say the odds were long for our heroes.
Luckily, the party had some very good initiative rolls and several of them got to go first. The mage led off, as is her usual tactic, with Tasha’s Uncontrollable Hideous Laughter. This spell will incapacitate (though not make completely helpless) a foe for 4 combat rounds. It does, however, allow the opponent to make a WILL save, and the vampire’s WILL was +10.
She rolled a 4.
Now, it’s always the DMs prerogative to fudge die rolls, either for or against the party. In this case, however, I let it ride, and, unable to put up more than the most token of resistance, they proceeded to dispatch her without much fuss.
Is she dead? Well, that remains to be seen. Vampires are very tricky to kill, and she did appear to collapse into mist on death. So there may very well be a powerful undead roaming free with notions of vengeance. Time will tell.
The party went back to town to report on their success. Unfortunately for them, Raffi got his elf on and made a very haughty speech to the townsfolk, blaming them (or more strictly their ancestors) for the curse of lycanthropy which was caused the lynching of Lawrence Gannu’s grandfather some hundred years prior, and how they had thus been directly responsible for the woes they had been suffering. Since the sort of simple frontier folk who tend to live in mining towns don’t usually take kindly to this sort of moral proclamation being made against them, they thanked the heroes for their efforts and suggested that perhaps it was a good time for them to leave town.
Overall, this was a very successful module. I’m absolutely in love with the Dungeon Crawl Classics line of d20 modules from Goodman Games.
As always, here’s some quotes from the previous adventures, leading up to the dispatching of the were-rat Lawrence Gannu. I’ll try to do more play-by-play in the next adventure.
Virko: We’re all injured. Let’s run away from the cleric. That’s called “strategy”.
Sensei: They’re disrespecting you, Virko.
Virko: I don’t speak vermin!
Sensei: I do! They’re disrespecting you.Raffi: You’re the Elvis of the rat world.
(After I describe another 30′ dogleg)
Don: We have this symbiosis. We understand each other.
Dave: The vermin whisperer.Lawrence Gannu: You are invading my home. Leave now before it becomes your tomb!
Sensei: (pause) Ok.Virko: So, you think you can terrorize the people of Silverton? I say thee nay!
Gaudi: Who *talks* like that?