Tag: defensive perimeter

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?

I apologize for getting so completely lax on the game transcripts, but I do want to keep noting the funny comments, because they’re part of what makes our group so much fun.

Virko after one-shotting a goblin wererat with a quad-damage critical):  Be careful.  There’s two of them now.

Virko (fighter):  We may need to change our tactics, now that we’re encountering lycanthropes instead of zombies.
Gaudi:(priest):  I’m a little amused that we keep running into them in a silver mine.

I apologize for the small handful of you who were actually interested in the story recaps of our little AD&D group. I fell down on my note taking and haven’t posted a summary. The party did manage to rout the kobolds who were attacking caravans and downed their leader, a magically mutated kobold warchief who had taken over this small clan. Once he had been defeated, the rest of the kobolds fled into the forests and have not been heard from since.

Here are the short form notes on the most recent two sessions. I’m afraid that the wisecracks and other levity that have been a hallmark of this series are missing, but it will get everyone caught up on the plot.

The party got sent up to a small frontier town north of Kelvin named Welwyn. There’s been a rash of thefts that the local populace has been unable to resolve, and they believe that the thief is utilizing the town’s well as an escape route. Our Heroes go down the well, and nearly die. (There was a snake in the well, but I think the well itself did more damage than the snake did.)

In between fighting the snake and trying not to drown, a secret door is discovered which leads into an underground tunnel. They followed the tunnel into a large cavern and fought a giant trapdoor spider. Then, they went down a tunnel which was laden with traps, found a secret door and fought four zombie dwarfs. Searching the room found a discarded piece of paper which was in code, but when unscrambled appeared to be a work order for the building of the portcullis and traps out in the hallway. The person who hired the dwarfs appears to have killed them and reanimated their corpses in lieu of paying them.

Venturing deeper in to the caves, the party encountered a dire badger, which they fought and killed, the thief sustaining some severe injury, but no deaths. They then ventured forth and found a man sitting at a campfire in a large cavern. Several small tunnels (too small for humans to venture through) led off, but there were no other exits. As soon as he became aware of the party, he snatched up a bow and attacked. The druid cast entangle, which greatly complicated the fight, as it hindered both friend and foe alike. The lone man used a set of pipes to call forth a swarm of rats, shapeshifted into a form that appeared to be half-human, half badger, nearly killed the duskblade, and finally shapeshifted again into a badger and disappeared down the small tunnels.

After healing and waiting for the entangle to expire, they searched the room and found various bits of treasure, some of which probably belongs to the townspeople. They also found several small harnesses, about hte size of the rats in the cave, and six potions of Reduce Size, Human.

Injured and out of spells, they have elected to camp for the night before deciding what to do next.

Well, since Our Heroes™ dispatched the evil cleric and saved the town of Threshold, it was time to do what all adventuring parties do when they succeed — bask in the glory, spend their valor-gotten spoils, and then look for a new job.

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Well, we had the second (and concluding) session of the introductory adventure in the new AD&D campaign. As a special treat, we had a visiting bedlamhouse sitting in, taking over the role of surrdave‘s cleric.

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Well, we actually got the new AD&D campaign underway last night. While we did ultimately have the traditional “meeting in the tavern”, I actually directed each of the characters there for reasons that fit their own agendas. Because we only have three players (plus me as DM), each player is currently controlling two characters.

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