My characters: Gwen & her retainer, Ongus
Dakota's characters: Sergius, Antemion
Dave's characters: Quintus, Duras, & his crew of bored gladiators (Primus, Alpharius, Bellicarius, Centius, and Diaxus)
Helpful NPCs: Zeno the torch-bearer
This adventure has some stats attached to it. They're pretty grizzly. You ready for 'em?
Total character deaths: 7
Total rooms explored: 27
Granted, some of those were mercenaries who died on the massive difficulty spike that ended this session. Three of those deaths were PCs, and if you don't feel at least a little bit bad for Dave by the end of this, you're cold-blooded.
MY QUICK RANT ABOUT CHAINMAIL
We're playing this campaign in Chainmail. And Chainmail, ladies and gentlemen, is a quirky game.First, attack rolls. You roll 2d6 to hit and add numbers based on what sort of Class you are and what sort of weapons you're using. Attacks get resolved based off of what type of weapon you're wielding - natural weapons and daggers go first, shorts swords and hand-axes go next, and big ass whompin' sticks go last. Pretty intuitive. I like it. It gives the game a bit of a Dark Souls feel, incentivizing using odd weapons to press your advantage in different circumstances, as opposed to simply maxing out your Greatsword skill and using it for every fight.
Second, attacks are tied to Hit Dice. So if you're 1HD, you make one attack. If you're 10HD, you roll ten of 'em. I can see where this rule makes perfect sense in a Warhammer-style setting, but in an RPG setting... oh boy. The game is shouting through a megaphone, "DON'T GET ATTACHED TO YOUR CHARACTER!"
I like this concept for a war-game. For example, if my 6HD Troll attacks the pair of 1HD Fighters that are engaged with it, I can resolve all that with a fist full of d6s and a yahtzee cup in about ten seconds. That's fun and efficient. Cool.
But in an RPG setting, where you're investing a lot of time into a particular set of characters? Well, that quick pace can really be painful. A 1HD Fighter is utterly and completely boned against a 3HD Fighter, and how are you supposed to know that your enemy has more hit dice? I guess you're not? I guess, if you're role playing, you're just supposed to play the game at a snail's pace and ask a million subtle questions that tease out this sort of information? I think designers moved away from this game mechanic for a good reason.
That's my opinion as of right now, anyway. Maybe it'll change by the end.
SESSION RECAP
Part I: The Gatehouse
Starting Zone: A campsite within a small granary within in a box canyon near a ruined gatehouse, outside of Stonehell Dungeon (aka the Mines of Masala).Starting Heroes: Sergius, Quintus, Gwen, & Ongus
We wake up early and start exploring the Gatehouse. Here's a list of our noteworthy finds:
* A room full of ghosts. We left them alone.
* A room with an empty chair in it
* A room full of empty shelves
* A room with a corpse in it, and also four stirges. Sergius and Quintus kill them swiftly.
* A room damaged by humidity with soft floorboards. Our 10' pole guides the way.
* A room full of horrible red wasps. We soak the corpse from the previous room with lantern oil, light it, and heave it into the wasp-infested room to smoke them out. We take a short break for some trail rations, then check back in.
* It worked. We find large amphora of wine. Still good! +50 g.p.
* In the next room, someone's been camping
* A room filled with goblins! They ambush us! Combat is fierce, but we prevail.
This is where CHAINMAIL really shines -- this fight was really interesting! Spears attacking at a different time than daggers, charm person failing to turn a goblin spearman against his comrades, swapping out to daggers once the goblins with shields were down... I wish I'd taken better notes. It was fun.
* We loot the goblins and press on
* A room with an old bed, a dresser, and a secret wall. Quintus pokes the bed with his spear, and four large and poisonous centipedes slither out! Sergius gets in quick, but not quick enough: Quintus and Ongus are bitten and fail their saving throws. They both die.
* Behind the secret wall, we loot a magic parasol and a magic cloak. Then we have a small freak-out, bury our friends on the mountainside, and return to Aquilea.
On the way home, we're lucky enough to avoid a random encounter with three manticores which fly overhead. This place is dangerous af.
In Aquilea, we regroup. We report to Octavius, sell some of our bounty, hire a mercenary named Duras for a fair cut of the loot, and also bring along his out-of-work gladiator friends (Primus, Alpharius, Bellicarius, Centius, and Diaxus) and an elderly torch-bearer called Zeno. And a donkey, and a wagon. We're prepped. We got this.
Part II: The Canyon
We go back to the (cleared out) gatehouse and make preparations to explore the canyon surrounding the mines. Here are the highlights:
1) We open a stuck door built into the left canyon wall. Inside, we look right and get rushed by half-a-dozen skeletons armed with swords! However, using our newfound allies, and fighting in a phalanx formation, we make quick work of them. Primus proves to be super adept at skeleton fighting!
2) We encounter a supernaturally dark room and a profaned shrine covered in Persian script. There's a cenotaph in the center of the room that tells us of "a bearded lion who sleeps in the land of the boyars, deep below a mountain." Cool. Sergius notices a loose stone and touches it. Cold fire burns his palm, and a secret chamber opens to reveal.... nothing. It's been looted. How strange.
3) Another canyon door, this one to the right. We encounter a small stone room in which a fire beetle is gnoshing on a goat carcass. Duras and Sergius attempt to make quick work of the creature, but the dice aren't having it. It deals 5 damage to Duras (he has 6 h.p.) and straight-up murders Sergius by biting off his head. It dies, eventually. But holy hell. We've only been exploring for a little over an hour.
4) We walk up to a bear cave and encounter a bear. We leave it alone.
5) We find a shredded deer carcass and smell some tomcat stink. A mountain lion? There's a dead bandit with some chainmail, a full wine flask, a sword, and a shield. We loot him and move on.
6) Duras pours the wine on the ground in memory of Sergius. +10 XP
7) There's a waterfall down the way. It's a small one. At the base of it, a silver hemisphere lay submerged. At the waterfall's height, there's a bronze sphere, sunk into the stone. The silver sphere radiates cold. The bronze one radiates heat. They're both sunken into the rock. If we could find some way to remove them, they could make us rich.
8) A hunter called Antemion stumbles across our camp. He's heard of our expedition and wants to join it. We're happy to have him along!
8) A trailhead winds above the entrance to the mines. For safety's sake, we go explore it. There's an ambushing crab-spider in one of them, which we quickly dispatch (Primus is beginning to impress us all with his swordsmanship, incidentally). The crab-spider was guarding a seemingly empty cave. While exploring it, Duras pokes some rotted hides and yet more fucking centipedes appear! Damn it, Dave! Stop poking beds with sticks! Thankfully, nobody dies this time.
9) A cave painting depicting some goblins. Neat.
10) Some gypsum crystals in a large cluster. We could sell these for about 300 g.p. if we're willing to do some manual labor...
11) A cave full of wolves. Not wanting to die in our sleep to wolf-related injuries, we attack them, and we quickly learn that, in this universe, a starving wolf is far more dangerous than a heavily armed Roman soldier, for lo! Wolves have 2 Hit Dice. We charge them, and they rip out Primus' throat. Then Alpharius'. Then Duras. We attempt a retreat; Bellicarius holds the line, but is ultimately overwhelmed. Centius, Diaxus, Gwen, and Antemion, as well as the donkey and the old man who carries our torches, are all that remain of the expedition. We've lost this battle.
We regroup at the campsite, then beat feet down the mountainside. Although we're retreating, make no mistake: we will be back. We're not going to let those wolves keep those suits of heavy armor and all the weapons those dudes were carrying, not to mention all the gold we paid them to accompany us! Most of our party's wealth is tied up in that corpse pile!
Oh yes, we will be back.
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