ROBOUTE the Bard joined us. On paper, Roboute is crap, with barely anything going for him except for a 15 Charisma. 3d6 in order is take-no-prisoners way of rolling up characters, after all. However, Roboute maxed his roll for starting gold, and generously decided to spent it all on hiring a small army of conscripts. Seriously. We hired and kitted out 13 mercenaries.
LAR GAIUS GALLIO
PUBLIUS CAIUS HOSTUS
NONUS CESSENA AULUS
AMMELIUS VERANUS
OPITER JULIANUS
And we would need them. Spoilers, I guess, but this is the kill/death tracker for tonight's session:
Kills: 53
Deaths: 7
Rooms Explored: 14
Let that sink in for a second. That's one casualty for every two rooms. Not precisely how it played out, mind you, but damn. I wonder how people who started playing D&D with 5th Edition would feel about this experience. My guess? Most of them would feel kinda bad.
I've been playing some form of D&D since the mid 90s, and even in the low-fantasy grimdark days of AD&D, I've never experienced a meat-grinder quite like this. I don't think I'd ever DM a Chainmail campaign, personally, but despite my dour observations, I'm genuinely enjoying being a part of this one. A lot of my enjoyment is tied to our DM's enthusiasm, I think. Another chunk of it is the challenge. Another still is the feeling that we're laughing in the face of death, and fatalistically exploring this well-reviewed, hyped-up thick megadungeon, all the while suspecting that it's going to end badly. I don't know. I don't think I really need to understand why I'm having fun, as long as I am.
Anyway - here are the session notes.
Room 1. We stumble across five disheveled, half-naked men, roasting what we mistakenly think is a pig on a spit over a small cooking fire. Ingrid realizes that's not a pig. We draw steel and murder these cannibals.
Room 2. Dark. Tall ceilings. Filled with webs. We're not about to fuck around with save-or-die-poisonous giant spiders. So, we set the webs on fire with an impromptu molotov made from rags and a flask of oil, then backtrack to the room with the dead cannibals in it, and prepare to defend against anything that comes our way. We hear a gong strike in the distance. We wait half-an-hour, then leave the cannibals' room and go investigate. Aside from some burnt webs, the room is mostly empty.
Room 3. But an adjacent room is filled with 7 orcs. Two of 'em have bows. One of 'em looks leader-like, and yells at us in Greek to, essentially, gtfo or die. Gwen and Roboute both speak Greek, and they banter back-and-forth with our new buddy Potitus the Orc Sergeant for roughly a minute - just enough time for Gwen to get a charm person spell to stick - before asking Potitus to give us a dungeon tour. He happily obliges.
We get a lot of weird scraps of information from Potitus, who, once charmed, is something of a blabber-mouth. Here are some of them:
"Aganopus is the boss orc."
"The orcs of the Open Sore tribe is conquering the levels of Stonehell one at a time. Those dirty kobolds are weak, and they're next!"
"Gauls came down here a week ago. We slaughtered 'em all."
"Pontidia would make a fine wife."
"There's a weird stone face in the other room, just down thattaway. It's kinda neat."
"Seek out the well that whistles, and cast a treasure in it!"
More importantly, we convince him that his mighty band of orcs - the Open Sores - is more than a match for the zombies in the crypts we explored the last time we came down here, and we're totally willing to help the Open Sores claim that skeleton gold as way of saying thank you. Thank you, Potitus, for being such a cool orc buddy.
Rooms 4 through 13. The Crypts. Little monster-closets filled with undead horrors. 5 of the 7 orcs, including Potitus, take the lead here, and ten giant rats swarm out of the first door they open. Dakota and I cackle as the dice gods favor the rats, and seriously, all the orcs are slain. We mop up the rats, loot all the bodies, and continue along our merry way.
In other rooms, we find zombies, more rats, ghouls, an altar of bones (we plan to come back here with Dave, next time), some skeletons, and even a pack of zombie ambushers. Our rear-guard, Opiter, kills one of them, but he is quickly slain in turn, as he was one of those unlucky Fighters who rolled a 1 for his hit points. Rest in peace, gentle Opiter. You were too fragile for this world.
Anyway, we're feeling pretty good about now, despite the death of Opiter. We've looted 600 g.p. worth of coins and jewels, and the way that plays out, that's roughly 15,000 experience points. When we get back to town, we're all leveling up. Some of us multiple times.
Didius the henchman has been a superhero this whole time. He's got ten kills to his name, survived a nasty bite from a plague rat, and killed a pair of ghouls. Ingrid the Amazon is the other heavy hitter, and Nonus and Ammelius and Lar, each equipped with spears, have been similarly clutch this session. I'm seriously contemplating upgrading Didius to player-character status if he makes it out alive.
Room 3 again, leading to Room 14. We go back to the place where we met the orcs, intending to kill the two stragglers and secure a large swath of the level. When we get there they're already suspicious, and they sound an alarm gong the moment things get tense. We roll initiative and quickly kill them.
However, a pack of 6 more orcs appears from down the hallway. They've got chainmail and battleaxes and two of them have bows, but we're hardly worried. We just watched 10 giant rats take down 5 orcs a few minutes ago. We have an armored column of 11 trained warriors.
That's when it all falls apart.
Gallio is shot and killed by an orc archer immediately. Veranus, too, dies in the orcs' opening salvo. Antemion, brave Antemion, fires back and kills one of the orc archers, but a lucky shot catches him in the heart, and he dies.
Didius gets chopped in the neck with a battleaxe and dies. Ammelius the spearman dies, too, despite being heavily armored in orcish chain. One of these orcs is a straight-up berserker, and apparently, there's no stopping him. Ingrid is spending each turn parrying the orcs' attacks, waiting desperately for an opening that isn't coming.
Desperate, Gwen summons a snake demon. She had hoped to save this trick for later, but this is looking like our last stand. It answers her summons and manifests itself behind one of the orcs Ingrid is fighting and bites down hard into the orc's shoulder, paralyzing and killing it. Ingrid seizes the opportunity and kills another orc. Somewhere in this fray, poor Lar is killed. A wild swing with a battle-axe. Rest in peace, Lar.
The last remaining orc's morale breaks and he attempts to flee, but the snake-demon will not show clemency. It catches him, twists its coils around him, and devours him in front of our stunned assemblage.
PUBLIUS CAIUS HOSTUS
NONUS CESSENA AULUS
We retreat to the surface with what remains of our party.
Here ends the tale of the Fourth Expedition.
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