Nappendixia Campaign Session Report
Session #- 28 Session Date- 12/14/22
Time Passed- 5 Days, 1-3 to 1-7
Roll Call- Mandigor- ½ Elf Fighter 4
Malden- Paladin 3
Gunther- Dog
Gregory- Paladin 2 Squire
Thantas- Elf Assassin 4
Gruumsh- ½ Orc Thief 4
Ulster- Druid 4
Caveman1- Ulster’s Henchman
Hirelings
Mondius- Fighter 2
LaSalle- Fighter 3
Adventure Log- The party moves through the secret door at the rear of the slavers hideout, passes through the thick keep outer walls, and ends at the back of another secret door 10’ through the stone wall. Mandigor is at the front of the narrow passage, and upon opening the second secret door is struck with a spiked iron bar rigged to slam into anyone who opened the door. Quite wounded, he is given one of the primitive healing potions Malden had purchased months ago in Cedar Crossing. Still wounded, the party presses on into an east west passage and chooses their favored direction of right. The halls inside what is likely the inner keep of the temple are broken and charred, but still intact. Through small holes in the walls the party can see the greater open area of the inner keep is in much greater ruin, just rubble and some ruined walls scattered about the open area. Going right, the hall leads to a small ruined room, but the back wall of the room has been reinforced and rebricked thoroughly, completely across the rear wall of the room. The party assumes there must be something important behind the wall, perhaps a secret pass or shortcut, maybe something valuable. A discussion of what may be behind the wall and the best way to get through to investigate is had. The druid offers to cast Stoneshape, and Draden also has a similar power from an odd scroll he found long ago. They opt to use the stoneshape, and quite a bit of stone can be moved by the spell. Ulster creates a portal in the wall roughly 4’x5’, revealing a large shadowy open area that must open into the open area of the keep. However off to the left the party sees that a 10’ wall has been constructed, penning this area off from the larger area, still climbable, but no openings in that similar brick wall. Then immediately notice many statues in the area, in poses of all kinds, very lifelike. They continue scanning through the area, and that is when disaster strikes, the front of the party, Mandigor, the dog, Gruumsh, Malden and Gregory are all met by the gaze of a Basilisk who crawls forward among the statues. Catastrophically, all but Gruumsh fail their save and are immediately turned to stone! The party panics, averts their eyes, and Gruumsh grabs Malden’s stone body, and instructs the hirelings to grab the dog. Draden is able to use his strange scroll to cast a form of stone to flesh on Mandigor and he returns but weakened. Unfortunately Gregory is left behind. Fortunately the party gets initiative and the basilisk makes no effort to chase them as they back out of the chamber, through the smaller room where they firmly shut the door. Unnerved, they retreat back out of the secret door, and return to their rocky outcropping to recoup. Dresden is only able to use his scroll to return those turned once a day, so Mandigor rests, and the party waits until the next day they scan the horizon looking for Rev. Ramsey and his party or perhaps other adventurers headed to fight the slavelords. Rumor has it that even the great heroes of White Plume Mountain have answered the call to bring the fight to Highport. No parties are sighted however. The next day the paladin is returned, and the following day the dog. Then the dog must rest one more day or it will not be able to return to the hideout. Should the party be able to get back to Gregory, he will have to be assisted by the hirelings until he can rest for a day. 4 days later, the party returns to the secret door of the hideout, recovers Gregory outside the door to the basilisk room, then promptly opts to go left, the other way down the hall. It brings them to a ruined door, stuck but splintered and broken, inside reveals an equally destroyed room, roofless, revealing an upper floor that has no floss save a ledge of beams and flooring going around. Perched on these ledges are shadowy creeping figures and the smell of death. Predicting undead, but having no cleric, the druid procures a scroll of protection from undead, and all within 5’ are immune to their attack. Huddled around the scroll, the party peppers the ghoul and ghasts with arrows and axes, taking out several; they surprisingly do not flee despite being unable to attack. Another volley of missiles from the party does take out a few more and drive the rest to climb up and out of the ruined room onto the top of the keep walls. The druid's caveman minion is sent up onto the ledge to investigate, and he brings down some treasure and a potion, identified as fire resistance by Draden. Beyond the ghouls room the party climbs some stairs and finds itself in a room with an almost completely ruined floor, a 3 story hole in its center with a wide wooden plank set across it, and ruined floor on both sides, a little wider on the right. Both sides of the room are tested and seem dodgy, and the plank in the center is not considered. They opt to fix ropes and all climb down to the basement below, then have the caveman walk across the plank and lower a rope from the other side. The caveman finds the plank to be quite solid, walks easily across it, and assists the party in climbing back up the other side. A safe but time consuming way to manage this obstacle, it takes about 2 hours to negotiate. Through the hall on the other side of the room the party finds an alcove with 3 barrels of what could be vinegar, sealed and dusty. Perhaps it's something more vile, perhaps just soured wine, but the party leaves it be. Just beyond the alcove there are stairs descending into an empty room save for what appears to be a pile of oily gray rags. Certain of a trap or monster, the party does not hesitate to begin hurling flaming oil and arrows at the pile. It begins flailing and sending out tentacles, but only out to 5’, so they are safe on the stairs. After the oil burns out the creature is still alive, but the party is unwilling to engage it in melee. Thinking, they reconsider the barrels of vinegar, could they be flammable? Unlikely, but maybe rolling the barrels down the stairs will do some crushing damage to the creature, likely some kind of plant or fungus, due to its somewhat visible roots clinging to the stone floor. The barrels crash down the stairs, burst open, and the acid in the vinegar begins acting on the plant creature, melting its roots and dissolving its body. Moving its desiccated body they find gold, gems, and a curious looking ring, a gold band set with 3 glimmering colored stones. After defeating the Sundew, they move into a hall that goes 3 directions. They listen at one door, and hear gruff voices speaking orc, and move along. Another direction leads to a long hall ending at 2 sets of double doors. One set of double doors has various holy symbols of many faiths crudely nailed to the doors. Again, being unnoticed in the hall, they opt to check the 3rd direction which leads past 2 empty ruined rooms and ends at stairs down. Bravely they decide to check out level 2 of the hideout. The stairs descend into narrow, primitively dug tunnels supported by wooden beams, they go one direction and it leads to a small cavern with 3 pits that once contained grain, they are empty now, and there is a ladder leading up to a locked trap door in the ceiling. There is one very narrow passage leading out of this chamber, but only large enough for a gnome or halfling to fit. Not wanting to immediately go back up, they backtrack the other direction down the hall, but are met by 2 orcs coming down the stairs they just came from. Tense standoff occurs as the 2 unsure orcs question the 10 man party. The party claims to be Lareth’s (the wannabe slaver they killed back outside of Orlane) men here to pick up slaves. The party doubts the orcs' unsure responses, but allows them to lead them to where they say the slavers and the slaves are. They lead the party back to the lacked trap door in the ceiling, knock, and are let up into a room containing 3 half orcs and 17 slaves, chained and huddled in dirty blankets. The session ends with the party about to negotiate with the slavers.
Session Notes- The session started off on sort of a down note, the basilisk’s gaze really threw them for a loop. After so many weeks of tight, coordinated, successful play, they got tunnel vision on the idea that the bricked up wall was hiding something good, and not keeping something bad contained. It's funny because last session they found a locked door and were absolutely certain there was something dangerous locked in there and avoided the door, but here they could only see the brick wall as a barrier to something good. Odd how that works sometimes. The flavor text describing the statues was a very big giveaway, so i think it was fair having the gaze affect so many, they were actively scanning the area looking for clues, and in the module it is written there is a 1 in 6 chance that a player looks at the basilisk each turn, the party rolled a one on turn 2, so that was bad luck. It was fortunate that Draden had that odd scroll and was able to use it as a form of stone to flesh, so it wasn’t a game changing tragedy, just time consuming and the party felt a little frustrated at itself for not reading the clues better.
This brings up another point, the 1 in 6 chance of seeing the basilisk is a RAW passage written into the module. The same was true of the spike trap that hit Mandigor at the secret door. It is written into the module that whoever opens the door gets hit for 3-18 no save. After asking for a save, I explained that’s how it is in these old modules, and everyone was cool with playing it out RAW in these peculiar module rulings.
Which led to another discussion during the session- clearly the power level and danger of this module is much greater than the last one which was a novice adventure. Several of the players have higher level characters that were played 2 years ago when this campaign started with a play through of White Plume Mountain. Those characters haven’t been revisited since, and I offered that they may now have been called to Highport to help fight the slavers. The players of these characters considered, and we agreed there may be a chance that they arrive at the hideout and can be available for the party to use. But that decision is for another session.
In session I just let PCs who recovered from Stone to Flesh to immediately rejoin play, but after the fact I decided to make anyone who transformed rest for 1 full day. That’s not harsh since there’s already a rule that if you drop to 0 you must recover with 1 week of rest. I have been adhering to that rule. One thing I did forget though was to have them roll on the Con table for system shock. That could have caused a permanent death, but my mistake, I will note this and grade myself down for poor DMing. Other things I would cite as bad DMing this session are I did not roll for random encounters on the first level, forgot. I also did use morale and reaction roll rules in the fight with the ghouls, but have to check the modifiers, I may have messed up applying modifiers since the ghouls could not harm the party. I should have had them throw rocks and debris at the party and not just stand there. I also could have been more descriptive and used better imagery. DM grade- Poor
Which leads to another point, it’s RAW to grade players actions per session, and the quality of play based on their class and alignment. The grading rules are on DMG pg. 86, and affect training for next level, the cost and duration. For the most part PCs played well, though I would probably deduct points from the thief and to a lesser extent the assassin, who didn’t use any skills in the room with the collapsed floor. Letting the caveman go across the beam when 2 PCs have climb walls and don’t use it warrants a deduction. The fighter opting not to go into melee with the sundew was close, but appropriate play. Because the party used ingenuity to avoid melee and defeat the sundew it’s good play, but fighters need to be willing, even eager to melee most opponents. Leaving the sundew alive to avoid melee would have been a deduction. Points would be given to the magic user, paladin, and druid for thoughtful use of spells and abilities. These kinds of gradings will be applied in the future and they will affect training costs as per the rules on pg. 86.
Treasure and XP- Monster xp- 8 ghoul, 2 ghast, giant sundew, 2803 +500 for good play. Treasure xp- gold, gems, potion, ring, 7260xp= 10,563 divided by 6 PCs, + % bonus, - 15% for henchmen.
Graveyard-
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