Nappendixia Campaign Session Report
Session #- 51 Session Date- 7/12/23
Time Passed- 5 Days (7/12-7/16), light duty 7/17.
Roll Call- Mook- T1
Harry- T4
Maximillion- F2
Godhard- C4
2 Med Cav
Bart- C1
1 Sgt
Tomas- F4
1 Med Cav
Adventure Log- 7/12- Several PCs are finishing up training this day, so there is some gathering of supplies, purchasing of horses, and plans laid to head out tomorrow in search of adventure. The party discusses heading SE to the ruined keep scouted by Jack, it seems there is a band of creatures and a fighter with a magic sword challenging travelers and kidnapping them. They also wish to return to the megadungeon to the west, but Tomas also checks in with Papagallo to get more info on his plan to move out of Bartertown with his people. He tells Tomas he needs explorers to scout the SE for him; he seeks a ruined compound with some strange metal devices. If found it will greatly help him in his plan to move. They decide to head to the megadungeon, thinking that maybe they can scout a place either inside or outside of the dungeon to make into a semi-permanent camp. During the day a group of 14 hungover ogres, fans of the East Orange Ogres, shows up expecting the game to be happening today. They are furious to hear it has already happened, and even more furious to hear the ogres lost! They are about to riot in the city, but some quick thinking city watch goes to the blood bowl pitch and gets some ogre players to calm things down.
7/13- The party heads out on the 3 day journey to the megadungeon, slowed by their heavier warhorses as several folks have upgraded their mounts. They go slower, but can now charge mounted in combat. However it now takes 3 days to get to the megadungeon instead of 2. The day of travel west reveals a crack in the badlands, a shallow cave. There are signs of combat between a few humans and some kind of creature. An errant boot and some broken arrows, some blood, danderish fur/feather matter and a black blood not human. Godhard casts light into the hole and Max climbs in, ready for a fight, but interested in any errant treasure too. Nothing but some feathers are found, Tomas finds one nice enough for his cap.
7/14- Another day of mostly uneventful travel, Godhard spots a palm sized reptilian scale on the open plains and has his cav retrieve it. That evening Bart and Max spy some red eyes from a distant bush peering for a few seconds then disappearing. They are extra watchful, but nothing else occurs.
7/15- The party arrives at the scene of the megadungeon at dusk. They do some observing and see the same scene of chaos and fighting between the Gorilla men, reinforced from the south, and the little manlings, reinforced from the north. The top of the flat mountain has a massive rectangular stone structure atop it. It is about 2 stories high and covers the whole mountaintop. At the north end of the structure there is a ruined keep occupied by the manlings. The gorilla men have a stables and small wood fort and clearly have some kind of stair access into the stone structure. As night falls the combats die down, and the party makes a break for a rocky outcropping to the east, hoping to sneak north and make an alliance with the manlings. They make it to the outcropping, but upon looking at the eastern cliffside and the cave mouth high up, they see first one, then 2 medium sized bird creatures wing down into the cave mouth and land inside. This alters their plan as Harry strips down to Tunnel Rat Gear Loadout, and makes a deft sneak across open ground to the cliffside. He then scrambles up the lower half of the cliff, fixes a rope, ties the other end around his waist and makes a push for the cave mouth. He makes it and secures the rope to the cave floor. Just as he is able to peer down the corridor and start footpadding, he bumps squarely into the 2 bird men, backing up, a 3rd attempts to pickpocket the fireworks off of Harry’s belt meant for an emergency signal. Harry allows the pickpocket despite interrupting it. He is unable to communicate with them, they seem to regard each other with looks and gestures. Finally a human emerges from a corridor and speaks with Harry, explaining they can offer them passage into the megadungeon and they can guide them to certain levels and answer certain questions, but it will be at a price. There were outsider humans they dealt with before and it was a lot of work dealing with them, so they are leery. They offer to fly the party up into the cliffside for 100gp each, offer them safe lodging and help them navigate the dungeon. However, they have a small interplanar infestation caused partly by the prior humans, and they need the party to handle that as a sign of good faith that they can work together. The rest of the party is flown up and things are discussed. The party agrees to rest the night and go into what the human calls the green portion and orange portion of their level.
7/16- After sleeping in a secure room in the birdmen (kenku) area, the party are give an orange key and told to proceed through the green area to the locked orange door and enter. In the orange area is where the planar disturbance is. They tell them to beware of traps in the green area. They are led through a secret door into the green area. As soon as the party enters someone steps on a pressure plate and triggers a portcullis to fall, blocking access to the secret door out. The strong members of the party try to lift the gate and get it a foot up but then get it crooked in the track, jamming it. They try to right it but it will take time. They proceed through this room into a corridor that turns right with a door on the left. Harry checks the door for traps and is unsuccessful and bathed in a gout of flame from the door's keyhole. He’s seriously wounded and backs away as the door opens, revealing a small mostly empty room with a bowl depression in the stone floor, some magical looking fire filling it. 3 orange/red 3 foot long snakes slither from the fire and approach. Max quickly slams the door as Godhard heals Harry. He then casts create water and has it all flow under the shut door, dousing the inside of the room. The door is opened revealing 3 sizzling snakes rendered extinguished by the water. The fire remains, boiling the water as it pools into the depression. Mook notices a gem in the depression and attaches a spoon to the end of his 10’ pole and fishes it out, a decent haul for one gem. They move down the hall, looking for the orange door, and find it and open it with the orange key. It opens into another small room that seems empty but when Harry goes to investigate the north wall it reaches out to strike him with a pseudopod. He is smacked by its slimy paw, but resists its paralyzing poison. Bart steps in and pushes Harry back, exposing himself to attack and is struck, also resisting the poison. An onslaught of weapon strikes, ending with a dart puncture from Mook bursts the slimy stunjelly, a cousin to the gelatinous cube to protoplasm an inch thick on the floor. The recessed wall where the creature was hidden reveals the slimed over bones and surviving magic items from its prior victims. They find a hammer, 2 potions, a jar of dust, a ring, and a fancy necklace amongst the bones. They also find a small metal owl, when they get the slime off it and check it out it looks like this- the haul is packed up and the slightly injured party decides to head back to the kenku area to recover and check out their loot, perhaps get some more info from the human that hangs out with the kenku. They rest for several days and check out their new items.
Session Notes- Some serendipitous die rolls have shown lately that you can get some amazing ideas and situations strictly from letting your games flow from the random tables in the DMG. One funny moment at the beginning of the session is Tomas casually stated he would like to buy a few med cav. I informed him he had to roll on the table on pg. 30 to represent searching on downtime for merc, not everything is immediately available. So on the first roll he gets med cav and just casually purchases exactly the troop type he wanted. Not an easy roll to make. Another thing I have been doing is throwing some mundane encounters into the mix. If every time you give details and descriptions about a situation and that always leads to a combat encounter, it kind of telegraphs to the players when a combat is upcoming. By introducing descriptive details that actually have no substance and go nowhere makes the players react differently. This group is starting to get that, I think it’s happened enough times that they realize not every descriptive moment from the DM is going to lead to a combat encounter. I throw out those random descriptions a few times a session and it colors the world better. It shows that in your epic travels and adventures, sometimes you just get your boot stuck in mud, or sometimes a creepy empty cave is just that, a creepy EMPTY cave. It affects players time management, and also affects how much loot heavy encounters they can get to in a session. I also have a separate encounters table of my own design that incorporates a lot of non-combat encounters, and it also is there to represent smaller encounters with fewer numbers appearing. Like orcs can’t possibly only walk around in groups of 20-200. That’s not feasible, clearly there are groups of 5 or 10 or fewer groups of orcs that can be encountered. My home encounters table accounts for this. I also have lots of non combat encounters like weather events, terrain features, signs of destruction/old combats, and monster tracks or signs, but not the actual monster. I think this combo of using the main dmg table plus a few of my own to broaden the scope of encounters available is working to make a more realistic world. Finally I want to talk about downtime. A lot is happening in downtime, way too much to catalog in session reports. I was trying to keep some downtime things in the loop in session reports, but I’m still trying to find a way to keep these reports shorter. So I’ll basically not be mentioning much that happens in downtime, readers can always contact me and get access to the Discord and read the downtime logs yourself. Players are doing a lot of info gathering about adventure locations, getting more details on the settlement they are living in, investigating magic items, making purchases, planning out the next session. This only works when you have good players who are invested in this type of play, so I applaud my players for really enhancing this campaign.
Treasure and XP- Monsters- Stunjelly 221xp, 3 Fire Snakes 273, Traps 400= 894xp. Treasure and Magic- 1000gp necklace, 500gp gem, hammer, 2 potion, ring, dust, owl= 6000xp Total= 6894xp /6 PCs= 1149xp each. Add % bonus if appropriate.
Graveyard-Rollo Tomassi- consumed by a Bag of Devouring in Zelligar’s dungeon #38
Ragenard- brought to Death’s Door by a stirge attack in Zelligar’s dungeon #39 (1 week bed rest)
Caolite- brought to Death’s Door by kobolds in Zelligar’s dungeon #40 (1 week bedrest)
Bart- brought to Death’s Door by Firetoad breath in Zelligar’s dungeon #40 (1 week
bedrest)
Ragenard- killed by Griffons exploring the plains west of Fort Turjmir #42
Vlana- killed by Troglodytes in the 2nd level of Zelligar’s dungeon #43
Stigr’s 4 Lt. Foot- killed by Zombies on the plains of Lancebrass #45
Godhard’s 2 Med Cav- killed by Firenewt’s mounted on Giant Striders #47
Stig- brought to Death’s Door by Orc raiders at the walls of Bartertown #48 (1 week bedrest)
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