Sessions 009-010 Play Report

[bravewolf]

Campaign: Arduous Adventures in the Kingdom of Arduin
Rule Sets: AD&D 1e - PHB, DMG, MMI&2, UA, & TDSG; Arduin Trilogy & Vols. IV & V for additional classes, races, special abilities, & gear; The Complete Alchemist
Setting: Kingdom of Arduin & Stonehell Megadungeon

Bwah! I fell way behind in our play report & here we are in the 30s . Consequently, this entry attempts to summarize sessions 9 & 10. I expect a certain amount of brevity owing to the vagaries of memory.

The Crew:
Skip: Blasto Slamo, the laser pistol-toting, half-Orc fighter 1 & Holly Morningwood, a half-Elven Druid 1 who speaks about 20 languages. Blasto & Holly are half-siblings, having the same father. Skip also fielded Connor McGill, a dual-class Irish F1/M-U3, & McGill’s staunch henchman Günther (human F1). He also played the Stoutish hobbitt thief 1 named Bibbo Quickstudy. Bibbo dresses extravagantly & rides a war boar.

Tim: Wayne, a human cleric of Favora, level 1. He is quite a beast-tamer & currently is accompanied by Surprise the mountain lion. Wayne borrowed Flardin’s - the dwarven alchemist - porters, cart & horse. They are still parked outside the entrance to Stonehell...hopefully!

Adam (just returned from Myanmar!): Grarl, the trollborn F1 with demonic ancestry & a wicked reverse forward kick. Grarl wears as a necklace the head of an Orc that he killed in Stonehell.

Aaron: Aaron brought back his trollborn Barbarian (level 1) Fljörn & Kelfi, a human T1 that he caught trying to lighten his purse...so Fljörn dragged the thief with him to Stonehell.


Sessions 9 & 10 Recaps

Our ninth session occurred on September 10, 2017 - commencing in the afternoon of 25 Kos in game time. Session 10 occurred on September 17, 2017 and ended in the evening of 26 Kos in game time.

Session 8 had ended with a tense conversation in orcish with the sentry for a 10-strong kobold work crew. Our heroes learned that the kobolds’ job was to reset & repair traps as well as the dungeon environment itself. The kobolds invited the party to accompany them back to the Kobold Korners Market, where they could do business & maybe obtain an audience with Trustee Sniv, the kobold leader.

No shrinking violets, the crew accepted the invitation. The Kobold laborers surrounded the PCs & led them east & southward, encountering Stonehell’s grand staircase to the surface along the way. Here, the PCs beheld Grarl, Fljörn, & Kelfi descending the stairs into the dungeon.

Kelfi saluted Blasto, “Hey, ugly, what’s up?” Blasto gave him the finger & guffawed.

“Friends of yours?” The labor gang muttered suspiciously & fingered tools & blades.

Holly & Blasto, the only orcish-speakers among the PCs, assured the kobolds that the three recent arrivals are friends who have come to trade. The trollborn blurted, “We heard you was down here again and dint wanna miss all the fun!” The kobolds waved the trio over to join the pedestrian convoy, which now numbered twenty, counting the cougar.

From the grand staircase, the mixed troupe passed through chambers & passages familiar to the PCs from previous antics in the night-haunted halls. The room containing opulent dwarven statues & bas reliefs was now still, the dwarven scholars having departed since the party’s last visit. Soon, the kobolds had the PCs beyond points they had mapped, and, moving at double-time, Wayne was unable to map effectively.

The party had a few mishaps on the way to the kobold market. First, they observed a kobold child wandering the corridor south of the party. The kobold work party, after some discussion among themselves, seemed unconcerned about the unsupervised Kind. Grarl decided to run after the diminutive humanoid but succeeded only in falling into a pit trap as the kobold ran away. The work party thought this all great fun.

The second mishap occurred a turn later when the combined party entered Open Sore Orc territory & I rolled a wandering encounter. Five orcs barged out of their guardroom & confronted the travelers. Already suspicious & churlish, the orcs became agitated when they observed Grarl’s Orc-head pendant. Speaking in orcish, the kobolds explained that they were taking the adventurers to see Trustee Sniv & throw them in the lockup for causing trouble in Stonehell. At this, the sentries grudgingly gave passage to the group.

Shortly thereafter, the kobolds led the PCs into a weapons-check room. Grarl & Fljörn bristled at the notion of handing over their weapons before proceeding to the market. Blasto & Holly began quietly urging the rest of their crew to go on the attack - twenty kobolds seemed like good odds - having taken the kobolds’ fast-talk with the Orc sentries as indicating the work party’s true intentions! Only after Wayne gave over his sling & scouted ahead did the PCs simmer down & (mostly) comply.

The crew explored the market, tavern, rat cafe, storage & sorting area, & inn. A few poisonous snakes were purchased, some rats, & an Orc unwisely challenged Grarl to a fistfight over Grarl’s “necklace”. The trollborn ended the fracas with a single kick to the goblinoids nads. Bugbear guards hustled in to prevent a larger fight from developing.

A kobold page called the party to a meeting with Trustee Sniv, leader of the Kobold Korners. There the PCs learned the kobolds’ position as custodians, superintendents, merchants, & brokers of parley within Stonehell. Sniv offered the party 1,000 pieces of gold for information about the dungeon’s most recent arrivals, the hobgoblins. He wanted numbers, intent, capabilities, & a map. The party readily agreed & Sniv appointed a scout to take the party to the second level, where the hobgoblins dwelled.

A night in the inn did not endear the Korners to our adventurous friends: flea-ridden blankets & straw piles separated by makeshift cloth partitions. Still, for a copper & remaining near all the action, most party members expressed that they could live down here part time. Not Holly, of course.

On the morrow, a young kobold led the party to the stairs that descended to the hobgoblin demesne. Bibbo asked everybody to hang back while he scouted down the steps. He went slowly, using a pole to check for traps. Fljörn grew tired of the waiting & muscled right past Bibbo, who promptly dropped his pole & hopped on the trollborn’s back. Upon reaching the bottom of the stair, two hobgoblins stood with bows drawn, looking displeased at their new visitors. After shouting back & forth, the goblinoids unleashed their arrows at the trollborn. Bibbo dropped off Fljörn’s back & into the anonymity of the gloom. Barbarian & thief managed to take down one sentry while the other ran for reinforcements. Fljörn grabbed the dead hobgoblin & said, “Let’s beat it before that guy brings the whole lot down on our heads.” The twain rejoined the group on the stairs.

[The Perilous Dreamer]

bravewolf, this has been a busy year with lots of good and bad going on. I have assumed that you were like all of us and very  scarce on time, but I was wondering if you have a slew of play reports to post?

[bravewolf]

I do, I do. I’ll see what I can...do ><

[The Perilous Dreamer]

Oct 10, 2019 1:04:19 GMT -5 bravewolf said:

I do, I do. I’ll see what I can...do ><

Fantastic!

[bravewolf]

Session 10, Part 2

Same cast as presented in the OP.

The party quickly dragged the hobgoblin sentry’s corpse back up the stairs, leaving a nice trail of blood that the PCs all chose to ignore. Starting back toward Kobold Korners, the gang ducked to the right into a room that served as the kobolds’ dump and occasional (?) latrine. A sizable pit dominated the center of the room and gurgled foul stenches from the thick miasma within. The two trollborn fighting men took the hobgob carcass and pitched into the sludge, in which the body sank out of view.

“‘At’s ‘at,” Grarl proclaimed.

McGill leaned against a wall, pipe in teeth, and said, “Well, it’s no good heading below using those stairs. We better blow.”

“I think I can get us down to the hobgoblin level by another way. First, we need to get back to the main stairwell,” Wayne offered.

The group returned to the Korners, picked up their weapons, obtained directions to the main stairwell, and headed back without incident - but with the route completely mapped this time. Wayne stopped the party at a crossroads just north of Open Sore Orcs territory.

“We need to go left here, past that wizard’s lab we found.”

The end of the corridor greeted the PCs with stairs heading into the gloom.

“This is good,” McGill observed, “The hobgoblins won’t expect us to approach from this direction.”

With that, the party descended the stairs, coming to a room whose walls were covered in stick figure drawings. They looked left and right, seeing passages in both directions. Seeing a figure slumped against a corridor wall to the right, Fljörn pointed and said, “We go that way.”

“Lead the way, big fella,” Bibbo said with a smile.

“Try to keep up, shifty guy,” the trollborn replied.

The adventurers gathered around the figure, which was aught but a humanoid skeleton. Scrawled in blood on the wall above was a pathetic epitaph, “My mother never loved me”.

“Oof,” said Kelfi, “Mommy issues.”

After a brief prayer from Wayne, the group shuffled onward to a Y-shaped fork. They went right and came to a door about halfway along the passage. Inside, they found a giant stone head and a door opposite them. Other than being huge, the statue yielded nothing of interest. The door admitted the PCs to a room full of jars and amphorae filled with various liquids, each fouler than the one before it. Several jars harbored a metallic glean, however, so the adventurers busied themselves emptying containers and recovered several hundred silver and gold coins.

Leaving the chambers, the gang decided to continue along the same corridor. It eventually branched left. Straight ahead, the way terminated at a door, which read, “Do Not Disturb the Slumber of It.” A careless cairn of potsherds stood before the door. Upon entering, the PCs found a wooden coffin, nailed shut and festooned with garlic braids.

Bibbo made a start for the coffin. McGill said, “Blasto?” The half-orc caught the hobbitt by his shoulders and held him in place. “Nope,” he said. Bibbo ran his legs anyway.

“Settle down, shifty!”

McGill regarded the coffin from a distance, “Aye, we have these back home...classic vampire disposal. We don’t have the gear to deal with what’s inside. We’ll need to kit up in town and come back. Let’s go.”

Proceeding along the branching corridor now, the party came to a three-way intersection: passages left and right, and a door straight ahead. They opted for the room. Inside were the remains of a dormitory and the sound of many voices - but no creatures were visible. Bibbo was intrigued and concentrated on the disembodied cacophony (the player rolled a Wisdom save and failed miserably). To everyone’s surprise, Bibbo plopped down on a cot and started babbling away like he was talking to an old friend. Minutes later, he came to and told his compatriots, “Guys, the inmates here say the dude in the coffin was a real bloodsucker all right, and there is a tiny blue dragon up on the first level. Treasure! We’ll be getting close when we see the glowing moss.”

“Um, I think Bibbo’s broken.”

Holly nodded, “He could do with fresh air. Woods know I could, too.”

The party decided to return to the surface. Along the way, they happened across a pair of cannibalistic men, Fafr and Rungar, who were persuaded to leave Stonehell with the mysterious promise of “other, other meats” on the surface. Wayne and Holly collected the remains of the “momma’s boy” and buried them outside of Stonehell. The group then retired to Pavane.

[Fantasy King]

bravewolf I have been reading these journals as a lurker up till now. I surely do hope you post more of these.