Another Sunday, another game of Between the Serpents of Smoke & Steel. Since this is going to be the last session for the year (the campaign being on hold until January because holidays), I figured I'd give my players a few hooks, but for the sake of metagame comfort steer them towards the small dungeon that could be cleared through the course of the session.
Summary
The characters explore a sunken temple on a small island and make a lizard friend!
Characters
- Esho- Sorcerer
- Maru the Witch - Sorcerer
- Syphon Gandu - Sorcerer
- Athra - Fighter
- Gal-Naha the Giant Gecko
A Very Quick Recap
The party did not really want to go back to the temple they visited the last two sessions, so they spent some money and time in their Downtime activities to look for some more hints. They got several, in fact, but the one they went for was a small cave and ruins on an island in the middle of the river, south of the Undying City.
They hired a ship, since they realized that despite there being 3 PCs, between all the mercenaries and porters their entire party was 19 people. After an uneventful trip down the river (uneventful because I've not gotten around to writing encounters on the river yet) they arrived at the small island.
The dungeon exploration itself is hardly remarkable, like the dungeon itself - a partially flooded underground ruin of a shrine that was once dedicated to the Serpent of Smoke, the river the island was on.
The net total of their escapade were two dead mercenaries and a giant gecko that befriended one of the fighters and a magical spear, a magical light armor and a helmet of Telepathy, a treasure map, and of course some coin.
Satisfied they headed back.
Observations
Combat in this game was, finally, not a simple one-sided affair, with a skeleton managing to take down a merc in a single sword thrust, while everyone else managed to bring it and its fellows down.
A player character also got banged up fairly well, but managed to patch himself up after the fact. We spent probably an hour or so before the actual adventure simply handling downtime, including stuff like Carousing, finalizing a deal with a Mentor for one of the Sorcerers so he can learn spells from that person, getting hints and leads for new dungeons, hiring people, buying stuff and also trying to safely leak information about the Chaos cultists that had taken over the temple in the previous sessions, without the party itself getting under too much scrutiny
It's up to the players, but things are very much moving in the direction of having at least one session be simply back in the Undying City just to be able to handle all the various threads and activities that are starting to weave together.
So, the giant gecko...the party ran into one as a random encounter, however the gecko was generally neutral and not that interested in dealing with them, mostly just hanging off a column and observing them curiously. The party decided to leave it be, as it headed down. Later another random encounter roll ended up again with the gecko, so I just decided to rule that it had simply followed them down the stairs (nobody had closed the big rusted doors behind them).
As they explored the dungeon they ended up running into ANOTHER giant gecko, and after feeding it some food, combined with a very high reaction roll I ended up deciding that it took a liking to the party's Fighter and started to follow him around. It helps that he said he'll use one of his language slots for Beast Speech, a language used by animals, beast men and other such things. Obviously communication with what is, ultimately, an overgrown lizard didn't amount to much but hey, it's something!
They later looped back around to the first one, with the two lizards becoming aggressive, unhappy with the other being their territory - the party decided to kill the first lizard, and with that act the second one officially became a Companion to the fighter, and is now named Gal-Naha!
It pleases me immensely that the first ever Companion in the campaign so far was not only a monster befriended in the dungeon, but a giant fucking lizard to boot! A great confluence of lucky rolls and treating it quite well.
Ending on a more general observation on the game - with OD&D rules, as they are, each HD worth of enemies killed gives the party 100 exp. Yes there is the comically stupid and convoluted formula for adjusting it based on dungeon level, character level and so on - I don't use that. It's impossible to arbitrate, for one thing. So I just stick to 100 xp her HD.
With that, combat and killing enemies actually now gives WAY more experience in this game than in something like B/X. I am not entirely sure how to feel about that yet, and I am curious if anyone has had experience with running OD&D this way and how it affected progression and general gameplay patterns in their game.