 |
| The Bull of Heaven |
Summary
The PC's travel to a new town to investigate rumors of a bronze colossus, but things don't quite go as planned, mostly due to me reading the dungeon wrong.
Characters
- Athra - Fighter
- Gal-Naha the Giant Gecko
- Esho - Sorcerer
- Shimsusa the Archer - level 1 Fighter
- Maru the Witch - Sorcerer
- Rajini - Sorceress
Session Recap
After a short and uneventful boat ride the group arrived in the late afternoon outside the titanic walls of Bastion of the Raging Bull, a heavily fortified and militaristic fortress-city, firmly dominated by the old imperial cult of the Bull of Heaven. They met with Captain Temen of the Bull Guards, who gave them the law of the land (visitors need a clay seal to be allowed into the city. Outsiders are allowed only within the Public Sector. Barbarians and sorcerers tainted by too much magic must reside in the Restricted Sector. No casting of spells within the city walls by outsiders.) and also confirmed the rumors of a massive bronze colossus somewhere in the jungles to the north of town. With introductions out of the way the party settled in for the evening, also finding a guide to help lead them through the jungle.
On the next morning they decided it was prudent to visit the temple of the Bull located in the outsider zone and make an offering, as well as talk to the priest there. The Bull Priest explained that the town tries to maintain the old traditions of the bygone Empire, and as such views people who practice sorcery outside of the directions of Imperial cults rather suspect. They also dislike people who dabble in summoning inhuman and otherworldly beings or deal with necromancy (two of the three sorcerers in the party start to sweat profusely and try very hard not to let out an awkward laugh). One of the players that is playing a sorcerer was disappointed that joining the cult of the Bull of Heaven would involve several years of training and practice before he is even taught any of their magic, so the party bid the priest farewell and left for the jungle.
While travelling through it, they did have two encounters - one with a group of river pirates, which their guide successfully managed to help them avoid, and one with four feathered monstrosities closer to the location of the colossus. The fight with the mutated beasts did result in one of the longer-serving mercenaries to die, but otherwise it was quite successful for the players. They set up camp and in the next morning explored the Colossus.
The colossus in question is a small-ish dungeon I got from Gus L’s blog, which I thought would fit quite well in my own campaign as the broken and magically contaminated old remnant of an Law-aligned army’s war machine. It took some futzing about with ladders, tying ropes and climbing up and down the thing’s legs for the party to safely disable the trapped entry hatch and then go inside, only to be met with another trapped hatch, this one also magically locked from the other side (more on that in the observations below). Stumped by this barrier to their progress, the group sent out their giant gecko companion(Gal-Naha) to explore some of the other possible entrances, but in both cases it returned simply repeating in the simplistic language of beasts “bad, bad, bad, scary, very scary, very scary!” and refused to elaborate.
Because of that, one of the sorcerers climbed up to check out the front of the colossus where they saw some windows. Through them he found a larger room, filled with rubble and destroyed machinery, and in the middle of it - a giant pile of tree trunks, bones, vines, feathers, other unmentionable things all centred on a giant stone altar covered in foul-smelling candles. The altar came alive, clearly some kind of magical construct which meant that this pathway to the insides of the war machine was also blocked off. The party’s necromancer did get a bit more information out of it, figuring out that this was some incredibly powerful necromantic construct, powered seemingly by hate, pain and the desire to kill and destroy.
With little in the way of progress the party decided to head back into town, with plans to figure out a way to get access to a spell that can open magically sealed locks.
Observations - What happens when you don't read the dungeon correctly?
So, two things I want to talk about regarding this session.
First off, worldbuilding - I came up with the details regarding this new town the day before the game itself, and as such did not even have a name for the town when the players visited it, only coming up with it yesterday (hence the post here). This was honestly fine. You really do not need to have everything figured out and planned out, you only need enough so that the players have a sense of the place and how to act within it. There are plenty of such places on the map of the Fertile Lands and I only have a vague idea for about a handful of those, and that is absolutely okay.
Secondly, dungeons. So…I realised, post-factum, that I had completely bungled up the layout of the dungeon. Part of it is due to the layout and write up of the dungeon itself, part of it is simply me not having had the chance to properly read through it several times and catch this weirdness before I started running it. After reading through it a few times I realised that the magically locked hatch is probably in a different level of the machine than where I thought, meaning the party probably had a way to go deeper if they desired. Oh well. I apologised to the players when I found this out, and we decided that in a future session they’ll be returning anyway, and we can just say the machine magically rearranged itself, or maybe they just now noticed an entrance they had missed.
Still, it is a very awkward feeling, like a pit in my stomach, when I realized that the session had ended as abruptly as it did due to me bungling the map, rather than it simply being a hard dungeon to navigate (though, to be fair, it is a rather deadly environment in its own right).
No comments:
Post a Comment