Characters
- Flake (Owl Village Spirit)
- Leda (Human Vampire Hunter)
- Grismelda (Human Religious Radical)
- Reynard (Fox Journalist)
- John (Opossum Trapper)
Session Recap
Venturing back into the dungeon proper, the party decide to check back on the locked and barred doors they found in the previous session. Going to the room with the well dressed skeleton bouncers they are told very firmly that they really need to leave and not loiter in the area, which they eventually do and simply go around to the other set of double doors. Just as they're pondering how to approach the problem, a solution presents itself - the gaggle of ten Small Folk guerilla fighters that they met two sessions back end up in the room, and after pleasantries are exchange the party recruits them to help unlock and then bust down the doors.
The racket unfortunately attracts the attention of a group of ghosts that have wandered off from the party, and a young officer with a lot of bravado starts shit-talking the group, and challenges Leda to a dual of sabers. Leda clearly is a lot stronger, however her strikes simply pass harmlessly through the ghost's ethereal frame. She decides to go for a disarming maneuver on his ghostly sabre, but he sidesteps it and plunges his blade deep into her, knocking her unconscious. Pleased with having show a dirty peasant her place he goes back to his group and they wander off. With all the commotion the small folk had also left the room, not wanting to deal with the ghosts.
Setting up Leda up against a wall to recover some of her lost power, the group start rummaging through the room, which appears to be a combination of a shrine and a storage room, with piles upon piles of old and half-rotten furniture, rugs, wall tapestries and other crap. Reynard the fox sniffs out some feint signs of magic among the trash and starts digging, while Flake and Grismelda mess around with the shrine. They find that there is a pocket of raw Primal Chaos swirling around right in front of an abstract statue that represents it (how appropriate), and end up with a smooth stone out of the whole thing (later turns out this is a Soup Stone. You boil it in water and it makes soup. The group donate it to the Domovoi camp), and Grismelda spends several turns staring into the chaos statue, her understanding of it growing deeper at the expense of getting rather dizzy and making her less precise in her actions.
Finally, Reynard digs up a strange shard of crystal which he realizes he can use as an improvised sword. Satisfied with their finds the group pack up and head north to the shimmering staircase that leads deeper into the dungeon. Once they get down to the next floor, the atmosphere is clearly different.
The walls of the room are covered not with the usual primordial bas reliefs, but instead skulls and bones, millions of them all mortared into the walls.
They also discover a pair of fountains, one with a deep purple, almost black liquid that smells of sickly sweet rot, and one with a thick, milky-like liquid. Grismelda, in her Goo Drinker way, takes a sip from the black one while Leda takes one from the white. Leda's body is wracked with pain as bone plates burst out and cover her skin. While they are hard and provide natural armor, they also end up messing around with her ability to wield her sabre correctly. Grismelda, on the other hand, simply falls unconscious and can not be woken up.
Leaving Leda to look after her, the rest of the party head up one of the nearby staircases and explore more of the dungeon, taking a while to navigate a room where the bones int the wall are shaped like spikes and make traversing the room very slow. While that is happening, Leda is visited by more ghosts. These ones tho appear to be revolutionaries, communists and freedom fighters, who recognize a fellow soul in her and give her some warnings and advice. They tell her that she and her friends have entered the domain of the Patriarch of Bones, that he claims all beings that have died as his servants and thralls. They also tell her that Grismelda will die from the liquid she ingested unless she is brought to a magician who can heal her. They reiterate the danger of the Pesoglavi, and confirm that they do in fact work with the Red Caps to liberate them from their fate.
Thankful for the help and the information, Leda rushes to warn the rest of the group that they should leave (which they do proceeding to slowly make their way back, having only made it halfway through the room of spikes). However as they return to the staircase, they find they are not alone. Grismelda's body is surrounded by four goat cultists, who clearly had plans for her, but when they see the group they attack them head on. Flake scares away one of them, and the rest engage the cultists in some close quarters stabbing and pushing, eventually defeating them and killing all three, taking their goat headdresses for themselves and lugging Grismelda's body back to camp.
They get Anya the Healer, a prominent member of the camp, to use magic to heal Grismelda, and set about doing their down time procedures, happy with the fact that they had taken out three more of the goat cultists and excited to have learned more about the dungeon.
Observations
This session was kind of a roller-coaster. Initially it looked like I would have only one player (which is fine by me), then two more joined kind of last minute. As such I let everyone decide if they wanted to run one or two characters, which two players did, but one decided to just use a single one instead. Re-threading previously explored rooms also helped them realize errors in their map, which I had made a point to not correct them on (as their map was not unusable or anything, just not quite correct on the dimensions of the rooms). They almost ended up heading into the cultist territory again because of map misunderstandings, but managed to correct it this time and found the right way.
Also the party have now breached level 2 of the dungeon! The goo drinking continued, mostly working out well for Grismelda.....until it didn't and she drank what is, effectively, poison. Luckily for her the black fountain does not kill anyone instantly, and as long as there was someone left to drag her back to the camp she would have been fine.
The other thing of note was that there were so many more encounters this time around. Which was curious, previous sessions would go for dozens of turns with one, or even no encounters at all, this one had 4! I also loved that I got to use both of my Dungeon Regulars encounters (those are always on a 7), which I had previously determined would be the small folk squad that are patrolling the dungeon and were thus friendly to the party, and the cultists who were explicitly looking for the party.
It helped provide some good contrast between friendly and hostile encounters, with a 50/50 split. The ghostly communists could have been an outright kill on Leda and Grismelda, had they been hostile, however the dice were incredibly generous with the reaction roll so instead the party got some information and the lay of the land. One of the players also explicitly mentioning that they liked that they got to learn more about the dungeon itself.
All in all this was a good, straightforward session, and it's exactly what one wants out of a session in a mgedungeon campaign - some exploration, finding new things, getting good magical loot, fighting some enemies and leveraging previous encounters in the campaign to one's benefit.
Session Stats
Rooms Explored: 3
Enemies Defeated: 4 Goat Cultists
Characters Dead: None
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