Wednesday, March 17, 2010

Unlucky 13... aka, "Should we smash the skull?"

Bolin, Ronson and Stonk are still in Richrom's dungeon, exploring three rooms linked by doors, a monster-occupied pit in the middle of each (one with ghouls, one with bubbling black ooze, one with a troll). Ronson briefly banters with the troll (in trollish), but the party learns little from him. Moving to the ghouls' room, Bolin turns them from above, and in their unholy panic they scrabble at the algae-covered pit wall, revealing a door through which they escape.
Unready to enter the ghoul pit right away, our heroes decide to attack the black pudding with fire, with the advice of Oozes of Many Hues (and How To Survive Them), stolen from Count Zynyrd's library. With only one major backfire, they slay the poor trapped pudding, who commences to stink up the place, bubbling away and leaving a smooth crystalline pit (specialized to hold the monster... revealing the architect's attention to detail).
The party venture now through a door in the ghoul room, to a hall containing a "Private Chapel" locked with a showy lock that accepts the wooden key-shaped Les Paul statuette we found above, in the abandoned Loamville chapel...
Within, they find signs of aggressive search, and in the center of the carpeted room the decapitated skeleton of a small misshapen man, armed and wearing a backpack. In the backpack is his missing skull, and an annotated treasure-hunters' map of this dungeon. (Further foolishness involving tying up the little skeleton and replacing his skull results simply in his looking grateful.)
Back they head into the ghoul room and down into the pit (scraps of paper on the ground are painstakingly matched up, and revealed to be the notes for a "Perfectly Coiffed Hair" spell). The passage ahead is through a 2' high, 3' long tunnel opening onto a larger space. Nervous of this bottleneck, the party hustle forward, but Bolin (first into the room) is swiftly fallen upon by a green slime! The back of his armor is eaten away but he strips it off in time to avoid its attaching to him, and burns it away. Stonk shoots a flaming crossbow bolt into the room, failing to tempt a slime to drop down and be battled, but revealing a wheelbarrow in the center of the algae-slick room. They use a rope & grappling hook to retrieve the cart, kill the final slime that drops into it when it reaches the passageway, and retrieve the small stone Les Paul statue within.
Entering the now slime-free room, the three try its only other door, which requires an extra shove from Stonk to open. He enters the hallway first and is swarmed by a giant spider, who kills him right away with poison! Bolin and Ronson (and hirelings Lert and Danth) slam the door shut on this horror, and flee the dungeon with sickening sounds of their friend's consumption resounding in their ears! In their hasty exit the map is lost...
The party camp, and the players discuss whether Heather (who has now lost two characters to spider poisonings) should be allowed to play as the troll...

Wednesday, March 3, 2010

Session 13 coming up!

Hey folks. We're playing tonight, it'll be lucky session 13. Haven't seen Heather's notes yet on the last two games, so maybe next week we'll get a mega-write up of sessions 11, 12 and 13. For those trying to follow along at home, suffice to say that the party spent session 11 at the yellow-fog-shrouded Swamp Castle, actually officially known as Castle Dripthorn. The occupants of which (old man Thil, old woman Mil, the burly Neg-Nock, and mangy dog Woofsie) proved to be very hospitable. The party, however, suspicious of the Dripthorn people and their absent master Count Zynrnd (who was out hunting), responded by sneaking into the library in the dead of night and stealing what they wanted: a spell book for Ronson the M-U. They also made off with another, strange book, locked shut. 

During the next session, Bolin finally figured out how to open that book, though (flipping it over and opening it backwards, sort of). It was in an unknown tongue, however, and the only words in Common were notes in the margins that said something about a "Carcosan Grimoire"... also there was a diagram of what appeared to be a shining trapezoid... 

After some wilderness encounters (with giant leeches in the swamp, who kill Stonk's horse, and at night with a giant eagle that nearly makes off with the sleeping Danth), the party returned to Loamville and entered into the dungeon beneath the Grinding Gear yet again, where they find the other party they'd left there some days before, tied up and sleep-ing, has apparently been eaten by giant beetles. They kill the beetles and also some giant centipedes, and finally end the session in conversation with a troll stuck in a pit (thanks to Ronson speaking trollish).

There were several good quotes from these two sessions, one of which had something to do with "the transitive property of XP ingestion".