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...

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".

Session 10: Turning undead - It's not so many ensorcellments

And two weeks ago (real time, not game time):

We start session 10 still in the tunnels under the statue in the middle of Loamville...

Flush with the victory of creaming another small human party and taking all its possessions, our party returns to a nearby secret door and heads deeper into the dungeon. They trail along through corridors and staircases until they spring a trap on one landing, a hunk of wall suddenly punching out and smacking Bolin into the rest, Bowling (Bolin-ing) them all down the stairs. Bruised, they proceed using their heavy packs to trigger the trap and crawl one by one past the stone, which retracts and doesn't re-launch as long as sufficient weight remains on the landing.
Further along Stonk sticks his head around a corridor provoking a goblin attack (?); next in line Bolin is attacked by a tattered human corpse. Ronson fucks up the goblin, but more corpses stagger forward to do some damage. Lucky for the party, Bolin's so holy he turns the whole crowd around.

Our heroes follow the fleeing monsters to an intersection, heading north as the undead go west, to a door with a flame on it. They listen at it (but take no other precautions for some reason) and, hearing nothing, open the door.

The door scratches along the ground and ignites a huge fireball, which blasts Ronson, Bolin and Stonk into unconsciousness (the land of zero hitpoints). [Amazingly, though, they all fall to exactly zero hp, so they don't die - DM]

Danth and Lert bind their wounds, and they wake up badly burnt, with much loot lost; what's worse, their own holy symbol and spellbooks are consumed too. Damaged and defenseless, the whole party makes haste to the surface, staggering out at last into the afternoon sun, and fleeing Loamville as fast as their stolen horses can carry them.

Having made camp, the party attempt some rest and recovery; but the watch (Danth) awakens them mid-night to the approach of trouble. Hurriedly dousing their fire and breaking camp, they discern an advancing party of what sound like aimless mad thugs, spoiling for a fight, rambling through the forest hacking at trees! The friends scramble away on the horses just as the thugs enter the clearing, and stagger off into a swamp to try to salvage what sleep they can.

They wake up late and discuss the next move; it is decided that provisions are needed before the party head back to Loamville, and a nearby castle seems like the best bet for finding them...

Session 9: You make a pile of wolves; or, I really ought to write these up while they're fresher in my mind

Thanks goes to Heather (aka Stonk) for taking notes the last two sessions. Here's what happened 4 weeks ago:

The scene as we open:
An outpost that has fallen on evil times. All its inhabitants seem to be dead or evacuated after some tragedy or madness. A four-story inn (the Grinding Gear), a chapel and a stable surround an overgrown cobblestone courtyard with an impressive copper statue on a marble block in the center; the statue is surrounded by corpses for 20' in all directions. Our nervous heroes are considering splitting town on the healthy (though spooked) horses they found tethered in the stables, but find themselves compelled to try and unlock the mysteries of this place before nightfall...

The companions approach the statue as a group, picking their way over bodies as they go. They are mostly dead goblins and orcs, a few wolves, a human (or a few?); all these are unarmed and bear no signs of battle or disease, though they all seem to have needle-like bite marks on them somewhere. The plaque (marked "Garvin Richrom") on the marble base is pressed, a panel in the side opens up, and the party hear a hissing... two are felled (Stonk and Bolin??) but the other three pull them out of the 20-foot radius corpse zone just in time for a battle with six bats! After some painful struggle (and some bloodsucking), during which few bats are killed and more approach, the knocked-out companions revive and the party hightails it to the chapel to bind wounds and recover. No bats follow them inside, and through the stained glass they see the bats fly back to their home in the inn. When they come out, though, the door in the statue's base has shut again.

They scheme out a crazy plan to pile up corpses and make a fulcrum for pews (torn from the desecrated chapel) to lay atop so that they can nudge the plaque from a safe distance, jam a pew into the door as it opens, run back to the chapel and wait for the bats to leave, and look inside. It doesn't work on the first try, and our party hikes south through the forest to stay the night, before returning to run the whole rigmarole again (and again) and open the secret door at last. Down the ladder one by one they go...

From here, we switch from a write-up based on Heather's notes, to the somewhat more cryptic notes themselves:

"Mark well your passage, you would-be robber! For the clever observe closely, and only the clever will win the day."
Find secret compartment, find lever in down position and flip up.
"Family Crypt: Do No Enter"
Four (dead) rats fall from ceiling!
Open door to night sky room in incredible detail. Man in the moon playing the organ; painted in moon "what is my favorite song?" Party kick themselves for not taking the sheet music on the floor of the birdcage in the inn.
Secret compartment with downward lever. Flip up.
Candle, half burnt, unlit, under glass bulb.
Another secret door, down lever, flip up.
Light candle, certain stones in the floor glow: "Richrom Dares You"... but nothing came of it.
East passage - search for secret doors, found one, but try E door
After some awkward parley, bust in on another party - 2 figures in leather armor, 1 robed figure, all human. They say "Go away" but we smashed the door down. Stonk is knocked out yet again during the early action; Bolin & Ronson vanquish 'em and put 'em to sleep. Strip & gag them and tie them up. Get a shitload of loot. Bolin realizes that adventurers are by definition hoodlums...

Session 8: somewhat spooky

Tentative notes from last session by Nick:

After returning Terry safely back to his parents, the companions receive a map from Skullface showing the location of a Tower and a town, somewhere to the east. They, along with their faithful retainers Lert and Danth, set out on the four day journey to the Tower. The journey is fairly uneventful, except for the exceptional sighting of a red dragon flying overhead on their second night's camp. The dragon passed them with no breath-weapon barbequeing or claw-ripping of flesh, thanks to the quick dousing of their campfire. They arrive in the town of ????? [Loamville - DM] to find it completely deserted and somewhat spooky. There is an inn that the companions explore. I think at one point inside the inn giant rats [actually, they were bats - DM] were fought? They break open the inn's strongbox and discover a note, the contents of which I currently can't remember, but it hinted at a cache of money/treasure hidden somewhere. There is also a stable housing three horses and another building the function of which I can't remember either [it was a chapel - DM]. The companions are currently deciding whether or not to take the horses and head to the Tower or continue exploring the town. I think that's pretty much all that happened, but I'm probably forgetting a lot of stuff.

Session 7: "Skullface, I Don't Think We Have To Fight This Goo!"

From Ronson's notes, only very slightly edited by the DM:

After their first unsuccessful attempt at rescuing Skullface's little boy Terry from the dungeon, the adventurers return to find the town of Acornloaf apprehensive and afrighted, with the street and fields deserted, and some windows boarded up. The next day, they meet with Skullface to return to the dungeon, consoling Skullface's distraught wife, reassuring her that they will bring both Skullface and Terry back unharmed, or at least alive. Halfway to the dungeon, the adventurers encounter their friend the Pink Slime along the road, dried up and looking quite dead (apparently it had followed them that far). They elect to bring the slime back to the dungeon with them in the hopes that the damp dungeon air will resuscitate it. Upon entering the dungeon, they find flame burning in the fire-bowl held by the statue, and someone (Stonk?) thinks he hears windchimes. They open the portcullis to "room 14" by lifting it enough to crawl underneath. The pink slime is then "laid to rest" in this room. They go through the door to the north and find themselves in a room strewn about with junk, including a throne, a bed some other stuff. Oh, and 2 goblins and 4 skeletons. 

The skeletons are easily turned by Bolin, and after damage is taken on both sides, the Goblins are dispatched. But halfway through the battle, a figure rises from the throne, the evil Frog Priestess the adventurers have been hearing about! Ronson casts magic missle, and although rolling maximum damage, the preistess sighs in irritation at the attack. She fills the room with a magical darkness and Stonk is badly wounded. The only visible light in the room is Skullface's flaming sword, but it is unclear whether is is being wielded by Skullface himself or the priestess, Bolin considers attacking the wielder thinking that perhaps the evil Priestess has wrested it away from Skullface somehow, but can't decide - before he himself appears to be attacked by the bearer of the flaming sword - but not by the sword itself. Suspense builds, until the priestess gets frustrated and lifts the spell (and is revealed to indeed be brandishing the flaming sword, an unconscious Skullface found on the floor later on). Bolin and the priestess engage in combat, neither connecting. Ronson throws a snake-venom encrusted dagger at the priestess, connects, and though only doing one point of damage, the poison finds its way to the evil priestess' heart and kills her. 

While searching the room and the bodies within, finding keys, gems, other treasures including a magical (?) silver dagger, the adventurers find a secret door leading to a hallway and a dungeon. Inside, Lert, their long lost hireling, is chained to the floor. They unlock and re-hire him, though he is understandably trepidatious. He also knows nothing of Terry. Further along the hallway, there is a door with no lock or handle, only a face with an elongated lower jaw. They feed the gargoyle-lock a few drops of blood and the door opens. Inside there is a beautiful room with a mysterious magical fountain in the center. Flying orbs orbit the fountain, exuding a blue light. Someone (Stonk?) tosses a few coins into the water and the surface turns opaque and mirrored. They ask the fountain where they can find Terry and the fountain shows them flashes of their future path: a cave, a tunnel, something pink, a boy's face!

On their way to the 2nd basement level, they encounter the pink slime, totally rejuvenated! They allow it to follow them downstairs, through the cave and the winding tunnel. Finally, a large chamber opens up, showing the adventurers a giant pink slime shaped into many forms including a what resembles a children's playhouse (or "bounce-house"), inside of which is a captive Terry! On second glance, however, it appears the slime is actually protecting Terry from four stirges (giant mosquito-like monsters). Skullface, upon seeing his trapped son, immediately runs toward him, flaming sword in hand, to free him from the "bounce-house". Stonk yells out to him, "Skullface, I don't think we have to fight this goo!" fearing for the health of the giant pink slime. The party dispatches the stirges and afterwards have a bit of trouble communicating with the giant slime. Difficulty that lasts, however, only as long as it takes for the adventurers' small pink slime friend to merge with the larger slime. A path forms through the slime and Skullface rushes out to grab his son. A dark pool in one corner of the cave bubbles and froths, and the adventurers decide not to face whatever lurks beneath its surface (the Frog God?). They are not hassled by anything else on their hurried way out of the dungeon. The three companions now all feel more experienced and knowledgeable.

Session 6: "How wide is our pink friend, and how deep?"

Last week's adventure started off with the PCs already in-dungeon. Bolin was drunk, due to the effects of a gaseous (and stinky) false-door trap the previous session. But they forged ahead anyway, continuing to explore the 2nd level of the dungeon, finding more friendly pink slime. After some slapstick antics (i.e. Bolin and Ronson trying to jump over the 2nd pink jelly and instead landing IN it, getting temporarily stuck), it joined up with the 1st pink jelly into one larger jelly which continued to follow the party through the dungeon. 

The PCs eventually entered a chamber lit with candles in gold sconces on the wall. One candle was mounted upside down - and burned that way, with the flame pointing straight down, and the wax dripping upwards. Some thought was given to perhaps removing the candle or blowing it out, but they chose to be cautious and left it alone, for now. Later, they found a dead-end corridor with a mysterious spigot at the end. Again, in an excess of caution, they resisted the urge to turn the handle of the spigot and see what might come out. 

Further exploration resulted in a battle with a giant snake (the PCs won, with Ronson happily adding its venom to his supply of poison: "If we kill it, I can milk it!"). And there was an encounter with a black slime.... then, a brave yet nervous Skullface showed up in the dungeon, looking for his son Terry, brandishing a flaming sword (which had belonged to his great-great-great grandfather). With the aid of the flaming sword, the black slime was killed. Later, the PCs encountered a roomful of gnolls, and murder them all. Ronson was nearly killed too, though, only surviving thanks to being force fed the rest of the magic hamburger by Danth. 

Exit dungeon.

Sessions 3-5

We're playing session six right NOW! Stonk, Ronson, Bolin are in the dungeon. Live bloggin' here.

Let's catch up with the preceding 3 sessions...

Session #3: Iommi is cured of spider poison via disgusting peasant remedy provided by Skullface (Bolin procures the cat's blood, Skullface's cute son Terry collects the pig shit and horse urine...) and/or Fingersnark's expensive potion they purchased. Then back in dungeon Iommi is impaled and killed by goblins. Then Ronson stabs goblin in face. End of session. 

Session #4: Statues and wererats. Stonk, human fighter, introduced.

Session #5: Terry, Skullface's son is abducted by goblins. Townsfolk are upset, blame party. Party returns to dungeon to look for treasure / rescue Terry. Ambushed by goblins, including one riding giant centipede. Centipede goes berserk, turns on goblins. Party enters second level. Oh and Bolin levelled up at beginning of session. Have discussion with fish in pool. Briefly explore some tunnels, meet seemingly benign pink jelly who begins following party, recovers magical hamburger from chest buried under fallen pillars, finds bottles of urine, Bolin falls victim to false door trap and is drunk and stinky. 

Session #6.... here we go

Second session report

With our 3rd session upcoming tonight, better get the write up of last week's game posted! (Before we forget all the details). 

Josh was sick or malingering, so he couldn't make it, leaving just Heather (Iommi the dwarf) and Nick (Ronson the M-U) to brave the dungeon alone.... well I let Nick run Josh's character (Bolin the cleric) as well (and he managed not to get him killed). Also, the party hired two 0-level torch bearer types to help out. 

That hireling hiring process took up the beginning of the session, played out at the local tavern, The Toothless Troll, in the small village of Acornloaf that is the home base of the campaign (for now).

Spending some gp on booze to attract the attention of the various ne'er-do-wells hanging out in the bar who might be interested in employment. They ended up interviewing two prospects: an out of work day laborer named Danth, who had no particular skills but seemed both eager and fairly hardy, and also a more educated type named Lert, who turned out to have once been a student in the clerical order of the god Uli. Both were hired, for a fee of 2 gp per day for Danth and 2.5 for Lert (who drove a bargain based on his possible prayer/healing skills), plus a small percentage of the treasure hall (coins only). 

Iommi and Ronson also spent some time talking to two other tavern patrons. Iommi bought a drink for a man known (for obvious reasons) as Skullface, and Ronson chatted up a rough-looking hobbit named Fingersnark. Neither had much to say about the nearby dungeon, but still made interesting conversation.

Then, the next morning at the hour after sunrise, it was off to the dungeon. Well, hour and half after, because Lert slept in. Once in the dungeon, the PCs discovered the same columned chamber with scary statue and flaming bowl of fire that the previous group of PCs had also found. From there, they went in the opposite direction, though, going west through a door into a hallway and another room, where having crossed through one archway, a heavy iron portcullis dropped from the ceiling blocking their exit. Try as they might, they couldn't budge it, so onward they went, further to the west, into a room where they met up with a half-dozen animated skeleton guardians with swords and shields! Fortunately, the cleric in the party, Bolin, was able to "turn" them. Several fled to the north, two more into one corner of the room where they scrambled and scratched ineffectively at the wall, and were soon destroyed by the PCs.

Next investigating the passage to the north, the party found themselves in an odd shaped room with some sort of winch mechanism mounted on the wall. Also a door to the north where presumably the fleeing skeletons had gone. Examining the winch, they speculated that perhaps it was connected to the portcullis. To test this theory, after turning it, they sent Bolin and Danth back to see if it had moved. Minutes later, Ronson, Iommi and Lert heard Bolin and Danth shouting for help, and went back to themselves to assist... The portcullis had indeed been raised, but oozing through (and blocking) that archway now was a huge, cube-shaped gelatinous monster!! Which the party decided to call a gelatinous cube. Somewhat surprisingly, they succeeded in killing it with nobody getting hurt. Danth even helped out with dagger and torch. Burning the gelatinous remains (stinky!) out of the way, the party found 100 gp and a bunch of trash inside the monster (adding to the treasure of swords and shields they had obtained from the skeletons).

Back to the winch room they went, where they listened at that door in the north. Hearing something that didn't sound like just skeletons... muttering weird voices and some sort of chanting or prayer. The party decided not to try to open this door just yet, and instead went back to the first room of the dungeon to explore in a different direction. The door to the north in that chamber (at which they couldn't hear anything) opened into a dusty, cobwebby room. A (unanimated) skeleton and another seemingly dead body lay on the floor. Ronson and Iommi went in to investigate, leaving Bolin to watch the exit and both the hirelings to shiver in the doorway.

Despite the cobweb clue, the PCs forgot to look up when they went in, and thus were surprised by the giant spider lurking on the ceiling. A battle ensued, the spider being slain but not before it bit Iommi, who failed her save versus poison and lapsed into frothing convulsions. But thankfully, a prayer to Uli courtesty of Lert seemed to have some effect and the unconscious Iommi didn't quite die (yet).

Treasure = 1 gp.

Time to leave the dungeon. However, Ronson insisted on dragging the giant spider's corpse out with them, so that he could try to "milk" it of its remaining venom. Which he did once out of the dungeon, with some difficulty, while Danth and Bolin carried the comatose, at-death's-door Iommi back to Acornloaf, hoping to find some healing help.

Next session: tonight!

First session report: TPK! (almost, basically)

Our first "get together, roll up characters, and maybe get into the dungeon" session was this past Tuesday, and it was pretty great, right people?! We all had fun, even if maybe the characters didn't...

We didn't exactly end up playing OD&D as advertised. Because of various time factors (such as making this blog instead of working on the actual game), I felt woefully underprepared as DM, and thus decided at the last minute not to run "real" OD&D using the LBBs, but instead used the Swords & Wizardry Quick Start rules instead 'cause I thought it would be a bit easier on everyone (myself included) this first time around. And using S&WQS went pretty well, though we'll probably switch to pure OD&D at some point soon, after a bit more study... certainly I think everybody agreed it would be nice to have more than one saving throw number on the character sheet.

The players (Nick, Heather, and Josh) rolled up their characters fairly quickly, though 3d6-in-order was almost too much for Nick, who insisted on scrapping his first try after getting, like, a 5, a 6, and another 5 on the first three stats... Nick had been planning on playing a Magic-User but his (eventual) best roll was for Wisdom so he ended up as the party's Cleric, while Josh made an M-U and Heather rolled up a Dwarf.

So, the party consisted of 3 brave/foolhardy adventurers. The dwarf veteran Mustaine. The cleric acolyte Hammett. The magic-user medium Holdsworth. All of 'em lawful of alignment. We were ready to play!

Originally, I was going to run Jeff Rients' Under Xylarthen's Tower module (which I had run my friends Mike and Giancarlo through a portion of some months previous) but 'cause of opting for the S&WQS rules, I used the starter dungeon in there instead.

Hearing rumors about great treasure lost in the darkness at the bottom of these mysterious, ruined stone stairs out on the nearby haunted moor, the party set out for adventure...

They descended the spiral staircase into the large, columned chamber (smelling vaguely of coffee) where they were confronted with a large statue of a bulbous horned creature holding a bowl of flaming fire, standing in the southern end of the room. The party declined to investigate the statue closely, wary of supernatural danger, but instead listened at the several (3) doors out of the room, W, N, E. Didn't hear anything (I was rolling behind the DM's screen) so, they opted to head through the eastern door.

That took them into a N-S hallway, with a door directly across from them down another short passageway. Their torches sputtering in the dank darkness, they could see the hall to the north turned a corner going east, and went that way... which led them to a 30' x 20' chamber where they encountered a group of apparently cowering goblins! Both parties were surprised, the players won initiative, and decided to attack rather than parley. Or, at least Hammett decided to attack, attempting to smash the nearest goblin with his mace. Mustaine followed suit, and soon two of the five goblins had gone down. But then it was the goblins' turn, and the tables soon turned. Mustaine was felled by one of the goblins (taken to negative 1 hit point, bleeding to death, as I decided that we should use the common house rule of unconsciousness at zero HP, death when below negative one's level in HP). If someone got to him soon to bind his wound, he might survive... but the battle was still on. One of the goblins proved to be some sort of shaman, and followed up a magic missile with a charm person spell, that resulted in a note being passed to Josh telling him that "you like this goblin, you don't want him to die". Hammett was about to attack the shaman, so Holdsworth tried to trip him up and spoiled his attack... Then Hammett was hit and also went down. Things weren't looking too good for the party at that point. Holdsworth, although he was charmed into protecting the shaman, hadn't yet been told not to attack anyone else, so he sneakily sent a magic missile at one of the other goblins, hitting him in the back of the head but not killing him. Then realizing the didn't have many options left, he tried to supplicate himself to the goblin shaman - allowing the goblin he'd just attacked a chance to return the favor, with a sword in the back! Negative HP for Holdsworth ensued.

The goblins proved surprisingly merciful though, and some hours later the entire party awoke, stripped of their possessions, naked and tied up to one another in the room with the scary statue, which now smelled of sulphur. Each character was back up to 1 hit point apiece, and realized that they'd better get out of there asap. Managing with some difficulty (as they were not a dextrous bunch) to stand and hop/drag themselves over to the fire pit, where they managed to free themselves by rubbing the rope binding them on the edge of the flaming bowl. Off they went embarrassedly back to the village where they'd started off earlier that afternoon, where they knew they could find some old barrels in an alleyway to wear...

Since this bunch was entirely destitute and dispirited, we decided to make a new set of characters who would return to brave the dungeon. Rolls went better than the first time, and this Mk. II party consists of another dwarf, as yet unnamed (Heather), a neutral human cleric named Allan Bolin (Josh), and a neutral human magic-user named Ronson (Nick, now finally getting the M-U he wanted).

After the debacle of the original party's excursion into the dungeon (for all intents and purposes a TPK in the second room, after less than an hour game-time of exploration) there's now some interest in acquiring hirelings to beef up the party, so I'll post some rules info on that next, before the next play session, scheduled for this coming Wednesday.