Sablemage
Demi-God
The completed Urf Durfal dungeon, courtesy of Axebane’s Deck of Many Dungeons.
Near Urf Durfal, 7 Abril 540
With Alaric back at full mana and the rest of the team as good as they’re going to get this side of a greater healing spell, it’s back into the dungeon looking for the elusive 9,000 ducats. Caspar and Dieter are left to recuperate outside, watching over the team’s camp, while Erich, Franz and Gunter follow Alaric and Beatrice inside.
“Left or right?” asks Beatrice.
“Left didn’t go so well,” Alaric admits. “Let’s try right this time.”
The right-hand door leads west into a corridor 60′ long with two doors on the north wall. Gesturing for silence, Beatrice presses her ear to the door and listens. Gathering the others round, she whispers: “I don’t like it. There are at least three somethings in there talking, and they sound big. Really big.”
“Maybe later, then,” Alaric says. “On the way back.” Something tells him not to open that door, but for all he knows it could have the main treasure behind it.
The adjacent door is quiet, so they enter cautiously, but find nothing of interest; a table, some chairs, and a bed. The corridor draws them on past cracks in the floor and rubble from the ceiling into a small complex of three rooms; Beatrice pronounces all of these quiet, so they open each in turn, finding 100 ducats in a chest of drawers and – behind a locked door – the bones of an earlier adventurer, curled up away from another chest of drawers with 80 ducats and 600 silver pieces in a pile on the floor by them. Judging by the skeleton, its life was claimed by some unknown trap, long discharged and never reset.
“That’s something,” Beatrice sighs as they divide the coins between them, “But it’s not nine thousand, is it?”
With their torches half gone, they turn back. Alaric still has a bad feeling about the Something Room, so they return to where the fought the ghouls the day before. Luckily, no new monsters have come to investigate the corpse the ghouls were dining on, so they press on. The ghoul corridor rolls on past a pair of doors east and west, which are a store room and a sleeping area respectively – where the ghouls were living, judging by the mess and the stench – before opening up into a squarish room 40′ on a side, pillars down the east and west sides and a pleasingly large treasure chest at the far side.
“All perfectly safe!” calls Beatrice, stridently, and the five of them fall to stuffing 9,000 ducats into their backpacks.
It’s only when they turn back to the exit that they notice three large humanoids sporting hefty clubs and disturbing grins, blocking their way out. Cornered and with nowhere to run, Alaric fires bolt after overpowered bolt into their huge forms while the others charge forward, stabbing and slashing furiously. Luck is with them, and they kill two ogres and drive off the third, but Erich and Beatrice are both wounded. Beatrice is not so badly hurt as she appears at first; her scalp wound bleeds out of all proportion to its severity. Erich, however, is carried out; fortunately Alaric is able to stabilise him, but moving him will be difficult.
Surveying his battered companions, Alaric decides they need to put some distance between themselves and both the Grand Turk and the surviving ogre. Fashioning a makeshift stretcher from spears and cloaks, they trudge south, with Franz and Gunter carrying Erich, and Caspar, Dieter and Beatrice as walking wounded.
“I hope nobody tries to rob us,” Alaric mutters to Beatrice as they lead the way south. “We’d struggle to fight off a child with a stick at this point.”
“Yes,” agrees Beatrice. “I like it rough, but that was a bit too rough.”
Still, each is over a thousand ducats richer, if they can hold on to it. Beatrice has given Gazza some more shiny stones and costume jewellery in lieu of his share.
Next time: Overland to Yerevan…
Party Status
Episode: 10. Bennies: Alaric 0, Beatrice 0. Advances: 1. Rations: 6 each. Torches: 2 left. Wounds: Dieter permanently injured, Vigour d4.
Party wealth and gear: Alaric 1,220 gp, mage’s pack; Beatrice 1,350 gp, thief’s pack; the Lads 1,181 gp each, mercenary’s pack, full leather armour, medium shield, short spear, short sword. Party fund: 1,155 gp.
GM Notes
Since I knew the first room they came to had three ogres in it, I rolled reaction dice to see whether Alaric would go in or not. The dice came up ridiculously low, so even giving him a bonus for being curious and overconfident, he decided against it. Later, however, Beatrice rolled a critical failure for her Notice roll in the treasure chamber, and it seemed to me that should mean the ogres had heard her and followed the party. I think to justify this sort of thing in future, Beatrice’s next advance should be Danger Sense; she would’ve taken that last time if I’d thought of it.
In my holiday ‘study’, I have just enough room for a laptop and mouse, but I find myself flipping between umpteen open windows to run things as I don’t have room to spread out notes, dice and whatnot. So, partly through laziness but mostly through lack of space, I gave up on the idea of running the fight in detail and zoomed out to a Dangerous Quick Encounter, although I reasoned that ogres were nasty enough to warrant a -2 on all player-side rolls – they’re big, strong, Resilient and have Sweep, so they dish out damage fast and soak it up better than most. Alaric rolled a modified 11, Beatrice 2, Erich 1, Franz 12, and Gunter 7; Alaric used 3d6=9 power points so has nothing left for healing, and Beatrice used up her last Benny Soaking her Wound. There’s no better use for it than that.
Based on previous experience with parties who use Extras as henchmen, I’d expected to burn through Followers quite quickly, but Alaric’s lads have been rolling unexpectedly well to recover after fights; still, don’t get too attached to them.
Continue reading...
