|
I am looking for some advice and discussion about handling quests, delves, missions, excursions, raids, whatever you want to call them using a megadungeon as a setting.
Some explanatory text.
I have been asked very nicely to run a game alternating with the Skull and Shackles game I am currently playing. I have decided to accept the request and want to do a sandbox style game centered around exploration and quest-based adventuring. When this group is given room to stretch their legs and go about things their own way they seem to thrive.
So this leads me to a couple of options: Kingmaker or Rappan Athuk. I have spent the last few days reading a lot of reviews and product discussions and I am pretty convinced that Kingmaker will be fun no matter what, so discussion of that product is kind of moot. Rappan Athuk seems generally well received and I am hopeful about that product.
Both fill the need for me so I am really torn about which I want to run. Kingmaker offers the added element of kingdom building and universally positive reviews while Rappan Athuk has more adventure material for half the price tag ($40 for Rappan Athuk versus $84 for Kingmaker) plus it has the charm and nostalgia value of an old school megadungeon.
I will be posing the question about which the group would like to play but if they chose Kingmaker that in no means invalidates this discussion.
The purpose of this post is twofold.
I am looking for advice for my game but I am also hoping to provide needed advice for the community at large.
Normally I am not a fan of dungeons when they lean towards more than a dozen or so rooms. Now, I know what you're thinking, why would I want to run a megadungeon if I dislike running dungeons? The reason I don't like dungeons is the grind of moving room by room and door by door in an endless stream of Perception rolls. I hope to offset that by introducing a complex far too large to approach in such a manner and the introduction of targeted delves where the group goes in for a specific purpose and then leaves. This should transform the megadungeon from a place to be explored and searched by the square foot and becomes a dangerous location for adventuring.
I have done a fair amount of searching online for input and ideas on delves into a megadungeon and all I have found are a plethora of articles about this approach being how megadungeons should be run but almost nothing about ways to pull it off.
...and now we discuss.
So what are your thoughts on the megadungeon as a sandbox style quest based campaign? How would you approach the introduction of quests? What sorts of things would you have players do and how would you get them to the locations?
If I end up running Rappan Athuk it will be from levels 3-20 (as opposed to Kingmaker's 1-17) so advice for all level ranges are appreciated and encouraged.
|
|
My current approach for quest design draws on my extensive experience running Shadowrun. Quests have some basic themes such as item grabs (treasure hunting), wetwork (er, I mean 'monster' hunting), or exploration. Options such as wanted posters, NPC requests, rumors, or treasure maps all serve as hooks to go on quests but the big thing for me is how the hell do I get the party where they need to be to perform the quest.
In a hexcrawl or urban setting its as easy as giving a vauge idea (or specific) and letting them just go there, but what about a megadungeon? The quest might involve an NPC telling the party the Ultimate MacGuffin of Awesome is buried in the tomb of Sir Badass the Butt-Kicker, deep underground, but this is a damn dungeon, how do they know where to go and how do I get them there without it being a grind or getting them lost? I could say, yeah it's past the kobold outpost, the underground river, and the pit of lava, if you get to the mushroom forest you went too far but that seems more than a little lame.
I want to avoid the grind or worse, the getting lost grind. I still remember when a group I was in got lost in Undermountain because some irresponsible thief accidentally burned the map when he was trying to burn out a room full of kobolds regardless of the fact that the room turned out to be empty except for three kobolds. Well three kobolds and the ashes of a map with our destination and escape route clearly marked. the party made me take point because of that, but its okay, I got them back by playing a kender after my thief died.
I ran a game that was dungeon centric without being a protracted dungeon crawl...
I nicked named it "the living dungeon" and the concept was to create a monstrous ecosystem within an enormous cave complex. The Caverns were home to multiple factions of monsters that would attack one another on sight, as well as fight the party.
The party were sent to locate an artifact that was supposedly lost somewhere in the dungeon.
The campaign included
a- overland travel to approach the location
b- assaulting a small stronghold outside the cave complex
c- assaulting another stronghold inside the cave complex
d- maintaining a foothold within the dungeon, as local inhabitants counterattacked
e- exploring the variety of sub-dungeons within the complex
f- surviving ambush upon exiting
The dungeon complex, was actually a massive grotto chamber with a dozen exits each one leading to a small dungeon crawl. Each mini dungeon had its own creatures and challenges. The Adventurers were free to explore in any direction they wanted, key enemies were leveled up to provide a continuing challenge to the party as they advanced.
This campaign worked out very well and I think it gels with your concept of sandbox megadungeon.
I was a player in a Rappan Athuk/Abyss Thor(sp?) game in 3.5 and it was one of the most entertaining games I've played in. The key thing for us was all the characters had interests outside of the dungeon. We had political/religious concerns in towns a few days ride/march from the dungeon. I played a paladin and the cleric and I were restoring the temples of Thyr and Muir for instance. Rappan Athuk can be a blast, just make sure to give the players chances to develop outside the dungeon and you should be fine.
One other thing, make sure your players make PC's that can hold their own in combat. If they don't they will be former PC's in short order.
|
|
Thanks for the advice guys. :D
I want to keep the game about quests and whatnot and focus more or role playing and exploration than combat though there will be a lot of that, likely well more than I would normally have in an adventure. I warned the players that it is a killer dungeon but with the exception of one of them, I don't think they really understand. I'm going to reiterate how deadly it really can be and the potential to get in over their heads is very real.
Keeping the game going outside the dungeon certainly seems important and I was leaning in that direction but I will be sure to maintain that and use it as hooks to enter the dungeon. I want to make Rappan Athuk feel alive kind of like the way Sunless Citadel felt alive when I ran it some time ago only on a considerably larger scale.
When you guys did individual delves how were they handled? That seems to be my biggest hurdle. Rappan Athuk is HUGE and getting the party to certain locations seems problematic to me. Were vague maps drawn, or perhaps some directions and the rest required exploration? Those are the only methods I can really think of to stop them from wandering aimlessly. I have some time to work on this since they are starting the game at 3rd level and won't be entering the dungeon in earnest for a little while.
I have gotten pretty excited to try something new to me as a GM. I've been gaming for more than twenty years with most of it behind the screen and I have never run a megadungeon before. It should be interesting to say the least.
| 9 people marked this as a favorite. |
I can't speak for either of those modules, but I do know a lot about running megadungeons. A few major pieces of advice for changing big dungeons from dull slogs to fun sandboxes:
1) This might not come up for you, since you aren't drawing your own map, but DO NOT block major corridors with puzzles, strong monster lairs, traps, or locked doors. Sandboxes are about interesting choices. If you put obstacles on a major corridor, it ceases to be a major corridor. Part of the megadungeon experience is the players getting to decide how deep they want to risk going. I don't know how those two modules handle it, but published adventures constantly make this mistake, and it's largely responsible for the bad reputation of dungeon crawls as grinding slogs. By all means use obstacles to seal away interesting side paths, shortcuts, and optional areas, but *never* the main path to the more dangerous regions. On a similar note, be sure to place keys to most locked or magical doors so that the people who aren't wizards or thieves can actually go through them.
2) Your PCs don't have to know all the details of the different areas on the way to where they are going. They *do* need to know which area to search. They also need to be able to tell when they've reached a different area of the dungeon. Long stairs down, thousand-foot-long passages, gigantic sealed doors, major changes in architecture, trailsigns, magic runes, directional signs, graffiti, half-dead or all-dead NPCs, journals, half-assed map fragments, and magic mouths are also all fine and very traditional ways to make the point. It helps a lot if you give each area a name. They also need to be able to make at least a decent guess that the new area is harder or easier than the one they just left. Traditionally, dungeons get harder as you go deeper down or further off the beaten path, but that's not necessarily the only system that works. The PCs must have enough information at any major crossroads to at least make the choice of direction interesting, even if they don't know all the consequences yet. If they want more details than you want to give, don't cave and tell them. Make them cast a divination or beat the information out of a goblin.
3) Reward players that take exploration and divination spells by not shutting them down when they try to use them. Light, detection spells, augury, clairvoyance, knock, create food and water. Let it work. You *want* your players using that stuff. Survival spells help let the party reach further into the really fun areas, and divinations are a great way to feed the party exposition they wouldn't otherwise get.
4) You need some form of time pressure and dwindling resources to stop your players from just resting all the time and get them playing the should-we-forge-ahead-or-slow-down game. Tracking light and food is optional, but useful at low levels. You should use wandering monsters, because unlike supplies, they stay useful for time pressure after the casters get "Create Food and Water". Make encounter checks every time the party takes a long time about anything, makes a loud noise, or (gods forbid) sleeps in the dungeon. If for whatever reason (guy on watch, rope trick, locked saferoom) the monster knows they are there, but can't attack them immediately, have it try to stalk them just out of sight until the first time someone isolates themselves or looks vulnerable.
5) Megadungeons are about claustrophobia, sprawl, endurance, and the stress of attrition, not usually about focused firepower. This depends a bit on the party, but 60-75% of your wandering monsters should be no more than EL+0: just tough enough to bruise the PCs and make them waste a spell or two in a quick fight. You want to have a rare few out-of-depth monsters (maybe 5-15% at EL+3 or more) around most areas that are so terrifying the players *should* escape, and that are either slow enough or stupid enough that players *can* escape. Variable-level monsters help keep "run, fight, sneak, or talk" an interesting choice. Make sure the players can learn ahead of time about about the scariest wandering monster in each area via rumors, NPCs, tracks, dung, giant piles of burned corpses, etc. Monsters in their lairs can potentially be tougher than wandering ones (EL+0 to EL+2), but should be much more rewarding to fight.
6) DON'T use damage traps to cause attrition. Constant use of boring damage traps on hallways and chests give you paranoid PCs who spend years cautiously searching every inch of dungeon and then don't get anywhere. Traps work much better and slow down the game much less when they are protecting side rooms instead of main hallways; when you us one long-term status effect trap instead of a whole bunch of damage traps (poison works well); when they cause exploration problems instead of straight attacks (like sealing passages, turning out the lights, or setting the complex on fire); and when they are used by intelligent creatures to harry intruders and buy time to scramble a defense. They work especially well as a dare for bold PCs. Make the trap itself blatantly obvious, but use it to guard a valuable treasure, an unexplored passage, a big red button, or some other visible bait so tempting that the PCs might risk it anyway.
7) Most monsters shouldn't just kill victims. Figure out what each monster *wants* for the party. Goblins might interrogate prisoners and take slaves, which makes for good future missions, and even a cave bear can drag unconscious characters back to the den to eat at leisure. That gives the other PCs a brief chance to plan a rescue op, or the injured character a chance to escape. Consider letting people play alternate characters or hirelings if their main PC is unavailable.
8) This is important. Award XP for achieving goals, but NOT every time they kill a monster. Give the XP for loot, explored areas, cleared lairs, quest completion, new monster types encountered, whatever you want. The specifics don't matter that much. But you should NEVER EVER EVER let killing wandering monsters be worth the party's trouble. Wandering monsters are there as a disincentive for wasting time and a way to wear down player resources. If you make them profitable, it defeats the entire purpose of deterrence and encourages the party to just fight them as they come for the XP. Save the rewards for lairs, secret treasures, deathtraps, and the like. The only real exception I can think of is if the party is specifically *trying* to lure monsters out of their lair and kill them.
Hopefully some of that is useful to you!
[outstanding advice]
Great stuff Big!
To the OP: I'm not clear on how you intend to run a megadungeon-delve-sandbox and also a published module simultaneously. It seems to me that you would only need one or the other.
Megadungeon. Now that is a name I've not heard in some time...
Until now. Ironically I've got a megadungeon in the works. Its a homebrew and small as these things go - only about 80 or so rooms. However mine isn't to be used as you're talking.
I DID however create a campaign that never really got going that WAS similar to what you're talking about. We got a couple sessions in and the game died due to scheduling conflicts. However here's the setup:
In the distant past of my homebrew there was a town that served as the summer castle of a corrupt royal. Eventually the town was sacked but the noble was wicked as well as powerful. He'd trapped a very powerful fey queen, turned her into a statue, and then during the siege of the town she'd been shattered.
Now the ruined town is overgrown by the woods and scattered across a couple square miles of forested hills. However the ruins and the dungeons beneath them are scattered with a variety of factions, each working towards some kind of resolution for the fey queen.
Now the queen herself is still alive in some fashion, and every so often her rage bubbles up manifesting in dramatic ways: wracking storms, earthquakes, pestilence, etc. Between this and the foreboding forest no one ever goes out there anymore and the place, it's lore and even the queen have been forgoten save in legend and myth.
The party then originally forms when the place is re-discovered by a loremaster-type society. They are meant to simply go out to one section of the ruins, document things, and try and bring back some artifacts. As the campaign progressed I'd have introduced some of the factions, had some mini-arcs involving either ending or aiding these groups, and also introduced rival adventurers looking to cash in on the find.
Physically I'd keep things fresh by having different environments: the surface ruins, some portions flooded beneath a bog-lake, underground levels and even a portion of the ruin entirely held aloft by the canopy of the forest. The various factions also would interact to keep things from being static and to provide roleplaying opportunities alongside the attack, loot, return to civilization scenario.
A lot of what the Big Mc said above is about maintaining that spark of freshness and I feel that's key to emphasize. Megadungeons by their very nature are more likely to get boring faster than smaller dungeons. As such you need to really work hard at keeping it interactive and alive for the players. Use logic - smart monsters won't just sit in a hole waiting for the murder hobos to show; they'll leave their lair, even the dungeon if need be, for resources.
I can tell you that when I laid out the scope of the ruins on a map for my players they were excited so more's the pity the game dropped off. But the couple sessions we had were a lot of fun. If it had kept going I hope I could've maintained that level of fun for them.
I think what they liked the most was the open and vast amount of possibility. They really wanted the challenge of seeing it all. Those particular players weren't big time roleplayers but they were getting into it in the first section with some prisoners trapped by evil fey who were about to be transformed into deformed fey pests (mites). Given time I think we could've really done this well.
|
|
...awesome stuff...
This is precisely the kind of advice I was looking for and the community at large needs, I think. Thanks mate!
I'm not clear on how you intend to run a megadungeon-delve-sandbox and also a published module simultaneously.
I'm only going to be running Rappan Athuk. I mentioned Kingmaker because I wasn't sure which I was going to run when I made the OP. The advice applies only to the former since the latter is wilderness exploration and kingdom building. Still sandbox, but otherwise nothing the same.
I as the GM will assume you have taken a 10+your skill for your roll.
I started doing this a little while back and I found that it dramatically speeds up play. If the players specifically say they were going to examine something I have them roll. Instead I use, as 4E calls it, passive perception.
...murder hobos...
Maintaining that spark is exactly what I am hoping to achieve. The last thing I want is to have the game turn into a grind. That is about as much fun as... something that's not fun.
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
Have you read through the articles on The Alexandrian about megadungeons? I haven't read through everything there myself, but in general I've found all of the articles there useful. Here is a link to one of the articles on megadungeons... I think there's a few more series that would be relevant, but I had this link handy.
Glad I could help. The real trick to a megadungeon is that it shouldn't be just a series of homogeneous levels like you'd get in a computer game; its more like a collection of different subdungeons, each with its own story and character, all stitched together by rooms and corridors.
Another useful place to get inspiration is to check out the level designs in Metroidvania-style video games. Nintendo's Super Metroid is one of my personal favorites. It is very *very* skillful at putting in sectioning, shortcuts, secrets, and interconnections, although it is a little too railroady at the beginning for an RPG group. If there's one thing to take away from it: You should put something cool in every dead end. That way it never feels like the party just wasted their time exploring. Maps are here, but it's no substitute for playing it.
Main Map
Developer's Map
From Software's Dark Souls also has an overall structure well worth looking at. You have your choice between at least two or three directions for almost the entire game after the tutorial, (even if some of them are likely kill you if you attempt them early). Likewise map, likewise playing (although this game definitely isn't for everyone).
Some guy's map
If there's one thing to take away from it: You should put something cool in every dead end. That way it never feels like the party just wasted their time exploring.
I dunno, as a video gamer, I'd actually suggest the opposite. It gets a little screwy in a lot of modern games... When you come to a fork in the road, and your map says one way is a dead end (or you can look ahead and reasonably guess), you know there's something awesome there.
While I agree you should often put something cool in dead ends, if you do it all the time, it gets really predictable, and it's not nearly as rewarding.
While I agree you should often put something cool in dead ends, if you do it all the time, it gets really predictable, and it's not nearly as rewarding.
True, but cool doesn't always have to mean powerful, mobile or useful. It just has to be interesting.
It could be a pile of monster dung for the ranger to look at, or a narrow window into another room, or a defensible place to rest in, or a little shrine, or a statue of the Builder, or a throne, or the wrong side of a one-way door, or just a dead guy with nice boots and a half-dozen arrows in his quiver. You just don't want an empty room with nothing in it at the end of a dungeon branch.
Besides, if something built the place, it probably has a purpose. Who would go to all the trouble to build a room, then not put anything there?
There are clues within the dungeon to steer them in the right direction. It's not a linear dungeon, I don't recall the exact layout, but to get say level 7 you would have to enter through level 4 and take the tunnel out of the undead knight's tomb, things like that. What our GM did was when we were away from the dungeon he would ask us where we intended to go in the session and work from there. There are multiple possible starting points and the dungeon itself will help give them direction. Figuring out where to go or what to do next usually wasn't a concern for our group, though there were times we got chased off and had to go elsewhere for a level or 2 and try again.
One other suggestion, if you can get a copy of The Tomb of Abysthor do it. There are some related plots with Rappan Athuk and a portal between the 2 dungeons.
Rappan Athuk is really well written, so most of the normal pitfalls of running a megadungeon aren't an issue even if you just run it as written.
@ the OP: you talked about how to get the party to the right area of the dungeon right? 2 bits of advice:
1. Scatter the dungeon: if you have the dungeon laid out in some predictable pattern (levels desending one to the next, a single level with a main road running through it, etc.) it'll be tough getting them there. However if you scatter the locale, like say a bunch of neighborhoods around a town, then each one will have their own character. Ex: perhaps the dungeon is a bunch of "islands" floating in a magma flow, connected by bridges and built upon with different structures. You can suggest the maguffin is on the Isle of the Painted Spear and then when the party gets to the central island, they notice that one of the distant shores has a bridgehouse with a spear painted on the side.
2. Use story scenes from one to set up the next: Perhaps the party comes to a door covered in fungal decay that they decide not to open. Their adventure goes by and they return to town to sell the loot. Your next adventure opens with a fungal creature erupting in the center of town and starting a pandemic. The party has to help stop the disease and must synthesize an antidote with spores from the original host. Lucky for the party the infected share a wierd hive-mind connection to the host and describe it being traped behind a door in the dark place, a door its tendrils grip but cannot break. Now they know why that door was so important.
|
|
This is exactly the kind of discussion I was hoping to get. the link to The Alexandarian was great. I did a ton of searching and reading blogs and forums but never ran across that site. The articles I read are interesting and show a megadungeon in action.
When it comes to quests, most seem to revolve around a few core concepts, item grabs, monster hunting, and exploration. Item grabs could also be a rescue operation, but ultimately its still a quest to get in and get out with something. Monster hunting is pretty straightforward with find the lair/hideout and kill/capture the target. Exploration is even simpler since it really is just go in, look around, and get out.
I feel pretty confident running Rappan Athuk now. I'd like to keep the discussion going however.
I would echo what Big Mc said as well. I ran a long campaign largely set in Undermountain in the Forgotten Realms. It was a blast. I used the little port (Skullport) town on level 3 as the base of operations and then had the PCs come and go from it to various parts of the dungeon as well as above to the surrounding countryside. The port town was chock full of exotic, fun npc's.
Make the dungeon dynamic, not static. Think about what the factions would do once events cause changes in one part of the dungeon. How would they react? Then make it happen.
Give the dungeon a personality. Some parts can be lighthearted in nature (I had a clan of kobold ninjas in one section). Others can be creepy or spooky (think old temple of elemental evil). Still others can be deadly dangerous.
Give it some mystery. I utilized a mystical exit from Undermountain to Waterdeep (the Winding Stair) that the PCs had to decode, but it allowed them to quickly traverse to various levels of the dungeon once they had figured it out. It used phases of the moon and alignment of stars in conjunction with a pattern of steps to open portals to the proper levels. The characters dug it.
Make it a sandbox. There will be things the party can't handle and things that their hirelings (old school) can handle for them. Likewise, give them rivals (not enemies that they kill, but a rival group to compete against).
Give them a break from the dungeon once in a while, too. I had quests that would require them to visit the surface in order to seek out some bit of information or track down some resource or villain before they retreated down below again.
Hope that helps. Good luck!
I like the discussion too J to the G. King of DOS - what does TL/DR mean? I've seen it all over these forums and have tried to identify it using context clues and just can't figure it out.
I started a thread on these forums, just for myself, where I could jot down ideas for my current megadungeon. I had this whole horror vibe going there and was all ready to spring it on my players, but it occured to me they had said months ago when the game first started they weren't that into horror.
I emailed and took a pulse check. Turns out no one wants real honest, gritty horror like I had planned. So here I am, 6:23 PM local time, trying to get inspired for how I'll spin this - the game is Sunday.
I still have the base map. I also have some ideas for some downtime RP and side stuff, so maybe I'll go that route.
But since my current project is under construction, I'd love to keep the pros and cons of megadungeons going here. If nothing else it'll keep the juices flowing for the re-tooling process.
|
@Mark Hoover: TL/DR means "too long, didn't read". People use it when they're summarizing long posts, warning people that the spoiler is a long post, or to indicate that they themselves haven't completely read a thread/post.
The best advice I can give about megadungeoning is that the dungeon should feel like its own world that exists even when the PCs aren't around. If there are intelligent creatures, why do they live in it and what do they do when not on "guard duty"?
If you do want there to be sapient NPC enemies, I recommend putting a village of them inside the dungeon if possible. Include a reason for them setting up their town here of all places, and a visible means of getting supplies in and out. This also raises the possibility of someone inside the dungeon sending the PCs on a quest to another part of the dungeon, or outside of it. Don't include a tavern/inn though, unless you don't care whether or not your PCs ever leave the dungeon again. Then again, an evil race of NPCs might not be willing to barter with the PCs-- or able; did someone in the party learn Aklo?
Eventually you and your party will want to just straight up have a monster wander by and attack them. If so, I recommend an ooze. They're mindless and they live in caves absorbing anything they can, so classic "wandering monster" behavior is actually perfectly in character for them.
Dot.
@ loud pluto: thanks for de-mystifying that. I like your intent but I'd say implement it differently. Maybe not a village, but a settlement of some kind, a LAIR.
I'm just going off on semantics I know, so I apologize in advance. But I like the idea that a megadungeon is a bunch of factions but not necessarily a civilization. That way the place doesn't become a place to visit; its a place to escape to and from.
But like I said SS - I like what you're saying here. If there's, say, some goblins in one section it stands to reason that they have food, water and shelter here and as well they do SOMETHING other than sit in their rooms waiting for heroes to murder. On the other side of the level perhaps there's a band of kindly vegepygmies just trying to tend their fungal gardens - they don't just stand in place among the mushrooms waiting to be raided (or maybe they do; I don't know vegepygmies all that well.)
So yes; creatures in megadungeon with greater than animal intelligence should have logical lairs that evolve with changing circumstance. That's one of the things I like about the Angry DM's approach. He suggests that, in the stat blocks for the factions you perhaps have some kind of logical development if other local megadungeon factions falter.
In the example of the goblin/vegepygmy level above, imagine that the party goes into the dungeon and encounters a few rooms of goblins. They're low level, hurt badly, and retreat into a natural cave triggering a bat swarm and a pit trap landing them in piles of guano. Sick as it sounds, amid the guano they also find weird fungi growing. The bat swarm heads deeper into the caves, signaling the veg's that they've got guests.
An RP encounter ensues, the PCs are given some "magic mushrooms" to heal them and a high-ranking cleric among the veg's asks them to head back into the goblins' area and strike a decisive blow, to end their constant raids. The party does so, defeats a major leader of the goblins and ends their quest with the veg's. They take their loot and leave...
The veg's however live here. After a time they'd enter the rough-hewn corridors of the goblins, searching for resources, maybe even setting up a new outpost of their own. Perhaps the new veg colony reveres the party as heroes and grants a boon to them whenever they re-visit the place, but the older conservatives become resentful of these "false prophets" and seek to discredit them as mercenary scoundrels. Smells to me like a civil war brewing.
Session one of the Ruins of Old Dammenterem (homebrewed megadungeon):
- Overarching goal: retrieve a lord's sword and re-sanctify the crypts.
- First primary quest: find one of 3 potential entrances to the lower halls beneath the surface ruins.
Entry: ruined hall w/only 1 access point. This access is guarded by a Wolf in Sheep's Clothing. Party burns up 2 flasks of Alchemist's Fire, a bit of healing but emerges victorious.
- Search of hall reveals nothing of import.
- Party retreats to safety outside, where the entry is warded; watches with morbid fascination as gellatinous cube absorbs remains of aberration. Rest and refit completed via strain/injury variant rule in place.
Dais: at one end of the hall is the lowest level of a grand, circular tower. This open chamber is the dais of the Great Hall. The area is both trapped and reputed to be haunted by a ghost.
- party makes all checks to avoid (not disarm) falling block trap. They then search dais; fail to notice ghost manifesting. Combat ensues; one NPC and an animal companion fail save vs Frightening Moan - NPC flees out of hall but animal companion flees randomly around the far end of the hall. Animal companion strangled and eaten by a choker out of view.
- PCs go toe-to-toe with ghost. Ghost halts attack for 1 round, begging the party to "grant her repose". They make it more corporeal with an oracle's spell and proceed over several rounds to do a little damage. In the meantime the ghost nearly kills 3 PC's (out of 4) and the party retreats out of the dungeon.
So after 4 hours of RL time worth of game play, PCs have explored 2 areas of the surface ruins. No goals accomplished.
Wolf-in-Sheep's-Clothing? AKA Cute little bunnyoid on a stump?
I've loved that thing since Barrier Peaks. Don't think I've ever actually used it though.
Got to say, your party doesn't seem the quickest on the uptake. When the ghost begs you to "grant her repose", that's a clue to stop fighting and find an RP solution.
One of the PCs, the person running the oracle, asked me if he could use Gentle Repose in a creative way, and I said I'd definitely include something in tonight's game for that. She focused, looked directly at him and begged "please, grant me repose". The very next round he cast his spell, made her more corporeal and screamed "Kill her!" She has 73 HP and they ended up, even with the spell, inflicting 21 HP over 5 rounds.
Needless to say, suggested play styles in emails rarely seem to match up with actual application at the table.
On the plus side the guy that was threatening to walk since there was too much "talky talky" for him in the previous couple sessions asked as we were packing up when the next session would be, suggesting he'd be around for the next month of Sundays. Thank goodness for small favors I guess.