Post by diogenes on Apr 18, 2023 6:15:35 GMT -6
Hello everyone, here is the sixth “Session Report” from the ongoing Viper Archipelago campaign.
The players for this sixth game were:
J: This session marks the third OD&D game for this player, so we can now say that they now fall into the “semi-experienced” category.
L: This player has been playing in this campaign very consistently, and is really getting stuck into engaging with the game world, so I’m now counting them amongst the ranks of experienced OD&D players who are active in this campaign.
G: I’m not exactly sure what level of experience this player has, but I think they’re an experienced player, based on their familiarity with the 3 LBB ruleset we’re using for this game. However, this is the first game they’ve played in this campaign, and I haven’t played with them previously.
In this game, J was playing Hamiltin (F-M 1), L was playing Vishan Durnas (M-U 1), and G was playing Father Gerard (W-P 1).
The pre-game rumours provided for this session were:
Weird blue-green lights have been seen in the night sky above the beach, very similar to the aurora borealis. Come morning, the cliff side that separates the jungle from the beach below has shifted in the night, as if somehow "terraformed". There is now a much more approachable slope, allowing easier access into the jungle. The cliff remains sheer further to the south, and further to the north, where the coastal fortress is located. Similar green-blue lights have been spotted in the sky near the lighthouse to the north. A couple of large ships were spotted sailing up from the south in that direction, rounding the corner of the cove, and disappearing from view, presumably heading to the Serpent-Man city. You would have expected them to crash into the rocks, but weirdly, the lighthouse light has somehow returned to functionality, and a bright golden glow can be seen even from the pirate camp.
-
A dishevelled and half-crazed adventurer was seen trudging up the hill towards the coastal fortress, clutching an ornate blade. He was accompanied by a band of fierce-looking pirates with an air of desperation and greed about them.
-
A large group of heavily-armed and well-equipped pirates struck off to the south. Leading this expedition is that older pirate you met behind the bar in the first session, as well as his apparent second-in-command, the giant black pirate who was leaning against the back wall, saying nothing.
-
The players hired three retainers, Karbash (F-M 1), Bargle (F-M 1), and Willow (F-M 1), and decided to head south to the white marble temple complex they had visited previously.
When they reached the base of the cliff beneath the temple, they were shocked to find a heap of broken, naked, and mutilated humanoid corpses. For the most part, the corpses looked like normal humans, except for the fact that they were all deathly-pale, and had a bit of an “Elvish look” about them in terms of facial features, with hard, high cheekbones, slightly-pointed ears, and so on. The party noted that all of the corpses were totally hairless, with completely shaven heads being consistent among both the male and female corpses. The wounds on the corpses indicated that they had been hacked into with swords and axes, and pierced with spears, before being thrown from the top of the cliff. Several of the corpses were riddled with arrows and crossbow bolts.
Leaving this disturbing sight behind, the party ascended the stairs up to the cliff, encountering a large band of pirates who were standing around and guarding the ruins. The pirates recognised the party, as they had also come from the pirate camp, and so the player characters and these pirates were at least passing acquaintances. Vishan struck up a conversation with one of the pirates who were guarding the perimeter, who was fairly talkative. The pirate revealed that they had a party of their own down in this dungeon, and that they had already ran into trouble with some weird undead creatures on a previous delve. The pirates also mentioned that they had fought the Magic-Users who were protecting the ruins, and it was they who had slain them and thrown their bodies from the cliff. Although friendly, the pirate wouldn’t let the party past the perimeter so they could enter the dungeon, suggesting that the party find an alternate location to explore, as the pirates were currently “laying claim” to these ruins.
The party decided that they would give the pirates a wide berth, and instead circle around towards the furthest outskirts of the ruins, located beyond the defensive perimeter the pirates had set up, about 200 yards to the west. This outlying section of the ruins was heavily-overgrown by the jungle, and was mainly made up of smaller individual houses and similar standalone structures. After a prolonged search that took up most of the day, the party found that a section of the floor in one of the outlying houses could be pried up, and in doing so, they found a long shaft that led down into the darkness, with iron ladder-rungs set into one of the shaft walls.
The party climbed down into the dungeon proper, and began to explore. In the first room, the found a pair of sentries, humanoid in shape, but wearing silver armour that entirely covered their features. Both sentries were armed with halberds, which crackled with arcing white electricity all around the bladed head, as if the weapons were functioning as Tesla coils or something like that. Both sentries moved very mechanically, as if they were robots or automatons, rather than ordinary men.
The party were wary of fighting these foes head on, and so elected to run past them, which was possible due to the large size of the room, and the mechanical, measured speed of the sentries. The party ran down a corridor to the west, and then, upon coming to an intersection, headed north, as the mechanical sentries stomped along the hallway behind them. The marked the first, but not the last time in this session that the party would unknowingly run in the exact opposite direction to a room full of treasure.
At the end of the northern corridor, the party came to a marble door with an elaborate carving of a tree on it, and pushed it open. To their surprise, the party had entered into what appeared to be a lush greenhouse, full of tropical vegetation. The air was hot and humid, and the entirety of this large room was overgrown with brightly-coloured exotic plants. This room was practically an “indoor jungle” as one of the players described it, that’s how densely-packed this room was with vegetation, a total contrast to the cold marble corridors the party had been traversing a moment before. This room was well-illuminated with a steady warm light, but no obvious source of light could be seen.
Moving quickly, the party combined their efforts, and dragged a huge stone plant pot over to the door they had just came through, barricading it shut. However, it seemed like the mechanical creatures were making no attempt to force open the door. Regardless, the players decided to spread out, and hide amongst the greenery of the room as a precaution. As the players took to their respective hiding places, I rolled some dice on my end, and it was Vishan who was unlucky this time.
As the Magic-User crouched among the brightly-coloured bushes, there was a rustling behind him, and as he turned, he saw three strange ambulatory plants shuffling towards him through the overgrown garden. These plant creatures had a deep green body that was about five feet high, with three vines sprouting from the top of the plant. Each vine had a trumpet-shaped flower of a unique colour on the end, with these being an orange flower, a red flower, and a yellow flower, respectively. Experienced players may recognise these creatures as being “Tri-Flower Fronds”, pulled from the pages of the second Monster Manual for AD&D.
These creatures entered into melee with Vishan, just as the remainder of the players and retainers came rushing across the room, intent on coming to Vishan’s assistance. A quick and lethal melee broke out, with one of the creatures being immediately cut down by Karbash. Had he been fighting with a regular sword, the creature would have survived to strike back against him, but Karbash was wielding the magic sword acquired in the previous session, which provided him with a + 1 bonus to not only his chance to hit an adversary, but to the damage his strikes inflicted. As such, this first strike was enough to drop the first of the creatures to exactly 0 hit points, killing it on the spot.
With one of their number down, the two surviving creatures stretched out their green vines, the vines with that dazzling orange flower on the end, and from this flower emerged a clutch of pollen-coated tendrils, which struck at Karbash and Willow. The retainers staggered, dazed for a moment as the effects of this strange poisonous pollen took hold of them, but they rallied and kept their feet, fighting on they both passed their Save vs Poison with flying colours. In the same moment, Father Gerard’s mace crashed through the midsection of one of the creatures, smashing away a huge chunk of its green torso, and sending it slumping to the floor, dead.
In the next round, another exchange of blows left the last of the plant creatures greviously wounded, but not slain. It struck Karbash again with it’s pollen-coated tendrils, but again, Karbash shrugged off the effects of the sickly-sweet poison. We were about to launch into the third round of combat, but then Vishan realised he had not yet resolved his attack with his dagger. The dice were rolled, and the Magic-User was able to finish off the last of the creatures that had attacked him. The three creatures had been slain, and the party wasted no time in coating their blades with the thick green “plant goop” that leaked from the bodies of the creatures, as well as running their blades through the brightly-coloured flowers that had been a source of such danger only a moment before.
As the party caught their breath, the harsh sound of a mechanical bell, like an old-fashioned schoolbell, cut through the dungeon silence. There was a grinding of stone, as a door opened somewhere towards the north-east corner of the room, and a strange mechanical beast emerged from the bushes. This creature took the form of a giant segmented centipede, covered in silver metallic plating. In size, it was about as thick as a barrel, and about 15 feet long.
The players held their ground, even as the creature approached. Instead of approaching the party, however, the metallic creature took hold of one of the slain plant creatures in its mechanical jaws, and dragged it out of the room, passing back through the door which it initially entered. The players waited, and sure enough, the creature returned, and dragged out the second of the slain creatures. After the third creature was removed in the same way, the players cautiously followed, exiting through the same door the mechanical beast had passed through. There was no sign of the mechanical beast nearby, and so the party pressed onward.
Passing through a few corridors, the party came to a grand hall, filled with marble statues. In the centre of the hall, there was a raised marble pedestal, where an ornate suit of “hoplite-style” armour was displayed, complete with the Corinthian-style helmet, plumed with brilliant orange-red phoenix feathers. The armour appeared to be floating in space, as if suspended in some kind of anti-gravity field.
In front of the floating armour, there were a pair of amber statues, fashioned in the shape of great lions, and postured like a sphinx. The party didn’t want to mess around with the armour, for fear of the amber lion statues animating, and coming after the party.
As the party continued through the maze of corridors, they found an apparent “non-Euclidean” intersection, which should have by all rights doubled-back on itself and took them into a previously-visited chamber, but instead continued onward. Understandably, the party were very confused by this development, and re-traced their steps to the previous intersection in order see if they’d made a mapping error, but the incongruous passageway remained as it had been first encountered. Mythic Underworld, indeed.
The session was drawing to a close, so the party began looking to exfiltrate the dungeon. As they looked around for a likely escape route, they suspected they had travelled in a bit of a loop, and this suspicion was confirmed, as they heard the crackling of electricity from around the corner. Looking around the corner, they spotted the two mechanical sentries from earlier, standing in the centre of the next room. The party took advantage of the slow speed of these sentries to rush past them once again, fleeing down the passageway they had entered from, and scaling the ladder to the surface.
The party made their way back to town without further incident, but also without treasure. In this session, the party showed an uncanny ability to avoid the rooms where the treasure was, and instead home in on the rooms that contained monsters, but little reward otherwise. At the time of writing, the seventh session of this campaign has already taken place, and I can confirm the party’s fortunes turned around, so stay tuned for that session report when it drops.
Until next time, readers.
The players for this sixth game were:
J: This session marks the third OD&D game for this player, so we can now say that they now fall into the “semi-experienced” category.
L: This player has been playing in this campaign very consistently, and is really getting stuck into engaging with the game world, so I’m now counting them amongst the ranks of experienced OD&D players who are active in this campaign.
G: I’m not exactly sure what level of experience this player has, but I think they’re an experienced player, based on their familiarity with the 3 LBB ruleset we’re using for this game. However, this is the first game they’ve played in this campaign, and I haven’t played with them previously.
In this game, J was playing Hamiltin (F-M 1), L was playing Vishan Durnas (M-U 1), and G was playing Father Gerard (W-P 1).
The pre-game rumours provided for this session were:
Weird blue-green lights have been seen in the night sky above the beach, very similar to the aurora borealis. Come morning, the cliff side that separates the jungle from the beach below has shifted in the night, as if somehow "terraformed". There is now a much more approachable slope, allowing easier access into the jungle. The cliff remains sheer further to the south, and further to the north, where the coastal fortress is located. Similar green-blue lights have been spotted in the sky near the lighthouse to the north. A couple of large ships were spotted sailing up from the south in that direction, rounding the corner of the cove, and disappearing from view, presumably heading to the Serpent-Man city. You would have expected them to crash into the rocks, but weirdly, the lighthouse light has somehow returned to functionality, and a bright golden glow can be seen even from the pirate camp.
-
A dishevelled and half-crazed adventurer was seen trudging up the hill towards the coastal fortress, clutching an ornate blade. He was accompanied by a band of fierce-looking pirates with an air of desperation and greed about them.
-
A large group of heavily-armed and well-equipped pirates struck off to the south. Leading this expedition is that older pirate you met behind the bar in the first session, as well as his apparent second-in-command, the giant black pirate who was leaning against the back wall, saying nothing.
-
The players hired three retainers, Karbash (F-M 1), Bargle (F-M 1), and Willow (F-M 1), and decided to head south to the white marble temple complex they had visited previously.
When they reached the base of the cliff beneath the temple, they were shocked to find a heap of broken, naked, and mutilated humanoid corpses. For the most part, the corpses looked like normal humans, except for the fact that they were all deathly-pale, and had a bit of an “Elvish look” about them in terms of facial features, with hard, high cheekbones, slightly-pointed ears, and so on. The party noted that all of the corpses were totally hairless, with completely shaven heads being consistent among both the male and female corpses. The wounds on the corpses indicated that they had been hacked into with swords and axes, and pierced with spears, before being thrown from the top of the cliff. Several of the corpses were riddled with arrows and crossbow bolts.
Leaving this disturbing sight behind, the party ascended the stairs up to the cliff, encountering a large band of pirates who were standing around and guarding the ruins. The pirates recognised the party, as they had also come from the pirate camp, and so the player characters and these pirates were at least passing acquaintances. Vishan struck up a conversation with one of the pirates who were guarding the perimeter, who was fairly talkative. The pirate revealed that they had a party of their own down in this dungeon, and that they had already ran into trouble with some weird undead creatures on a previous delve. The pirates also mentioned that they had fought the Magic-Users who were protecting the ruins, and it was they who had slain them and thrown their bodies from the cliff. Although friendly, the pirate wouldn’t let the party past the perimeter so they could enter the dungeon, suggesting that the party find an alternate location to explore, as the pirates were currently “laying claim” to these ruins.
The party decided that they would give the pirates a wide berth, and instead circle around towards the furthest outskirts of the ruins, located beyond the defensive perimeter the pirates had set up, about 200 yards to the west. This outlying section of the ruins was heavily-overgrown by the jungle, and was mainly made up of smaller individual houses and similar standalone structures. After a prolonged search that took up most of the day, the party found that a section of the floor in one of the outlying houses could be pried up, and in doing so, they found a long shaft that led down into the darkness, with iron ladder-rungs set into one of the shaft walls.
The party climbed down into the dungeon proper, and began to explore. In the first room, the found a pair of sentries, humanoid in shape, but wearing silver armour that entirely covered their features. Both sentries were armed with halberds, which crackled with arcing white electricity all around the bladed head, as if the weapons were functioning as Tesla coils or something like that. Both sentries moved very mechanically, as if they were robots or automatons, rather than ordinary men.
The party were wary of fighting these foes head on, and so elected to run past them, which was possible due to the large size of the room, and the mechanical, measured speed of the sentries. The party ran down a corridor to the west, and then, upon coming to an intersection, headed north, as the mechanical sentries stomped along the hallway behind them. The marked the first, but not the last time in this session that the party would unknowingly run in the exact opposite direction to a room full of treasure.
At the end of the northern corridor, the party came to a marble door with an elaborate carving of a tree on it, and pushed it open. To their surprise, the party had entered into what appeared to be a lush greenhouse, full of tropical vegetation. The air was hot and humid, and the entirety of this large room was overgrown with brightly-coloured exotic plants. This room was practically an “indoor jungle” as one of the players described it, that’s how densely-packed this room was with vegetation, a total contrast to the cold marble corridors the party had been traversing a moment before. This room was well-illuminated with a steady warm light, but no obvious source of light could be seen.
Moving quickly, the party combined their efforts, and dragged a huge stone plant pot over to the door they had just came through, barricading it shut. However, it seemed like the mechanical creatures were making no attempt to force open the door. Regardless, the players decided to spread out, and hide amongst the greenery of the room as a precaution. As the players took to their respective hiding places, I rolled some dice on my end, and it was Vishan who was unlucky this time.
As the Magic-User crouched among the brightly-coloured bushes, there was a rustling behind him, and as he turned, he saw three strange ambulatory plants shuffling towards him through the overgrown garden. These plant creatures had a deep green body that was about five feet high, with three vines sprouting from the top of the plant. Each vine had a trumpet-shaped flower of a unique colour on the end, with these being an orange flower, a red flower, and a yellow flower, respectively. Experienced players may recognise these creatures as being “Tri-Flower Fronds”, pulled from the pages of the second Monster Manual for AD&D.
These creatures entered into melee with Vishan, just as the remainder of the players and retainers came rushing across the room, intent on coming to Vishan’s assistance. A quick and lethal melee broke out, with one of the creatures being immediately cut down by Karbash. Had he been fighting with a regular sword, the creature would have survived to strike back against him, but Karbash was wielding the magic sword acquired in the previous session, which provided him with a + 1 bonus to not only his chance to hit an adversary, but to the damage his strikes inflicted. As such, this first strike was enough to drop the first of the creatures to exactly 0 hit points, killing it on the spot.
With one of their number down, the two surviving creatures stretched out their green vines, the vines with that dazzling orange flower on the end, and from this flower emerged a clutch of pollen-coated tendrils, which struck at Karbash and Willow. The retainers staggered, dazed for a moment as the effects of this strange poisonous pollen took hold of them, but they rallied and kept their feet, fighting on they both passed their Save vs Poison with flying colours. In the same moment, Father Gerard’s mace crashed through the midsection of one of the creatures, smashing away a huge chunk of its green torso, and sending it slumping to the floor, dead.
In the next round, another exchange of blows left the last of the plant creatures greviously wounded, but not slain. It struck Karbash again with it’s pollen-coated tendrils, but again, Karbash shrugged off the effects of the sickly-sweet poison. We were about to launch into the third round of combat, but then Vishan realised he had not yet resolved his attack with his dagger. The dice were rolled, and the Magic-User was able to finish off the last of the creatures that had attacked him. The three creatures had been slain, and the party wasted no time in coating their blades with the thick green “plant goop” that leaked from the bodies of the creatures, as well as running their blades through the brightly-coloured flowers that had been a source of such danger only a moment before.
As the party caught their breath, the harsh sound of a mechanical bell, like an old-fashioned schoolbell, cut through the dungeon silence. There was a grinding of stone, as a door opened somewhere towards the north-east corner of the room, and a strange mechanical beast emerged from the bushes. This creature took the form of a giant segmented centipede, covered in silver metallic plating. In size, it was about as thick as a barrel, and about 15 feet long.
The players held their ground, even as the creature approached. Instead of approaching the party, however, the metallic creature took hold of one of the slain plant creatures in its mechanical jaws, and dragged it out of the room, passing back through the door which it initially entered. The players waited, and sure enough, the creature returned, and dragged out the second of the slain creatures. After the third creature was removed in the same way, the players cautiously followed, exiting through the same door the mechanical beast had passed through. There was no sign of the mechanical beast nearby, and so the party pressed onward.
Passing through a few corridors, the party came to a grand hall, filled with marble statues. In the centre of the hall, there was a raised marble pedestal, where an ornate suit of “hoplite-style” armour was displayed, complete with the Corinthian-style helmet, plumed with brilliant orange-red phoenix feathers. The armour appeared to be floating in space, as if suspended in some kind of anti-gravity field.
In front of the floating armour, there were a pair of amber statues, fashioned in the shape of great lions, and postured like a sphinx. The party didn’t want to mess around with the armour, for fear of the amber lion statues animating, and coming after the party.
As the party continued through the maze of corridors, they found an apparent “non-Euclidean” intersection, which should have by all rights doubled-back on itself and took them into a previously-visited chamber, but instead continued onward. Understandably, the party were very confused by this development, and re-traced their steps to the previous intersection in order see if they’d made a mapping error, but the incongruous passageway remained as it had been first encountered. Mythic Underworld, indeed.
The session was drawing to a close, so the party began looking to exfiltrate the dungeon. As they looked around for a likely escape route, they suspected they had travelled in a bit of a loop, and this suspicion was confirmed, as they heard the crackling of electricity from around the corner. Looking around the corner, they spotted the two mechanical sentries from earlier, standing in the centre of the next room. The party took advantage of the slow speed of these sentries to rush past them once again, fleeing down the passageway they had entered from, and scaling the ladder to the surface.
The party made their way back to town without further incident, but also without treasure. In this session, the party showed an uncanny ability to avoid the rooms where the treasure was, and instead home in on the rooms that contained monsters, but little reward otherwise. At the time of writing, the seventh session of this campaign has already taken place, and I can confirm the party’s fortunes turned around, so stay tuned for that session report when it drops.
Until next time, readers.