ANGUISHEDWIRES - Session One, Part Two

 (Continued from part one)

THE SECOND DAY
The next day, Monty caught the morning ferry across the river, and hiked out to the tower again. He moved carefully enough to get the drop on a trio of thugs going in the same direction. The three goons were obviously hung over, and obviously headed for the tower. Monty followed them stealthily. The bandits rolled up on Kamilla and Thomas. They were looking for the same group of adventurers as the militia were, but for a different reason: they owed Trade Warden Jan Estoc a cut of whatever they found on the expedition, and the goons were here to remind them of the obligation.

Thomas and Kamilla hadn’t seen any adventurers around. They were just here to pick up a few silver pieces themselves. That was alright with the thugs, but since the whole place belonged to the Trade Wardens, there was the little matter of the tax they owed. Just hand over whatever they were carrying, and the debt would be paid.

Monty struck from surprise with his rapier, but flubbed the attack. The bandits sprang into action, with one striking back with his falchion while the other two pelted Thomas and Kamilla with arrows. Kamilla cast her freshly prepared Sleep spell, but all three thugs made their saves. One of the thugs took Monty’s arm off with a lucky swing, before Thomas got stuck in with his two handed maul. Monty and Thomas killed two of the bandits in retaliation. The third ran away as fast as possible, vocally rescinding his request for their hard earned treasure. Thomas caught up with him and bludgeoned him to death, to ensure he couldn’t tell anyone the party had killed two of the Trade Warden’s goons. The team took a few silver pieces off the bodies, stripped and dumped them in the woods for the owlbears to scavenge.

THE BAR CRAWL
Monty was missing an arm. The gang decided to ask the Fiend for help, since she was a powerful demonic being, and they should be back in her good graces after feeding her five new slaves. Indeed, Luria was happy to see them, lounging on her new throne of burly, scantily clad men. But she didn’t have powerful healing magic at her disposal. She recommended the team descend to level 3 of the dungeon and talk to Dario the barkeep, in the tavern North of the citadel.

The staircase down to the third floor was located just East of the landing to the second, through a checkpoint where a large circular saw blade extended from the wall, rusted in place. Thomas didn’t take the hint and almost lost a leg to an identical sawblade at the bottom of the stairs, but managed to hop out of the way. The third floor checkpoint offered several choices of direction. The party chose to go North, into the citadel.

The first room was a large chamber with a high ceiling. Two metal roads extended East and West out of the chamber, into huge tunnels. Arched footbridges crossed the metal roads, allowing access to the other side of the citadel without walking across the roads. There was a single wagon, decorated like a gaudy stagecoach, sitting on the road.

The players crossed the room via a footbridge and headed down the hall, past several rooms labeled HOTEL to a shuttered door that promised access to the BAR. The shutter had BACK LATER written in common, dwarven and orcish. Thomas knocked on it, got no response, and decided to lift it up. A pale, cave adapted dwarf came storming out of the hotel and warned him to put it down, carefully. A guy could get hurt barging into places like that! The dwarf opened the shutter himself, slipped under, and promised to open up in just a couple minutes. The players waited patiently, and the shutter slid open.

Dario the dwarven bartender held court over the brightly lit room, with crystal lanterns and a countertop of polished granite. He was happy to have customers, which were quite rare in the underworld. He asked them what they wanted to drink. Monty explained his problem - his arm was gone, and the Fiend upstairs said Dario could help. Dario had a potion for that: a vial of troll blood he kept up in the bitters cabinet. But it wouldn’t be any good by itself, the regenerative juices would give Monty a fast growing cancer that would kill him soon after regrowing his arm. The brew would have to be diluted with something strong. They’d need some serious liquor as a mixer. But he knew where they could get some. Dario told them to head East out the employees only door, down the hall and down the stairs to the Glass Desert, and take one of the barrels Lucilla kept in the water exchanger. That would do the job.

Dario also made the trio some normal strength drinks, to fortify them for the journey ahead. As he sipped a dwarven gimlet, Monty had an intrusive thought about Dario biting Kamilla on the small of the back. But it passed quickly. The trio shouldered their packs, hefted their weapons, and headed out the door to the East.

They almost immediately ran into a carrion crawler, snuffling and probing down the hall with its tentacles. Thankfully it was almost blind, and they were able to ambush and kill it before it could paralyze them with its tentacle attacks. They could also have just closed the door and waited for it to leave, but they went with the permanent solution instead. The hallway to the downward staircase had a room full of strange machines, which connected gears from the floor below to a huge axle that went into the machinery in the citadel. The room after that was full of old machines for smashing and smoothing rock. There was also hole in the wall, which looked out into a huge natural cavern. They ignored these distractions and went down the stairs to level 4.

THE GLASS DESERT
They were met with a blistering wind, sweeping over them from a vast desert of fused glass, pierced in four places by bubbling lakes of magma. A huge pyramid stood over the farthest lake, connected by a pipeline to a machine that extended up into the ceiling. The players saw their prize dangling inside this machine: barrels of liquor, suspended in a waterfall by a net, over a catchbasin below.

The team hiked across the glass desert, taking extreme care not to shatter the fused dunes and cut their feet to ribbons. Kamila tossed Monty’s grappling hook up to the barrels and got a good solid hold, then began to climb. Monty only had one arm, and Thomas was wearing too much heavy gear. When Kamilla reached the net, trouble emerged from the pyramid on the other side of the desert: A fire giant, clad in a giant bathrobe, carrying a brass boiler repurposed as a bowl filled with steaming magma-crab legs, accompanied by six horse-sized hellhounds that chased each other around her legs. She strode across the desert, bare feet melting the glass, coming straight for the water exchanger where the players were gathered.

Thomas and Monty hid in the catchbasin below the waterfall. Kamila crawled into the net and hid amid the barrels. The giantess reached into the net and grabbed a barrel at random, thankfully not the one Kamila was clinging to. Then she walked back across the desert to one of the magma pools, slipped out of the robe, slipped into the magma, and immediately stopped paying attention to anything outside her bowl of crab legs and barrel of whiskey.

Kamilla cut through the net and dropped a barrel down into the catchbasin. The players fished it out as a curious magma crab came over the translucent peak of the nearest glass dune. They turned and ran, rolling the barrel with them. The crab followed. Kamilla lagged behind, but the crab wasn’t interested in her. It ran after Thomas, who threw his rations aside in hopes that the crab would go after them instead. It wasn’t distracted, but reducing his equipment load let him outdistance it, barely. (The crab was interested in eating Thomas’ chainmail, Kamilla wasn’t carrying any significant metal objects). Running across the dunes cut up everyone’s feet as they broke through the glass with every step. Thomas went tumbling down the slope, but arrested his downward progress before his fall became uncontrolled. The gang made it into the checkpoint ahead of the crustacean, which couldn’t fit through the door. They caught their breath, hefted their hard-won barrel, and hauled it back upstairs to the bar. There was a large group of large ants patrolling in the cave outside the crushed wall, which the players were absolutely not interested in interacting with. They stumbled back into Dario’s tavern and sat at the counter.

Dario removed the stopper from the barrel and found it full of… advocaat? Pre-frothed, by all the rolling around. He mixed the creamy, eggy brandy with just a little troll blood, dry shook and served it up to Monty. Thomas had an intrusive thought about Dario biting into Monty’s raw. bloody stump, but it passed quickly. Monty’s arm grew back before their eyes. Mission success!

THE WAY HOME
The team paused in the citadel on their trip back to the surface when the strange wagon in the citadel caught their attention. It looked fancy, and it was still sealed. Maybe there were riches inside. The windows were smashed, but too small to climb through. The doors were still shut, and they had nine pointed stars inscribed on them. Kamilla recognized these as the signs of the Starhelm, a chaotic order of anti-undead warriors who had been a passing fad in the Commonwealth during a previous age. Monty ensured the doors weren’t booby trapped, and Thomas levered them open.

Two ghouls sprang out.

The fight went badly for the players, as the half-starved undead creatures unleashed a flurry of blows, the slightest of which could prove paralytic. Thomas and Monty went down incapacitated. Kamilla, in desperation and remembering the previous anti-ghoul strategy, shouted that there was a juicer morsel upstairs. Incredibly, this worked (I said to myself “I’ll only allow this if the die shows a 20” and that’s what happened). The pair of ghouls grabbed the players by the shoulders and marched them upstairs, so that they could show them where the tasty treats were.

On the second floor, the players heard the patter of tiny feet, receding into the darkness. They tried to convince the ghouls that this was something delicious, but the undead husks didn’t buy it. Three adventurers in hand were worth an unspecified number of creatures in a mine tunnel. So they climbed up to the first floor. The players were counting on the Fiend being home, to make short work of the ghouls.

The Fiend wasn’t home. She was out in the dungeon, and left only a single militia soldier to tidy up the lair. He didn’t even have his gambeson on, armored only in a mesh vest. The ghouls pounced on him. The players joined the fray, hoping to cut the ghouls down.

The flesh eating beasts tore through the militia soldier, then turned on the players. Thomas went down paralyzed, Kamilla suffered a broken leg and fell to the ground insensate. Monty ran for the surface, before the same could happen to him. He got out of the dungeon with his body intact, his pockets full of silver, and his mind shattered.

POSTGAME THOUGHTS
With no other players to claim the XP reward from the recovered treasure, Monty got the full stack. Enough to take him to level two.

Between the five militia, the three thugs, the four NPC adventurers and the two player characters, a whopping fourteen people died or went missing in or around the dungeon over the course of two days. But, the one survivor emerged with some serious riches. Between all the missing persons and the promise of payment, more adventurers are sure to flock from Brazenkragg to the fortress ANGUISHEDWIRES.

The players could have run away after introducing the ghouls to the NPC soldier and been fine. Instead, they decided to stay and fight, hoping the addition of the militia guy would turn the tide through sheer action economy (four on their side vs two ghouls). They said afterwards that they stuck it out because they felt bad leaving him to die. After tricking five people into slavery, killing three people over a handful of silver pieces, and feeding two people to ghouls, it was the players’ one act of conscience that doomed them.

Ghouls are no joke. They only have two hit dice, but their multiattack and paralysis ability means even a single round in close quarters can be fatal. Unless the players immediately flee, it quickly becomes impossible to make a clean break. Someone gets paralyzed, then the rest of the group follows suit trying to protect them. It highlights why the Cleric’s turn undead ability was so important in the early editions. I was worried that I’d made the dungeon too easy, or that my rules made first level characters overpowered. The final encounter was a serious reality check.

I’m happy with the way things turned out. Putting a dangerous high level enemy right on the first floor might not have been the best idea. Even if she’s not hostile by default and is easy to avoid unless provoked, the Fiend literally camping the dungeon entrance means that if anything pisses her off, the rest of the map is basically off limits. Sure, there are alternate entrances, but finding them requires the players to explore inside the dungeon.

The fire giant encounter went exactly the way I wanted. I filled the dungeon with all the most dangerous monsters from the solo game, but deliberately gave each one a condition that prevents them from immediately attacking and killing the players when they first meet.

I don’t know how I feel about Brazenkragg. The introductory assignment worked great, giving the players a reason to keep pushing their luck in the dungeon, rather than retreat back to town when things got tough. But having a settlement with lots of NPCs nearby also robs the dungeon of some of its power. Meeting a single friendly traveler or explorer is no longer a huge deal. The people you do meet are more likely to be “generic guard, generic merchant, generic elf” rather than a smaller number of handcrafted NPCs. Putting the city above the dungeon does have its advantages if you consider crime and faction intrigue to be an important part of the game.

I ran a second session of ANGUISHEDWIRES yesterday. I'll post the play report of that when it's finished.