Another Jackson Elias Server Virtual Convention, another run of the Manor of the Giant Arminius using the latest revision of Begone, FOE, my personal D20 dungeon crawler.
By Arthur Rackham
We had four players.
- Gideon the Rogue
- Elbekh the Cleric
- Douglas the Fighter/Mechanical Engineer
- Aric the Magic User
The players left their mule and cart in the forest and marched up the wedge shaped hill, on which the Manor of the Giant Arminius was sat. The hill was 100 feet high, and the manor stood a preposterous 100 feet higher. The area was patrolled by rebels, but by staying off the path and keeping to the brush, they were able to avoid being spotted - even with most of the trees chopped down. They noticed corpses of soldiers hanging from a couple of the giant statues on the way up, the ones the rebels hadn't toppled.
The group stopped before they got too close to the structure, and sent Gideon the Rogue to scout ahead.
Gideon took a look inside the giant chapel, where a group of rebels were celebrating their victory over the corpse of a giant with some sacramental wine. They had muskets stolen from dead soldiers, and he had no wish to challenge them. He went North to the house, to scout possible points of entry. There was a group of rebels holding a drumhead court on the giant porch, deciding which captured soldiers and civilians to execute as collaborators. He went around the East side and found a couple giant doors that probably led to a kitchen and pantry. He explored the West side and found a way into the giant greenhouse. While he was sneaking around, a group of soldiers made a sortie outside the building, and got in a fight with the rebels. He escaped and reported back to the team. The players cut some of the corpses down from the statues, and obtained a set of thoroughly trashed but still recognizable soldier uniforms. They decided against putting them on just yet.
Using the giant paving stones leading up to the greenhouse door as cover, the group avoided a rebel patrol and snuck up to the West wall of the greenhouse. The giant glass panes were cracked and missing in places, and with the rope and grappling hook they were able to climb up through a window and onto a table inside.
The greenhouse had a full vineyard inside, with grapevines growing all the way up trellises and the window frames. Below that, at floor level, was a jungle of overgrown plant life, which the explorers could see was full of giant frogs. There was a decorative pond, in which swam a giant carp. The pond was full of giant sized copper coins, which all together might have been worth a lot of money, but were also large enough to pose a logistical challenge even without the giant fish guarding them.
The team decided to keep climbing, rather than challenge any of the jungle creatures for passage into the house itself. Gideon went up the wall the roof of the greenhouse using his climbing expertise, and let a rope down for the other characters. As they were climbing, a flock of stirges flew in from the door to the East. They were looking for corpses to drink blood from, but in the absence of recently dead people they went after the players instead. Fortunately the small mosquito-pterodactyls took time to awkwardly fly across the huge interior space of the greenhouse, giving the players time to climb up onto the roof.
On the roof, the players quickly ran East across the greenhouse, dodging missing glass panes, and climbed up the wall of the house's second story. They quickly crawled under the window frame and into the second floor boudoir, leaving the bloodthirsty flying creatures behind. They found themselves standing on a vanity set, the room dark and abandoned. There was a giant door to the East, under which they could see firelight and hear conversation. There was also a giant blob creature on the floor. It started to drag itself toward the dresser the players were standing on, using numerous extrusions that extended from its excessive number of hungry maws.
The players quickly hatched a plan to deal with it. They escaped under the window, but Douglas doubled back to lure the creature, opening the window with his pole weapon. The monster almost grabbed him with a tentacle, but he escaped it by falling backwards off the windowsill and down ten feet onto the glass roof of the greenhouse. He took minimal damage, and avoided breaking the pane and falling through to his death. He was able to run away before the monster fell after him, shattering the panes under its immense weight and falling into the koi pond below. The carp immediately attacked the creature.
From the Sekiro art book. Not sure who the artist is.
The players heard giant footsteps from the room they just vacated. They hid under the windowsill and an undersized giantess poked her head out to look at the destruction they had just wrought. She yelled back into the house, informing "dad" that "mom" had gotten out again. Then she retreated into the house. The players climbed back into the boudoir and grabbed some giant perfume bottles, which looked like the most valuable objects there. Gideon snuck under the door to the East, into the firelit room beyond.
(Manor of Giant Arminus really rewards stealth at low levels. Which is logical, since you're sneaking around under the furniture of a giant's castle, but it means that sometimes one player plays the game while the others wait patiently)
The Giant Arminius lay dying in a gigantic bed, tended by slaves, watched over by soldiers. The room was sweltering, courtesy of a hypocaust beneath the floor, heated by a fire somewhere below the room. Gideon noticed several treasures scattered around, including a huge signet ring under the Giant's bed. He didn't have the inventory space to grab it, but he noted its location for later.
The thieves decided to try their luck on the first floor. On the way down from the greenhouse roof, they noticed a hidden tunnel at the edge of the balcony on the North side of the house. Not a giant size tunnel, but a human sized tunnel. Once they got down to the ground floor, they went around back to investigate. The tunnel had a staircase leading down into the earth, with a decapitated rebel corpse halfway down it. Douglas took the oriflamme armband off the corpse, easily avoiding the swinging blade trap that decapitated it.
The team climbed up to the edge of the first floor balcony for a look around. There were two giant doors leading into the house, and a human-scale village to the East of that, which was probably slave quarters. They looked under the doors as they crossed the balcony. One looked into the livingroom, where slaves stoked a huge fireplace by tossing chunks of furniture into it. The room was full of treasure, but also soldiers. The players moved on to the second door, which looked into a corridor, where a group of ghouls were eating corpses from a recent skirmish. The players decided they didn't want anything to do with either of these doors. They put on their ragged soldier uniforms and went into the slave village.
The slaves ignored them, or got out of the way as they entered. There was a set of scaffolding that went up to a high window, so the players climbed that and went through. They ended up on top of a high shelf in a giant pantry. There were huge sacks of grain, huge jars of pickles, jerkied humans, pickled humans, and various other foodstuffs. A group of slaves ignored the soldiers as they ate gherkins from a big glass vessel. The disguised thieves looked down over the side and saw a bunch of wild hogs rooting around on the floor, 40 feet down. The hogs were huge, probably fed on human corpses. There were plenty of doors out of the room, but the players didn't feel like fighting the hogs. There were lots of oversized provisions to steal, but they were at the edge of what they could realistically carry already, so they went back outside, looking for a spot to bury their loot.
They heard gunshots from somewhere below, in the slave village. They decided this was none of their business, and went back across the balcony toward the greenhouse. A group of blunderbuss wielding dwarves exited the village at the same moment the players did, leading a group of captured slaves on a rope. The dwarves held their weapons at a low ready, and suggested that everyone just keep walking and act like they didn't see each other. The players agreed and stepped out of the way to let them pass. The dwarves took the slaves across the balcony and down into the trapped staircase tunnel the players encountered earlier.
The characters buried their treasure for later retrieval, and considered their next move. (At this point, we only had two left. Elbekh and Aric had fallen asleep - the latter snored over an open mic until we muted him). They wanted more loot, and the ring from the Giant's bedroom upstairs looked like the highest value item they'd seen. So they climbed back onto the greenhouse. There was another giantess in the boudoir, looking through the perfumes and silks, but she went back into the bedroom when her father called to her. Gideon climbed into the window and snuck under the door after her.
There were three giantesses in the bedroom now. One beautiful and vain, one bloodthirsty and agitated, and one who looked like she was paying attention to her father. The soldiers and slaves were still there, making things complicated at ground level. Gideon entered the room in his soldier uniform and went straight for the giant signet ring, hoping to pick it up when nobody was looking. The uniform stopped anyone from noticing him until he grabbed it, then the soldiers realized he was an impostor and gave chase.
Gideon grabbed the ring and ran West, back through the boudoir. Douglas laid down cover fire with his bow, prompting the soldiers to ready their arquebuses. Both players climbed out the window before the enemies could get a shot off and ran as fast as possible to the rope down from the greenhouse roof, dropping encumbering items along the way to aid their escape. The soldiers fired, and Gideon took a musket ball through the arm, rendering it useless for the remainder of the adventure. His great climbing skill let him descend the rope with only one arm and his legs, and they got to the ground floor without further assault by the soldiers.
The group quickly left the greenhouse and dug up the perfume bottles they buried earlier. They were running across the lawn when a battle broke out around the human scale soldiers' barracks at the front of the house, as the soldiers pushed to retake them from the .rebels Ordinarily the combatants would have ignored a pair of thieves in the background, but the players hadn't doffed their soldier uniforms. A group of rebels broke off from the fight and pursued them.
The two thieves threw away everything they had that could hinder their escape, except the treasure. Weapons, armor, spare suits of clothing, they left it all on the trail behind them, allowing them to outdistance their pursuers and escape with the money.
By Cabrera Peña
Because both characters were neutral aligned, and there were only two of them by the end of the adventure, the wealth they retrieved was enough to take both of them up to Level 4. It's not a big deal, since this is a one-off. In the moment I forgot that, with half the team missing, they shouldn't have been able to carry all the perfume bottles AND the signet ring.
The manor is very intimidating to first level characters. The module text says to give the players the benefit of the doubt when they try to move around without being spotted, but they don't know that. This makes some of the challenges, like just getting inside, seem insurmountable at first. The DM has to create confidence that, if they play carefully, they won't instantly be squashed. The players in the first run of the dungeon were higher level due to exploring ANGUISHEDWIRES previously, and felt more confident teaming up with the various dungeon factions to challenge the giants in combat.
Even with a player-facing map, it can be hard to communicate the relationship between different parts of the building across 3D space. A couple times, the players planned routes through the house that were physically impossible, requiring them to run across empty space or up a sheer surface. Often these misconceptions don't get corrected until the very end of the planning discussion, when the players state their intention to do something that their characters would immediately notice was unworkable, but seems completely reasonable to the players based on the information they have.
Good run overall. Got to use a bunch of content that the players never encountered in the first run of the Manor. If I do it again, I'll run it with the accelerated timetable, with the rebels seizing the first floor halfway through the session, and Morwenna arriving at the end.
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