Last Friday, we were without Jay again for gaming. Since everyone was in the mood for some dungeon crawling, I threw together a fantasy one-shot with
True20. Character creation took a bit longer than I expected, but we ended up with Grafthor Axebëard, dwarven warrior (Matt; the umlaut was added to make to name 10% more metal), Cantor Byram, cleric of an unspecified deity (also Matt), Elmorth the Elf (Mike) and Barik Mhadeen, professional burglar (also Mike).
The previously unacquainted characters met at a bar in the village of Whitford, where soon after they were given a job by a random stranger. It seems there had been an increase in the number of goblin attacks recently, and some shepherds thought they spotted some activity in those ruins about a day away from town. After some perfunctory haggling and travel scenes, the intrepid adventurers arrived at the ruins.
While exploring the crumbled buildings, they spot a group of 4 goblins who seem to be returning to the ruins. Three are made short work of, while the last one escapes. They do not find much of interest in the ruins except for a staircase leading underground, which they naturally descended. The staircase opened into a small room* containing 2 goblin guards, one of whom was able to beat the alarm gong a few times before they were both killed.
Faced with 2 exits from the room, they explored the southern hallway. After opening a door that split off to the right, Elmorth nearly fell into a pit trap. The two goblins the popped out from around the corner exchanged bow fire for a couple of rounds, then retreated to the next room. After Barik disabled the trap, the party gave pursuit, only to encounter the goblin tribe's attack beast, an ogre, in the dead-end next chamber. After a tough fight, they downed the ogre and the remaining goblin (the other had been eaten by the ogre). Returning to the main hallway, they were unable to break down the next door, which was jammed instead of being locked.
They decided to abandon that door and explore the eastern hallway from the guard room. They found the (empty) room of what was presumably the tribe's shaman, but nothing else of interest except a door that had been boarded over and painted with crude goblin symbols ("Death here. You turn around now."). Naturally, the party ripped the boards down and went through. The first room they found was only filled with trash,** but a bit further along they discovered a trapezoidal room containing a sarcophagus and some long-deceased bodies propped against the wall. After dispatching the zombies (because absolutely everyone knew the bodies were going to start moving), they discovered a non-animated skeleton clutching a sword with an onyx-encrusted hilt (Barik: "Yoink!").
Across the hall, they discovered a circular chamber that contained, on the far end, a statue of some sort between two pillars carved to look like demons. In the middle of the room was a pool of what appeared to be blood 10 feet wide at it's narrowest. Grafthor jumped the pool, but was attacked by the animated pillars*** before he had a chance to examine the statue. Realizing there was little they could do to overcome the gargoyles, they retreated back towards the guard room (the gargoyles did not pursue them after they left the circular chamber).
In the guard chamber they were surprised by 6 goblins. Barik, who had been leading the retreat, took the brunt of the attacks until the others could push their way into the chamber. He ended up being critically wounded, which Byram was able to stabilize but not revive him to consciousness. The party decided to press on (leaving Barik in the guard room) and found the door they had been stymied by before was now unbarred. They fought their way through 2 more chambers before encountering the goblin chief and his last 5 warriors. The ensuing combat left Grafthor dead and Elmorth unconscious. Byram finished off the last goblin, but the party was too decimated to explore any more.****
* I found a dungeon map online that I used, but for some reason I interpreted the squares as 5' instead of 10', which made the dungeon fairly claustrophobic. Good for a goblin warren, not so good for having been a former evil temple.
** Nobody poked around to find the giant rats that lived there.
*** They had encounter similar pillars in 2 previous rooms, which is probably the only reason they were only mildly suspicious, instead of extremely suspicious.
**** All they would have found is the tribe's shaman, his assistant and the women/children.
---
All in all, it was a fun-enough night in a retro-stupid kind of way. True20 would have worked better if I had more experience with it (it is just enough different from both Mutants & Masterminds and standard d20 that I got tripped up a few times), but I stumbled through OK.
I have been contemplating sandbox campaigns recently. I thought this might be a good way to sample a type of adventure that might come up. And while people still had fun, it still seemed like there was still that undercurrent of take-it-or-leave-it about the game. I'm not sure that I want to go through the work of putting a campaign world together unless I know there is going to be more pay-off than mild interest.
Labels: RPGs
