Old School Essentials: A Shroud of Ghouls in Ion City

tl;dr: The Dullgray River Rats hire a trio of dwarves and clear a shroud of ghouls from the Dullgray Temple.

Ocean, Level 3 Thief
Tomoe the Belt, Level 3 Fighter
Muffin St. Dymphna II, Level 2 Mage

There were still ghouls to clear out from their temple HQ. They hired some help from the local dwarven crime syndicate, the Anvilless (sounds cooler in Dwarven, Those Without Anvil). I rolled up 3 dwarves with the OSE NPC Generator and picked fitting names dwarven names from the Fantasy Name Generator: Gross, Thrav and Thrak.

Had a nice quiet-little-moments-before-the-storm moment where the dwarves asked Muffin St. Dymphna II about her religion and she explained why she doesn’t worship the Mage Trinity and they smoked some Axeweed. I rolled a random encounter as they entered the temple, so they ran into 4 ghouls right away. It became a fight over the hired dwarves’ heads.

There were fun decisions: the dwarven shield wall in the doorway fell as the bearded hired help fell to paralysis. In the end, the last of the ghouls ran for it with Ocean holding the last shield up, having failed their morale roll, right into the spotted lion, whose prey drive kicked in. Mrs. Cottonswald continued to charm the huge lion with meat the crew bought while out hiring the dwarves.

This might be my favorite dungeon-stocking that I have ever done. Just 3 monsters in an amazing Dyson Logos map. The monsters were reflections of Ioun City current events and history. Water Weirds are just so cool they deseserve their own blog post. If they group had tried to push through and kill it all in one go they would’ve likely perished. They had to reach out to factions and use money grabbed in one part of the temple to hire help to clear another. I didn’t know that they were going to do so but I’m thrilled they did.

Cue up the Legend of Zelda Triforce Overhead Sound as they open up dwarves as possible retainers and future characters by hiring the trio of dwarves.

They’ve got their HQ. Now what?

I’ll offer some options in our FB group:

Take stock of the criminal underworld neighbors and see if there are any pieces of turf ripe for the taking.
See if the Anvilless need any outside freelancers to take some paid work.
Find out who the ICMC is meeting with outside the city, see if there is any info there worth selling?
Something else?