tl;dr: The group crept into the abandoned temple where the previous gang who ruled the streets of the Dullgray Riverfront neighborhood had their HQ and ran headlong into a water weird.
I grabbed a lovely Dyson Logos Map and wrote notes on it. I didn’t have much. There was a Spotted Lion outside on the river entrance. There were ghouls in the basement. I was going to put a water weird in the pools of water and almost balked when I read the Monster Manual entry.
I’m glad I stuck to it. Yes, it nearly killed half the party. Yes, it might still kill the entire party. Still, it is now one of my favorite monsters of all time.
Tomo the Belt (Fighter 2) and Ocean (Thief 2) got together with their friends Gavin (Mage 1) and Noose (Thief 1) to clear out the abandoned temple the previous gang who held the Dullgray Riverfront as their turf used as their HQ.
But wait! As folks were getting acquainted, Gavin the Mage (yes, named after the creator of the Mage and OSE, the game we were playing), mentioned that he stole scrolls from his master. Gavin’s player was going to just say the scrolls he bought were those scrolls but no, I dig that. I randomly rolled to see the level and then rolled the spells. Rolled to see how adeptly Gavin chose those spells – not so well. Angry Mage incoming…some day.
What levels are the spells, though? I jotted down a quick 2d6 table on my handy-dandy office whiteboard:
2 – 5, First Level Spell
6, Second Level Spell
7 – 8, Third Level Spell
9 – 10, Fourth Level Spell
11, Fifth Level Spell
12, Sixth Level Spell
Perfect? No, but it worked. Gavin started with some extra spells – Light, Water Breathing and Wizard Lock.
They entered on the river-side, where there was a little amphitheatre that the river was slowly eating. While they were looking at the body of a drowned guardsman from the Order of the Spindle (Ioun City’s constables) a spotted lion walked up with a deer in its jaws (rolled on the Monster Reaction Table and it was uninterested – made sense). The giant effing lion sniffed at them and began eating. The mastiff Tomo had bought strained against its leash (rolled on the Monster Reaction Table to see how the pooch reacted to the lion…Sparky wanted blood).
Two Conversations About Sparky
Conversation 1
“I want to buy a wardog.”
“Dogs bark. We need to be stealthy.”
“You find a mercenary company camping outside the city, more than willing to sell you a mastiff that was meant to be a guard dog but she refused to bark.”
“I name her Sparky.”
Conversation 2
We talked about violence to animals. Everyone was okay with a pet dying in-game. I have dear friends who can play in the bloodiest of horror but violence to dogs, horses and cats is a no-no. I get it, seeing our real-life four-legged family sucks. I dont’ want anyone to have to relive that. But the green light was given. Pet death is on the table.
They made their way through the temple. Noose desecrated every shrine to the River Goddess and her Children she could find; we found out she had been sent to become a nun and returned with the scar on her neck that birthed her nickname. Eek! Eek! They found a word written on a wall in a language none of them knew, written in the same chalk that the warnings on the front door were written in. They found books – one on Morganti Blades (I’m reading Jhereg audiobooks on the way to work) and another on the angry incarnations of the River Goddess – how she often cursed places with river ghouls and water weirds.
Then I rolled a random encounter while they were searching a room. They heard a ghoul trigger a Magic Mouth spell in the hall. They got surprise and drove it down to 1 hit point. It threw its hands up and surrendered. Tomo grabbed his rope in one of his sacks (iron spikes, hammer, mirror, crowbar, 10 foot pole, more sacks, etc.) and tied the ghoul up. It offered to show them the treasure in the pools.
I rolled some quick dice behind the scenes and the Water Weird was in the third pool. The ghoul hauled out an unreal amount of treasure – jewlery and gold. The Water Weird attacked but they were ready for it thanks to the book’s foreshadowing. The group was ready to run when Gavin the Mage ran past them with his staff aglow. Jesse read the Mage power:
In the hands of a mage, a normal staff can harm creatures that are immune to mundane attacks.
Carcass Crawler #1
Had to make a ruling on drowning rules. Decided it was d6 Con damage per round and then a Save vs. Death every round once Con hit zero. They seemed to defeat the monster and dragged their friends from its pool, where they had been drowning. Anthony described Tomo vomitting river water out of his lungs while laughing at Gavin’s mad charge at the Water Weird (a monster that I described as I remembered Larry Elmore drawing it on the cover of Dungeons of Dread, angry water in the shape of a cobra).
It reformed before their eyes and we’ll start there next week.
It felt like I had done a decent job of stocking the dungeon. I had stocked some real duds in the past year, so it was nice to whip up a good one. This was a fun way to flesh out the religion along the river before the Ioun Stones brought in Mages and their industry and their Arcane Trinity Church (more on them later).
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