Stonehell campaign report 1
Sorry folks, end of grad school and early parenthood is a doozy, blogs have fallen far to the wayside.
I have gotten into running Stonehell, using OSE. I am actually running it for two groups concurrently; one is my IRL group of buddies and the other is online friends from college, who are dispersed across the US.
So far, my IRL group has only done character creation, but I thought I'd blog about how it's been going for the online group and some of my preparation process.
This game is being run in a pseudo-West Marches style. The parties can communicate between sessions and effects on the dungeon persist between parties.
Setting & preamble
I am setting the whole thing on a large island, and using the keep from B2 as the dungeon's town. Stonehell is subbing in for the Caves of Chaos.
There is a little hexcrawl around the dungeon that I have yet to populate (I have been agonizing over how to best do so). It's actually not little, it's big enough that populating it has been a problem; point stands. I want to give them some breathing room if they spend a lot of time in the dungeon and need to "get some air".
Pretty standard six-mile hexes, I have read Stonehell and am trying to make the hexes contextually-relevant or even give hints to contents of the dungeon. For some reason, my brain does not want to focus on filling this hexcrawl out.
Play report
Let's get into the good stuff.
The online group was originally composed of three characters: Grover Laird, Daisy, and Weird Molly. Grover Laird was an illusionist, Daisy was a halfling Reeve, and Weird Molly is a tiefling (note the tenses).
First delve
They spent most of their first session exploring the keep, which was fun. They got introduced to NPCs who will be important to their continued survival (provisioner, tavernkeep, banker, etc).
Their first delve was not really much of a delve. They only made it to the gatehouse outside the dungeon, of which they did not breach the perimeter, and camped outside. The night had two random encounters: goblins and bandits. The goblins passed them by, the bandits were alerted to their presence (as I recall that is because the character on watch opted to alert them about the goblins).
The bandits tried and failed to extort them for their trouble, and even with the party getting into combat sluggishly (two party members waking from sleep), they killed the bandits and took no damage. Looting the bandits yielded ~20cp and a torc worth 1100gp. They were quite satisfied with the result and we called the session there. I am calling the gatehouse the "beginning of the dungeon" for dungeon doom roll purposes, so they were good.
Second delve
More treacherous. Weird Molly was also absent.
Their delve began with hiring two retainers as they set off to the keep. I am making retainers 0 level until they get given a share of treasure, at which point they gain a class. TL;DR, they hired peasants. Daisy was comically bad at doing so, and got ill will twice in the hiring process (I don't think this was following OSE to the letter; I think she should have been prevented from rolling from the first ill will roll– whatever).
They ventured from the keep and went past the gatehouse, first examining two ruined buildings. They then decided to explore the mini dungeon far to the north. In doing so, Grover ran afoul of a green slime and could survive neither the slime nor the flames required to kill said slime. RIP. They party fled that part of the dungeon afterwards. Grover's player took control of both of the retainers until his next character was introduced.
After, they went to the southern mini-dungeon. They ran into the skeletons, and ran away. They decided to try to visit the most intact building in the valley, which had a shrine to St. Ras inside. Grover's player's replacement character, Marga, a fighter, was praying within. I decided to be nice and yield to Marga the secret of the shrine, and so to gain the benefit of praying there they decided to spend the night at the shrine.
The one random encounter I rolled during the night was goblins. It was merely four of them, and I got a good reaction roll from them. I decided they would just kind of mess around with the party, giggling and throwing pebbles at the character who was on watch (Daisy). Daisy responded by slinging one of them across the head, knocking him (her? I never decided) off of the half wall it was lounging on.
The goblins decided to respond with lethal force as well, and we began a quite nasty combat. The player characters lost a retainer after dispatching about half of the goblins (three goblins had melee weapons, one ranged). At some point during this mess, the goblin who got winged in the face snuck around the back of the shrine and stabbed Daisy in the back, killing her. Seeing the party in such dire straits, the last retainer failed a loyalty roll and ran away. Marga's excellent AC and big fuckoff sword afforded her the durability to dispatch the rest of the goblins.
Marga decided to forego her rest and fled back to the town, and thus we ended our session.
Thoughts
I was really disappointed with the outcome of the fight with the goblins, and that it happened at all. My players are pretty experienced, I would not normally expect them to respond with overwhelming violence to such a minor provocation. Ah, well, sometimes a lesson needs to be relearned. It's odd to me because they so clearly demonstrate discretion in other parts of their dungeon delving practices.
I am very excited to get my real-life group to the table. There are more of them and they play longer, which is just great in general, but also (hopefully) yields more dungeon explored per session. I hope they find Daisy and the retainer's body in the shrine building, it will be the first instance of seeing the actions of another party in the environment.
Todo
As I said, I need to flesh out the hexes. I also have seeded the goblin conflict with the orcs (every goblin they have seen looks in some way haggard or battle-scarred). I want to run this like a dungeon that they can have considerable success talking through.
For the swamp, I want to have a snake-people temple dedicated to the Children of Yg from Stonehell. I may take the zombie-snake people temple from that Carcass Crawler zine and reflavor it to be the last redoubt of the snake cult. I really like the OSE anthology dungeons and will probably do my darndest to sprinkle them in as well.
I also want there to be at least one point of interest in every hex. To do so, I am using a combination of the Cairn 2e Warden's Guide and the Tome of Adventure Design Revised. The Warden's Guide has explicit PoI generation and the ToADR has those sparks on the sides of the pages. I am using one until I get bored of it, then jumping to the other. The downside is I keep creating PoIs that could be fucking dungeons, and the prep requirement for a new dungeon is very high by my standards. Such is my lot.