Skip to main content

Stonehell August Game

This Stonehell session went well. The party started by checking out the repaired stone head. They determined that the head now could answer more than three questions, provided new, cryptic responses, and seemed to be more unreliable.

While leaving the head area, they saw a kobold work crew hauling off a large stone block. They found that the room they had previously used as a secure sleeping area had been converted to a staircase heading up. The staircase headed up about 60’.

They began investigating the Hunter’s Lodge above. They fought some animated columns in the entrance hall and began exploring to the east when they heard some moaning coming from that direction. They opened the door to find a bathroom with a large man in flagrante delicto with a crystal gnome statue. They had a brief encounter with the naked hunter who wielded the gnome statue as a club, but he escaped by jumping into one of the pools, which seemed to teleport him elsewhere. They followed him to the pool and were teleported to the base of the waterfall in the canyon.

The party decided to let the hunter escape and headed back down the steps to the dungeon. Once back in the dungeon, they made their way back up the stairs to the Hunter’s Lodge. They listened carefully, but heard no sign that an alarm had been raised. They decided to check behind the other door in the pool room and found A collection of the naked, crystal, gnome statues in both genders. They decided that the gnomes could fetch a good price in town and stashed some in the stairwell.

They decided to investigate the room to the west before returning to town, and found a library. Moving through the library, they found a store room and what appeared to be a collection of bizarre taxidermy. Our brave adventurers decided to head back to town with their loot and returned to the library to scoop up some valuable books. The wizard determined that three of the books were magic and began pulling them down. The second book animated and began flying around the room, attacking the wizard. They eventually managed to knock the book to the ground where it was savaged by the dog. They scooped up are loads of books and returned to town through the pool with some statues.

After resting up, the party returned to the canyon and began making their way back to the dungeon entrance. On the way there, they stopped to root around an old foundation at the urging of the assassin. After some digging, they found 800 gold buried.

They decided to further explore the second level that they had tentatively identified as an asylum in earlier expeditions. A map won from a riddle contest with a sphinx served as their guide as they began poking around. They discovered a secret room haunted by a poltergeist, a room filled with maddening script, a tribe of descendants of inmates that followed a man who worshipped a jack-in-a-box, and the corpse of an elf lounging in a trapped hot tub. As their resources began to run low from slaughtering inmates and baboons, they discovered a staircase heading up. During the ascent, the dwarf determined that they had gone up beyond the first level. They eventually found themselves in a room with a secret door that opened into the storeroom they found earlier in the Hunters’ Lodge.

As they headed back across the entrance hall they were confronted by they man they had chased, naked, from the baths earlier and another hunter. This time he was fully clothed and armed.

The party managed to kill the first Hunter quickly, but as he died, the sound of a hunting horn emanated from him and his friend seemed to grow stronger. After dispatching the second Hunter (and hearing another horn), with relative ease, they decided to investigate a southern hallway before leaving. As they listened at the door, two larger hunters ran into the room. As they fought these hunters, they noticed that they were significantly harder than the last two. After they killed one, the horn sounded again, and the remaining Hunter visibly enlarged.

The final Hunter proved a difficult foe, and struck down Kelkin before they managed to kill him. The saddened party carried Kelkin, and their loot, back to town. Fortunately, the avatar was able to resurrect the cleric.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Hex Crawls

Those of you who have been reading this blog know that I have never run a megadungeon before. I have always used more realistic dungeon settings, keeping all underground areas to a minimum and keeping the over all size of castles and the like fairly small. There is another style of gaming I have never indulged in: the hex crawl. I have never seen hexes as discrete chunks of the map. I always just used them as a guide to find distance if they were present and not worrying about themif they were not. I have always taken a more continuous view of overland maps. This is another streak that will be ending with my upcoming OSRIC game. I will be using James M's Outdoor Map as a starting pont in my campaign. I will be heavily modifying it for my purposes but most of the features will stay the same. I will be adding my own versions of Castles Blackmoor and Greyhawk to the map. I have been struggling with how a hex crawl works. How do I know if they find features in the hex and isn't 5 m

Traveller: Session 5

    This is part of an ongoing campaign. You can find the other sessions over on the sidebar. This session was run on October 27, 2022. This session contains secret communications between me and the individual players. This means that these recaps do not cover everything that happened in the session. I will be reporting only the information that all players had access to.   131-1116   After the council meeting ended, Nashu, Archduke Ishuggi’s chief of staff, pulled him aside. Following the revelation that Yuri Lang, the emperor’s would-be assassin, had been a member of Archduke Adair’s intelligence service and had been involved in a combined operation with Gateway Intelligence, she had the staff run overlap checks on all recent contacts. The goal was to determine if there were any more unexpected connections between people that could be a threat to Ishuggi or the emperor.   She learned that, in 1113, Yuri Lang (“Baron Pazi”), Zurzi (Archduke Bzrk’s chief of st

Wilderlands: Session 36

    This session was run on May 1 st , 2023 They continued heading east towards the beach with the rock rolling along beside them. They were not sure where they had washed ashore with respect to the various port cities on the coast, so the best plan was to reach the beach and then decide how to proceed from there. Around noon, the skies darkened and white flakes began to fall from the sky. As it was around 85 degrees, they realized that it could not be snow. It turned out to be ash. The ashfall was quickly mixed with a moderate rain. They discovered that the rain stung when it hit unprotected flesh and raised small red welts. Drex found shelter in a hollow beneath the roots of a large tree and they waited out the acid rain for a couple of hours before resuming their journey. They reached the water as it was getting dark and spent an uneventful night camped just off the beach. In the morning, they could see masts on the horizon to the north, but nothing to the so