Session 11: a Death in the Family

This session began with the players retreating from the dungeon to heal their wounds and restock themselves. Lexent the cleric had reached 5th at the end of the last session and so obtained his henchfolk Matyas, whom he'd rolled up for the first running of this campaign only to reveal later that he was wondering about his former cleric from the previous campaign I'd ended before Covid. We'd agreed then that when Lexent reached 5th, he could take Matyas into the party, and so that had come to pass.

Pandred lent a handaxe to Ti, who had broken just about all his weapons, and I believe it was on the 12th of June, two days after leaving the dungeon, that the party returned. Because a player could not make this running, Zoltan and Edvard sat this out, along with the two Croatians and a centaur named Xerxes, who is looking after the party on account of his tribe, so that should anything happen on the outside, the party would receive warning.

Because Ti is so short of weapons, specifically the scimitar that he broke, I suggested the party might take on a small Ottoman encampment of about twenty soldiers, which Xerxes identified as being about four miles away; there would be lots of scimitars there, the centaur said. The party declined, though I had designed the encampment for the running. I won't post it here, because the party didn't go, and I might yet use it. Alas, it is again a spider casting webs to the wind.

The whole running took place thereafter upon this one stretch of hall, so that the players didn't actually do that much exploring:

This is where things were at the end of the game, with the party in full flight from the troglodytes, except for Matyas, who was at -8 hit points, unconscious and effectively unreachable.

For reasons that passeth all understanding, the party decided to recheck the toilets on the left side of the map, specifically that round "urination hole," where again I rolled a wandering monster check, getting a "1," then rolling 1d4 carrion crawlers to emerge from there, as I had the first time in the last session. And like the first time, I got two. If I'd rolled three or four, several members of the party, including the 5th level fighter Pandred. If I had rolled that many, they'd have never reached the trogs.

Just as the carrion crawler fight began, Ti the 4th level fighter had to excuse himself for a family issue and thus the party lost one of their defensive pillars. Pandred and I believe Mikael were soon paralysed and the rest of the party struggled hard to kill one, then the other of the two creatures. Matyas proved to be a piledriver, though, so that the party managed to get out of that scrape. The paralysed players recovered, the party issued some healing and they went forward.

Then, I would say the party had some bad luck by having too much good luck right off. At this corner, behind 2712, the party encountered three waiting troglodytes, two of which were quickly "held" by the cleric for nine rounds. The purple fat number "1" shows how many rounds were left on the spell, before the spell would have worn off. With one trogloydyte left, another came out of the dark and the party easily managed them both. Another single one came the next round and again, the party managed it, moving forward as they did. It all looked so easy. Two more came after, and the party was fine, smacking one of them right off.

But then three more came and it all started to fall apart. The party's "line" had spread out too thin by that point, where the three corridors above formed a large open space. The very next round, five troglodytes came on and the party did not do well for two rounds... which was enough to turn the tide against them. Soon, they realised they'd have to run to preserve their lives... but the stun lock rule seemed to imprison at least one of the party every round, so that if the others ran, the one left behind would certainly be mauled by as many as five or six troglodytes. Yet, they could not manage a round where no party member was stunned... and that when the time came to make a tough decision.

Matyas had been doing very well, but even so, he was getting hit way too much for a first level fighter. He was driven down to -4 hit points when his liege Lexent managed to give him Aid, restoring 17 hit points. Alas, it wasn't enough. Matyas continued to get hit, while the overall strength of the party continued to dwindle as the intense odour of the Troglydytes sapped the party of their strength.

This part was particularly interesting. Every member of the party failed their saving throw against the noxious odour; Mikael managed to preserve Pandred, the party's lynchpin, by bestowing "Freshen," upon him, taking advantage of my rewrite of that cantrip. It meant Pandred wasn't suffering from strength loss, but everyone else was.

And this was particularly fascinating, as my encumbrance rules are built in such a way that the amount a character can carry and how many actions they can take in a round depend very much on strength. So as their strength dwindled, their encumbrance issues grew, as the stuff on the party's backs began to weigh them down more and more. The players were using, I believe (because I'm not using it) a system built by Maxwell, commentor on the blog here, to calculate their encumbrance in an ongoing fashion, so they could tell when they had lost a point of movement because of the strength loss. At the point when the party did have to run, lasting one more round for Pandred to escape being stunned and coming to terms with the reality that Matyas would have to be left, everyone was down in their movement. Thankfully, however, the stride rules enabled them to run fast enough, while the troglodytes themselves were all wounded.

All the orange numbers on the troglodytes, shown on the battle map? That's their present hit points. Every trog with a number has been hit at least once. The freeing of those two that were held would mean two more trogs that hadn't been hit yet, so things were looking awfully dire. Each trog here had 2 HD, but as they weighed more than 290 lbs. (trogs in my game are big and meaty), they had 2d4 per hit die. With them having a minimum of 4 hit points, the party was beginning to feel how hard they were to kill, even for low-level humanoids.

So that was it. Lexent rolled up a new hench, managed to get another 1st level fighter, a dwarf now, again with an 18 strength, and will roll that character out with the next running. Hopefully, Ti and Zoltan will be back and the party will be more buff and ready to take those hobgoblins on again. Assuming they don't clear out and seek another lair, given that this one's been compromised. I tend to do that, because it punishes parties who don't hang in there and see the thing to the end before retreating. But, knowing what I know about these trogs, that's not all that unlikely. This was just the front group, and the party only killed about half a dozen of them. Hardly enough to think the trogs need to run away.