AD&D Session 4: Thunderhead

In the last session, the Order of the Perfect Circle slew a 'dragon', caroused with the kobolds on the first level of Stonehell, and butted heads with the Cult of the Ultraviolet flame. Now they have been trapped in the quiet tombs of Stonehell. Will they find a way out? What treasures remain out of their reach, and what threats will they face? Join them in this week's journey to find out...

The Party

Norbeth Yelfiel, elf mage/thief with a periwinkle wide-brimmed floppy hat, played by Finn

Akiva ben Moshe, beetlefolk fighter with a short ponytail, played by Ali

Occam, goblin fighter with a greathelm, played by Anne

Agatha, human paladin with a smiling-masked samurai helm, played by Anne

Innus Entus, goblin cleric/fighter with a bishop's mitre, played by Cao Linh

Ingvar Duram, human cleric with an extravagant tricorn hat, played by Jackson

Eileen Longtail, human soldier

Precious, domesticated rat

Casualties

None

Loot

300cp

350sp

Golden ring (50gp)

200pp

Winged boots

Potion of healing

Brass ring (unidentified)

Acquaintance of sage, Eramay the Impassive

Some answers

The Game

25 Plantings 1113

• As the Order of the Perfect Circle looted the tomb of the bone-thing, they spotted a torchlight coming down the long hall towards them, from the unexplored north. A heavily armored figure stood before them, with a masked helm bearing a smiling face. 
• This was Agatha, a warrior who had come down to Stonehell alone, managed to push open the northern danse macabre door. When Occam heard this, he dashed north and headed towards the surface to see Tork, leaving the Order with Agatha. When they learned she was a paladin and established her love for circles, they were more than happy to include her in their expedition. 
• They plundered the remaining tombs nearby, picking up no shortage of coinage and even a pair of magical boots with metallic wings on the ankles, and came to an intersection stuffed with fire beetles, feeding on goblin corpses. Akiva stepped forward and spoke to the insects in their own tongue, beetle-to-beetle, and negotiated safe passage and mutual non-hostility. 
• At this point, Innus Entus determined he had contracted a nasty ear infection from his night's sleep in the kobold 'inn'. Faced with the opportunity to return to the surface, they decided to continue exploring the level. 
• It wasn't long before the Order came to another cluster of tombs and set their looting system into action. But in these, the Order found bells next to the biers, where animate corpses could ring them.
• The Order elected not to mess with them, but as they proceeded down the hall, powerful undead hands tore down the doors and the ringing of bells filled the mausoleum. 
• The Order retreated to the mouth of the corridor, Akiva and Agatha holding the front. A swarm of shambling corpses and skeletal archers marched out of their tombs to crash into their defensive line, but they held fast for several rounds.
• When the zombies had been cut down and only a contingent of archers remained, they heard a command from behind them. The undead ceased their attack and stood at attention as Numin, the leader of the Ultraviolet Flame cultists, with his serpent-headed staff, approached. Now getting a closer look at him, he wore the distinctive corpse-like face paint of the Death Nuns. 

By Carol Heyer (?)

• He was keen to see why the Order had neglected his order to leave the tombs for the surface, until he saw they were now accompanied by a paladin. After a quick negotiation, he permitted the Order to pass and head for the surface unmolested. As they were departing, he caught a look at Agatha's face and was very curious about her ancestry, but a monotonous lecture on daily life in Beegrove sent him wailing back to his lair.
• Back on the surface, the Order decided to put their newly acquired flying boots into action and scout the caves on the sides of the canyon: they determined many were filled with predatory animals, and that the waterfall cave had some strange mechanism hidden within it. They also discovered a secret room complex and recovered a strange brass ring scintillating with rainbow colors, whose use they could not determine. 
• They also found a chamber filled with cold, necrotic energy, and a defaced insciption. The legible part read 'all rot and decay is a sacrament unto our lady--'.
• Thereafter they departed Stonehell and returned to Beegrove, where they partied it up. 

4 Low Summer 1113

• A week of carousing passed in the small town of Beegrove, during which Innus Entus was recovering from his ear infection, Agatha was falsely accused of stealing the Count's prized horse (a gift from the king!) and the parish priest approached Ingvar with a request: to look after a box during the time the priest was away, make sure it was safe, and not open it. Ingvar determined the container, no larger than a ring box, contained something small, no larger than a single coin, and was padded on the inside, but did not open it. 
• After that week, they traveled to Clifton in order to track down clues to the Clifton heir's lost treasure. 

7 Low Summer 1113

• The night of the Solemnity of the Implacable presence, they passed through the walled city of Blackstable, which was in the throes of its annual cattle festival. The Order ate a lot of good beef and had a generally enjoyable time. 

8 Low Summer

• The Order arrives in the Clifton area, and starts hearing warnings about a vicious bandit group prowling the area, even going so far as to attack the mail wagon (usually left alone by brigands). At the same time, they spy a messenger gallop into town, give the sheriff a brief message, and ride down the road on a fresh horse. 
• The alarm goes up. A hurricane is incoming! The townspeople start grabbing supplies and valuables and move to high ground in a frenzy, and the Order pitches in. 
• The sheriff asks around for anyone willing to ride down the road to warn an isolated sage of the incoming storm. The Order volunteers, with Agatha taking the winged boots and double-timing it while the rest of the Order heads there at regular pace. 
• Two hours of flight exhausts the boots for the time being, but gets Agatha to the remote hut... which at that moment is being assaulted by more than a dozen bandits!
• Strong though the paladin was, she wouldn't come out on top against those numbers in a fight. Instead she stepped out of the treeline and bellowed out as intimidating a threat as she could muster. 
• As she did so, an elderly woman threw open the shutters, shouted,

'My savior! Kill them all!'

• and dumped an armload of sticks onto the assembled thugs, who screamed and fled as the sticks turned into snakes. 
• This woman was the sage, Eramay the Impassive, unparalleled expert in human history and genealogy and dabbler in the supernatural. She was, in fact, unaware of the pproaching storm and set Agatha to work moving her most fragile and valuable possessions into a nearby cave which would shelter them. Once the rest of the Order arrived a couple hours later, they were enlisted in the effort as well. 
• The bandits did not return, and as the wind began to howl, Eramay offered the Order a chance to shelter with her while the hurricane raged. They accepted, and spent the next four days in close quarters with one of the most learned scholars in the region. She offered them a single free question in exchange for their timely aid (a fair boon, given how pricey a sage's aid can get), which the Order used to decrypt the treasure map left by the Clifton heir. 
• She was the right person to ask: not only was human history her field, it all happened in her own backyard. She identified two locations on the map as a selkie cove and the site of the old Clifton manor, long since abandoned, and quickly determined that the riddle's reference to 'the flock' referred to a mural of a flock of sheep, which abutted the stony hill against which the manor was built; doubtless the resting place of the treasure!
• Eramay offered the Order another free question, if one of them answered one of hers... specifically, if Agatha told her about her ancestry. 
• This was the second time someone had asked about this, and with some prodding, Agatha revealed she was descended from the Wicke family, a prominent merchant house from the south, recently fallen into disarray. Few knew that the Wicke family was involved in the construction of the Castle of the Silver Prince, and fewer knew that the Wickes had a congenital allergy to silver. 
• In exchange for her genealogy, Eramay told the Order the story of the Silver Prince, both the fairytale they already knew, and the more obscure information they didn't. 

12 Low Summer 1113

• The hurricane abated, and the Order emerged from hiding. The land was still being soaked in a rainstorm, but at least the wind was tolerable. As a rare spot of sun broke through the clouds, they spied the outline of a miles-high human face in the retreating thunderhead over the sea; as soon as they spotted it, it was gone. 

Will the Order find the hidden treasure of Haemedean Clifton? What strange secrets lie at the heart of the hurricane? And what shall come of Ingvar's mystery box? Join us for next week's session of Cascabel!

Takeaways

It doubt it comes across in the recap, but I was dissatisfied by my performance this session. 

The battle with zombies and skeletons in the corridor, which takes up just a couple lines here, took up a considerable portion of the session. 

When the players found a little mausoleum complex near the Stonehell entrance in session 2 (where they got the bag of holding), having undead next to each other like that was a novelty. When they found that same structure again in the quiet halls, it was like a little call-back; they knew what to do. 

However, by the time that second complex got sacked, it got old. The presence of Unquiet crypts scattered among them ought to partly alleviate that, but it mostly means the party sometimes has to deal with a few undead before they want to. Not really riveting stuff. 

I tried to make it more challenging by putting bells in some of the tombs, so undead could awaken each other and call for aid. That ultimately meant 20+ mixed undead waking up and coming towards the party. Not a bad thing, but I wasn't ready to run that. We use a grid whiteboard with 5'x5' squares, which is great for tracking PC location, not so much for tracking the location of that many swarming enemies. In addition, I didn't really move the undead in any strategic way, leaving many of them in their tombs. This was kind of deliberate and kind of not, overall it was a mess. The cultists appeared once most of the undead (out of the half or so I actually moved to engage the party) were defeated, mostly to keep the fight from dragging on after its outcome has basically been decided. 

It didn't help that I was rolling enemy type, number, hit points, and treasure in the moment, for a half-dozen different rooms. I should have taken a break to pre-roll those once I figured the party was staying in the area. 

I was also very silly in the way I was interpreting crypt results. When the result came up 'Empty' for Crypt Resident, I described the crypt as just being empty, no body in it. That's dumb! I should have made 'Empty' usually mean a non-undead body within, maybe an actually empty result now and again indicating an unusual unused or robbed crypt. I know this! But in the moment my good sense fled. What dumbassery. 

I also wasn't satisfied with my performance after the party left the dungeon. I felt my description of the caves and rooms on the surface was dull and rote. When the party was carousing and using downtime, I didn't leave them space to roleplay, and I was deficient in describing the travel from Beegrove to Clifton. I also felt like my description of stuff at the end was incoherent. 

Part of this is doubtless magnified by memory, but in large part it was just subpar DMing on my end. Thankfully, all the players from this session have RSVP'd for the coming one, so I can still make it up and improve going forward. 

Some changes I plan to make:

On my end, when I have large groups of homogenous monsters in the future, I'll treat them individually but move them in groups: let a large 10'x10' token represent a squadron of up to 9 hobgoblins, or a mob of up to 16 swarming zombies, etc. Then I can keep track of everything much more easily and feel confident in actually using these large numbers of monsters without throwing the rules to the wind. I will also, when situations like the corridor fight happen again, consider using average damage and to-hit chances and fast-forward the combat a few rounds at a time, stopping when something breaks the stalemate. 

I will also print out the list of carousing actions and leave the players time to figure that stuff out on their own and interact amongst themselves. The game works best, I think, when combat is the junior partner and exploration and roleplay are senior. This session did not have enough roleplay, though there was plenty of opportunity to create the space. 

I think I also just need to slow down, take a couple 5-minute breaks during the session to compose my thoughts and plan, and just generally slow down description so I can visualize and simulate, not just read off the page. Maybe Stonehell is too convenient, in a perverse way; I got comfortable just relying on the text.