The players started out in the cave, standing over the corpse of a freshly slain cave bear. We did some hand-waving to replace Anthony's ranger with Varin, a half-elf warlock played by new player Marc. Everyone got reacquainted and pressed forward into a passage in the back of the chamber.
I'll save some time by using the flavor text from Goodman Games' Isle of Fury; players, please advise me if I'm violating copyright too egregiously:
The dungeon corridor splits into three much smaller hallways. Each of these hallways is obscured by long wisps of spider web that stretch from floor to ceiling.
No one wanted to treat the webs too lightly. Mendas the rogue scouted ahead to the mouth of all three hallways, but found nothing. Bartix the wizard tried to burn the webs, but the environment was too damp to have much affect. In the meantime, they noticed that the inner walls were stalagmites, 15 feet high in a thirty foot ceiling that was probably crawling with spiders. They decided to man up and send Gudrun the fighter in first down the center corridor, with Varin and Rurik the warlord a step behind, and Mendas and Bartix waiting back at the branching point. Halfway in, spiders dropped down: a Deathjump giant spider in front, a swarm of smaller spiders dropping down into a gap in the party, and two more dropping in the other hallways in an attempt to flank. Everyone rolled initiative and began!
This was a tough fight, with lots of poison effects going around and no room to maneuver. Gudrun got stuck in with the deathjump spider and hacked at it throughout the battle. Matt was controlling the fighter (the original player, Todd, has had to leave the game), and forgot to mark on the first attack; then missed the next two attacks when it would have helped. Rurik and Varin retreated from the corridors, but the warlock kept getting stuck adjacent to the swarm, taking a swarm aura attack and an attack of opportunity from using his spells in the same turn. Bartix got in a good rhythm of giving ground and thunderwaving the swarm back. (They took half damage from all but close and area attacks, so the options were limited.) Mendas was engaged immediately by the second deathjump spider, and he and Rurik fought it for quite a while before overcoming it.
There was some cool stuff: Gudrun used his Berserker power gained from reading the Runestone of Thor to respond immediately to attacks on him with another attack; he then cleaved, reaping-struck with an action point, and moved one square instead of shifting to get an attack of opportunity from a swarm, which he responded to. Three axe swipes in one turn! A few turns later, though, he was dropped by spider poison, and barely hung on to life until the end of the battle. At the end of the encounter, only a swarm was left, crawling over Gudrun's helpless form, but it was down to one hit point. I told the room that there was only one little spider left alive. Mendas rushed in to finish it off, but missed... then the swarm acted, rolling a critical hit! Obviously the King Spider had survived to the end. It was eventually killed, and everyone took a break and some healing. Bartix was wary of egg sacks, so he magic-missiled the hell out of the ceiling. A better DM would have squashed his head with a falling rock for that crap.
A word about this encounter: as written, these corridors should have been really tight, giving penalties to armor class. In the meantime, there were only two spider swarms, of generally weak strength, but I can't really read 3rd edition stat blocks. I took out these complexities because it's my second dungeon, and I was trying to make this a vanilla encounter. The fight was still defined by claustrophobic terrain, with everyone's ability to flank and shift and draw line of fire severly hindered.
Also, the miniatures used were Deathjump spiders and a Red Scarab swarm. It's fun to fight the things you're fighting, I'm finding, so I tweak the game rules to fit the miniatures. The rules for the monsters came from a Level 2 Rat Swarm, the only swarm that Level 1 characters had a chance against. But they had poison and a swarm aura and played like spiders. As we go on I'll be more confident at changing the stats of an existing monster to fit the appropriate level. Right now I usually just change the name and visual representation... I've played with adding the distinctive power of, say, a Level 11 Kuo-toa fish-man to a level 3 orc, that sometimes works too.
Proceeding through the caves, the group stopped at a widening corridor and declared that they were rolling Perception. Mendas and Varin rolled far above average and spotted two trigger plates just ahead of them! They avoided the plates and inched through the rest of the room, looking every step... but things seemed clear. Try as they might, no one could find the source of the trap, but they reached the doors without incident. The bit of XP from this encounter put the original four characters up to 2nd level! I kept the game going, but allowed players to add things like a +1 to attack, and anything else they could look up while I tore down the current rooms and built the next encounter.
Just after the trapped room, the party had three pathways to possibly follow. Mendas listened down each one, and heard soft voices coming from the south. The party filed quietly down the rock corridors to find a large room with eight goblin sentries.
This oddly shaped room is home to a halfdozen or more of the rat-tailed creatures (which are now goblins in the rewritten encounters) that inhabit this dungeon. Eight small bedrolls, a small pile of gnawed bones, and other odds and ends are strewn about the floor.
Two were asleep, three were playing cards, and three more seemed inattentive. Batrix tried his daily Cloud of Sleep on a cluster of five of them, and had pretty good success. Meanwhile, Mendas snuck up, ending up right next to one of the goblins. With so many sleeping foes, everyone was thinking "coup de grace." Sadly, they got greedy. Rurik and Gudrun tiptoed in, hoping to get within charge range before the trap was sprung. Sadly, Gudrun flubbed the roll, and the goblins snapped to attention. Not only that, they all beat the party's initiative. No sneak attacks!
In a testament to the party's growing strength, these goblins were getting torn up pretty fast. Still, there were 8 of them. Mendas had overextended himself and was facing four, including an archer that could hang back and stick him throughout the fight.
Two of the goblins charged up to engage the magic users, who had ended up in front of the fighters to get the prime shots. They missed... I think all of the goblins missed that first round. Bartix and Varin shifted away, and Gudrun and Rurik took their places. The plan was to finish off the goblins as quickly as possible, so that the melee fighters could aid Mendas at the front of the room. To do that, Gudrun used his daily Brute Strike to murderize one of them, then Spinning Sweeped the other to knock him prone with an action point. Hmm, I guess the party planned on sleeping some time in the near future. Gundrun then bravely advanced, triggering the prone goblin's one opportunity attack so that Rurik would be unhindered. Fighters are so valiant when controlled by proxy! But that aside, he was best prepared to take the hit, and it was a good strategic move.
Rurik joined Mendas in the southwest corner of the room, where the rogue was looking rough. Mendas considered tumbling to get to the one still sleeping goblin, but with all the difficult terrain of the cave floor, he couldn't make it work. Instead he used his Runestone of Thor power, putting on the bear shirt in a manner that you don't normally see in three foot high guys armed only with knives... but it worked, he started responding to all his hits in kind, and spent an action point which he immediately gained back when he killed a goblin. Rurik used Viper Strike to help Mendas set up a flank (I think that was this battle), cool use of powers now that they had room to move!
Finally it was down to just one goblin bowman. Mendas charged him over the rock as the rest of the party closed in. The goblin critted him, and he berserk-responded back with a crit of his own. Long story short the dude died.
These goblins were kind of loaded, with three healing potions and over 200 gold. Finally: this party has been plotting a treasure-free course through the island for three weeks now.
Casualties:
2 Deathjump Spiders
2 spider swarms
2 magical crossbow traps
6 Goblin Warriors
2 Goblin Sharpshooters
18 beers (well, okay, 11 beers and 7 Mike's hard drink products)
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