It's our fifth session of the Dragora's Dungeon arc, based on the published adventure from Goodman Games. Zach took pictures, thanks!
In late 2009, we played game 5 of our modified Dragora’s Dungeon story arc, based on the Master Dungeon module of the same name by Goodman Games. I’ve modified the module to work for 9th-level characters, but the intellectual property is certainly theirs.
We opened the session in mid-fight. Last week, the party had stumbled onto a patrol of the strange four-armed Tharkans, and we had to end the game after the second round of combat. As we opened up, Motuhl the Barbarian had just fallen, and everyone else was determined to end the fight. In attendance we had Andrew playing Erik the cleric, Marcus playing Mendas the rogue, Marc playing Varin the warlock, Rebecca playing Oddny the paladin, and Zach playing Bartix the wizard.
We had started the combat two weeks ago with Anthony playing Hermiad the Ranger and Matt playing Motuhl the barbarian. Motuhl, of course, was at 0 hit points, so I had him quietly stabilize and ignored for the rest of the combat. But it left the problem of Hermiad, and also the problem of the combat being balanced to more heroes than were currently available. I offered the players a choice: they could accept simplified, “monster” versions of all of their unavailable allies: Hermiad, Edgar the Fighter, and Rurik the Warlord. These statblock heroes had less powers and less complexity but generally had the same stopping power as the full characters. The tradeoff would be more mouths to split XP amongst. The players decided to tough it out and let five heroes do the work of seven! I had the ranger shuffle off the stage, and the five charged back into the fray.
And they weren’t quite up to the task. The fight was brutal, with a few players knocked unconscious and brought back up again. The Tharkans revealed through battle cries that they were from House Vendrius (whatever that meant), and that they thought they were defending their homes.
The tide turned to favor the Vikings, but the wide-open battlefield left the enemies lots of options. Three of the tharkans turned to flee off the map. Mendas tried his switcharoo to keep one of the Infiltrators from escaping, but one square didn’t make much difference. Another infiltrator scaled a hill and made for another table edge. He was looking weak, and Bartix threw a lot of effort into trying to stop him, Dimension-Dooring his way across the map and trying to Thunderwave the creature off the hill. The attack missed, though, and the four-armed reptile man got away.
So the word was being spread and the surprise might have been lost, but everyone in the party was alive. The Vikings slunk off the streets and into the ruins to rest up. Mendas climbed a building to take a survey of the area.
Before them stretched a ruined city, dotted with cooking fires. The tower they had arbitrarily decided to reach lay ahead of them, and the easiest path was to work down the river. Ahead of them was a curious open line in the debris, some kind of cleared no-man’s land between two zones.
The Vikings gathered themselves and found a place to sleep for the night. They picked cautiously through the streets and found a protected building shell. In the bottom floor was a curious altar containing a small clay fertility idol, shaped more like a human than a tharkan. But the main focus was sacking out. Bartix used his Silence ritual, and everyone else got some sleep.
After six hours, the adventurers got up in the dark. The city was still semi-lit from the fires, but they noted how the sunstone in the cavern ceiling was completely out. If they had seen it during day before, things were really dim in this cavern. Takign this as “cover of darkness,” the Vikings got moving and made their way unmolested to the cleared zone. On the ground, they noticed that the zone followed old city streets, but had been meticulously cleared, unlike the rest of the city. On their side of the zone, they saw a crude glyph painted on a building, depicturing two crossed axes. Across the zone was a similar glyph, showing what Varin and Bartix knew as a basic arcane symbol. Perhaps, the players reasoned, they were in the control of a martial house (this House Vendrius?), and the next zone was that of an arcane house?
They cautiously crossed over, Mendas in the lead. Immediately the hair on the necks of the arcane characters pricked up… they were being scryed. With no options, they pressed forward.
The terrain in the new zone was very similar to the old, but within 15 minutes Mendas saw a four-armed figure standing in the street. The party realized that they were quickly being surrounded, and hunkered down. Then a voice called out, “We come in peace. We are House Zamosh, and we have no conflict with you. We invite you to an audience with our house leaders.”
The players agreed, and walked out into the streets. Some four tharkans met them, with several others and their pet drakes joining the party. The whole group made their way down the river towards the Wizard’s Tower.
We left off there, to pick up in two weeks!
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