After a thoroughly enjoyable demo game of Shadowdark at RiverCityCon a few weeks ago, I’ve decided to start a side campaign with the usual suspects. This will likely involve most or all of the players from Kaserne on the Borderlands, and perhaps a few others from the same friends circle, but not all at once. Somewhere West of Light, as I’m calling it, will be a pick-up game – either “we don’t have a quorum for a scheduled Twilight: 2000 session” or “I’m bored, can I get three to five players for a dungeon?” It may wind up being West Marches-ish. I’ll be chronicling it here, both for my own memory and for entertaining my three loyal readers. Don’t expect writeups to be as in-depth as what I do for Kaserne, though.
We did a dry run tonight with four players. I threw together a set of level 1 pre-gens, and my players chose:
- Pryist, goblin wolfchild, priest of Memnon
- Worluck, human minstrel, warlock of Kytheros
- Nyte, halfling amnesiac, Knight of St. Ydris
- Baarrd, elf scholar, bard
(I may have been giggling like a twelve-year-old as I rolled up and named a score of disposable PCs.)
For our test-run adventure, I grabbed the free Foundry pack community content pack and selected Sersa Victory‘s Tomb of the Dusk Queen. It’s a delightfully tightly-written dungeon, and I suspect I’ll be buying more of that author’s content in the near future. Module spoilers behind the cut:
Thanks to good rolls and good tactics (all of these are 20- to 40-year TTRPG veterans), my players thoroughly looted the dungeon. Worluck’s player had a hard stop at four hours, so that and the light timers (wonderful mechanic, that) enforced a sense of urgency.
Pryist got off three turn undeads in the course of the module, which was excellent crowd control. The skeletons in the first chamber were much more manageable, as was the owlbear zombie, and even the boss had to burn one of her legendary resistances to get out from under a turning.
The PCs also recognized the gelatinous cube for what it was. Worluck’s starting inventory included a flint and steel and three flasks of oil (Worluck: “Is this for a lantern I don’t have?” Me: “No, for arson.”), so the cube started the fight on fire. A pseudopod paralyzed Baarrd before she could get an action, but Worluck dragged her out of the way before it could engulf her, and the team finished it off as it burned.
Baard used the scroll of invisibility to bypass the basilisk encounter. With a natural 20 on the check to cast from a scroll (one of several ridiculously well-timed crits throughout the session), she was able to sneak in and loot the room while the death-lizard was busy investigating a guttering torch that Pryist had hurled into the room.
Despite the complete lack of healing in the party (Pryist had turn undead, holy weapon, and shield of faith), no one went down until the final fight, when Pryist got dropped with a 1-turn death timer, but Baarrd dashed in to stabilize him. Nyte, thanks to having grabbed both the scarab of drain resistance and one of the rings of protection, avoided both a massive crit (she only had 4 hp) and a 3-point life drain, and, with Pryist’s holy weapon spell on her bastard sword, wound up doing the lion’s share of the damage on the boss. Pryist got in a couple of good licks, too – and most of those hits were thanks to rerolls from luck tokens that Baarrd was busy restoring each round.
For the stable campaign, I’m having each player build a primary PC and a reserve PC. I decided that XP from this module would transfer 50/50 to those, so each of those players’ incoming PCs is starting at a baseline of 6 XP. Pryist’s player decided to adopt his goblin as his primary, so the party now has a token thread of continuity with Vraazox da Pryist.
Tonight’s six-word dungeon: rentals turn undead: queen briefly surprised.