November 18 Session


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 Our November 18 session was an old fashion dungeon crawl which took our players a little over four hours to complete.  Our party had been sent to investigate a tower in the Tenebris Silva (the dark forest).  A group of followers of Rectus Deus, including its priest leadership, had disappeared there investigating followers of the dark god The Betrayer a few years ago.  The party had gone through the parts of the tower that were above the ground in our November 11 session and found several types of undead.


In this session the party cleared out the underground temple.  Under the tower they encountered several types of undead; skeletons, zombies, Betrayer soldiers, and the boss.  There were also a number of carrion crawlers, described as nine foot long centipedes with tentacles.  A fight had happened between the followers of Rectus Deus and the followers of the Betrayer and now both sides were undead.

I clued the party in to the difference of the Betrayer soldiers (which regenerate if not burned or decapitated) by describing them as grey skinned with jet black eyes that move with a twitch.  The party discovered that just bringing them to zero hit points was not enough when one got back up while the party was searching the room!  The party's strategy with most of the undead was to douse them in oil and set them on fire.  When the party went toe to toe with the undead (particularly the Betrayer soldiers, which were 3 hit die monsters) they did not fare very well.

Strewn throughout the rooms (and in the hands of the undead, who used them) were magic weapons which would be important for the boss fight later.

The underground dungeon ultimately led to the temple, which was the boss fight.  The boss was described as standing next to an altar.  The altar had something chained to it, something that had been tortured horribly and now had a dagger in its heart.  The boss was wearing dark robes, had glowing yellow eyes and was almost see through.  The boss was a drelb, which could only be hit by magic weapons.  As our party members weren't necessarily proficient with these weapons the combat took awhile, it took nine rounds and our druid lost a significant percentage of his hit points.

As this is 1E AD&D, I don't tell the party the details of the magic items that they encounter.  They either need to cast a spell to find out or pay someone to identify it.  I just tell them things like, "the sword glows slightly or the armor is strangely light for a suit of chain mail."  If they use the equipment I make the adjustments on my side during combat.  However, if they are not proficient in the weapon then non proficiency penalties still apply!

We're taking the 25th off (Thanksgiving), but the week after we have to backtrack and go back to the city.  There we'll have to have a reckoning with Death's Queen and I'm planning on the party encountering the infamous crime boss, Mother.

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