Session 9 was held on 8/29/19
The Rogue Marklech, Spider Cultist
The Wizard Falur Ryerson, Ordained Arcanist
October 11th, First Watch
Marklech and Falur approached Arpad outside of the mine, the prospector offered the group 50sp per room to map the quicksilver mine. They accepted the offer, and requested the service of some of Apad’s guards. They negotiated briefly, and Arpad offered three men at the day rate of 10sp per man. Falur and Marklech agreed, each paying 15sp to hire the three guards for the day. Bronek, Marek, and Jurek each carried a shortsword, bundle of torches, and wore leather armor. Arpad had the storekeeper give each member of the expedition one ration.
The first room (1) was a long narrow chamber that descended towards a wide natural cavern mouth, there were two masoned doorways on either side of the room, leading to excavated and reinforced corridors.
The group entered the first doorway to their right. The corridor led to a natural room (3) where one wall featured a 25-foot climb up to a rocky balcony. The characters climbed up to the balcony (4) to find a rocky shelf broken-through by the heavy solid roots of an ancient tree. From within the center of the root ball, a glistening crystal shape reflected light. The characters peered into the crystal to see the skeleton of a Winter Elf with hands raised protectively above its head as if to ward off a blow. Marklech touched the crystal, a vague sensation of fire and combat washed over him but he resisted the pull of the experience and yanked his hand away. Jurek came up to the platform with them, but he did not seem to see the crystal. Marklech and Falur decided not to map the balcony, hoping to keep the discovery of the winter-elf-crystal a secret from Arpad until they could further investigate it privately.
After climbing down from the balcony, they proceeded down the corridor to find a locked door (5). After picking the lock, they saw that the room was lined with shelves of old mining equipment and some old supply crates. Amongst other artifacts, there were usable mining picks, leather aprons, gloves, boots, lanterns, and helmets. After some searching, Marklech found 13 small mirrors in a leather pouch. Marklech discovered that his new lantern could be converted into a hooded lantern using the mirror and some leather pieces. After some time, a cold breeze blew in and each person sensed miner-ghosts lurking in their peripheral vision. They took this as a sign to leave the room, the henchmen guards required some persuasion to keep them from fleeing towards the entrance.
October 11th, Second Watch
The next doorway led to a four-way intersection. Ingress to the intersection was partially obstructed by four masoned pillars. The pillars supported an unsteady-looking shale slab ceiling.
The group proceeded through the first doorway on their right, finding a large room with a seemingly-bottomless pit (7). Marklech and Falur thought they heard something calling for help in the depths of the pit. Falur seemed convinced that he needed to descend the pit to provide assistance, but he came to his senses before going over the edge.
They continued to the next room (8), finding three grain silos dug into the floor and a dry ditch that ran along the cave wall towards a deep ravine. A swollen door at the top of a small ascent sealed off the room. At the party’s direction, Bronek and Marek kicked the door in. A thick mildew smell of rot filled the room and a viscous black fluid began to seep down towards the ravine.
The group proceeded up the ascent into the next room to find a large dark pool of black sluice. As they tried to walk by the pool on a narrow stone walkway, a grey ooze attacked them from out of the black sluice. Falur was nearly slain when the ooze bludgeoned him with an acidic slap.
October 11th, Third Watch
After they mapped the room with the grain silos (8), the frozen apparitions appeared in the doorway. As the characters approached the doorway, an intense cold emanated from the apparitions. When the party tried to pass through the apparitions to leave, the apparitions sapped the air from their lungs as if plunged into an icy bath. They pushed through the airless zone, gasping for breathe on the far side.
Marklech and Falur returned to Arpad and each received 17gp 5sp in payment for mapping 7 rooms.
October 11th, Fourth Watch – Rest
GM Notes
Experience:
We have transitioned to using an XP system where 1xp is gained for each 1sp that is spent on repaying their bond-debt, paying taxes, buying goods, or hiring services. I believe that this has encouraged the players to drive the sandbox a bit more forcefully. The players have started emailing before the session to identify what the characters intend to do during the session, this has helped me to focus my prep.
Bond-debt:
Each character starts the campaign with 3,000 gold of bond-debt to Lady Osis, this is why the characters are adventuring. A 100gp payment is due at the end of each calendar month (in-game time). The characters have enchanted tattoos which reflect the amount of their debt and the identity of the creditor. There are collection agents in any sufficiently large town to whom they can make early payments along the way, if they wish. While they have bond-debt, they cannot purchase property, and any assets they acquire can be seized if they default on their monthly payment. We talked for a while about how central debt is to the society, I am interested to see where that takes us.
Exploration:
For this session, I prepped by developing a few random tables so that we could generate the mine as we explored. I have about 12 set-piece rooms prepared, when the characters entered a room there was a ⅙ chance of generating a set-piece room. I believe random tables are useful for some chaos and inspiration, but the GM should always feel free to place rooms by fiat if it would be more fun, thematic, or appropriate. Likewise, to determine room contents I would roll a d6, roughly using the following results: 1-3. Empty, 4. Monster, 5. Special, 6. Trap. We ended up with a good number of empty rooms, to the relief of the characters.
Tracking Time:
I tracked the time using a print-out each session. The handout represents one week of time, with 24 hour segments per day, organized into four sections of six blocks. Each of these sections is referred to as a “watch.” To map a room, I would mark down 1 hr. I did not require any rolling for success here, I did roll to determine a random event each hour. Random events would occur on a roll of 1. Luck was with the party, no random events took place. At a few other points, the players would spend a decent amount of time deciding how to approach an obstacle. If they had taken too long without deciding, I would let them know that another hour had passed in game. The characters also knew that they needed to consume one ration per day, and that if they went four watches without resting then they would gain a level of exhaustion.
Magic:
This was the first session with the wizard Falur since he found the enemy wizard’s spellbook in May. I explained the character’s absence from the last session that he had been working to decipher the spellbook. I made some house rules for spellbooks, wizards can prepare their daily spells out of any spellbook they are carrying, but each spellbook takes up one Stone of inventory. Also, a spell within spellbook can be used like a scroll, but this will remove the spell from the book. Spells can be copied from one spellbook to another, using 10gp worth of special ink and 1 hour of time. I am considering limiting the number of spells that can be written in one spellbook, either by limiting the sum total of spell levels, or just limiting the spell count.
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