Kharmlund Session 2

In the time between the....oh hell, skip the cliche and let's begin it's time for Kharmlund! An open table OSE game I'm running here bi-weekly. For...ever? I have no idea. It's a sandbox campaign.

For this session, only two players sporting three characters and a pack of four dwarven henchmen went into Kharmlund (it's long weekend time in Canada, it was a fool's gambit to do this). 

That was:

Talsi - Drow illusionist

Ulf - Human Assassin

Grent - Elf

And of course, I will be simply naming any dwarves by the names of Thorin's company aside from other, neater sounding names I find on the spot. So Thorin, Dwalin, Balin and Floki joined the party into the depths of Kharmlund. There was no adventuring in the Dveghom about the underground, they took their eight hour (in-game) time limit and entered into...the long dark of Kharmlund. 

This session had the party dealing with their first combat encounters and uh, boy howdy did they have some combat encounters. First and foremost the party decided to go to the south-west from where they scored an easy win, gaining 400sp, which is like, 40gp in my lazy currency conversion. They scooped it into the pockets of their henchmen without a second thought. Money is kind of a trap unless it's literally gold, especially since I just make "coins" all weigh the same, but the party had four doughty dwarves with them. 

 

                                                                                  The Party's hand-drawn map(it is not correct but close enough)

 

From there, they entered into a few rooms (and made an absolute shitton of listening checks, holy hell, every door, multiple times, at least 60 minutes IGT(in game time) was spent listening at doors. They found the hasty camping site of some bandits belonging to one of the campaign's factions and then found one of the "easy early" treasures I usually put in there. It's a book of smut, with a GP value of 2500 gp. So think "lust argonian maid" and you're golden (also the book is studded with rubies). Sadly, the party was then surrounded, as there's a two-way mirror wall that allowed them to be seen. These bandits, with shoddy equipment and large red K's somewhere on their armor had placed the book there, see. Stolen from Kurgan's treasure, you see. They were just trying to figure out how to get past the wight that "guards" the entrance to the dungeon. One of the bandits also was able to clock a treasure sack full of coins and cut it open, causing silver, sweet silver to spill onto the dungeon floor, everywhere. This caused some distraction, enough for Turk, the assassin to use his ability.

Assassins in OSE have a neat trick. If they do a sneak attack on an unaware target(and I ruled he was unaware) the target needed to make a save or die roll. He did this to the leader - who did not make the save. The bandits also lost initiative, and most of them lost their morale rolls when their numbers were halved in a single combat round. Sadly, they did manage to kill Floki, so when all was said and done, the dwarves were down a number. Loyalty checks passed easily, but there was some soreness at losing someone so early on.

Onward! 

The party pushed northwards into a small, safe room. There was a pair of living eyes on the wall, and it called out, "Well Met! Have a drink!"  The party greeted them as the wall began vomiting water, cool, clear, water. There was a door to the north, so the party entered and stepped into a teeny tiny shelob's cave. Not willing to mess around with the webbing and the near silent rustle of something on the roof, the party decided to see if they could go around, noting at least two other doors. 

 So they went east. After much more listening at doors, hooray, they entered and moved north, stopping at a small Altar of some kind of wolf god, taking 2 damage from touching it(they were heathen nonbelievers) and debating knocking it over before moving into the "spider" room from a secret door. They were able to try and bushwack the spider and it worked...sort of. The Elf had to dodge what would have easily been a one-shot kill from the thing, but they were able to murder the awful thing. At this point, with the IRL timer running low and them already having a ton of money, they shrugged and decided to turn back.

No major encounters despite 3(!) rolls for them, and the party managed to return back to the land of the living, with a few thousand XP and many large piles of coins, they did good. 

The Dwarves will likely be asking for an up-front fee due to people dying. 1gp ain't worth your life, after all!