Kharmlund #4: Stomping around the dungeon with your big gold giant.

 It's yet another wonderful nightmare in the depths of Kharmlund - an OSE campaign using a homebrewed megadungeon. 

Today, we had two players again, giving us two characters - 

Ildaberd played by anon.

Turk played by anon.

They were joined by allies this time, as the roll on the "pre dungeon events" table happened, and the players were able to get a member of the Solargaurd to come with them. Who are the "Solargaurd" you may ask? Well, they're certainly not me being extremely lazy and using Stormcast Eternals miniatures in my setting because I think they look cool! But yes, that's the reference I gave them, and that's what I will be using if we ever get to mass-battles. Involving that specific type of person, since the Solarguard are weird little guys and one would probably have to join them to get them to fight with him. They were also informed that since they've been having henchmen die, dwarves want shares of the treasure now. So instead they hired worse henchmen, including a lantern boy named Lemmy and a halfling(?) named Nibbles, who was as vague about his reasons for wanting to go into Kharmlund as he was good at picking locks.

This is probably the single largest exploration that the party has ever done, since they found a shitload of rooms, but didn't have much in the way of combat to worry about - the wandering monster checks did spawn a hellish encounter of a single Ratman(and his 19 Giant Rat Pets) which would have been one hell of a nightmare combat but I decided that a seven foot tall, golem looking mother fucker with a hammer the size of a person might do a morale check, and yes, the Ratman did not like that idea and took off at a run. The party returned to the "skull room" at Dracondir's urging (there was gold there) and opened the skull-chest with some of Nibbles's engineering, removing the top half and rendering it safe. This is where the Ratman encounter was rolled, and they were ready to ambush the party, hearing the divvying up of loot and wealth. The players gave all copper and silver coins to Lemmy, buying his undying loyalty. Vandus accepted nothing - he had no interest in the worldly treasures, but did mention he was looking for "solar gold" or "sun gold" and refused to explain its properties or value.

As stated before, the Ratman ordered his rats to attack, got a better look at the Solarguard, Vandus, and promptly noped out of there. The party decided to explore some more around the dungeon floor. Exploration was mostly finding small trinkets here and there, some traps, etc. Then, exploring the north east end of the first floor of Kharmlund, they find a door that had been nailed shut, with more, large spikes driven into the tiled floor to prevent it from opening. They decided to not go this way, despite my cajoling. Vandus was fine with going - he made many references to the land being tainted and liked to purge the land from it. This did not encourage the party to go forward into the Dont Dead Open Inside door, but you can't fault a DM for trying! Otherwise, nothing too impressive, until they found a pair of goblins enjoying a meal of Giant Rat in a small 5x15 hallway. 

The Goblins looked to be Byzan Legionnaires, and they were kind of, well, not supposed to be sitting around eating tasty rat. Nibbles and the goblins chatted in Titchy cant a bit (it's a tiny person thing, you wouldn't get it) and then there was some information gathered. They were relatively low-level greenskins but there was some information that could be gleaned. 

Kharmlund has four "factions" vying for control of the place. Newforge is comprised of the survivors from when the Forges(not literal forges, they're like giant towers and the purpose for them is completely unknown) fell, becoming cursed. The Arin-Vosdht(Orcs, the main movers and shakers of the Byzan Empire) fled here with their slaves, plebes, soldiers and carved out a small niche. There's the "Kurgan", followers of a bandit king who is also behind the resetting of traps and such. The gobbos didn't know a lot about them, but they did know he's an asshole, to the point that there's a kill-on-site order for any "adventurers" working for him. The Ratmen seem impossible to understand, but they are if anything, deeply numerous and whatever is sealed off, the Goblins were not privy to know. 

The party spent a good 40 minutes in game time resting, chillin', (in real life, this was nearly half the in-game session. a lot information isn't really pertinent here, and there was some good roleplaying, but not important for our purposes) then bid them farewell and went north, to find a room that was extremely well furnished, with a fire elemental offering them nice Lay-Z-Boys to sit on and listen to some lore dumps if they wanted. The party declined, mostly because who the fuck trusts sentient fire? Ildaberd wanted to, but the rest went norther and found a room where there's a lot of miniatures in display cases - beautifully hand-carved and incredibly well painted - with a sign telling them and everyone else not to touch the miniatures, especially the gold ones, in the display case - they would regret it. The party was generally quite cautious and left the miniatures alone, finishing up their new room exploration to the north-east a bit. They found the half-eaten dinner and still-warm bed robes of some people, and a beautiful silver hand-mirror face down which they immediately destroyed(lol). 

After that, the party simply shrugged and returned back to the surface. Most of their gold/exp was based from the skull room but there were some levelups. The Elf, Ildaberd found some stuff written in Dwarvish code, and got Read Languages as a scroll, so maybe there's something there. No deaths due to the randomly rolled super-golem that joined the party, and Vandus vowed to return to do something about the "taint". He then stepped backwards into a sunbeam and vanished while they were in town. Weird guy.

Overall the party continues to map the floor, and that's good. They're in the opening stages of a Bethesda game - learning how to play, and hopefully soon they will meet the other factions and start making choices. 

Current Player Map of Kharmlund: 

Kharmlund #3: The players find themselves a magic hammer - and Ori the Unwise gets eaten by a treasure chest.

 The sages have sung, the seven weirdstones have been gathered, and the clouds crack apart to reveal...another session report of Kharmlund!

In this session of Kharmlund, we see our first levelup and magical item as the party goes deeper...deeper into the depths of Kharmlund (about a hundred or so feet deeper. The...the point is the map is getting mapped more:

Our players this time around was:

Turk - Level 1 Assassin

Half-Elf - Level 1 Bard (I do not know his name atm)

and two Dwarves - Ori and Nori, because the Dwarves of Lester's Folly weren't a fan of how people might be getting killed for a single GP, so they were concerned about negotiations for "shares".

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So far, the party hasn't had much, er, direction to what they've been doing, basically just choosing a different direction each and every time, and this was mostly not any different, they decided to go south from the intersection containing the strange altar that shocks people, and found and open room where a pack of Kurgan's bandits were chillin' and talking to one another. I gave them some useful information(through the bandits): Kurgan rewards handsomely for magical items and artefacts brought to him from Kharmlund, and these men were discussing how to get the dagger(assumption was it was magical, otherwise why protect it?) from the altar - the party was offered a large ruby(100gp, 10 coins weight) if they could figure it out.. 

The party thought of taking this on, but instead decided to head south into a large room where they discovered a cabal of the verminous ratmen, who were, funnily enough, also discussing something - how to get water from the wall-face from last session. They wanted the password(they scream at it and it gets angry and unleashes a gelatinous cube on them) and bartered mightily with the party for the password, including the "stick" one of them was carrying (actually a magical wand, but). After getting the "password" the rats scurried off. The "stick" was thrown backwards as a reward and the ratmen ran off to get access to basically just free water, I suppose. 

Ah well. Onto some searching for hidden rooms. There were four in this room, all on the west wall. It's a big-ass room, too. After some kind and clever searching, the PCs were able to find for themselves a couple hidden rooms. One of them was basically just a "how cautious are you" test, with a lever in a hole in the wall - just reach in and pull it! I didn't get this idea from rewatching The Mummy Returns at all. Anyway - they opened it - nothing inside. Just a fun prank, having a laffy laff of a time, friends. The other one was a kind of military Cache - stored away and hidden by Arin-Vosdht(orc) runes. After some guessing, they party arranged it and got their first magic item - Dracondir! It's a hammer for dwarves, with cool runes inscribed on it and the - and I swear I rolled this randomly - an ability to detect gold in a 40 foot radius. With that finished, I promptly pulled out a shredder and fed my maps and notes int- no I'm just kidding, but I have, with this simple item, changed the nature of the campaign hilariously, as players will be able to have far more lucrative delves going forward. On session three. Ha ha. Oh well, this means faster level-ups and likely will take away some focus from the actual Kharmlunding - but that is entirely okay, the campaign only starts at Kharmlund, and won't be ending in it unless that players choose to do so.

They did their first ping and located a treasure cache nearby. Eastwards, so naturally off they went. They found a goblin brewery northeast from the big ping - goblins chillin' and offering brews. Nominally, allies or henchmen of Kurgan, but just happy brewmasters looking to get wasted and placated dangers with brews. Otherwise they found, in no good order - a floating glass orb with a giant ruby inside alongside many poisonous spiders. Turk remarked there's no ratmen around when you need them. There was also a reading table, and a book of a man writing a memoir of his regrets (said regrets were mostly just him bragging) with many pages earmarked. They did find the last major get of this floor, the blood-drinking box. Basically it's a treasure chest with fangs, feed them things and then it will open. After some negotiating with the henchmen, Ori took the chance - he died. Nori wasn't too happy with how things went after this but he wasn't going to cry about it - accepting a share instead of a wage for his silence on the cruel throwing away of Ori's life (and the discovery of the lost hammer Dracondir). They got a decent get for it - a gem worth 1500 gp. With that, the party decided that enough was enough, time-wise and left Kharmlund, passing all WM checks with no attacks. Money money! We got some levelups and such, so the party will be better served, but I'm very curious exact how Dracondir will change the campaign going forward.