Kharmlund 7: The Black Widow~

 Another week, another adventure in the depths of the Dwarfen? Dwarven? The nightmarish place known as....KHARMLUND! Today was a regular player count.

LVND STATUS: Perigree, Full

Player Characters: Ildaberd, Half-Elf Bard, played by anon.

Aurelius, Half-Orc Fighter, played by anon.

"Carver" played by anon.

NPCS: Nibbles the odd halfling and Lemmy the upgraded torchboy. 

Begin

The players began with a new roll on the town events table. It turns out the goddamn mercenaries are in town. This is the free company of the Ninth Legion Deserters, the IXLD, and they are one of the many companies that spread out like locusts from the (recently compromised) lands of the Mayson-Vosdht(or Men, as they call themselves). The Empire sort of just...abandoned their conscripts there to deal with "the northern threat" and refused to elaborate, leaving behind instructions to disband return home in the middle of a rebellion pacification campaign. This did not happen.  Our heroes opened up looking for Lemmy to hire him on a simple job - but they found him starry-eyed, talking to Ambrosius Klange, who was selling Lemmy on the grand idea that he could get rich quick in the Mercenary life. Ildaberd met Klange, and then after a brief introduction, saw him out. It was time to get to business. Lemmy was given an assignment - he was to go to the nearby Byzantown and get information, lodgings, etc. Lemmy took the job with gusto, mostly because Ildaberd gave him 500gp. Now that's loot! 

Then Ildaberd realized Turk wasn't "turk" anymore, and had adopted a new name and persona. Turns out "Turk" had an important reason to get a new face and name. 

After this, Ildaberd and his "new" friend went to go check out this Spider Cult he joined a few months ago as a result of a carousing table. It was an open house at the temple, and basically, I just read the opening monologue to "Black Widow" by Alice Cooper, to properly illustrate how weird and fucked up this cult was. Ildaberd, not to be worried about this, heard the promise of magical items and signed up. Basically, bringing the cult horrible poisonous spiders = free stuff, and the party remembered there was a floating orb filled with spiders in a room they'd chosen to not fuck with. Well, now, that's a floating orb of money, so, off to Kharmlund it's time to go.

I also forgot to mention they got a bounty system going - 500 gp for "scalps" of Kurgan's men. Problem is, the rune that identifies them as Kurgan's men disappears upon death. The party did manage to figure out to prevent that, and then instead of turning in one "scalp", decided to kill...more..Also, they were able to steal the scalps from the big battle at the end of session six. So, the party headed to Kharmlund and descended into the dungeon, beelining for NewForge for money and fun. I've had too many asshole DMs just go "uhhh no uhhhh I never said that..." or try to take away the money someone could earn as a way to "balance"(lol) a co-op game based off imagination with no real stakes, but I usually make things "stop working" after someone gets an exploit. If you figure out a good hole in my logic, I'll let you exploit it...once, then the hole will usually close, because otherwise it risks not becoming a game. 

Yoki was pleased to see the scalps and paid enormous amounts of money for them, even more for the secret to preventing the runes from vanishing. The party debated discussing what to do next, return the gold or continue one (it was a lot of gold). Carver's player asked me if say, someone owned property in Newforge it would count as "safe" and I answered yes, because Carver owns property in Newforge, and don't you ask why that populist leader of the plebian faction was dead or where Carver's disguise kit and potion of invisibility or rare poisons went! Don't worry about it. So after dumping gold (and splitting with Aurelian) and taking a new level around the board, the party went to the "horrible Spider Orb" room and got themselves some spiders. I'll not bore you with the details, it involved a sack and some careful planning. Then Carver revealed they could return the spiders easily, and also that they could simply use his gemstone wand he acquired on his downtime to pop back to Lester's Folly. Ildaberd didn't have any issue with that, and went back. They traded the deeply poisonous spiders for some magic items and used the same wand to pop back to Newforge. After this, the party just went around exploring various rooms and kicking them open. In older bat-reps I'd described each one, but the party is so confident that they've gone from exploring 1-3 rooms to around 10 each session. That means this turns into a huge essay, so I'll summarize the important points, because my god, I don't want to write a 5k word essay every single session. The most important thing they got from the spider cult is the rank of "priest" which gives Ildaberd an escort of cultists when he desires it, and Carver leveled up to be able to recruit assassins. Also a magic sword that allows the wielder to speak to and command spiders.

Main highlights of exploration:

- They found a massive pit in the ground where a massive creature, stalk-eyes seen, asked for "tasty" food. Didn't want the ratmen fed to it - no soul, no flavor. Wanted humans. Big claw as well seen, but otherwise, not murderous. Good(?!).

 - They went back to the area where they fought and grappled with a Moon-haunted lantern wielding man. They had set the room on fire beforehand to deal with spiders, and checked using the Spider-sword. No spiders. With this out of the way, the party encounter the Gemlatinous Cube, a massive cube-like thing that rolls like a big..block obstacle from mario. Made out of gems, skin seemingly inpenetrable, the party fled after it nearly smushed poor nibbles. The GemCubes followed them out, smashing the wall and door down, making a lot of noise (three wandering monster checks no hits) and finally falling to Draconir's mighty blows from Aurelian. They found the "core" from intuition, scooped up all of the gems, and left the "normal" way back to Lester's folly, on Thomas the Dwarf's wagon. 

Good adventures so far. For downtime, they decided to "pimp" out the lower levels of their house, building a secret basement, with some special safes for carrying their loot, and a meeting room for Carver's new assassins. It was not cheap - I personally add a "and 20% more than that if you want it to stay secret" tax to secret things like this - and then we ended the session. 

Can't wait to see what stupid shit they do with their new underlings now!

Kharmlund 6: The party meets the hate wall and deals with their first Moon-Haunted encounter. And..the battle of the entrance!

Once again, the party enters Kharmlund! Why this time, you ask? Well, it certainly won't be to talk to people, that's for sure! Having met the desperate Imperials of NewForge the party decided it wanted more money, fast.

So, without much delay Kharmlund 6: The party meets the hate wall and deals with their first Moon-Haunted encounter. And..the battle of the entrance!

Our Players...

Ildaberd played by anon

Turk played by anon

Nibbles - DMPC

Lemmy - DMPC

Lemmy has done ever better for himself, spending all of the "chaff" money (which is still a lot but dismissed by the party as having no value) on some basic arms and armor. He's basically a base level hireling, and that's pretty good for what was effectively a torchboy. Nibbles is unchanging and strange, his weapons and clothing always spotless (rumors say he spends hours on this), but always odd and mysterious. Ildaberd has many questions! 

The party went deep into the depths of Kharmlund this time, north of mighty NewForge and discovered some interesting things, many of which they absolutely refused to touch. The bloody cowards! Since there was a lot criss-crossing and back-tracking in this session, I decided to draw an arrow of the party's progress, because they did a loop here. This won't be 100% accurate but it will be close enough.

 

The order of party movement is Red - > Yellow -> Blue -> Purple -> Green

RED

The party decided to strike out in a different direction than before. Entering into the large area, they found it mostly empty except for a chest on a small island, surrounded by bubbling green liquid. So, they roped the chest and yanked it off, which caused the (unlocked) chest to noisily spill its contents all over the room. The subsequent divvying up of coins was interrupted by people hiding right to the south. It's a simple "bait and ambush" operation by some of Kurgan's men. The party used entangle and murdered them all in short order. Good stuff, to be honest. Can't let bandits start pushing you around. 

After this, the party continued to the south before running into a repeating dart trap. Lemmy made his save by 1(one) number and managed to block the insta-killing poison dart with his shield. 

YELLOW

After waiting a full ten minute time block for it to stop firing, they shrugged and moved around to find a way to shut it off. They didn't find one, but they managed to find a cache of gold, and green wins out over caution.

BLUE

Not to be deterred, Lemmy and his small shield were recruited to lead the way, as it was determined that the darts were firing down three corridors. They pushed all of the way to the far right of the three hallway chamber, plugged the arrow, causing a buildup of ammo, and ultimately a jam. They were then attacked by their first moon-haunted: an eyeless man with a lantern who shrieked loudly when his lantern glazed against them as they leapt around a corner to avoid this. The shrieking caused more moon-haunted, the ones with obsidian black eyes, to peel off the walls around them and attack. Ildaberd, trapped in a corridor and with nothing else to do, fired his lighting rod wand at them. It did exactly what it needed, but then bounced back and killed Ildaberd - with a save - and he was forced to use one of the five mellinated man confections he bought in the first session. He spoke briefly to the same wight that sold them to him, which cheerfully warned him that he had four things left - and then he would be theirs.

Then they fled into a room where they found another wall-face. This one, speaking only in text appearing on the wall, told them it had a quest: kill yourselves. It also began to angrily quote AM from I have no mouth and must scream so the party shrugged and moved on. No gold, no glory. They followed a path and emerged into the starting room, having found their first major shortcut. 

PURPLE

At that, they went to the northwest in search of gold. Exploring rooms, the party found a dead wizard surrounded by skeletons.

The party responded with a resounding "hell no", and then entered into an open room, to find their first wandering adventurer group. These guys were hauling a massive statue out of the room - solid gold. There was an extremely tense minute where the party deliberated robbing them - they chose not to. They allowed them to leave with that beautiful gold statue worth 2500 gp! Crazy, these adventurers. 

 Finally they checked out the south-western part of the revealed maps. There, they found some ratmen drilling into a wall in the room there. A simple use of a sleep scroll dealt with that, and then the party found the switch to open the secret door to the room the Ratmen were trying to dig into. 

They found their first gemstone wand and statue, alongside a ruby gem in one of the Ratmen's pouches. With this find, and unlocking their own fast travel system, the party decided they had done more than enough and headed back. The gold take was okay, but the real win was the wands. On the way out, they caught up to the rival adventurers, current in battle with some of Kurgan's men over the statue. Hiding out of sight, the battle between the NPCs generated enough noise to summon a battle group of ratmen, and the NPC party lost two, but managed to barely make it. The players followed them up and pinched the gemstone statue in the entrance. 

Awkward cart ride back home, but at least the PCs had managed to get their own fast travel system working!