I didn’t post it cause no time, but I incorporated the ranting about how to do a Megadungeon properly and made an actual 1st level mega-dungeon with varied zones, encounter tables, treasure, etc. I think if I showed him it might get a C or a B grade, but probably depends on how sour his morning coffee was. I then sufficiently incentivized my players to try it out, and it remains to be seen if they have any desire to go back.

Observations

  1. DM note-taking is hard during session.

  2. I did lanterns and “resting” dungeon time wrong

  3. We are getting the hang of combat, even though I had to pause things to read the Charging rules. You can actually just figure things out, and when people are doing fairly normal stuff, the combat is pretty straightforward

  4. I feel bad that they didn’t get more treasure, but also they didn’t really explore all that much of the place so… a little more effort being required for the reward does kind of make sense. Little Risk, little reward.

  5. My software was working fine on the client side, which is usually where i have issues, but this time everyone was connected to it and it seems that the server was chugging sometimes. Guess I know what to work on next.

The Action

We had a good sized group, a Fighter, two Thieves, and a “thief” (Assassin), all level 1. They spent two days rounding up and bribing some hirelings, in addition to the NPC Barton (level 0 noob who knows the way to the Mega-dungeon). They hired a few horsemen, sappers, and spearmen that the Fighter, Sigurd, had worked with before, in addition to 2 porters, a teamster, and a linkboy (lanter-bearer). So it was a fairly well prepared group that set out to “Yarbon’s Burial Mound.”

Overland travel took about a day, and no encounters on the way. They saw the remains of a recent excavation, which Barton had been involved in, and decided to make camp for the night outside the dungeon, rather than head in at night. They set watches, the 2nd of which noticed a scout-party of 11 Orcs in a random encounter. Unfortunately, one of the party was obviously an Elf, which Orcs HATE and reaction roll was negative, so combat began. The orcs were being kind of dumb and charging from 20”, so took a lot of missile fire on the way in, but actually not too many died until they hit the spearmen who had set to receive charge. After that, the horsemen flanked, and a round of very favorable rolls put the orcs at half strength. Morale Check failed, and they tried to retreat, but Sigurd wearing his boots of speed led a pursuit charge, followed by his horsemen and they wiped the rest of the orcs out. Casualties on the parties side: 1 horse+horseman and the Assassin was pretty low on HP.

Searching the bodies in the light of the morning resulted in 39 ep… The most directly-valuable result of this whole session. Lol.

Enter the Dungeon.

You travel down a deep and long dark earthen passageway which leads into a rough-hewn stony chamber with a large iron door at the far end. The walls are rough, except for immediately around the door, where it is clear finished construction. In the corner to the left lies a discarded pick, a coil of rope (50') and some detritus indicating that humaniods were likely digging here. Off to the right, is a lower, narrower, natural-seeming passageway that leads into the gloom.

They didn’t even try the door, just immediately headed down the “lower, narrower, natural-seeming passageway.” They were being somewhat careful, tapping with the 10ft pole on the advice of Sigurd.

They came to an intersection, left a dusting of flour on the floor of the passageway not taken so that they could tell if anything was moving around down here, and continued on.

Next, during a series of switch-back maze-like hallways, they found a strange flower growing alone in the darkness in the middle of the hall. Very carefully, the Elf Thief reached over to pluck it, but failed his save versus poison, so not carefully enough. His thumb was pricked, causing -1 max HP permanently. But it also granted the boon of infravision… if Elves didn’t already have infravision. Oh well. The flower crumbled to dust.

After avoiding a rather obvious pit-trap, they came to the “main event” of this zone, a large underground cavern lake, with a small island in the middle featuring a prominent stone altar. At the 8 main compass points, there were streams flowing out of passageways, all draining into the lake in the middle.

Much heming and hawing (including doubling back to the first entry-room to finally test the iron door, find it locked and come back to the lake), but eventually they investigated the shoreline a bit and found a map—to a large cache of gems in the mountains to the north! Potentially valuable, but of no use right now.

Being that he was wearing only leather armor, the Elf Thief again volunteered to be guinea pig and swim to the altar island in the middle. He did, saw some more creepy snake+blood themed carvings, including a prominently featured chalice overflowing with blood. He even went so far as to lightly cut himself and smear some blood on the altar, but nothing happened.

When he returned to the party, they decided to walk around the edge of the lake to the North stream, and see what that passageway held.

The very first room they came in… had a large iron key suspiciously lying alone in the center of the floor. I swear no dice were fudged. The probability for this was pretty dang low, and the first room that could have had it, did. The fates were kind this evening. However, the injured Assassin decided to be the guy to pick it up this time, and promptly fell into a pit trap, which put him unconscious. They climbed down in, got him out, and had the porters makeshift a stretcher, before retreating with as much care and haste as they could.

They made the overworld trip back home, and brought the Assassin to temple for some paid healing, and then abandoned him to his room for at least a week’s worth of rest and recuperation.

The player-made map of the dungeon so far: