Tag Archives: OSR

Dungeon Crawl Classics – Sixteenth Session

Leddy Manor

Sixteenth Session – The party pierces the heart of the dungeon… Then drags through its entrails… Then the horrors of wandering the wilderness… Fun?

I was in Japan and missed this session. Which seems like it was for the best, as this was a grind.

We were almost at the end of the dungeon – one Guano Mound away from finding some Blade style bleeding coffins and our MacGuffin.

But, for every DCC dungeon that is a load-bearing dungeon and immediately collapses at its end (usually requiring ridiculously high rolls to escape), there is a “you have to grind your way back out” dungeon and this is one of the latter. So, they get to partially or wholly replicate all the previous fights. Across the bridges… Up the stairs… Getting barfed on by Manx cats…

Then traveling through the woods, getting sick, stung by insects… A generally horrid time. But finally they get back to the Emerald Enchanter’s place and rest, and Ned gets a tiny quasit familiar, which he then proceeds to forget about pretty much constantly in subsequent sessions.

Then back on the road to be murdered by wolves. Life of the low level is brutal and short. My would-be squeeze Morgan nearly buys the farm but manages to pull through.

Finally in Pythorp, the party relaxes and then finds out that Gallfred Weasel is the last remaining Leddy relative that can claim a jacked up manor house outside of town, the Black Manse. It looks forbidding. Perfect!

Dungeon Crawl Classics – Fifteenth Session

The Emerald Enchanter's tower

Fifteenth Session – The Wizard of Oz sends us to a dungeon full of barfing cats. Film at 11!

After we extract from the Yoda hole where we slew the Hound of Hirot, Morgan is better! Well, mostly, she’s not in a coma any more but her eyes are washed out and she’s interested in wizardry.

We then move to one of Ned’s quests, and head to the Tower of the Emerald Enchanter – a namedrop from DCC69 The Emerald Enchanter, but I don’t think the adventure is from there because we don’t fight him, we cozy up to him to get a quest so Ned can get a familiar. As he’s an evil wizard and we have two evil wizards in our party, everyone gets along famously.

He sends us to the “Vault of Necros the Grotesque” to get a box. Which must be doused in Lawful blood, but he doesn’t share that with anyone but Ned. So off we go!

After some random encounters on the trail (as usual, no goblins, which is driving Gallfred Weasel and his goblin-killing magic sword insane), we go down into a cave that has an infinite staircase going down. Awesome.

tirgrefrabs, aka barf tigers

The first enemy we encounter says a lot about the adventure author’s home life – hairless vomiting cats named “tirgefrabs” which Tim immediately understands is “barf tiger” lightly scrambled. They do indeed barf on us, which is terrifyingly effective (-2 STR and -3 STA for Gallfred! Holy crap!)

We finally manage to kill them. The stairs are indeed semi infinite, we go down them for an entire day and have to camp. Next day – more tirgefrabs. At least we see these ahead of time, though they beeline to Gallfred and vomit in his mount.

As “tirgefrab” is pretty good as a Google search term goes, I’m happy to report this adventure, Elzemon and the Blood-Drinking Box, is from the DCC Free RPG Day 2014 product.

Anyway, we make it to the bottom and there’s a guano mound surrounded by sulfurous vats and a bunch of weird stuff; an invisible quasit nearly knocks Gallfred to his death. It becomes visible briefly when it does, and Ned’s magic missiles (50% change to mutate him unfortunately, 50% chance to absolutely murderize their target) take care of it.

Dungeon Crawl Classics – Fourteenth Session

Fourteenth Session – We set up a hasty ambush for the Hound of Hirot and then track it back to its “Yoda hole.”

Well, we figure it should be easy to free the hapless butcher’s son, pretend Podrick is strapped to the feast-stone, and ambush the fabled black dog, easy greasy. Well, it works, though it kicks our asses up and down the standing stones. Nobody told us it could fly!!!

Anyway, we kinda kill it, but it goes gaseous and billows out to the swamp vampire style. Hemp knows that it is retreating to its lair from his shadow demon’s counsel, and tells the rest of the party we have to hustle to track it to its “Yoda hole.” This excites a bunch of comment. You know! The hole! In the swamp! Like Yoda sends Luke into! A Yoda hole!

Well apparently the Mr. Fancy Pants who wrote the adventure calls it the Heart of the Foul Fens instead. I prefer “Yoda hole.” Anyway, we find the hole and loot it but then have to wait till sunset for the Hound to reform and kill it on its turf.

Meanwhile, Gallfred Weasel finds the Cloak of Cheret the Lost. It makes him ultra at hiding in shadows. It makes people forget they saw him. It also makes him forget himself. As DCC is all about mutating yourself in ultimately unfortunate ways to get superpowers, he is very jazzed, and use of this cloak will become a recurring theme in the rest of the campaign.

Anyway, the fight goes a lot better this time – Ned gets a super duper magic missile roll and then Podrick stabs it to death with the wolf-spear! Victory! And I go to third level (we’re not all leveling at the same time; I’m not in the lead but not in the rear either.)

Dungeon Crawl Classics – Thirteenth Session

Doom of the Savage Kings DCC Adventure Cover

Thirteenth Session – The dungeon we’ve broken into goes from bunnies to more horrible creatures quickly. But we discover that, as usual, the most dangerous animal is man.

Giant unfortunate bunnies for Easter give way to a ghoul with a snake in it (the worst fast food promotion ever). We kill it though and get a bunch of awesome loot – that shield I got last time, Ulfheornar the magic wolf-spear, the Horn of Kings, and the Hide of the Cave Bear! We divvy these up excitedly. The latter allows Old Man Fish to rage, it does not just make cro-magnon women get naked. (IYKYK).

Then we find a bunch of crummy huntsmen are bugging Morgan where we left her in the cart. We thought this was a nice neighborhood! We are forced to murder them all. Well, “forced” is a strong word, more like “our traditional battle cry is ‘NO WITNESSES!!!’

Then we go back to Weebrook. Which I now have discovered the map for comes from the village of Hirot, in DCC 66.4 Doom of the Savage Kings, where this adventure came from as well. Nice! (Many of Paul’s later adventures are AI-generated, so enjoy the product tie-ins while you can.)

Anyway, they are still sacrificing people to the Hound of Herat, which is somehow related to Cheret the Lost (or “Sherbet the Lime,” as Hemp calls her). We plan to save the primitive screwheads from themselves… next time!

Dungeon Crawl Classics – Twelfth Session

Twelfth Session – The aftermath of the rat manor in Wymoor, and we figure out how to go free Weebrook from the clutches of the great black dog of the moors. Plus, zombie bunnies!

I am late to the session due to Easter. In the meantime the party decides to burn down the hedge maze and manor house that are now a rat-pus-plague-factory. They limp back to town with four diseased peasants, which gets Podrick entry into the Loyal Order of the Water Buffalo for his heroism.

Unfortunately though, Morgan, who we had rescued from sacrifice to the Hound of Herat in Weebrook, is caught in a strange shadow-haunted sleep. We engage in research on her problem (learning that some godling named Cheret the Lost is related to the Hound) and other topics, including this bit which will be a very long term plot thread:

[Podrick] is specifically interested in recovering the Helm of Chistu so it is safe for a Lawful person to use. He finds that Chistu was an ancient King of Eldros, a kingdom that once existed in these parts. His reign was tainted by the rise of an evil deity named Chavinaugh, an entity that changed from defender of humanity to a god of the dead. The ancient kingdom of Eldros was ultimately destroyed in a devastating war against Chavinaugh and his dark forces – but there is little solid information on what happened. The Knights of Lushnia have long sought the Helm and protected the legend because they hope to reinvigorate the forces of Law with the powers of Eldros.

Hemp, who is still crushing on Morgan, summons the shadow demon from his crow-whistle since this is clearly a shadow problem. As usual, the shadow demon is worthless about doing anything, though it does dump some lore (partially a duplicate of research lore, but some new) and takes some of his STR. But, it was about trying.

So we decide to go to Weebrook, find Cheret the Lost’s lost knickers or something, and somehow use them to thwart the Hound, and hope that frees Morgan. But along the way we get an Easter-themed mini-adventure, a fight with some giant zombie rabbits! Hemp comes out of it with a lovely bronze rabbit-head magic shield.

Dungeon Crawl Classics – Eleventh Session

A rat butchery run by giant rat-men to chop up and vaporize infected rats

Eleventh Session – An abandoned manor house has turned into a rat pus factory that’s infecting nearby waterways, so we go kill a large number of rat-themed opponents.

Our first opponent is a big mean rat-fiend that sprays quite damaging pus when wounded. We manage to put it down, though we take an unfortunate amount of damage and stat loss for the first fight. It does warn us what to expect at least.

Podrick takes advantage of the rat fiend’s vulnerable position to stab it right through the ghoolies. Everyone is well aware of the pus that will follow and avoids taking damage. And then Hemp the Weaver cuts straight through the creature’s jaw and into its brain.
Hemp high-fives Podrick, “That’s how we do it in Weebrook!”

Dead rats that burst into pus, live rats that burst into pus, pus-infected peasants, rats being chopped up and turned into pus spray, rat revenants, rat ogres, a rat swarm demon – the whole thing is pretty icky. We get in a poor tactical position in a big group fight where extremely damaging cloud spells come into use from the bad guys. Most of the session is this one big hard complicated fight, with several times folks got badly wounded – we’re getting used to the game system and so no one actually goes down, which is a bit of a miracle, though we pretty much all lose a bunch of stat points.

Finally we chase off the final rats and collapse in a heap, getting the largest XP award we’ve ever gotten!

P.S. I tried to search to find what adventure this was from to no avail, now I have managed to just happen across it, it’s “The Rat King’s River of Death,” a bonus adventure from DCC 83 The Chained Coffin boxed set.

Dungeon Crawl Classics – Tenth Session

Tenth Session – As we make our way back to civilization, the island hopping and town hopping yields both short and long term plot hooks!

First, Hemp talks to a sentient oak tree on an island that takes a magic sacrifice for info. He feeds it the pirate muder sword and it tells him that the Wizard King in Sewich is behind a plot to replace all the kingdom’s leaders with undead and werewolves and shit and turn the place into Monster Land. This is great as it gives us longer term plans than “murderhobo,” so I’m excited.

Hemp and Old Man Fish decide not to tell anyone about the sacrifice of the sword, on the grounds that Galfred might be upset. Instead, they will feign ignorance, and maybe blame the theft on immigrants.

Then, in the night Old Man Fish sees a mummy on a haunted barge go by. For some demented reason he decides the mummy “might be friendly” and throws more logs onto the fire to attract it. Spoiler alert, the mummy was not friendly, and wanted our souls. We kill it after a hard fight.

Old Man Fish awkwardly apologizes. “Sorry guys, I honestly thought he’d be friendly. Good job on killing it through, everyone.”

It also turns out that the fishing rules are such that we all end up getting hurt or otherwise messed up half the time we try to fish. We had some bad turns in earlier sessions but now we got the message that we don’t just have bad luck, it’s an “on average, fuck you” rule.

Back in Wymoor, Hemp turns his attention to making cool custom matching cloaks for everyone with the various cloths and furs and stuff we’ve collected. He also goes to get some blood to drink as Aphiel’s bow is urging him to. He keeps trying to hook up with Morgan but she’s not having it, so the rest of the party starts planning to marry her off to a random local.

Then we hear that local water pollution is coming from a nearby count’s manor, so he goes right onto the hit list for next time!

Hemp asks if the tax collector if the bay is always this nasty, and is told no, it’s a side effect of some agricultural project by Count Zodra. (Old Man Fish: “With a name like that, he’s totally a vampire. Especially since he’s a count. That’s just basic logic.” Mordecai: “Yeah, the only way to be more obvious is if he was named Chocula.”)

Dungeon Crawl Classics – Ninth Session

Ninth Session – We brave the Tower of the Black Pearl to get its… Pearl! A little on the nose but we do get to murder pirates aplenty so there’s that.

This is apparently from a DCC adventure called Tower of the Black Pearl. After Ned decides to mutate himself heavily to become a tentacle-god follower, and Hemp has a not terribly satisfactory conversation with a random chess-playing cyclops, we take a boat to a sunken tower that Mordecai hears has magic that will let him be a fighter/mage.

When we get there, there’s pirates! We fight, and fight, and fight and fight and fight… Fight fight fight, fight fight fight! After some dungeon weirdness (animated statues… Charon taking us downriver…) we find the pirate leader, Savage Quenn, who teams up with us for all of 3 pages of session summary. His attempted betrayal goes poorly because we knew he was gonna do it, so Gallfred Weasel interrupts his evil soliloquy with a backstab.

We clear the dungeon and get the goody, and flee as the dungeon floods. DCC adventures love for the most dangerous part to be “make lots of checks or die to escape the dungeon collapsing.”

Mordecai is very pleased with a pearl that can “allow him to wear armor and use weapons as a fighter, and gives him +1 to saving throws, AC, and attack rolls as an added bonus.”

Hemp tries out the rapier from the pirate captain – it is super cool and powerful, but makes him make DC10 Will saves to not stab random people for kicks. He is not made of Will and fails the first one and murders a captive we found. I decide that random forced thrill-killing isn’t a great upside so he packs the rapier back up.

Dungeon Crawl Classics – Eighth Session

Eighth Session – The Wizard of Oz and his minions, and a priest of the Deathbringer and his minions, compete with us to loot some tombs to find the Blazefire Bow!

Hemp the Weaver, now more the archer, really wants a magic fire bow even if he has to get a little Chaotic in the bargain – I mean, everyone else is getting cool Chaotic patrons to go ham with. So it’s off to some tombs which I just discovered were taken from the DCC adventure “The Black Feather Blade” from Goodman’s Gen Con 15 Program Guide.

We come across a crashed hot air balloon, and boy it took us a while to figure that out as our primitive savages poked at the contraption clearly meant to ‘wicker man’ hapless victims. When we get to the tombs there’s two competing groups also wanting to loot them so we split them up between us and each scamper to a random barrow and get to looting.

We pick a tomb that isn’t dangerous but also just gives us crappy bronze coins, so we have to go try to claim jump. We help the gnome and his boys because we kinda like them and band together with their survivors, splitting loot 50/50.

After some dungeoneering, we find the bow, Hemp picks it up, and is motivated to plug the competing priest of the Deathbringer with one shot. We extract, with loot, magic, and some new buddies!

Dungeon Crawl Classics – Seventh Session

Seventh Session – It’s death or glory in the tentacle pit as we face off against the lead cultist and his pet tentacles. The body count is significant.

The woman we rescued is a hunter. Hemp is thrilled to have a hot bald archer in the group! Of course she is killed shortly thereafter. And then used as an undead as Mordecai. Also, Mordecai finally decides to murder the Lawful priest when no one is watching. Hemp is not thrilled by all of this.

Ned Wimbley also gets downed but we manage to save him.

We finally kill off the rest of the cultists, who are trying to sacrifice yet another woman (ok, like, one’s fine, but this is pushing it). Back to the village, with one survivor to show for it. And a bunch of “potions of tentacle control” that we pull out anytime subsequently in the campaign there is anything that looks like a tentacle – which isn’t that uncommon really!

Dungeon Crawl Classics – Sixth Session

The Tentacle Hole and the Tentacle Prostate

Sixth Session – We murder and/or rescue people from the tentacle cultists’ lair, and Mordecai learns the “control tentacle” spell. Then we descend through the tentacle hole. Hey man, I didn’t write this adventure!!!

There’s a lot of 3D clambering and killing solo cultists involved and tentacled owlbears and demonic toads. It’s a long session of good old fashioned dungeon crawling.

We rescue a Lawful cleric, Berrenon, a bad fit with the rest of the party as the mages are psychotic murderhobos and the rest of us except for Podrick are of a Chaotic bent.

Finally, we get to rescue a comely maiden chained to the wall for cultists to sacrifice for a ritual, a standard feature of all 1970s dungeons. Nostalgia +1!

Dungeon Crawl Classics – Fifth Session

Fifth Session – The group is messed up after their first run at the tentacle pit and needs to rest outside the dungeon. And naturally we are beset by gorilla bears and hydras and decide to bail back to town.

My character (Hemp) gets ambushed and hugged by a “gorilla bear” which could well have been fatal, but I maange to break free and decapitate it in a single blow!

Then, a wounded hydra cursed so it can’t regenerate bullies Ned into helping him get healed in the village. We reenter the nameless village from the Christmas adventure. It suddenly has a name, Cartwell, and more info on their fire deity Aphiel. Hemp takes an interest in it, especially when he hears a magic bow artifact may be in a cave across the Great Rift aka Tentacle Pit.

The group decides there’s no real opportunity to help the hydra so we should try to dupe and kill it. Even a non-regenerated hydra is going to be a problem for our level 1 asses. I register my objection and then go help; as the archer I reckon I’ll at least be the last to die.

And last to die I am – Podrick and Ned get wasted round one and then it chases down Old Man Fish and wastes him. I finish shooting its heads dead and we manage to save our downed party members at the cost of permanent STA loss and hideous scarring. We retreat back to Cartwell to lick our wounds (or, in Hemp’s case, a local trader lady).

While we had spent several sessions making fun of this village for not having a name, Hemp starts getting philosophical. A village worshipping a fire god, that’s a pretty Epicurean and transitory thing, he kinda ended up liking it. And while Aphiel is Chaotic, they’re not a bunch of serial killers, they just are the Live Free Or Die types.

We head back to the tentacle pit after recovering to find that the Knights of Lushnia have been killed by skeletons on its lip. We kill the skeletons and recover intel. Podrick starts jonesing to become one of the order.

Then we work our way back into the tentacle pit dungeon, whacking one cultist at a time and finding some secret passages to get us deeper into the complex. We do find some water that drips up to a puddle on the ceiling like that one John Carpenter movie.

More next time!