Stonehell Session 6 and 7
Making an effort to make time to write up a session report. Bit of a weird one since there is a time gap between these two sessions. We had session 6 about a couple of months ago and session 7 just a couple of days ago. But let's try to get going from memory.
So for session 6, we are joined by Lomwoginn the MU, Echo the Anti-Cleric and Charlice the Fighter.
Early on, several more rooms were explored in the Contested Corridors. Mostly empty and not much for the party to interact with. I always promise that the further down the party goes, the more interesting things may become. And there is definitely more loot the farther down they explore. We haven't gotten to that point yet, I think my players are just happy enough to explore the first floor in almost its entirety.
One room in particular, there were a couple of Giant Toads hanging out eating bugs. Echo wanted one for themselves and tried to coax it over with some rations. I wanted so bad to just say no, but just going with what a player wants to do could lead to interesting situations. I used the reaction table a couple of time and both times ended with neutral results. This left Echo with only being able to hold the toad, so long as they were able to keep feeding it. But once the toad were put down, it might take the chance to hop away. Echo of course refused to let that happen so they were carrying the toad at all times. Party gained an indifferent Giant Toad, named Toadette.
Shortly after, the party make it to the part of the Contested Corridors where a few kobolds were fighting off a Giant Shrew. Much like it in the book, I emphasized that this seemed to be a battle strongly leaning on the Shrew's side. Not wanting kobolds to die, the party swiftly form rank around the kobolds to fight off the Shrew, successfully killing it. The kobolds happy over the turn of events, helped guide the party to the Kobold Korners.
The rest of the session was time spent exploring the stalls in the market and having some humorous interactions with the kobold merchants. Lomwoginn has a pet snake now and the party has received some readings from the soothsayer. All in all, not a wild game this go around but the quieter sessions are always enjoyable for us.
After a couple of months between sessions, we finally agreed to sit down for a game. Kicking off session 7, we are joined by the usual suspects. But a 4th party member has joined as well. Titty Smalls "The Rock Johnson", the Fighter. I just wanna let y'all know, I've heard this name repeated several times, and typing it out left me with a big sigh and rubbing my temples. For the purposes of writing and my sanity, I will be referring to them as Smalls. One of our players was going to be late, we took the chance to take a few extra minutes to make sure that character sheets and backup character sheets were sorted out. Then we started the game.
The party decided to start the session off in the Quiet Halls. Room 1, similar fire beetles still eating lichen and the cold air clinging to skin. The party asked me if these Fire Beetles looked like the same weird clay Fire Beetle from session 5. I thought about the ability of a Doom Lure, and how effective it might be in camouflage. I figured that with the party looking at regular Fire Beetles now, they could discern that what they saw earlier, was not a Fire Beetle, but something trying to imitate a Fire Beetle. Ignoring the Fire Beetles in this room, the party press on to the North passages and end up in a dead end after exploring all the rooms.
It was at this time I was unsure about how I've been handling time passing. I was a lot more relaxed on marking dungeon turns and even forgot to mark turns when the party spent time exploring. It's not something I'm going to stress over, I think its fine that as a GM I slip up over some of these things. I just tried to gauge how much there was in party discussion or player discussion. Plus all the tangents we went off on in conversation, I didn't want to punish the fact we were hanging out by rolling for encounters. That felt weird to me so I just let us all get it out of our systems and tried to bring everyone back to the table when the conversations died down.
Further exploration let to checking out the crypts in the northern part of this section leading to Room 4. Almost every one of the crypts had monsters in it. And each fight was progressively harder. Ultimately, the party was successful in getting out with some jewelry and the only casualty was the Orc hireling, Lash. The party decided to do the cool thing in returning the body to the Orcs that lived here and even left them with some GP for paying for memorial services. I thought was was special for them to do and had the players mark XP for doing something like that. But after several combat encounters, we decided to end the session here.
I considered trying to give my players more sources of XP. So I decided to do the 0DnD thing and just give them 100 XP per hit die of monster they slain. I did 50 XP for the half hit die monsters they encountered. I tallied up the total XP and evenly split it to everyone at the table. I felt bad as a GM that there isn't the most opportunity to go with my original ruling that XP can only be gained from gold coins spent. I'm sure later on, that will be how most of the XP can be gained, but for now, I wanna make sure my players are not getting burnt out from creating new characters frequently. But if the only casualty are hirelings, that is okay in my book. Thankfully my players agreed with that too.
Thank you for your time, I hope things are alright for everyone. It's getting wild out there. If you can, reach out to a friend. Hang out at a safe place and yap if you need to. Or, distract yourself with board games or hanging out watching a movie. Just be safe, take care of yourself and each other.