shifty louts

A Simple Dungeon Session Report

Players

Summary

With two players missing the bi-weekly Mausritter, we opted to run a one-shot dungeon, A Simple Dungeon taken from the OSR-Lite game Bastards, essentially an Odd-like mixed with Whitehack’s “sandwich AC attack”, and a “Save vs.” called Luck based on halving one’s highest stat.

The general set-up was as follows…

The town of Snake Falls seeks answers for its missing animals and livestock. Two hungover acrobats answer the call after their own circus abandons them. Two arquebusiers join the roustabouts, seeking to protect their homes from whatever plagues their village. Goblinish footprints lead through the giant spider-infested Forgroth Forest to this cavern entrance.

Vanilla enough. Standard dungeon monsters: goblins, oozes, skeletons, a troll. Simple, but effective traps. I used Skerples Monster Overhaul to sauce up the monsters a bit. That book is worth its weight in gold, in my humble opinion.

Notable moments were when Charles died after failing the 40’ jump, the hireling Lothar succeeding on the same 40’ jump down, and the clutch one-shot on the Goblin Pope Strax.

map

The group nearly completed the dungeon, but I left them on a cliffhanger after routing the two goblins; they chased them into the goblin burrow itself, finding themselves face to face with nine corpulent goblins ready to defend their goblin larvae.

I wish the players had used The Black Egg, its power being that if fed with blood, the person who gave their blood to the egg would be reborn from the egg if they died.

The players thought it evil, mistaking its motives for seeking out the corpse of Charles as necrotic and evil. They opted to put it back in the coffer they found it in.

The players aren’t “traditional OSR-minded” gamers, and some elements dragged, as I’m sure they felt a bit limited. They both rolled poor stats, but to their surprise, a lot of times their rolls succeeded when it mattered most. They often had some mother-may-I’s and such, which I don’t fault them for.

In more recent games I’ve run, as well as this one, I’ve been implementing the practice that Retired Adventurer writes within their blog post; a sort of recursive line of questioning that keeps the flow of a session moving while creating a positive feedback loop between referee and players.

“…whether a player or referee, end almost any and every assertion you make, especially one that answers another player's question, with another question, one that either asks what their response is, what further information they want, what the foreseeable consequences of doing something would be, even just confirming their choice.”

Aftermath

Treasure Found:

Foes Encountered:

Rumors:

Deaths:

XP Awarded:

Notes

notes