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After Action Report: Strata + Shadowdark

A combination of another bout of Covid and elder family members getting hospitalized delayed this by a few weeks, but my hopes for a steady gaming group seem to finally culminate in an actual game last night.  Socrates was delayed by theatrical problems, but Gwenchant and I arrived at Soddentowel's place, and, after discussing parenting and schooling, snacks and drinks, we got around to talking about play experience and what we were going to play.  It probably helped a bit that we had hashed out lines and veils and a few other session 0 topics on our Discord.

After determining that Gwenchant and Soddentowel's play experiences were more exclusive to latter day D&D, we decided to each make two characters to play the Shadowdark quickstart, using 3d6 down the line, with a house rule stolen from the *WN books of replacing one attribute with a 14.  Socrates got there shortly after they started making characters while I skimmed the GM's Guide.  I think it took us about an hour to make two characters, each, mainly due to unfamiliarity with the particulars of character creation.  In the future, I'm pretty confident any of us could make a character with that system in about ten minutes, similar to Old School Essentials or Basic Fantasy RPG.

Gwenchant made a half orc thief (Evara? I don't have my notes in front of me right now) and an elven priest (Zeph, short for Zephariel, I think).  Soddentowel made a halfling thief (Steve) and a wizard (Beep), and Socrates made, I think, a halfling thief (Red Kolva) and a human(?) wizard whose name I can't recall at the moment.

To get play going quickly, I manufactured a tunnel with goat tracks to a room on the first level of the crypts, which is the third level of the Strata.  They had followed a treasure map to the cave entry, which lead to a small circular room in the crypts from an opening tunnel on its north side, about fifteen feet across, illuminated from above by a ceiling that glowed across its entirety, with a sun embossed in it.  Part of the ceiling and cracked and dropped chunks of stone.  Stone doors were to the east, south, and west.  The walls in between were biers holding mummified and wrapped corpses.  Corpses with snouts, tails, and oddly angled legs, roughly like velociraptors, and finding a pair of platinum coins over its eyes.

While Red Kolva listened at the three doors in turn, hearing nothing at the south and west doors, and a metallic chime from the east door, and Steve tried to determine where the goat tracks went--he was determined to rescue them--Zeph pulled out one of the mummies and carefully unwrapped and examined it, confirming it was some sort of lizard humanoid.  

I had evaluated this as a deadly area, which under Shadowdark calls for a wandering monster check each turn crawling round, and I decided that would be a 1 in 6 chance on the pre-existing wandering encounters check from this level in the Strata.  I rolled a 1, which was a wandering guardian golem encounter.  In the disorganization of my notes (I normally print them out and put them in a binder or duotang), I assumed they were stone, when they are instead made of bone.  I then, contrary to my normal practice, cheated them to be weaker when they would normally be, which put them in line with their actual stats.  The party managed to take it down, but not before it took out Evara.  Immediately after they took it down, Zeph tried to cast a healing spell on Evara, and failed the casting check, losing that spell until she rested.  Fortunately, Steve made his first aid check to keep Evara alive.

 Kolva then decided to take Steve's lantern and look into the room to the east.  It was twenty-five feet wide, and seemed to drink up light, so that the lantern could just barely illuminate the door directly across from where Kolva was looking in.  There was a well centered in the room, with a steel chain dangling from the ceiling above it, holding a bucket.  Kolva looked down, but could not see far enough down.  Steve followed and dropped a pebble down the well, and heard it fall into water.  Based on how long it took, Steve calculated that the fall indicated about sixty feet between the top of the well's wall and the water below.

I then rolled another encounter check, and again rolled a 1.  This time, they encountered a caretaker, a zombie reptilian creature.  This was an even tougher fight, in which Steve exhausted his magic armor spell, and Beep and Evara were both knocked unconscious.  Then Zeph remembered she could cast turn undead, and rolled a natural 20 on the check.  The caretaker rolled a natural 3 to resist, and was utterly destroyed by the spell.

Socrate's wizard healed Evara on the first first aid check. Beep had five attempts for first aid to live.  They flubbed all of their rolls to do so, and so Beep was the first victim into our hall of heroes.  While this was going on, Kolva or Evara tried to pick the lock to the north door, and also opened the door to the east, another circular room lit from above, but this one twenty-five feet across, and with a ring of eight slight pillars.  Steve noticed what looked like a constellation in bright contrast to the dim light of the ceiling, although many of the stars were slightly out of position, and also noted a wave motif on the pillars.  They didn't actually enter the room.

                              *   *   * 

What went well:  

  • Character creation.
  • Socializing, assisted by Soddentowel's excellent barkeeping.
  • Provisionally agreeing on Shadowdark as our system for the night.
  • Playing as a group in tension with playing as independent characters.

What went poorly:

  • They only managed to explore two rooms and open a door to a third room.
  • I messed up the stats on the guardian golem.
  • On reflection, I should've only been rolling for encounters every two or three turn

Thoughts on Shadowdark:

  • Rolling to cast spells is interesting.  I'm not sure I like it.  I'm not sure I dislike it.
  • I like the leveling up process

 Before next session:

  • I mentioned raising everyone to third level, but I'm on the fence now about that.

 


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